Yet even at Blidah Dunoisse knew the nip of poverty, and there were times when the pack that de Moulny’s hand had bound upon his shoulders galled him sore. For—the stroke of a pen and one could have had all one wanted. It needed no more than that.
For in Paris, at the big hotel in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, in the book-lined, weapon-adorned, half library, half smoking-room that was Redskin’s private den, and had been the boudoir of Marie Bathilde; there lay in a locked drawer of the inlaid ebony writing-table, a white parchment-covered pass-book inscribed with the name of Hector Dunoisse, and a book of pretty green-and-blue checks upon the Messieurs Rothschild, 9, Rue d’Artois. The dip of a quill in the ink, and one of the bland, well-dressed, middle-aged, discreet-looking cashiers behind the golden grilles and the broad, gleaming rosewood counters, would have opened a metal-lined drawer of gold louis, and plunged a copper shovel into the shining mass and filled the pockets of young Hector; or more probably would have wetted a skillful forefinger and thumb—run over a thick roll of crackling pink, or blue, or gray billets de banque, jotted down the numbers, and handed the roll across the counter to its owner, with a polite bow.
“So you think there is a curse upon my money, eh?” Monsieur the Marshal had said, upon an occasion when one of those scenes that leave ineffaceable scars upon the memory, had taken place between the father and the son.
Hector, spare, upright, muscular, lithe, ruddy of hue, bright of eye, steady of nerve, newly issued from the mint and stamped with the stamp of the Training Institute, and appointed to join his regiment in Algeria, turned pale under the reddish skin. He was silent.
“You have used none of it since you heard that story, hein? It would defile the soul and dirty the hands, hein?” queried Monsieur the Marshal, plunging one of his own into the waistcoat-pocket where he kept his snuff, and taking an immense pinch. “Yet let me point out that the allowance you disburse in pious alms and so forth——” Hector jumped, and wondered how his father had found out, and then decided that it was only a good piece of guessing, “may not be any portion of your mother’s dowry. I was not poor when I recovered those three hundred-and-twenty-thousand silver thalers from the Prioress of the Carmelite Convent at Widinitz. I wished to be so much richer, that is all!”
“Poverty,” said his son, breathing sharply through the nostrils and looking squarely in the Marshal’s swollen, fierce-eyed, bushily-whiskered face, “poverty would have been some excuse—if anything could have excused so great an——”
“‘Infamy,’ was the word you were going to use,” said Monsieur the Marshal, smiling across his great false teeth of Indian ivory, which golden bands retained in his jaws, and scattering Spanish snuff over his white kersey, tightly-strapped pantaloons, as he trumpeted loudly in a voluminous handkerchief of yellow China silk. “Pray do not hesitate to complete the sentence.”
But Hector did not complete the sentence. The Marshal went on, shrugging his shoulders and waving his ringed hands: “After all, it is better to be infamous than idiotic. You hamper your career by playing the incorruptible; you are put to stupid shifts for money when plenty of money lies at your command.”
“Do I not know that?”