Too removed from the passions and the sensibilities of ordinary men except in his abnormal hatred, Louis did not understand the significance of the heat and trembling of his flesh. He was aware of the disturbed beating of his heart, of the sudden unbearable beauty of the light-struck brilliance of the glade. To his ears, the songs of the birds were distilled rapture, the wind a deep chant, the sky shaking with light. The ground under his feet appeared to move and tremble.
As he looked down at the girl, he was vaguely surprised to see that she suddenly started, that her cheeks flushed a warm crimson. It was not until he felt the withdrawal of her little gloved fingers that he understood. With the withdrawal, he experienced a profound shock of deprivation and pain.
The girl moved gracefully down the path, and he followed her. She glanced back over her shoulder at the groom, but he had calmly ridden to the abandoned horse, had taken up the reins, and then had sat there, waiting in silence, as though at a silent signal. He watched his mistress and the priest until they disappeared through the trees, and then he winked, grinned, muttered a coarse word or two to the disinterested birds. He began to whistle shrilly.
Louis and Mademoiselle Marguerite de Tremblant continued their speechless passage through the green aisles. They came at last to a heap of sun-warmed rocks at a distance from the path. Louis helped the girl to climb upon the topmost rock, and then sat at her feet on a lower one. Marguerite, still without speaking, removed her hat, and shook her head until her loosened hair billowed about her cheeks and forehead and snowy neck. It seemed to have a vitality and life of its own, too powerful for her fragility, too heavy for her strength. But when she smiled, a dazzling light sprang from her lips and eyes. At the base of her white throat, a pulse beat and swelled as though her heart had risen from its accustomed place.
They did not speak. A dreamy ecstasy possessed Louis. He smiled dimly about him. He saw the girl’s foot near his elbow, and one little white hand. She had removed her gloves. The hand shook more than a trifle.
He had seen Marguerite at the bedside of her petulant and pretty sister on each of his visits to his brother’s betrothed. The girl had a quality of sustained devotion and selflessness that had impressed him most favorably. Not given much to speech, she had not conversed with him to any extent. He had innocently found it necessary to visit the distraught Clarisse frequently, to console her and minister to her spiritual needs. But even as he did this, he was not aware that his eyes dwelt long and deeply on her older sister, nor was he aware that she gazed back at him as intensely.
However, on one occasion she had timidly informed him that she believed she had a religious vocation. Then he had become eloquent. As he spoke, Clarisse’s large pale blue eyes had wandered cynically from the young priest to Marguerite, and once or twice she had put her long white fingers irrepressibly to her lips. Neither of the two innocents had observed this worldly by-play. They had conversed eagerly with each other, each face brightening more and more.
Now, as they sat together in the lofty green peace of the Bois, Louis said:
“Mademoiselle, have you come to any conclusion about entering an order?”
Marquerite twined a silken curl about her fingers. She replied, in a low voice:
“I have consulted Mamma. She was horrified. She wishes me to consider the Comte de Ramboud.” She hesitated. “Mamma spoke to my uncle, the Comte de Tremblant, my father’s brother—”
“But he is a Huguenot!” cried Louis. A deep sickness at the mention of the Comte de Ramboud pervaded his heart, and his face paled. He was suddenly filled with an obscure but powerful rage, a bitter and enormous hunger.
Marguerite smiled, shrugged her pretty shoulders. “That is So. However, he gave me grave consideration, and urged Mamma to be patient and tolerant.”
But Louis hardly heard. His eyes fixed themselves fully on the girl’s face, and woman as she was, she saw all that was to be seen, and her heart bounded and leaped with an agony of joy.
“It is a sin to interfere with another’s vocation,” said Louis. His lips were white and dry. “Mademoiselle, if it is your heart, you must not disobey the call of God.”
She was silent. A sudden and inexplicable sadness possessed her. She gazed down at him with a mute and passionate earnestness and yearning.
Again, neither spoke, but an irresistible force brought their hands together, and the fingers clung as if both were drowning in deep black seas.
A squirrel ran through last year’s leaves, near their feet. A large bird pecked in the ground. The soft wind rose, parted the trees, so that shafts of long sunlight fell over them, was gone, leaving green translucence behind. The girl looked down at that still and marble countenance near her knee, and she drew a long and quivering breath that was almost a sob. The pulse quickened in her throat.
She said in a mournful whisper: “The world holds nothing for me. I am in such sorrow, Monseigneur de Richepin.”
He did not ask the reason for this sorrow. For sorrow had, all at once, rolled over him, and they sat together, their hands intertwined. Yet, with the sorrow, was a formless but passionate rapture, like diffused light on turbulent dark waves. They experienced it together; their souls ran to each other and clung, weeping wordlessly. They became aware of each other’s flesh and warmth; their yearning mingled, but it was not a desperate yearning.
Their eyes grew dim and misted, seeing only the shattered and dazzling light of earth and sky. They heard each other’s breath, uneven and shaken. The warmth of their hands mingled, and it seemed that the flesh dissolved and they were one flesh. The songs of the birds, and the deep shining silence, became part of them, part of their unspoken emotion and their rising anguish of joy.
Now, all at once, the invisible but crushing wings of Louis’ old agony lifted, fled away into soundless space. A wild and unfathomable fulfilment flooded his soul, and with it came a feeling of power and ecstasy, and great release. It shook the bastions of his grim gray hatred. He was transported to some realm of flame, unbearably bright, and his spirit seemed to become incandescent. He shivered. His heart rolled and tugged. Nameless cries rang through his ears. His loneliness was consumed like a straw in a leaping fire. He thought: I am not alone! And as if the words were a spell, the pillar of salt that was his mind was shattered and destroyed and poured out.
Now, he could believe in the presence of God. He felt that presence all about him, like a pervading radiance. Everything was good, explained, full of bottomless peace. Tears rose to his eyes. He thought, humbly and with joy: I understand the visitation which is God.
But still, so innocent was he, that he did not know what had come to him.
He whispered: “Mademoiselle, the Comte de Rambaud—?”
She bent over him. Her dark bright curls touched his cheek.
“There is no one for me, but—” she whispered in return.
Their eyes were close together. They held their breath. Their lips came closer, met, clung. At that touch, they were both swept into a veritable agony, blinding, disintegrating, blown upon by winds of savage harmony. They felt nothing, saw nothing, but this. The universe swirled about them, filled with bursting stars and blazing nebulæ. They heard a roaring in and about them, and did not know that it was the beating of their hearts.
They drew apart. Like twin flames leaping together, their eyes held entranced. Then Marguerite’s little white hands enclosed Louis’ face. Tears ran down her cheeks. His face turned in her hold, and his lips pressed themselves against one trembling palm, as if he were seized by a mortal hunger. Marguerite closed her eyes. She smiled through the tears that still fell from under the thick bronze lashes.
For long moments they sat like this, unable to move. The sun became brighter. The trees quickened.
Then, at last, shuddering violently, Louis sprang to his feet. A horrible coldness ran over him. He cried out. The girl rose, visibly shaking. She held out her hands to him.
“Do not leave me!” she moaned, and bent down towards
him.
But he moved backwards from her, staring at her with horror and anguish. He had paled excessively. Turning, he fled from her.
He heard her call out to him, and he shook his head with numb and gasping violence. He stumbled, blinded. Once he lurched against a tree, and the impact stunned him. A bush tore his floating black cloak.
“Tomorrow!” came the girl’s far voice, like an echo.
“Never, never tomorrow!” he groaned, pressing his hands over his eyes.
“Tomorrow!” sang the wind, and the sun smiled through the trees.
CHAPTER XIV
Though he was only in his forty-first year, Armand-Jeandu Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, was beginning to experience more and more that languid malaise of the body, those vague yet pungent pains of a chronically nervous and delicate constitution, those increasingly frightful headaches, which had, all his life, darkened occasions of the most intense joy and satisfaction in accomplishment.
There was many a time, when, remembering the tales of his mother about his sickly and precarious infanthood and childhood, he sincerely and gloomily wished that his physician had not been so skilful and so devoted, and had allowed him to sink, while still in a state of unconsciousness, into an early grave. And sometimes, meditating upon himself (a favorite occupation) he wondered if ambition did not always arise, like a strong and noxious flowering weed, from poisonous soil where gentler blossoms could find no roothold and no sustenance. Always, even deserts and wildernesses had their horrible blooms and plants, fatal and thorny, though never a violet and never a fragile rose. It seemed that the stronger vices and virtues, so ominous to men and nations, appeared only in stony or arid soil, in wild and dangerous places, or in deathly swamps, or in the crevices of mountains.
He had no illusions about himself, and of that disillusion had come his strength and his power. Only he knew the savage confusions and disorder of his own mind, from which came his passion for order in all things about him. The complexities of his devious spirit compelled a simplicity and implacable directness towards the world. The weakness of his frame and the instability of his constitution demanded a strength and inexorableness in policy and affairs. Hating hypocrisy in his heart, he employed it vigorously among men. Despising the ungrateful, he knew well the clever uses of ingratitude. Secretly, he detested exigent men, but knowing that exigency was a sceptre of power, he cultivated it. He had a terror of weakness and gentleness, feeling these soft spots in himself, and so he displayed a ruthlessness and mercilessness and cynicism which made him the most hated man in Europe and in France. He had a vast and unremitting love and desire for peace. Therefore, masochist as he was, he created about himself an atmosphere of miasmic intrigue, turbulence and strife. To be himself, he felt, was to die. In all his suffering, he had an almost monstrous love and zest for life. Life was power. Afraid of death, he could not get enough of power. But at all times his soul and his body suffered from an eternal weariness, sickness and despair. Only his will forced him to seek power; only his intellectual love for life kept at a distance the dissolution that constantly threatened his flesh.
He knew he was hated, and in his heart he acknowledged that he deserved this hatred. But the knowledge of the hatred amused him vastly. He knew that his enemies called him the Red Death, the Cardinal of the Huguenots, the Black Pox. He was even more amused at these names, for in him was a mortal detestation for all men. Sometimes he half believed that it was this loathing, this detestation, that kept him alive. Morbidly self-analytical, he experienced moments of cynical wonder that his strongest motivation was his ambition for the unity and strength of France. Then he knew that this motivation was a form of escape, and that when under its influence he had no time to think, and felt no pain.
Ambition, he knew, was the great illusion, rising most powerfully in those in whose body or mind the seeds of death were the most deeply planted. It was the convulsion of desperate limbs, fleeing. Yet no one knew better than he the ghastly weariness and distaste and longing for death that took up their abode like dark specters in the house of the ambitious.
But, always, he was amused. In a lesser man, amusement enervated the will to strike and the will to seize. In him, it was wine and stimulation. He knew that desire for life springs the most passionately in those who are dying; he knew that amusement is the most delightful in those who know there is nothing amusing in consciousness.
“The only enemies I have are the enemies of the State,” he was fond of saying. But he knew that his greatest enemy was himself. He loved to meditate upon himself, but indulged in this with increasing rarity, for when he so indulged, as in a secret and fatal vice, he was, for long days afterwards, so enervated, so exhausted, so prostrated and so benumbed, that he was only a ghost imitating the gestures and the sounds of the living. Yet never was he afflicted by so plebeian a thing as conscience, that haunter of the bourgeois soul, that puerile exercise of the feeble. Rather it was because he found in himself, in the moments of his vice, the futility and the horror, the illness and the despair, the soul-sickness, of all the universe, and perhaps of God.
Those who are genuinely enthusiastic and devoted are limited by their own passions. This, he knew. They were hampered by vehemences, by fervors, which rose from this enthusiasm. They were blinded by their own ecstasies. The man who attained real power was the intellectual man who had no enthusiasm, and so could operate only by will.
He surrounded himself with magnificence, as if to crush his secret love for austerity. His famous avarice was in reality the fevered terror of a man who builds barricades against an approaching enemy. Because he had no real desire for opulence and wealth, and knew that if he should allow these true characteristics to operate in his life he would be ruined and would perforce die, his hands were never satisfied in their grasping.
Sometimes, when experiencing the blackest moments of his immense disappointment in life, he indulged in a nostalgia for his early days at Pluvinal’s Academy, where he had learned military arts. Economics, he would think, have the gravest influence over a man’s life. It was the necessity for maintaining the endowment of Henry IV in his family that had made him a priest. In thinking of the military life he had abandoned at the request of his mother, and at the urging of the need for the continued endowment, he would be filled with pain and longing. He chose to forget, then, that he had abandoned the life of a soldier with promptness and without regret, seeing the larger possibilities of the priesthood. He forgot that a native conservatism and a shrewdness and immediacy had impelled his acquiescence. At these weaker times, he was sentimental, and liked to believe that in those early days he was a stern victim of circumstances. Later on, he would have moments of intense satisfaction that his decision had given him, in reality, a larger scope for his military accomplishments. His passion for militarism and his knowledge of strategy, his love for discipline, enforced order in his wild and disorderly mind and thus prolonged his life. Fearing death, therefore, he constantly cultivated his bent for militarism.
In short, he cultivated all those things which might tend to keep him alive. Sometimes he became aware of his manœuvres, and tasted the dryness of death in his mouth. He would allow these moments to come rarely. However, his tormented soul, tormented almost from birth with a desire for extinction, revenged itself upon his body.
Sometimes he would think: I support tyrants because I despair of the people. But in the ruthlessness and inhumanity of tyrants he found strength for himself. A tenderness and compassion for the people would hasten his mortal disintegration. Compassion, he would meditate, is good, but it must not be indulged in promiscuously by those who desire to rule. (Or to live, would whisper his soul in reply.) And so, from one man’s terror rose his detestable reputation for indifference to suffering, to injustice, to cruelty and to mercy. He was a man beset by death.
His fear had given his natural reserve a basilisk quality, his natural quietness of temperament an inscrutability, his native languor a specious tolerance, his French
lucidity a contempt for abstract justice, his immense curiosity a genius for intrigue, his inherent firmness an indomitable immutability. There was a coldness of the quality of his temperament, and this had degenerated into an icy ferocity. His natural egotism had extended itself to an inordinate pride of family, in which even his sardonic self-analysis could find nothing ridiculous. Even his humor, with which he had been richly endowed at birth, had become a vicious irony and an obscene subtlety. His tendency to melancholy had become a constant black despair which had entered his very bones. Even his intellect had turned demoniacal.
It was rumored that there was a taint in his blood, which in some members of his family had become imbecility or madness. At all events, he was given, mostly in privacy, to moods of epileptic exaltation and causeless ecstasy, which left him ominously weakened in body while it enhanced the exaggerated vices and virtues of his temperament, and his fear.
In externals, only, was there safety for him. His genius for organization came from his inability to organize the thoughts that beset and besieged his rampant soul. He was keen and rapid in all things, because of the somber despair that lived always with him, threatening to destroy him at the last.
Once he said: “A passion for justice can so distract a man, can so confuse him, that he may become no more than a rag flapping in a dozen diverse winds. It imperils the strength of the State, is a force for disunity.” But in reality he meant that it was himself that might become a rag in the wind.
Always, he was terrified that he might discover that the mountain on which he had built his house was only a mole-hill, and the god he worshiped dwelt not in a far and momentous heaven, but in the habitations of earth-worms. From his earliest youth he had suffered from fits of inarticulate and gloomy depression. Now, as he was growing older, he suffered more and more that terrible paralysis of the spirit, that frightful absence of all emotional sensation, that suspension of the will like the suspension of the heart-beat. It was then, in stern terror, that he would rise from his bed and plunge into public and foreign affairs with an inhuman concentration and sleepless and ruthless ambition, and an extraordinary and supernatural intuition, all the stronger because behind them was nothing but the will to live.