The Duc knitted his thin brows, and from under them his remorseless blue eyes regarded the Cardinal unflinchingly. His heart was beating with great rapidity. But he was a brave and courageous man, haughty in his own strength and egotism. At last he smiled.
“You would seduce my religious convictions, Monseigneur?” he asked, softly.
There was a moment’s silence, then the Cardinal returned that smile, and shrugged.
“I assume, then, that you prefer the unlimited power you wield over the Sedan, to a limited power granted by the Church, Monsieur. I am not unsympathetic. I admire men of power. Nevertheless, I do not allow them to stand in my way.”
Now his smile had gone. It was replaced by a look of much candor and blandness. The Duc’s heart began again its rapid beating, and he paled excessively. His eyes were calm but fierce as he stared at the Cardinal.
The Cardinal lifted his hands and let them drop onto the arms of the chair again.
“The Duc de Tremblant, as you have no doubt heard, has been assassinated by—brigands,” said the Cardinal, in a voice of mournful regret.
There was a little singing silence in the chamber. The Duc shifted in his chair, but a more formidable and steely look settled upon his countenance. It became secret and inflexible.
“That, too, is extremely unfortunate,” said the Duc, in his calm and musical voice. A tenseness pervaded his body. He pressed his hands upon his knees. Père Joseph waited in the background, like a hovering and russet wrath.
The Cardinal regarded space thoughtfully. “I loved de Tremblant. His death leaves a wound in my heart. I would avenge him.”
“A man of power who ‘stood in Monseigneur’s way,’” said the Duc, very softly.
The Cardinal delicately laced his fingers together and studied them.
“Ah, yes,” sighed the Cardinal. He appeared to be plunged in thought. At length he aroused himself. He gazed at de Bouillon with terrible but smiling directness.
“No help can come to the Rochellais,” he said.
“Thus,” remarked de Bouillon, “the Rochellais can be overcome with a minimum of trouble, and peace will be restored.”
“You do not regret their conquest, you, Monsieur, a Huguenot?”
The Duc was silent. He was not certain to what destination this conversation was leading, but he experienced a cold stab of fear. He said, at last: “I am, first of all, a Frenchman. I do not desire civil war at any time.”
The Cardinal leaned towards him, his eyes brilliant and full of menace. “You think, perhaps, you can now solicit the complete aid of the English without its being diverted by the Rochellais?”
The Duc, hearing these words, half rose from his chair, grasping the arms. Dizziness seized him. He fell back into the chair, slowly, and said through white lips: “I have said, I do not desire civil war.”
There was a bursting pain in his head. Nevertheless, he stared at the Cardinal with hating grimness and threat.
The Cardinal inclined his head, and smiled gently. “It has been rumored that Monsieur le Duc is no true Frenchman, that he has no passion for France, and only for himself. That is a libel, Monsieur?”
“A libel,” said the Duc, steadfastly, the grim threat increasing in his eyes.
“Ah,” murmured the Cardinal, “that removes a weight from my mind.” The Duc said nothing, but his hand instinctively reached for his sword.
The Cardinal saw the gesture. His smile broadened. Now he was excited, thrilling with hatred and power.
“I have a suggestion to make Monsieur,” he said, still in a thoughtful and murmurous voice. “I would suggest that Monsieur leave Paris at once, and return to the Sedan. I would suggest that Monsieur despatch those English emissaries who await him in his château in Sedan, and tell them that he does not desire their aid, that he has decided to lift no hand against France.”
The dark and choking blood rushed to de Bouillon’s face. He struggled for breath. He was like a man in extremis. He gazed at the Cardinal like a cold python which has been aroused to murderous life. But the Cardinal appeared unaffected by the extraordinary change which had come over the great noble. He appeared only to reflect murmurously.
“I suggest that Monsieur, upon retiring to Sedan, cease his plottings, that he administer his province in peace and obscurity, that he refrain from all acts, open, overt or hidden, against the State. I suggest that he forego his ambitions, which have taken possession of him like a league of devils.”
He raised his voice a little: “In other words, I suggest that Monsieur exile himself at once, and have no further dealings with the English.”
The Duc sprang to his feet with a black brow and blazing eyes. Distraction was evident in his every movement.
“And,” he said, in loud and penetrating tones, “if I do not follow Monseigneur’s suggestions—?”
The Cardinal reached out to the table nearby and lifted a sheet of paper. He regarded it with visible pleasure, nodding and murmuring to himself. Finally he looked at de Bouillon blandly.
“I have here a double warrant. One is for the murder of the Duc de Tremblant, much beloved of the people of France, and another is for conspiracy against the State. The latter charge you may defeat, after a long sojourn in the Bastille, which I assure you is an unpleasant place, Monsieur. But the first you cannot defeat.”
The Duc was beside himself with fury. He struggled for speech. The congested blood had empurpled his fastidious and haughty countenance. He lifted his hand and pointed it at the Cardinal.
“Monseigneur, this a moment for plain speaking. You consented to the—removal—of de Tremblant. Without your consent, it would not have been done!”
The Cardinal was undisturbed. His bland smile was deadly.
“Monsieur le Duc will need to prove that. He will find that impossible. But I have nearby a witness who can prove my assertion that the Duc was murdered by Monsieur. This witness was brought to me yesterday.”
The Duc caught the back of his chair to keep himself from falling.
“There was no witness!” he cried.
“Unfortunately for you, Monsieur, there was. Monsieur has shown himself without cleverness in his seductions, or his selections of assassins. Even assassins are wont to be free with their tongues. Perhaps these assassins talked too openly to one who was devoted to Monsieur.”
With a truly frightful countenance, the Duc recalled names to his mind. All at once he started, remembering that for some days he had not seen de Brisson, his most trusted aide. He had not been unduly disturbed, believing that de Brisson was engaging himself with the soubrettes of Paris. But now he recalled the man’s changed face, his silences, his pallor. He clenched his fists. “It is not possible,” he muttered.
“The witness,” said the Cardinal, gently, “is in a safe spot. Do not attempt to discover, and murder him, my dear Duc. He has made a deposition. He has told his story to unimpeachable gentlemen. He has told it to me, in the presence of witnesses, also. The dossier is in a place beyond your reaching. It makes strange reading.”
The Duc contemplated the ruin of his ambitions. Cunning narrowed his suffused eyes, as he stared at the Cardinal.
“I have no true conviction that Monsieur will faithfully follow my suggestions. I should regret it, however, if he did not. In the meantime, circumspect delay on Monsieur’s part will be of great assistance to us.” He paused, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Good day, Monsieur.”
The Duc, almost reeling in spite of his struggle to control himself, left that chamber. It was not until he was in his hôtel that he gave way to his enraged frustration, hatred, murderous wrath, and despair.
CHAPTER XXXVI
A truly appalling malaise had taken possession of Louis de Richepin like a black pestilence of the mind. Always, that cold and phlegmatic exterior had been the glacial shell over turbulent and disordered passions. Always, he had been the screaming prisoner behind ice-covered and silent walls. There are men who are born to solitud
e, and there are men who have it forced upon them, either by evil circumstance or by their own natures. Louis de Richepin was a curious victim of both these alternatives. Vain, proud and haughty, he suffered the consequences of these defects in the curse of an inordinately sensitive and suspicious temperament. He was repellent in manner and speech, enraging when he did not intimidate. The casual observer did not hear the groan behind the measured and indifferent words, or see the extended hand behind the stony and glancing eye. None suspected that anticipation of rebuff, a bewildered lack of comprehension of other men, and an abysmal fear, were the stones of the wall that enclosed him away from humanity.
He pursued his duties with his old methodical care, spoke as usual, moved as usual. But nothing stirred in him, in that black and empty grave which daily grew deeper and wider as the molten core cooled and turned to blowing ashes. Never having sought the company of others with true eagerness, for all his constant yearning, he now avoided contacts with other men as much as possible. He had once delighted in learned discussions with the Cardinal, and with other scholarly Jesuits. Now, in the midst of such discussions, the sickness would well up into his throat so that he retched, would be obliged to flee. He went no longer to the Bois de Boulogne to see Marguerite de Tremblant. For on the last innocuous occasion, the sickness had fastened upon him so that his agony had been too great for endurance and he had left her suddenly.
No one had ever suspected, or cared, that there had lived in him at one time a pure delight in the simplest manifestations of nature, that a breeze filled with perfume had had the power to plunge him into shy ecstasy, that often the mere passing of a silver cloud across the face of the moon had brought trembling tears to his eyes. And none knew now that he could look on all beauty with the glazed eyes of a dead man, with no response in his heart. The prisoner under the glacial shell was dying; he no longer implored and shrieked for help. Nor did he care, at last, whether help came or not. Sometimes, for hours, he would sit with his swimming head in his hands, conscious only of a dim and boundless pain as vast as eternity.
The siege of La Rochelle, his dearest wish, was about to begin, his dearest hatreds were about to be fulfilled. Yet he could not arouse himself to interest in them. In him was the final suffering instinct of the dying animal: to creep away into some solitary blackness of obscurity and expire soundlessly. On the few occasions when he was aroused to fury, it was the mechanical fury of an impersonal storm, or the lashing-out of a man tormented beyond endurance and striking blindly as a wounded dog bites in his extremity.
He spent hours on his knees, not praying, only enduring, his empty eyes fixed upon his crucifix, and from out his soul drifted the thin mist of the ashes that blew about in him. He received no comfort, expected none. The emptiness increased. He forgot everything.
At times, terror seized him briefly, and he would force himself to external acts, to speech, for there was an instinctive knowledge in him that his flesh would soon lose its limits of endurance and he would go mad or die. But these efforts to climb up the long and agonizing slope towards the light exhausted him. At last, he did not care whether he reached the light again or not.
All Paris was now aroused by the tragic and mysterious death of the Duc de Tremblant. His body was returned to his home, and he was buried with his illustrious forebears. Madame de Tremblant was prostrated, but she did not weep. Her daughters knelt about her, sobbing, in the cool blue twilight of Notre Dame, but she stared before her, drily. The great cathedral was filled to bursting. Louis de Richepin did not attend any of the masses for the dead man.
But several weeks later, he was overcome by an unfathomable impulse, and wrote a missive to Marguerite de Tremblant, whom he had not seen for a long time. It was a cold, but incoherent missive, in which he expressed his commiseration for her sorrow, and urged her to seek comfort in spiritual consolations. As he proceeded to write, his incoherence grew, his writing became illegible. When he had done, had forgotten he had written to her, and only gazed dully at the letter, he was trembling throughout his body, and was forced to fling himself upon his bed, to lie for sightless hours staring at the opposite wall.
The next day a messenger brought him a reply from the girl. He turned it over and over in his hands. Finally, he opened it. It was not for long moments that her words became coherent in his mind.
She began the letter without salutation, and ended without signature:
“Words of comfort and sympathy from a friend are received with gratitude. If this kind friend will appear at a certain spot known to him, at midnight, tonight, he will hear words of this gratitude in person, and a last farewell.”
After some dazed minutes, the import and strangeness of this missive finally pierced to the dulled consciousness of Louis de Richepin. He felt a slow but rising beat deep within the empty chaos of his being. A mysterious terror began to pervade him, and another emotion he felt had died forever. The word “farewell” began to imprint itself on his inner eye in letters of fire.
The spectral terror increased as the day passed. Now, he was no longer empty. An enormous restlessness, a prescience of agony, sweeped upon him. Everything darkened and changed before his eyes. The long interval of soundlessness and emptiness in which he had struggled in diffused torment, fell behind him like a black tunnel as he emerged into gathering storm. He felt no presence but the presence of Marguerite de Tremblant, and he exclaimed to himself: “How was it that I had forgotten her, that I could not think of her?”
As sunset approached, his anguish increased. Remembering the horrible agony of the last weeks, he dimly suspected that in some manner the girl had been involved in this, that his withdrawal from her had been the withdrawal of fear, that in his absenting himself lay the secret of his suffering. At intervals, as he waited for the night, he was caught up in a rapture which he dared not name. But the rapture increased, alternating with despair and anguish. Never having in all his life confronted himself fully, understanding and confessing in himself, he closed his eyes before the dazzling mirror remorselessly set up before him, fearing, as always, the truth. Now as his flesh burned, became heated, as the pounding of his heart communicated itself to all his veins and his arteries, he still would not understand, or confess.
Would the torturous hours never pass? The empty days had gone by like clouds, featureless and formless, but now they were endless corridors through which he rushed impatiently, sweating in his extremity. Life roared in on him like a fresh and virgin flood, tempestuous and violent. He could not endure its onslaughts.
At eleven o’clock that night, he, was waiting at the spot where so often he had met Marguerite de Tremblant. He heard the melancholy booming of the bell in the belfry of St. Cloud, and every tree in the Bois seemed to vibrate with the sonorous tones. There was only a faint moon. It made ghostly and stygian caves in the woods; the tips of the trees were silvered in the most spectral light against the black heavens. There were strange rustlings, faint breaths and murmurs in the underbrush, and formless shadows swept down upon the earth, from which a dank and ominous smell arose in heavy gusts. Louis de Richepin, chilled and weighted in spite of his fever, felt himself alone in an abandoned universe.
He tried to calm himself by seating himself upon the stones on which he and Marguerite had sat for so many warm summer mornings. But the stones were stones of fire. He would leap to his feet, striding back and forth in the black hollow formed by the surrounding trees, dried leaves crumbling and crackling under his foot, the cool wetness of the air blowing on his hot and tormented face. Sometimes he groaned softly to himself, striking his hands together at intervals. Now the trees had a leathery and slapping sound in the wind, and from the depths of the forest came the long wild notes of a melancholy bird, restless and sleepless. Once or twice he saw the phosphorescent eyes of small animals gleaming at him from the darkness, and they seemed to him full of malignancy and evil. Pale forms like apparitions drifted through distant aisles of black shadow, and he shuddered with superstitious fea
r. Paris slept behind him; not even the rumble of a carriage on cobbled streets, or the sound of a horse, disturbed that deathly silence.
As the hour wheeled towards midnight, his nameless agony of mind and soul increased. Blood pounded in his brain, leapt from his heart, made his knees tremble and sweat to burst from every pore. He felt himself drawing to some appalling climax, a climax still veiled and voiceless, but all the more terrible. The stillness and blackness about him did not calm or soothe him. He was the bursting and flaming heart of the forest, and it seemed to him that at length he must ignite those weighted and ominous trees.
There was no approaching sound of Marguerite de Tremblant as St. Cloud boomed out the midnight hour from its grating and iron throats, but Louis at length became aware that he was not alone. He saw a pale and floating oval before him, and halted in his tracks. The moon slid from behind a cloud, shot down long pallid beams into the enclosure, and he saw the slight form of the girl advancing towards him, clad in black, with a black mourning veil floating from her head. She stopped a pace or two from him, her hands clasped before her, and those hands gleamed like cold marble. He could not see her expression, but he felt that his own torment was on her face and in her heart, and when he seized her with a strangled sound of violence and clasped her in his arms, it was more a gesture of frightful compassion and despair than a gesture of love. Her heart beat against his own, in the same language of pain and grief, and the soft white arms about his neck were arms that pleaded for help.
One in suffering, they clung together in that silence and darkness, torn and distraught, voiceless and desperate. They sought to find refuge in each other, a hiding place from the enormity of life. Louis bent his head and pressed his lips against the girl’s quivering mouth, and she responded with feverish passion. Her hands clutched his body under his arms; she dropped her head to his breast, and, finding relief, sobbed aloud.