Chapter XV: A Bolt From the Blue

Surprised and beset in that moment of unguarded emotionalism, Fanchette had capitulated; and there was an end to her scruples as a reluctant confederate. With the sacrifice of her self-respect went her last feeling of charity towards hard-pressed virtue. She regarded that now, with the eyes of the qualified _chère-amie_, as an hypocrisy to be derided and shown up. Thenceforth she was in all things her showy tyrant’s most devoted auxiliary, to be cursed or fondled, to be used and abused, to be dragged by him by the hair of her head, should he please--and so to revile him and spit at him, and turn with raking fingers on any humane champion who should come to her aid. That is to speak conditionally of Fanchette, but not of the type to which she belonged, and to which she would sooner or later conform. Not that jimp figure of hers, in its striped sarsenet frock with the slim waist, not that demure smile and young mealy complexion, would save her presently from the fate of the termagant, swollen of feature and foul of tongue, to which she was destined. There was in her that seed of Xantippe which is wont, once quickened, to sprout and increase and burst into riotous blossom in a night. She was of the substance of the true virago--vulgar, incorruptible, animal; rending the lust she has provoked; ready to die whether to spite or to save the object of her desire; ecstatically courting her own destruction at the hands of the rage she has wantonly excited--and all to prove her utter devotion to and absorption in the one. Such was Fanchette in promise--a sufficient foil, even so undeveloped, to the nobler passion she was called upon to assist in betraying.

That idyllic love should lie at the mercy of such coarse understandings! But so is it decreed in this paradoxical world of ours, where the myriad inanities sit in judgment on the sapient few, where the rabble overrules the senate, the dunce the scholar, the loud illiterate voice the cultured wit.

La Coque stood for the vulgar majority in this case. His hatred of a finer spirit was simply the expression of an envious and ignoble mind. He was avid to ruin Tiretta, and indifferent as to what other fair fames he besmirched in the process. At the beginning he had had no least grounds, save his own inventive malice, for the scandal at which he had obscurely hinted. Later, when he came to learn that appearances were at least beginning to give colour to his fiction, his joy waxed great and fierce. He began then seriously to contemplate the means and methods by which he might bring this belauded cockerel to his knees. He set Fanchette to watch and to report.

Enough was soon gathered to give him a clue to his policy. He aimed at nothing more at the outset than the disgrace and recall of his detested rival, as he chose to consider him--an end, nevertheless, which must be effected without compromising the Infanta. He was sharp enough to see that any mistake in that direction might involve himself in ruin. It would be sufficient for his purpose could Tiretta be led, somehow and definitely, into an amorous self-betrayal, armed with the evidences of which it would be easy for anyone to procure the reptile’s dismissal. He instructed Fanchette to affect sympathy, to worm herself into the chevalier’s confidence, to inveigle him if possible into a pretended intrigue with herself, on the score that it would at once cover his real design and afford him particular opportunities for prosecuting it. He instructed her so to manage appearances, in fine, that at the right moment M. Tiretta could be represented to the duke for the traitor he actually was, and to the Infanta as having been secretly prosecuting all this time a discreditable _affaire_ with her own serving maid.

And to this pretty programme, Fanchette, a procuress for love’s sake, was amiably prepared to subscribe--even though she might endanger her own emotions in the process. For she certainly found a fearful joy in playing with the fire kindled for another’s consuming.

As material for the plot, that little scene in the corridor had had its timely uses. It had put her and her gentleman on a confidential footing, which that later whispered colloquy had encouraged and his own indecision confirmed. Thereafter he must suffer her secret intelligences meekly, and little by little cease of any pretence at misreading them. In truth, poor fool, in the torment of self-reproach he must endure, the solace of a sympathetic ally was hardly to be refused. Somehow it seemed to make him feel less guilty.

Not that he frankly countenanced Fanchette’s partisanship, or ever appeared to assume an inner meaning from it. But, like the artless receivers of stolen goods we hear of, he accepted its fruits unquestioning, and, when she made profitable opportunities for him, took them with the most ingenuous air possible. He thought, in truth, she was a friend, and so played in all things into her hands.

The main thing was, for his greater exposure and degradation, to discredit him in Isabella’s eyes. Fanchette took a peculiar pleasure in that moiety of her task. One day, having manœuvred to come upon him alone in the grounds, she met him point blank with a question which brought him up aghast:

“Are you in love with me, monsieur?”

He stared a moment, and then bungled out a monosyllable:

“Why?”

“O!” she said; “it is a fair challenge, is it not? Tell me--do you think me pretty?”

He was beginning to recover his self-possession.

“Yes, certainly I do, Fanchette,” he said.

“Do you take an obvious pleasure in my company?”

“If it is obvious, it is obvious,” he answered evasively.

“I will put it another way,” she said. “Is it for my sake that you seek it so often?”

“Do I seek it often?”

She put up her face quite close to his, and said mockingly:

“Would you like to kiss me now, monsieur?”

He drew back, with a smiling shake of the head.

“I honour your good fame too well, Fanchette.”

She broke into a shrill little laugh.

“O, the darling, the Joseph! And yet he cannot be happy apart from me. Why, I wonder. He will never say--wherefore it behoves the poor rejected one to give him a morsel of advice.” She came close again, and perked her chin at him. “Do not think for a moment, monsieur, that I want your love; and as for my good fame, it can look after itself. But, for my company, that is another matter from the point of view of your own interests; and, if you follow my advice, you will continue to pretend to take pleasure in it, if you do not feel any.”

“But I do feel pleasure, girl.”

“That is well, then; and I say, let your pleasure be as obvious to others as it is to yourself.”

He looked his bewilderment, and she derided him:

“How slow of comprehension you are! Why, for the reason that they may think this no more than an intrigue with a femme de chambre, and so spare you the gossiping and eavesdropping which might otherwise work you mischief. O, understand me, monsieur! It is friendship which suggests this--not inclination. I do not propose to you to do more than pretend.”

He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an abyss.

A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love--an outrage and a shame. But it embodied a _quasi_-revelation which was even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally, for the guilty sham it was. He positively blushed like a child detected in a lie.

Was it a fact, too, that gossip was beginning to whisper? He had been so absorbed in his dream, had held it in truth so sacred from the world, that he had never so much as imagined that danger from without. Not while the dream lasted--the mad impossible beatitude. And was it already threatening to an end? He would not believe it--so perfect and so uplifted, risen above the reach of mortal hurts. These shadows were but conditions of its brightness.

After all, what had he done but follow the path appointed him, and if by the way he had wandered into paradise, that chance was in the itinerary. He had not abused his paradise; he had simply turned its inspiration into song. In appearance, at least, there was nothing to convict him.

And so he ended with derision for that monstrous suggestion, and a determination utterly to discard it. Yet the thing being always in his mind may have given him thenceforth in Fanchette’s company an air of self-consciousness, which the vicious might interpret if they would into a secret understanding.

Let all that pass for the moment. Our theme is still of Isabel and her “young palmer in love’s eye” wandering, yet unchallenged, in their unsoiled Eden.

Now June with these bewitched lovers drifted down a golden haze into July, and July itself burned stilly on towards harvest-time. It was the midsummer of their happiness--all the world one soundless tide of light on which their dreaming hearts, like the fairy nautilus, made rainbow sail by mystic strands, and silent moon-drenched gardens, and paths of rippling flame which ran into the sunset. All time was rapture to them, and most when they were silent and together; for speech is but the sorry change of thought, and cannot for all its volume match one golden maxim of the soul. What they felt, each to the other, was better understood unspoken; in sleep alone it found the perfect utterance.

One day, loitering so rapt, they came upon a terrace-corner by the house where, at a man’s height above the ground, was a window with a little balcony looking towards the lower gardens. Here were myrtle bushes growing and loading the air with their scent. Beyond, the turf shelved down to meet the leafy margin of the thickets, which enshrined the flowery walks and lily ponds dear to the girl’s heart. She paused and pointed to the window.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that was my bower, my oratory?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“It is,” she said. “Have I not a beautiful altar to worship at?”

He understood:

“This view? the green dale of quietude, with all its lovely secrets. I like best, Madonna, the lilies of your altar-piece.”

“Ah, if one could but see them!”

“It is enough to know they are there, as I know the love that is in your heart. It is sweet, I think, in hiding. But some day it will be sweeter to go down and drown among my lilies. Is the basil in bud yet?”

“Not yet.”

She called him by the name it was only hers to know. He sighed.

“It is shyer than these myrtles. Why did we not make them the symbol of our bridal? They have the better right. I wonder what it waits for?--my life’s blood, perhaps, Aquaviva would say.”

She cried “Bonbec!” and looked at him with such a white piteousness that his heart smote him.

“Beloved,” he whispered: “That was a senseless and a wicked thought. Forgive me for it. But I wish the basil would blossom. Where do you keep it--in that same dear bower?”

He stood on tiptoe to peep, but could catch no more than a glimpse of daintily flowered silks and hangings, and gilded mirrors, and a sheen of _marqueterie_ and ormolu, all in the richly fragile fashion of the day.

“No,” she said, still pale and troubled: “In my bedroom, which is above.”

He wafted a kiss to that lily sanctuary.

“Could you not, unsuspected, come down from it,” he whispered--“just to the little balcony--and speak with me when all the house is silent? To be alone together in the night, my beautiful!”

Her cheek had turned from pale to pink; but she looked at him with unfaltering eyes.

“I will do anything you tell me to,” she said.

“Even if it were that, Isabel?”

“It would not be wrong if you told me.”

Much moved, he touched her hand, and bade her sleep undisturbed for him. “And speak for me in your prayers,” he said.

“Every night,” she answered, “when I kneel to our unknown God, Bonbec, and pray that some day we may find the print of His footsteps under the rainbow.”

It was his song that was in her mind--that had become, indeed, her new faith’s inspiration. That “passion of the past” of which he had spoken, and into whose ghostly texture her own life seemed woven; those “long far lands of home” towards whose unutterable rest and understanding his spirit sought to convey her--to what more soothing wings of mysticism could she confide her burden of fearful joys and apprehensions? Northward: the world’s unfathomed mystery of the pointing finger: the threshold of the great wonder; and home--not home new made, but home recovered! That was the ecstasy of the thought. They had been wanderers apart these long centuries, and now at last were come together again upon the starry track.

Fond nonsense, was it not? And yet so strangely real to them, that that flight together up the white staircase of the world for ever took them in fancy homewards. When they thought of escape--not spoke, for that had not come yet--those little outpost islands in the cold seas were always their mental refuge and first breathing-place.

But these transcendent moods were not for every occasion. They had their living Eden to engage them, and it was sweet to tread all day on flowers, and hear the drowsy doves murmur, and take the sun into their hearts. And so fate allowed it until the golden cup was brimming.

One night--long cause had Tiretta to remember that night with rapture and with grief--the Gonzalès left the two alone together in the _salon_ whither the chevalier had been invited to improvise sweet ditties for the ladies’ behoof. He had not perhaps acquitted himself very well; he seldom did under compulsion; and the marquise had shown signs of boredom. She was overfed, she was sleepy, she was cross; moreover she had an indescribable air as of resenting the lagging close of an entertainment which had lost its point and its motive. There was patronage in her manner to the soldier; there was even a hint of insolence. At last she said, with rude impatience: “Well, minstrels stale, I find, like other sweetmeats, and there comes a time when we wonder why we cloyed ourselves with them. After all they only appear at the feast to prove how well we could have done without them.”

She had gorged herself at dessert on _marrons-glacés_, the old pig, and no doubt spoke feelingly. Yet there seemed a motive behind her ill-manners, too.

“I have sung badly,” said Tiretta good-humouredly. “I admit it.”

“Eh bien!” said madame; “it does not matter in the least. You have done your best, and there is an end of it.”

She got up almost immediately, having delivered herself, though with a hurried manner, as if she doubted having gone too far, and, saying she had an appointment to keep and would be back in a minute, waddled out of the room.

“To sleep,” whispered Isabella. “She will say to herself it is only to shut her eyes for a moment; but it will be an hour.”

“She will expect to find me gone when she returns,” said Tiretta. “It was a very palpable hint.”

He stood before the girl. She rose, and they looked at one another. Their hearts were somehow conscious of a vague foreboding. Then she moved, and made a sign to him to follow her to the window. Together they stepped out upon the balcony which overlooked the dreaming grounds.

It was a night for love and lovers. The moon burned large behind a film of mist, whose gauze just veiled the barren spaces of the dark, and charmed the sleeping trees, and shook within its tissue a spangled star or two, caught like fireflies in a web. Deep and shadowy below them lay the gardens, their far solitary sentinels two dim and grey colossi, Hercules and a satyr, whose hugeness alone had in past days saved them from the hands of the despoiler. Now, mere unsubstantial phantoms of the mist, they seemed to move and palpitate, as if some antique spirit in the night stirred in their stony veins. Here and there low down a light twinkled from a distant lodge or villa. Not a sound broke the utter stillness, save now and again the drowsy burr of a cricket, or the swish of a bat’s wings as its shadow dipped and fled.

Silent in that breathing trance of things, the two stood together and drank in the beauty of the scene. Their pulses throbbed in unison to its sensuous appeal; they touched, and did not draw apart. Never before had he seemed so dear or she so fair in the other’s eyes. He marvelled how he could ever have dared to lift his to this white miracle of girlhood--to dream of possessing it. As she stood near him, the sense of her proud young loveliness, so submissive to his love, of all that maiden treasure, and he the chosen master of its sweets and secrets, swelled in his heart until he scarce could bear its rapture. Mad thoughts were surging in his brain; he felt that he was losing command of himself, when suddenly she turned and spoke to him, a tense emotion in her voice:

“Whatever happens, keep me in your heart.”

“Isabel!” he breathed.

He held out his arms; and she came instantly into them, and gave her lips to him, yielding herself utterly with just one sigh like a dreaming child’s. All discretion, all good resolutions were forgotten in the passionate stress of that moment. He strained her to his breast with a fierce tyranny of possession; and, her face lifted close to his, she whispered out her soul.

“I shall not be false, even though--O, you will believe me, you will believe me, will you not?”

“Hush!” he said. “What is there to fear?”

“I do not know,” she sighed.

“Not the cryptic utterances of that rude old woman?”

“Your mind, too, is troubled. How can I be so close to you and not feel it. Bonbec, I am afraid of to-morrow.”

“Come away with me then--here, to-night. I will get horses, and we will fly northwards--Isabel--to the unknown Eros! He gave us to one another--O, long long past in the beautiful gardens!--and I cannot live without you, beloved. Duty, honour, reason--throw them all to the wolves, so that our love alone remain to us.”

She clasped her white arms about his neck, and with one soft hand caressed the hair from his forehead.

“Would it remain, dear my lord? Or would you not come to grudge the price you paid for it? And yet I love you so that I must risk it; but not till every other hope is gone.”

“What hope, Isabel?”

“Ah! I do not know. But give me that plea of desperation for my pretext. Then, at last, if you call to me I will come.”

“My princess; my true heart!”

“Not your princess, but your slave, Bonbec.”

“My bird, then.”

“O, yes, indeed--caught captive by a song, and trembling in your hand.”

Some noise, real or imaginary, startled them. He stirred; but she would not let him go.

“Yet one moment, beloved.”

“Is it she returning?” he said. “Well, let her find us. To die for you, Isabel--what a little thing it sounds beside my love! Just to change this mortal suit for one more meet to await our nuptials in! Yet how sweet the body clings to sweet!”

She struggled to free herself--to push him from her.

“No, go,” she said. “For pity’s sake, Bonbec! O, you kill my heart with fear!”

“One last kiss to comfort it.”

She tore herself from him, and he left her, going gaily through the empty room.

All that night he slept on roses, and all the following day he walked on air, his brain drugged with an exultant ecstasy which bore him far above the world of common thoughts and common apprehensions. Some instinct holding him from presuming too soon on a transcendent favour, he took horse and rode far into the country, returning only to the palace when night was falling. And presently, hardly knowing what to hope or what to fear from it, the summons reached him to attend the ladies in the _salle-d’audience_.

She was not there when he entered it; only the old marquise, who rose with unwonted condescension and alacrity to greet him.

“Ah, monsieur!” she said; “you are to congratulate us and yourself on the happy termination of your labours.”

There was a sort of leery jubilance in her manner, sufficiently significant in the context of late forebodings. He looked at her stupidly.

“I do not understand,” he said.

“What!” she cried. “You have not heard?”

“Heard what? I have been absent all day.”

“And no advice has reached this amorous proxy from his indulgent principal? Eh well, monsieur! Wonders will never cease. It was for us to suppose that your periodical reports to the archduke were lately of such a favourable nature as to decide his Highness upon thus bringing matters to a head. And he has not informed you of his decision?”

“No, madame.”

“That I, then, should be the first to enlighten you!”

“If you please, madame.”

“It is only, monsieur, that her Imperial Majesty has despatched an ambassador to Parma to request for her son Joseph the hand of the Infanta. Such, you may consider if you like, is the fruit of your fond advocacy.”

If he was staggered, he took the blow standing and like a soldier. No hint of what he felt must betray itself here. Even the old lady was half imposed upon by his manner.

“And her Highness herself?” he said, in a voice whose very desperation lent it coolness. “She is reconciled?”

“Hoity-toity!” cried the marquise. “A fine expression to apply to her.”

“Else,” said the chevalier, “why should _I_ be here?”

“Well,” answered madame: “that is true enough; but it was not diplomatic. Judged by the alacrity with which she obeyed her father’s summons to court, I should say she was very well reconciled indeed.”

“She has gone to Parma?”

“To receive the betrothal ring, monsieur. And so your task is ended. Henceforth, so long as you favour us with your company here, you are free to command your own time and your own inclinations. I can appreciate, believe me, the relief it will be to us all.”