Chapter IX: The Decoy

Tiretta one morning was traversing an inner corridor of the palace on his way to the gardens, when, passing by a private door which gave egress from the Infanta’s apartments, he almost ran against a young woman who at that moment issued from the opening. The lady effected a quite natural little scream and start, notwithstanding the fact that her eyes had been, but the instant before, watching through the door-slit the young gentleman’s approach. He apologised becomingly, with many regrets for the alarm he had occasioned, and was proceeding on his way, when an exclamation from the girl arrested him. She had pressed a faultless little hand to that region in her dainty bodice under which her heart was presumably lodged, and, with her eyes half closed, appeared to be swaying slightly. He returned at once, and, with an aspect of real concern, offered his support.

Mademoiselle Becquet resisted, though faintly, the proffered assistance. There was, after all, something of the moral _hors-d’œuvre_, of the appetisingly unexpected, about this early capture of her slim waist by a shapely masculine arm. Finally she turned her head away, and, with a sigh, yielded herself to the embrace just as it appeared about to be withdrawn.

“You are better?” said Tiretta anxiously.

She gulped, still panting a little.

“It was the suddenness, monsieur. My heart is weak.” (The wicked fibster! It was as tough as indiarubber, what there was of it.)

He expressed his compunction:

“And soft, I am sure,” said he, “on behalf of a penitent sinner.”

She smiled, in a recovered way.

“If you please, monsieur. But you need not take advantage of that absolution. A soft heart is the most fatal possession a girl can own to in this bad world. It were as foolish as to flaunt her jewels in the Ghetto.”

Tiretta, with a laugh, released the slender waist.

“If you can stand alone,” he said.

“O, yes!” she answered--and indeed there was no doubt she could.

He looked at her with a twinkling gravity.

“What is your name, child?”

She dipped him a demure little curtsey.

“Fanchette Becquet, at your service, monsieur. I am her Highness’s confidential maid.”

“She is prettily served, Fanchette.”

“And handsomely, I am sure, monsieur. You see I return the compliment.”

He laughed again at her insolence--and checked himself suddenly.

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

“O!” she said innocently: “do you not love my mistress? Everybody loves her.”

He breathed again. There was safety in generalisations.

“If everybody loves her, then I suppose I must,” he said.

She clapped her pink hands.

“I will tell her. She will like to know that.”

He stared at the girl aghast; then nipped one of her slender wrists.

“If you dare! Are you off your head?”

“Perhaps, monsieur. You see you startled me so.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. I believe this was premeditated.”

“Yes, that is quite true.”

“It was?”

“I saw you coming before you saw me. I thought I should like to be her Highness’s proxy for your attentions. I would have let you kiss me, if you had offered.”

He released her, and stepped back.

“You are certainly mad,” he exclaimed.

She laughed: they were quite alone: then came close up to him.

“Would you like to practise again on me, monsieur--to test the softness of her heart by deputy? No?”

“I am no thief,” he said, as if stupefied. “Keep your jewels, for what I care.”

“That is well,” she answered mockingly, “since they are bespoken by another. Only I love an intrigue.”

He commanded himself by a great effort; assumed a chilling masterfulness, if he did not feel it.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I cannot pretend to know on what false and vicious assumptions you are daring thus to impeach my honour. They are mistaken, whatever they are; and let that suffice for you.”

Fanchette set her lips tight, and nodded her head once or twice.

“O! very well,” she said. “There is no harm done. If I am mistaken I am mistaken, that is all.”

He should have gone; but he unwisely lingered.

“I believe,” he said, “I ought to probe this to the bottom. Only gossip takes good care to be elusive.”

“It cannot help itself, monsieur,” said the girl. “It is all shaped upon signs and hints and glances--upon a mystic code which only the initiated can interpret.”

“Then in that case you are not one of the initiated.”

“I do my best, monsieur. Hey-day! Well, from my own point of view, I am sorry for my mistress--especially as she looks, for her entertainment, to the company this afternoon of so chill a cavalier.”

“What do you mean?”

“O! nothing, but that we are going, she and I, to that old Aquaviva’s garden; and without the she-dragon, who will be engaged over M. du Tillot.”

“Her Highness expects me to accompany her?”

“I did not say that. To think she could so commit herself! But she sighs over the incompleteness of her dear orange-grove, which, says she, only needs its Orpheus to be the sweetest garden under heaven.”

“It is melancholy to have to produce music to order, is it not, Fanchette?”

“I think it is, monsieur.”

“Well, I must respond, I suppose. It will only be a little while longer. It has this use, that you shall convince yourself by my behaviour of the wickedness of your innuendo.”

Convince herself as he convinced himself, no doubt. He told his conscience, as he walked away, that thus to go forward, steadfastly and dutifully, his eyes set to his mission, his ears deaf to the jeers and chuckles of scandal, was his only safe course. There was a story somewhere he had read of a prince whose way to a definite purpose lay up a stone-strewn hill, every pebble of which, when he came to the test, was clamant with an agonised or seductive voice entreating him to turn. And he did turn, and was changed into stone. Well, he must not be like that prince, that was all--an easy matter, it seemed. But the spirits of evil know their business better than man, or they would not provide so simple a lure for his ruin. It is the complicated trap which fails to beguile the confiding little mouse; the deadly snare consists in no more than a fragment of bait and a wire spring.

Just to go steadily forward: yes, but this unexpected halt, with its startling revelation, had suddenly made of that plain road a rather formidable maze. Had he appeared, noticeably appeared, to be making too personal a matter of this business? Then how was a part so impassioned to be played in a spirit of aloofness? He swore he was loyal to his mission, loyal to his friend, that he was a man of honour, that he had never consciously wavered in his fidelity. Of course he had not. The devil knows better than to inoculate his victims perceptibly. It is a very favourite trick of his to encourage a man, who knows nothing whatever about moral architecture, to build over-heavily upon his moral strength. Tiretta was so confident in his, that he had never thought of questioning its capacity for supporting any test. He did not now; he would not, Fanchette and all such mischievous gossips despite. He was just, he flattered himself, beginning to succeed in his romantic undertaking, and to feel a certain thrill in the near accomplishment of a task which had once promised to prove so distasteful. To withdraw now would certainly seem to give a colour to calumny. If only for the lady’s sake, he must prosecute his purpose to its triumphant end.

What a chivalrous Tiretta, to be sure; but indeed, he was not yet so conscious of his own state as to be guilty of lying to himself in the matter.

And in the meantime Mademoiselle Fanchette stood and looked after the retreating figure, and curtsied derisively to its back.

“You are a very pretty gentleman,” she said: “but I know a prettier.”

She had that other in her mind’s eye. He was also a musician, but of a very different “tone,” so to speak. He did not deal in the visionary stuff of dreams, but in the practical material of courtship--the sort of suitor a woman could understand. He set adorable words to intelligible music; one was at no trouble with him to puzzle out sentiments which fitted themselves quite naturally into the love-traffic they recorded and provoked. And he too was handsome, but in a braver, bolder way, wooing, as a man should, by compulsion. She was in fact very much under the thrall of this cavalier, though still coquetting--for business’ sake, as some Frenchwomen will--with the thought of capitulation.

And yet, with a curious perversity, she was jealous of the very quality she sneered at--acutely jealous of the mistress who might command, if she liked and as she liked, that dreamer of dreams. She did not understand M. Tiretta’s mystical rhapsodies (she had often, herself unseen or unobserved, heard him improvise), or the fine subtlety of his mind, or the rareness of his gift; she did not admire either his melancholy looks or his serene humour. But an uneasy suspicion as to the superior value of these qualifications, as compared with la Coque’s showy and meretricious ones, haunted her. She felt them like supercilious reflections on her own vulgar taste, or on what they seemed to imply to be such; and the thought, as with common natures, did not drive her to aspire, but to degrade. She had no wish, for herself or her lover, to rise to Tiretta’s level; she would have liked dearly to pull him down to theirs. Wherefore, in the prosecution of that amiable design, she had been quite ready to lend herself a subtle instrument to the ruin of that rival favourite. She would even, if provoked to it, have given her body to the task, as she had her soul. To hate and to seduce, to seduce because she hated, to risk loving because she had seduced--that was something her mental attitude. It was the passionist French view, and Fanchette was excessively French.