Part 7
The question of a token of remembrance for faithful Smithwick was a thorn in her ex-pupil’s pillow. You are to understand that Redskin, in his blundering, boyish way, had been trying hard to keep inviolate the oath imposed upon him by de Moulny. The monthly two louis of pocket-money were scrupulously dropped each pay-day into the alms-box of the Carmelite Church in the Rue Vaugirard, and what a hungry glare followed the vanishing coins, and to what miserable shifts the boy resorted in the endeavor to earn a meager pittance to supply his most pressing needs, and what an unjust reputation for stinginess and parsimony he earned, when it became known that he was willing to help dull or lazy students with their papers for pay, you can conceive.
He possessed the sum of five francs, amassed with difficulty after this fashion, and this represented the boy’s entire capital at this juncture. A five-franc piece is a handsome coin, but you cannot buy anything handsome with it, that is the trouble. The discovery of the scene-painter Daguerre, first made in 1830, was not published by the Government of France until 1839. Otherwise, how the faithful heart of the attached Smithwick might have been gladdened by one of those inexpensive, oily-looking, semi-iridescent, strangely elusive portraits; into which the recipient peered, making discoveries of familiar leading features of relatives or friends, hailing them with joy when found, never finding them all together.
A portrait, even a pencil miniature with stumped shadows, its outlines filled with the palest wash of water-color, was out of the question. There was a silhouettist in the Rue de Chaillot. To this artist Hector resorted, and obtained a black paper profile, mounted and glazed, and enclosed in a gilt tin frame, at cost of all the boy possessed in the world.
That the offering was a poor one never occurred to simple Smithwick. She received it with little squeaking, mouselike cries of delight, and grief, and admiration; she ran at the tall, awkward, blushing youth to kiss him, unaware how he recoiled from the affectionate dab of her cold, pink-ended nose.
You could not say that the organ in question was disproportionately large, but its owner never managed to dispose of it inoffensively in the act of osculation. It invariably got in the eye or the ear of the recipient of the caress. A nose so chill in contact, say authorities, indicates by inverse ratio the temperature of the heart.
Hector got leave from the School, and went with the poor troubled Smithwick to the office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Boulevard des Capucines, where for ten of her scanty store of francs she got her passport signed. Stout Auguste drove them in the shiny barouche with the high-steppers in silver-mounted harness, to meet the red Calais coach at the Public Posting-Office in the Rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires, whither one of the stablelads had wheeled Miss Smithwick’s aged, piebald hair-trunk, her carpet-bag, and her three band-boxes on a hand-truck. And, judging by the coldness of the poor soul’s nose when, a very Niobe for tears, she kissed the son of her lost mistress and her adored patron good-by, the heart beneath Smithwick’s faded green velvet mantle must have been a very furnace of maternal love and tenderness.
“Never neglect the necessity of daily ablution of the entire person, my dearest boy!” entreated the poor gentlewoman, “or omit the exercises of your religion at morning and night. Instruct the domestics to see that your beloved papa’s linen is properly aired. I fear they will be only too prone to neglect these necessary precautions when my surveillance is withdrawn! And--though but a humble individual offers this counsel, remember, my Hector, that there are higher aims in life than the mere attainment of great wealth or lofty station. Self-respect, beloved child, is worth _far more_!” She was extraordinarily earnest in saying this, shaking her thin gray curls with emphatic nods, holding up a lean admonitory forefinger. “Persons with gifts and capacities as great, natures as noble and generous as your distinguished father’s, may be blinded by the sparkling luster of a jeweled scepter, allured by the prospect of dominion, power, influence, rule....” What could good Smithwick possibly be driving at? “But an unstained honor, my beloved boy, is worth more than these, and a clean conscience smooths the--way we must all of us travel!” She blinked the tears from her scanty, ginger-hued eyelashes, and added: “I have forfeited a confidence and regard I deeply appreciated, by perhaps unnecessarily believing it my duty to reiterate this.” She coughed and dabbed her poor red eyes with the damp white handkerchief held in the thin, shaking hand in the shabby glove; and continued: “But a day will come when the brief joys and bitter disillusions of this life will be at an end. The bitterest that I have ever known come late, very late indeed!” Had Smithwick met it in the library that morning when the Marshal bade her adieu? “When I lay my head upon my pillow to die, it will be with the conviction that I did my duty. It has borne me fruit of sorrow. But I hope and pray that this chastening may be for my good. And oh! my dearest child, may God for ever bless and keep you!”
The mail-bags were stowed. The three inside passengers’ seats being taken, poor weeping Smithwick perforce was compelled to negotiate the ladder, must climb into the _cabriolet_ in company with the guard. With her thin elderly ankles upon her mind, it may be judged that no more intelligible speech came from her. She peered round the tarred canvas hood as the bugle flourished; she waved her wet handkerchief as the long, stinging whip-lash cracked over the bony backs of the four high-rumped, long-necked grays.... She was gone. Something had gone out of Hector’s life along with her; he had not loved her, yet she left a gap behind. His heart was cold and heavy as he brought his eyes back from the dwindling red patch made by the mail amongst the vari-colored Paris street-traffic, but the hardening change that had begun in him from the very hour of de Moulny’s revelation stiffened the muscles of his face, and drove back the tears he might have shed.
“Holy blue!” gulped stout Auguste, who was sitting on his box blubbering and mopping his eyes with a red cotton handkerchief, sadly out of keeping with his superb mauve and yellow livery, blazing with gold lace and buttons, and the huge cocked hat that crowned his well-powdered wig. “There are gayer employments than seeing people off, my faith there are! Who would have dreamed I should ever pipe my eye for the old girl! It is a pity she is gone? She was an honest creature!” He added huskily, tucking away the red cotton handkerchief: “One could do uncommonly well now with two fingers of wine?”
He cocked his thirsty eye at penniless Hector, who pretended not to hear him, and turned away abruptly; saying that he would walk back to the School.
“That is not a chip of the old block, see you, when it comes to a cart-wheel for drink-money,” said Auguste over his shoulder, as the silver-harnessed blacks with much champing and high action, prepared to return to the stables in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, and the silkstockinged footman mounted his perch behind.
“It is a learned prig,” pronounced the footman, authoritatively, adding: “They turn them out all of one pattern at that shop of his.”
“Yet he fought a duel,” said Auguste, deftly twirling the prancing steeds into a by-street and pulling up outside a little, low-browed wine-shop much frequented by gold-laced liveries and cocked-hats. “And came off the victor,” he added, with a touch of pride.
“By a trick got up beforehand,” said the footman pithily, as he dived under the striped awning, in at the wineshop door.
“Nothing of the sort!” denied Auguste.
“Just as you please,” said the footman, emerging with two brimming pewter measures, “but none the less true. M. Pédelaborde’s nephew, who taught the _coup_ to M. Hector, told M. Alain de Moulny, long after the affair, how cleverly he had been grassed. It was at the Hôtel de Moulny, my crony Lacroix, M. Alain’s valet, was waiting in the ante-room and listened at the door. Money passed, Lacroix says. M. Alain de Moulny paid Pédelaborde handsomely not to tell.”
“That is a story one doesn’t like the stink of,” said Auguste, making a wry mouth, draining his measure, handing it back to the silk-calved one, and spitting in the dust. “But the knowing fellow who taught M. Hector the dirty dodge and blows the gaff for hush-money, that is a rank polecat, my word!”
A crude pronouncement with which the reader may possibly be inclined to agree.
XI
The months went by. Hector ended his course at the School of Technical Military Instruction with honors, and his examiners, in recognition of the gift for languages, the bent for Science, the administrative and organizing capacities that were distinctive of this student, transferred him, with another equally promising youth, not to the Academy of Ways, Works, and Transport, where the embryo artillery and engineer officers of the School of Technical Military Instruction were usually ground and polished, but to the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff. An annual bounty tacked to the tail of the certificate relieved that pressing necessity for pocket-money. Redskin, with fewer anxieties upon his mind, could draw breath.
The Training Institute for Officers of the Staff was the School of Technical Military Instruction all over again, but upon a hugely magnified scale. To mention the School was the unpardonable sin: you spent the first term in laboriously unlearning everything that had been taught you there. On being admitted to the small gate adjacent to the large ones of wrought and gilded iron, you beheld the façade of the Institute, its great portico crowned with a triangular pediment supported upon stately pillars, upon which was sculptured an emblematical bas-relief of France, seated on a trophy of conquered cannon, instructing her sons in the military sciences, and distributing among them weapons of war. Following your guide, you shortly afterwards discovered two large yards full of young men in unbuttoned uniforms, supporting on their knees drawing-boards with squares of cartridge paper pinned upon them, upon which they were busily delineating the various architectural features of the buildings of the Institute, while a Colonel of the Corps of Instructors sternly or blandly surveyed the scene. Within the Institute, studies in Mathematics, Trigonometry and Topography, Cosmography, Geography, Chemistry, Artillery, Field Fortifications, Permanent Fortifications, Assault and Defense, Plans, Military Administration, Military Maneuvers, French, English, and German Literature, Fencing, Swimming, and Horsemanship in all its branches were thoroughly and comprehensively taught. And once a quarter the pupil-basket was picked over by skilled hands; and worthy young men, who were eminently fitted to serve their country in the inferior capacity as regimental officers, but did not possess the qualities necessary for the making of Officers of the Staff, were, at that little gate by the side of the great gilded iron ones, blandly shown out.
For, sane even in her maddest hour, France has never--under every conceivable political condition, in every imaginable national crisis, and under whatever government--Monarchical, Imperial, or Republican, that may for the time being have got the upper hand--ceased laboring to insure the supply to her Army, constantly renewed, of officers competent to command armies, of scientists skilled in the innumerable moves of the Great Game of War. Nor have other nations, Continental or insular, ever failed to profit by France’s example, and follow France’s lead.
* * * * *
The Marshal’s son was not dismissed by that dreaded little exit. The fine flower of Young France grew in the neat parterres behind those lofty gilded railings. Sous-lieutenant Hector Dunoisse found many intellectual superiors among his comrades, whose society stimulated him to greater efforts. He worked, and presently began to win distinction; passed, with a specially-endorsed certificate, his examinations in the branches of study already enumerated and a few more; served for three months as Supernumerary-Assistant-Adjutant with an Artillery Regiment at Nancy; did duty for a corresponding period in the same capacity at Belfort with a corps of Engineers; and then received his appointment as Assistant-Adjutant to the 33rd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, quartered at Blidah.
Money would not be needed to make life tolerable at Blidah, where mettlesome Arab horses could be bought by Chasseurs d’Afrique at reasonable prices, and the mastic and the thin Dalmatian wine were excellent and cheap. Algerian cigars and pipe-tobacco were obtainable at the outlay of a few coppers; and from every thicket of dwarf oak or alfa-grass, hares started out before the sportsman’s gun; and partridges and Carthage hens were as plentiful as sparrows in Paris.
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?”
“You have won honors, and with them a reputation for parsimony--are called a brilliant screw,--name of a thousand devils!--among your comrades. You coach other men for pay; you translate foreign technical works for military publishers; you burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. It is all very honorable and scrupulous, but would those who have sneered at you think better of you if they knew the truth? You know they would not! Instead of being despised, you would be laughed at for playing Don Quixote. That is one of the books I have read,” Monsieur the Marshal added, pricked by the evident surprise with which his son received this unexpected testimony of his parent’s literacy. “One can get some useful things out of a book like that, even though the hero of it is mad as a March hare. It is one of the books with blood and marrow in them, as the Emperor would have said: books that--unlike those of your Chateaubriands, Hugos, Lamartines, the devil knows who else!--are the literature that nourish men who are alive, not wooden puppets of virtue and propriety whose strings are pulled by priests--sacred name of----”
The Marshal went on, as his son stood silent before him, to lash himself into a frenzy of rage that imperiled the seams of a tight-waisted high-collared frock-coat of Frogé’s own building, and gave its wearer what the Germans term a red head; with such accompaniments of gasping and snorting, rollings of the eyes and starting of the forehead-veins as are painfully suggestive of bleedings and sinapisms; cuppings and hot bricks; soft-footed personages with shiny black bags, candles, wreaths of white, purple and yellow _immortelles_ inscribed with “_Regrets_,” and all the plumed pomp and sable circumstance of a funeral procession to the Cemetery of Père La Chaise. He wound up at last, or rather, ran down; sank, puffing and perspiring and purple, into an easy chair.... Hector, who had listened with an unmoved countenance and heels correctly approximated, bowed and left the room, across which a broad ray of sunshine fell from the high, velvet-draped windows, across the inlaid ebony writing-table near which the Marshal lay back, wheezing and scowling, and muttering.... The thousands of shining motes that danced in that wide golden beam might have been wasps; the old man about whom they sported was so goaded and stung. Who wants to watch the Marshal in his hour of rageful humiliation.... He fumed and cursed awhile under his dyed mustaches, and then hit on an idea which made him chuckle and grin. He wheeled round, and splashed off a huge blotty letter to his bankers, and from that day the sum of One Million One Hundred and Twenty-five Thousand Francs stood to the credit of Hector Dunoisse upon Rothschild’s books, and stood untouched.... One did not need much money out in Algeria, the temptation to dip into the golden store was barely felt, the malice of the Marshal was not to be gratified just yet awhile.
Though perhaps it was not altogether malice that inspired that action of Monsieur. His son forgot to question before long; forgot that old desertion of de Moulny’s and its fanged tooth; forgot that check-book dimming with dust that drifted through the keyhole of the locked drawer in the writing-table, whose key was on his ring.
For there came a day when the boy--for he was little more--rode out at the Algiers Gate in command of a squadron of Chasseurs d’Afrique, under orders to reinforce the Zouaves garrisoning a hill-fort in Kabylia, threatened with siege by a rebellious Arab Kaïd who had thrown up his office, and his pay, and declared war against the Francos.
* * * * *
The rustle of the white cap-cover against his epaulet as he turned his head, the jingle of the scabbard against his stirrup, the clink of the bridle, made pleasant harmony with the other clinking and jingling. The air was cool before dawn, and the blue shadow of mighty Atlas stretched far over the plain of Metidja. In the deep-foliaged sycamores; from the copses of mastic, the nightingales trilled: turtle-doves were drinking and bathing in the mountain-rills, Zachar lifted a huge stony brow upon the horizon.... A slender young trooper with a high, reedy, tenor voice, sang an Arab song; his comrades joined in the chorus:
“Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor. Ride on! Who knows what lies at the end of the long journey? Ride on!
“Life and Love, Death and Sleep, these are from the Hand of the Giver. Ride on! Thy Fate in the balance, thy foot in the stirrup, before thee the path of Honor! Ride on!”
So Dunoisse rode on; the feet of his Arab mare falling softly on the thick white dust of the Dalmatie Road. And the great mysterious East rose up before him, smiling her slow, mystic smile, and opened her olive-hued, jeweled arms, and drew the boy of twenty to her warm, perfumed bosom, and kissed him with kisses that are potent philters, and wove around him her magic spells. And he forgot all the things that it had hurt him so to remember, for a space of two years.
XII
When his two years’ service with the Cavalry were ended, he was transferred, with his step as lieutenant, but still in the capacity of Assistant-Adjutant, to the First Battalion, 999th Regiment of the Line, Paris; quartered in the Barracks of the Rue de l’Assyrie.
With the return to the familiar places of his boyhood, those things that Hector thought he had forgotten began to revive sufficiently to sting. A brother-officer spoke to him of de Moulny, who had quitted St. Sulpice a year previously, under a shadow so dark, it was discreetly hinted, that only the paternal influence had saved him from expulsion.
Hector did not blaze out in passionate defense or exoneration of his whilom comrade and friend. He said, briefly and coldly: “Those who say so lie! I used to know him!” And dropped the subject, as the chatterer was glad to do. For that duel fought by two schoolboys with disbuttoned fencing-foils six years before, was to be the first upon a list that grew and lengthened, and kept on growing and lengthening.... Unless you were desirous of cold steel for breakfast, there were subjects that must not be trifled with in the hearing of Assistant-Adjutant Hector Dunoisse.
The Catholic Church: Religious, particularly nuns; more particularly nuns of the Carmelite Order: ... instances of foul play in trials of strength and skill, particularly shady _coups_ in fencing, slim tricks in the Game of the Sword. With other cause of offense provoking the _quid rides_? you never were quite sure where they might crop up.
And the fellow was a fighter--loved risk, enjoyed danger....