The girl looked up in surprise and glanced timidly at her mother. The Marquise’s eyes sparkled with curiosity.
“Well, mamma?” she said, and her voice had a troubled ring.
“I should like to know what is going on upstairs. If there is anybody up there, he has not stirred yet. Just go up – ”
“I?” cried the girl, with something like horror in her tones.
“Are you afraid?”
“No, mamma, but I thought I heard a man’s footsteps.”
“If I could go myself, I should not have asked you to go, Helene,” said her mother with cold dignity. “If your father were to come back and did not see me, he would go to look for me perhaps, but he would not notice your absence.”
“Madame, if you bid me go, I will go,” said Helene, “but I shall lose my father’s good opinion – ”
“What is this!” cried the Marquise in a sarcastic tone. “But since you take a thing that was said in joke in earnest, I now order you to go upstairs and see who is in the room above. Here is the key, child. When your father told you to say nothing about this thing that happened, he did not forbid you to go up to the room. Go at once – and learn that a daughter ought never to judge her mother.”
The last words were spoken with all the severity of a justly offended mother. The Marquise took the key and handed it to Helene, who rose without a word and left the room.
“My mother can always easily obtain her pardon,” thought the girl; “but as for me, my father will never think the same of me again. Does she mean to rob me of his tenderness? Does she want to turn me out of his house?”
These were the thoughts that set her imagination in a sudden ferment, as she went down the dark passage to the mysterious door at the end. When she stood before it, her mental confusion grew to a fateful pitch. Feelings hitherto forced down into inner depths crowded up at the summons of these confused thoughts. Perhaps hitherto she had never believed that a happy life lay before her, but now, in this awful moment, her despair was complete. She shook convulsively as she set the key in the lock; so great indeed was her agitation, that she stopped for a moment and laid her hand on her heart, as if to still the heavy throbs that sounded in her ears. Then she opened the door.
The creaking of the hinges sounded doubtless in vain on the murderer’s ears. Acute as were his powers of hearing, he stood as if lost in thought, and so motionless that he might have been glued to the wall against which he leaned. In the circle of semi-opaque darkness, dimly lit by the bull’s-eye lantern, he looked like the shadowy figure of some dead knight, standing for ever in his shadowy mortuary niche in the gloom of some Gothic chapel. Drops of cold sweat trickled over the broad, sallow forehead. An incredible fearlessness looked out from every tense feature. His eyes of fire were fixed and tearless; he seemed to be watching some struggle in the darkness beyond him. Stormy thoughts passed swiftly across a face whose firm decision spoke of a character of no common order. His whole person, bearing, and frame bore out the impression of a tameless spirit. The man looked power and strength personified; he stood facing the darkness as if it were the visible image of his own future.
These physical characteristics had made no impression upon the General, familiar as he was with the powerful faces of the group of giants gathered about Napoleon; speculative curiosity, moreover, as to the why and wherefore of the apparition had completely filled his mind; but Helene, with feminine sensitiveness to surface impressions, was struck by the blended chaos of light and darkness, grandeur and passion, suggesting a likeness between this stranger and Lucifer recovering from his fall. Suddenly the storm apparent in his face was stilled as if by magic; and the indefinable power to sway which the stranger exercised upon others, and perhaps unconsciously and as by reflex action upon himself, spread its influence about him with the progressive swiftness of a flood. A torrent of thought rolled away from his brow as his face resumed its ordinary expression. Perhaps it was the strangeness of this meeting, or perhaps it was the mystery into which she had penetrated, that held the young girl spellbound in the doorway, so that she could look at a face pleasant to behold and full of interest. For some moments she stood in the magical silence; a trouble had come upon her never known before in her young life. Perhaps some exclamation broke from Helene, perhaps she moved unconsciously; or it may be that the hunted criminal returned of his own accord from the world of ideas to the material world, and heard some one breathing in the room; however it was, he turned his head towards his host’s daughter, and saw dimly in the shadow a noble face and queenly form, which he must have taken for an angel’s, so motionless she stood, so vague and like a spirit.
“Monsieur…” a trembling voice cried.
The murderer trembled.
“A woman!” he cried under his breath. “Is it possible? Go,” he cried, “I deny that any one has a right to pity, to absolve, or condemn me. I must live alone. Go, my child,” he added, with an imperious gesture, “I should ill requite the service done me by the master of the house if I were to allow a single creature under his roof to breathe the same air with me. I must submit to be judged by the laws of the world.”
The last words were uttered in a lower voice. Even as he realized with a profound intuition all the manifold misery awakened by that melancholy thought, the glance that he gave Helene had something of the power of the serpent, stirring a whole dormant world in the mind of the strange girl before him. To her that glance was like a light revealing unknown lands. She was stricken with strange trouble, helpless, quelled by a magnetic power exerted unconsciously. Trembling and ashamed, she went out and returned to the salon. She had scarcely entered the room before her father came back, so that she had not time to say a word to her mother.
The General was wholly absorbed in thought. He folded his arms, and paced silently to and fro between the windows which looked out upon the street and the second row which gave upon the garden. His wife lay the sleeping Abel on her knee, and little Moina lay in untroubled slumber in the low chair, like a bird in its nest. Her older sister stared into the fire, a skein of silk in one hand, a needle in the other.
Deep silence prevailed, broken only by lagging footsteps on the stairs, as one by one the servants crept away to bed; there was an occasional burst of stifled laughter, a last echo of the wedding festivity, or doors were opened as they still talked among themselves, then shut. A smothered sound came now and again from the bedrooms, a chair fell, the old coachman coughed feebly, then all was silent.
In a little while the dark majesty with which sleeping earth is invested at midnight brought all things under its sway. No lights shone but the light of the stars. The frost gripped the ground. There was not a sound of a voice, nor a living creature stirring. The crackling of the fire only seemed to make the depth of the silence more fully felt.
The church clock of Montreuil had just struck one, when an almost inaudible sound of a light footstep came from the second flight of stairs. The Marquis and his daughter, both believing that M. de Mauny’s murderer was a prisoner above, thought that one of the maids had come down, and no one was at all surprised to hear the door open in the ante-chamber. Quite suddenly the murderer appeared in their midst. The Marquis himself was sunk in deep musings, the mother and daughter were silent, the one from keen curiosity, the other from sheer astonishment, so that the visitor was almost half-way across the room when he spoke to the General.
“Sir, the two hours are almost over,” he said, in a voice that was strangely calm and musical.
“You here!” cried the General. “By what means – ?” and he gave wife and daughter a formidable questioning glance. Helene grew red as fire.
“You!” he went on, in a tone filled with horror. “You among us! A murderer covered with blood! You are a blot on this picture! Go, go out!” he added in a burst of rage.
At that word “murderer,” the Marquise cried out; as for Helene, it seemed to mark an epoch in her life, there was not a trace of surprise in her face. She looked as if she had been waiting for this – for him. Those so vast thoughts of hers had found a meaning. The punishment reserved by Heaven for her sins flamed out before her. In her own eyes she was as great a criminal as this murderer; she confronted him with her quiet gaze; she was his fellow, his sister. It seemed to her that in this accident the command of God had been made manifest. If she had been a few years older, reason would have disposed of her remorse, but at this moment she was like one distraught.
The stranger stood impassive and self-possessed; a scornful smile overspread his features and his thick, red lips.
“You appreciate the magnanimity of my behavior very badly,” he said slowly. “I would not touch with my fingers the glass of water you brought me to allay my thirst; I did not so much as think of washing my blood-stained hands under your roof; I am going away, leaving nothing of my crime” (here his lips were compressed) “but the memory; I have tried to leave no trace of my presence in this house. Indeed, I would not even allow your daughter to – ”
“My daughter!” cried the General, with a horror-stricken glance at Helene. “Vile wretch, go, or I will kill you – ”
“The two hours are not yet over,” said the other; “if you kill me or give me up, you must lower yourself in your own eyes – and in mine.”
At these last words, the General turned to stare at the criminal in dumb amazement; but he could not endure the intolerable light in those eyes which for the second time disorganized his being. He was afraid of showing weakness once more, conscious as he was that his will was weaker already.
“An old man! You can never have seen a family,” he said, with a father’s glance at his wife and children.
“Yes, an old man,” echoed the stranger, frowning slightly.
“Fly!” cried the General, but he did not dare to look at his guest. “Our compact is broken. I shall not kill you. No! I will never be purveyor to the scaffold. But go out. You make us shudder.”
“I know that,” said the other patiently. “There is not a spot on French soil where I can set foot and be safe; but if man’s justice, like God’s, took all into account, if man’s justice deigned to inquire which was the monster – the murderer or his victim – then I might hold up my head among my fellows. Can you not guess that other crimes preceded that blow from an axe? I constituted myself his judge and executioner; I stepped in where man’s justice failed. That was my crime. Farewell, sir. Bitter though you have made your hospitality, I shall not forget it. I shall always bear in my heart a feeling of gratitude towards one man in the world, and you are that man… But I could wish that you had showed yourself more generous!”
He turned towards the door, but in the same instant Helene leaned to whisper something in her mother’s ear.
“Ah!..”
At the cry that broke from his wife, the General trembled as if he had seen Moina lying dead. There stood Helene and the murderer had turned instinctively, with something like anxiety about these folk in his face.
“What is it, dear?” asked the General.
“Helene wants to go with him.”
The murderer’s face flushed.
“If that is how my mother understands an almost involuntary exclamation,” Helene said in a low voice, “I will fulfil her wishes. She glanced about her with something like fierce pride; then the girl’s eyes fell, and she stood, admirable in her modesty.
“Helene, did you go up to the room where – ?”
“Yes, father.”
“Helene” (and his voice shook with a convulsive tremor), “is this the first time that you have seen this man?”
“Yes, father.”
“Then it is not natural that you should intend to – ”
“If it is not natural, father, at any rate it is true.”
“Oh! child,” said the Marquise, lowering her voice, but not so much but that her husband could hear her, “you are false to all the principles of honor, modesty, and right which I have tried to cultivate in your heart. If until this fatal hour you life has only been one lie, there is nothing to regret in your loss. It can hardly be the moral perfection of this stranger that attracts you to him? Can it be the kind of power that commits crime? I have too good an opinion of you to suppose that – ”
“Oh, suppose everything, madame,” Helene said coldly.
But though her force of character sustained this ordeal, her flashing eyes could scarcely hold the tears that filled them. The stranger, watching her, guessed the mother’s language from the girl’s tears, and turned his eagle glance upon the Marquise. An irresistible power constrained her to look at this terrible seducer; but as her eyes met his bright, glittering gaze, she felt a shiver run through her frame, such a shock as we feel at the sight of a reptile or the contact of a Leyden jar.
“Dear!” she cried, turning to her husband, “this is the Fiend himself. He can divine everything!”
The General rose to his feet and went to the bell.
“He means ruin for you,” Helene said to the murderer.
The stranger smiled, took one forward stride, grasped the General’s arm, and compelled him to endure a steady gaze which benumbed the soldier’s brain and left him powerless.
“I will repay you now for your hospitality,” he said, “and then we shall be quits. I will spare you the shame by giving myself up. After all, what should I do now with my life?”
“You could repent,” answered Helene, and her glance conveyed such hope as only glows in a young girl’s eyes.
“I shall never repent,” said the murderer in a sonorous voice, as he raised his head proudly.
“His hands are stained with blood,” the father said.
“I will wipe it away,” she answered.
“But do you so much as know whether he cares for you?” said her father, not daring now to look at the stranger.
The murderer came up a little nearer. Some light within seemed to glow through Helene’s beauty, grave and maidenly though it was, coloring and bringing into relief, as it were, the least details, the most delicate lines in her face. The stranger, with that terrible face still blazing in his eyes, gave one tender glance to her enchanting loveliness, then he spoke, his tones revealing how deeply he had been moved.
“And if I refuse to allow this sacrifice of yourself, and so discharge my debt of two hours of existence to your father; is not this love, love for yourself alone?”
“Then do you too reject me?” Helene’s cry rang painfully through the hearts of all who heard her. “Farewell, then, to you all; I will die.”
“What does this mean?” asked the father and mother.
Helene gave her mother an eloquent glance and lowered her eyes.
Since the first attempt made by the General and his wife to contest by word or action the intruder’s strange presumption to the right of staying in their midst, from their first experience of the power of those glittering eyes, a mysterious torpor had crept over them, and their benumbed faculties struggled in vain with the preternatural influence. The air seemed to have suddenly grown so heavy, that they could scarcely breathe; yet, while they could not find the reason of this feeling of oppression, a voice within told them that this magnetic presence was the real cause of their helplessness. In this moral agony, it flashed across the General that he must make every effort to overcome this influence on his daughter’s reeling brain; he caught her by the waist and drew her into the embrasure of a window, as far as possible from the murderer.
“Darling,” he murmured, “if some wild love has been suddenly born in your heart, I cannot believe that you have not the strength of soul to quell the mad impulse; your innocent life, your pure and dutiful soul, has given me too many proofs of your character. There must be something behind all this. Well, this heart of mine is full of indulgence, you can tell everything to me; even if it breaks, dear child, I can be silent about my grief, and keep your confession a secret. What is it? Are you jealous of our love for your brothers or your little sister? Is it some love trouble? Are you unhappy here at home? Tell me about it, tell me the reasons that urge you to leave your home, to rob it of its greatest charm, to leave your mother and brothers and your little sister?”
“I am in love with no one, father, and jealous of no one, not even of your friend the diplomatist, M. de Vandenesse.”
The Marquise turned pale; her daughter saw this, and stopped short.
“Sooner or later I must live under some man’s protection, must I not?”
“That is true.”
“Do we ever know,” she went on, “the human being to whom we link our destinies? Now, I believe in this man.”
“Oh, child,” said the General, raising his voice, “you have no idea of all the misery that lies in store for you.”
“I am thinking of his.”
“What a life!” groaned the father.
“A woman’s life,” the girl murmured.
“You have a great knowledge of life!” exclaimed the Marquise, finding speech at last.
“Madame, my answers are shaped by the questions; but if you desire it, I will speak more clearly.”
“Speak out, my child… I am a mother.”
Mother and daughter looked each other in the face, and the Marquise said no more. At last she said:
“Helene, if you have any reproaches to make, I would rather bear them than see you go away with a man from whom the whole world shrinks in horror.”
“Then you see yourself, madame, that but for me he would be quite alone.”
“That will do, madame,” the General cried; “we have but one daughter left to us now,” and he looked at Moina, who slept on. “As for you,” he added, turning to Helene, “I will put you in a convent.”
“So be it, father,” she said, in calm despair, “I shall die there. You are answerable to God alone for my life and for his soul.”
A deep sullen silence fell after these words. The on-lookers during this strange scene, so utterly at variance with all the sentiments of ordinary life, shunned each other’s eyes.
Suddenly the Marquis happened to glance at his pistols. He caught up one of them, cocked the weapon, and pointed it at the intruder. At the click of firearms the other turned his piercing gaze full upon the General; the soldier’s arm slackened indescribably and fell heavily to his side. The pistol dropped to the floor.
“Girl, you are free,” said he, exhausted by this ghastly struggle. “Kiss your mother, if she will let you kiss her. For my own part, I wish never to see nor to hear of you again.”
“Helene,” the mother began, “only think of the wretched life before you.”
A sort of rattling sound came from the intruder’s deep chest, all eyes were turned to him. Disdain was plainly visible in his face.
The General rose to his feet. “My hospitality has cost me dear,” he cried. “Before you came you had taken an old man’s life; now your are dealing a deadly blow at a whole family. Whatever happens, there must be unhappiness in this house.”
“And if your daughter is happy?” asked the other, gazing steadily at the General.
The father made a superhuman effort for self-control. “If she is happy with you,” he said, “she is not worth regretting.”
Helene knelt timidly before her father.
“Father, I love and revere you,” she said, “whether you lavish all the treasures of your kindness upon me, or make me feel to the full the rigor of disgrace… But I entreat that your last words of farewell shall not be words of anger.”
The General could not trust himself to look at her. The stranger came nearer; there was something half-diabolical, half-divine in the smile that he gave Helene.
“Angel of pity, you that do not shrink in horror from a murderer, come, since you persist in your resolution of intrusting your life to me.”
“Inconceivable!” cried her father.
The Marquise then looked strangely at her daughter, opened her arms, and Helene fled to her in tears.
“Farewell,” she said, “farewell, mother!” The stranger trembled as Helene, undaunted, made sign to him that she was ready. She kissed her father’s hand; and, as if performing a duty, gave a hasty kiss to Moina and little Abel, then she vanished with the murderer.
“Which way are they going?” exclaimed the General, listening to the footsteps of the two fugitives. – “Madame,” he turned to his wife, “I think I must be dreaming; there is some mystery behind all this, I do not understand it; you must know what it means.”
The Marquise shivered.
“For some time past your daughter has grown extraordinarily romantic and strangely high-flown in her ideas. In spite of the pains I have taken to combat these tendencies in her character – ”
“This will not do – ” began the General, but fancying that he heard footsteps in the garden, he broke off to fling open the window.
“Helene!” he shouted.
His voice was lost in the darkness like a vain prophecy. The utterance of that name, to which there should never be answer any more, acted like a counterspell; it broke the charm and set him free from the evil enchantment which lay upon him. It was as if some spirit passed over his face. He now saw clearly what had taken place, and cursed his incomprehensible weakness. A shiver of heat rushed from his heart to his head and feet; he became himself once more, terrible, thirsting for revenge. He raised a dreadful cry.
“Help!” he thundered, “help!”
He rushed to the bell-pull, pulled till the bells rang with a strange clamor of din, pulled till the cord gave way. The whole house was roused with a start. Still shouting, he flung open the windows that looked upon the street, called for the police, caught up his pistols, and fired them off to hurry the mounted patrols, the newly-aroused servants, and the neighbors. The dogs barked at the sound of their master’s voice; the horses neighed and stamped in their stalls. The quiet night was suddenly filled with hideous uproar. The General on the staircase, in pursuit of his daughter, saw the scared faces of the servants flocking from all parts of the house.
“My daughter!” he shouted. “Helene has been carried off. Search the garden. Keep a lookout on the road! Open the gates for the gendarmerie! – Murder! Help!”
With the strength of fury he snapped the chain and let loose the great house-dog.
“Helene!” he cried, “Helene!”
The dog sprang out like a lion, barking furiously, and dashed into the garden, leaving the General far behind. A troop of horses came along the road at a gallop, and he flew to open the gates himself.
“Corporal!” he shouted, “cut off the retreat of M. de Mauny’s murderer. They have gone through my garden. Quick! Put a cordon of men to watch the ways by the Butte de Picardie. – I will beat up the grounds, parks, and houses. – The rest of you keep a lookout along the road,” he ordered the servants, “form a chain between the barrier and Versailles. Forward, every man of you!”
He caught up the rifle which his man had brought out, and dashed into the garden.
“Find them!” he called to the dog.
An ominous baying came in answer from the distance, and he plunged in the direction from which the growl seemed to come.
It was seven o’clock in the morning; all the search made by gendarmes, servants, and neighbors had been fruitless, and the dog had not come back. The General entered the salon, empty now for him though the other three children were there; he was worn out with fatigue, and looked old already with that night’s work.
“You have been very cold to your daughter,” he said, turning his eyes on his wife. – “And now this is all that is left to us of her,” he added, indicating the embroidery frame, and the flower just begun. “Only just now she was there, and now she is lost… lost!”
Tears followed; he hid his face in his hands, and for a few minutes he said no more; he could not bear the sight of the room, which so short a time ago had made a setting to a picture of the sweetest family happiness. The winter dawn was struggling with the dying lamplight; the tapers burned down to their paper-wreaths and flared out; everything was all in keeping with the father’s despair.
“This must be destroyed,” he said after a pause, pointing to the tambour-frame. “I shall never bear to see anything again that reminds us of her!”
The terrible Christmas night when the Marquis and his wife lost their oldest daughter, powerless to oppose the mysterious influence exercised by the man who involuntarily, as it were, stole Helene from them, was like a warning sent by Fate. The Marquis was ruined by the failure of his stock-broker; he borrowed money on his wife’s property, and lost it in the endeavor to retrieve his fortunes. Driven to desperate expedients, he left France. Six years went by. His family seldom had news of him; but a few days before Spain recognized the independence of the American Republics, he wrote that he was coming home.
So, one fine morning, it happened that several French merchants were on board a Spanish brig that lay a few leagues out from Bordeaux, impatient to reach their native land again, with wealth acquired by long years of toil and perilous adventures in Venezuela and Mexico.
One of the passengers, a man who looked aged by trouble rather than by years, was leaning against the bulwark netting, apparently quite unaffected by the sight to be seen from the upper deck. The bright day, the sense that the voyage was safely over, had brought all the passengers above to greet their land. The larger number of them insisted that they could see, far off in the distance, the houses and lighthouses on the coast of Gascony and the Tower of Cardouan, melting into the fantastic erections of white cloud along the horizon. But for the silver fringe that played about their bows, and the long furrow swiftly effaced in their wake, they might have been perfectly still in mid-ocean, so calm was the sea. The sky was magically clear, the dark blue of the vault above paled by imperceptible gradations, until it blended with the bluish water, a gleaming line that sparkled like stars marking the dividing line of sea. The sunlight caught myriads of facets over the wide surface of the ocean, in such a sort that the vast plains of salt water looked perhaps more full of light than the fields of sky.
The brig had set all her canvas. The snowy sails, swelled by the strangely soft wind, the labyrinth of cordage, and the yellow flags flying at the masthead, all stood out sharp and uncompromisingly clear against the vivid background of space, sky, and sea; there was nothing to alter the color but the shadow cast by the great cloudlike sails.
A glorious day, a fair wind, and the fatherland in sight, a sea like a mill-pond, the melancholy sound of the ripples, a fair, solitary vessel, gliding across the surface of the water like a woman stealing out to a tryst – it was a picture full of harmony. That mere speck full of movement was a starting-point whence the soul of man could descry the immutable vast of space. Solitude and bustling life, silence and sound, were all brought together in strange abrupt contrast; you could not tell where life, or sound, or silence, and nothingness lay, and no human voice broke the divine spell.
The Spanish captain, the crew, and the French passengers sat or stood, in a mood of devout ecstasy, in which many memories blended. There was idleness in the air. The beaming faces told of complete forgetfulness of past hardships, the men were rocked on the fair vessel as in a golden dream. Yet, from time to time the elderly passenger, leaning over the bulwark nettings, looked with something like uneasiness at the horizon. Distrust of the ways of Fate could be read in his whole face; he seemed to fear that he should not reach the coast of France in time. This was the Marquis. Fortune had not been deaf to his despairing cry and struggles. After five years of endeavor and painful toil, he was a wealthy man once more. In his impatience to reach his home again and to bring the good news to his family, he had followed the example set by some French merchants in Havana, and embarked with them on a Spanish vessel with a cargo for Bordeaux. And now, grown tired of evil forebodings, his fancy was tracing out for him the most delicious pictures of past happiness. In that far-off brown line of land he seemed to see his wife and children. He sat in his place by the fireside; they were crowding about him; he felt their caresses. Moina had grown to be a young girl; she was beautiful, and tall, and striking. The fancied picture had grown almost real, when the tears filled his eyes, and, to hide his emotion, he turned his face towards the sea-line, opposite the hazy streak that meant land.
“There she is again… She is following us!” he said.
“What?” cried the Spanish captain.
“There is a vessel,” muttered the General.
“I saw her yesterday,” answered Captain Gomez. He looked at his interlocutor as if to ask what he thought; then he added in the General’s ear, “She has been chasing us all along.”
“Then why she has not come up with us, I do not know,” said the General, “for she is a faster sailor than your damned Saint-Ferdinand.”
“She will have damaged herself, sprung a leak – ”
“She is gaining on us!” the General broke in.
“She is a Columbian privateer,” the captain said in his ear, “and we are still six leagues from land, and the wind is dropping.”
“She is not going ahead, she is flying, as if she knew that in two hours’ time her prey would escape her. What audacity!”
“Audacity!” cried the captain. “Oh! she is not called the Othello for nothing. Not so long back she sank a Spanish frigate that carried thirty guns! This is the one thing I was afraid of, for I had a notion that she was cruising about somewhere off the Antilles. – Aha!” he added after a pause, as he watched the sails of his own vessel, “the wind is rising; we are making way. Get through we must, for ‘the Parisian’ will show us no mercy.”