She was tall, just as tall as he. It was a blunt-witted devil who whispered John Bulmer that, inch paralleling inch, the woman is taller than the man and subtly renders him absurd; and that in a decade this woman would be stout. There was no meaning now in any whispering save hers. John Bulmer perceived, with a blurred thrill,—as if of memory, as if he were recollecting something once familiar to him, a great while ago,—that the girl was tall and deep-bosomed, and that her hair was dark, all crinkles, but (he somehow knew) very soft to the touch. The full oval of her face had throughout the rich tint of cream, so that he now understood the blowziness of pink cheeks; but her mouth was vivid. It was a mouth not wholly deficient in attractions, he estimated. Her nose managed to be Roman without overdoing it. And her eyes, candid and appraising, he found to be the color that blue is in Paradise; it was odd their lower lids should be straight lines, so that when she laughed her eyes were converted into right-angled triangles; and it was still more odd that when you gazed into them your reach of vision should be extended until you saw without effort for miles and miles.
And now for a longish while these eyes returned his scrutiny, without any trace of embarrassment; and whatever may have been the thoughts of Mademoiselle de Puysange, she gave them no expression. But presently the girl glanced down toward the dead man.
"It was you who killed him?" she said. "You!"
"I had that privilege," John Bulmer admitted. "And on Thursday afternoon, God willing, I shall kill the other."
"You are kind, Monsieur Bulmer. And I am not ungrateful. And for that which happened yesterday I entreat your pardon."
"I can pardon you for calling me a lackey, mademoiselle, only upon condition that you permit me to be your lackey for the remainder of your jaunt. Poictesme appears a somewhat too romantic country for unaccompanied women to traverse in any comfort."
"My thought to a comma," the Dominican put in,—"unaccompanied ladies do not ordinarily drop from the forest oaks like acorns. I said as much to Cazaio a half-hour ago. Look you, we two and Michault,—who formerly incited this carcass and, from what I know of him, is by this time occupying hell's hottest gridiron,—were riding peacefully toward Beauseant. Then this lady pops out of nowhere, and Cazaio promptly expresses an extreme admiration for her person."
"The rest," John Bulmer said, "I can imagine. Oh, believe me, I look forward to next Thursday!"
"But for you," the girl said, "I would now be the prisoner of that devil upon the Taunenfels! Three to one you fought,—and you conquered! I have misjudged you, Monsieur Bulmer. I had thought you only an indolent old gentleman, not very brave,—because—"
"Because otherwise I would not have been the devil's lackey?" said John Bulmer. "Eh, mademoiselle, I have been inspecting the world for more years than I care to confess; I have observed the king upon his throne, and the caught thief upon his coffin in passage for the gallows: and I suspect they both came thither through taking such employment as chance offered. Meanwhile, we waste daylight. You were journeying—?"
"To Perdigon," Claire answered. She drew nearer to him and laid one hand upon his arm. "You are a gallant man, Monsieur Bulmer. Surely you understand. Two weeks ago my brother affianced me to the Duke of Ormskirk. Ormskirk!—ah, I know he is your kinsman,—your patron,—but you yourself could not deny that the world reeks with his infamy. And my own brother, monsieur, had betrothed me to this perjurer, to that lewd rake, to that inhuman devil who slaughters defenceless prisoners, men, women, and children alike. Why, I had sooner marry the first beggar or the ugliest fiend in hell!" the girl wailed, and she wrung her plump little hands in desperation.
"Good, good!" he cried, in his soul. "It appears my eloquence of yesterday was greater than I knew of!"
Claire resumed: "But you cannot argue with Gaston—he merely shrugs. So I decided to go over to Perdigon and marry Gerard des Roches. He has wanted to marry me for a long while, but Gaston said he was too poor. And, O Monsieur Bulmer, Gerard is so very, very stupid!—but he was the only person available, and in any event," she concluded, with a sigh of resignation, "he is preferable to that terrible Ormskirk."
John Bulmer gazed on her considerately. "'Beautiful as an angel, and headstrong as a devil,'" was his thought, "You have an eye, Gaston!" Aloud John Bulmer said: "Your remedy against your brother's tyranny, mademoiselle, is quite masterly, though perhaps a trifle Draconic. Yet if on his return he find you already married, he undoubtedly cannot hand you over to this wicked Ormskirk. Marry, therefore, by all means,—but not with this stupid Gerard."
"With whom, then?" she wondered.
"Fate has planned it," he laughed; "here are you and I, and yonder is the clergyman whom Madam Destiny has thoughtfully thrown in our way."
"Not you," she answered, gravely. "I am too deeply in your debt, Monsieur Bulmer, to think of marrying you."
"You refuse," he said, "because you have known for some days past that I loved you. Yet it is really this fact which gives me my claim to become your husband. You have need of a man to do you this little service. I know of at least one person whose happiness it would be to die if thereby he might save you a toothache. This man you cannot deny—you have not the right to deny this man his single opportunity of serving you."
"I like you very much," she faltered; and then, with disheartening hastiness, "Of course, I like you very much; but I am not in love with you."
He shook his head at her, "I would think the worse of your intellect if you were. I adore you. Granted: but that constitutes no cut-throat mortgage. It is merely a state of mind which I have somehow blundered into, and with which you have no concern. So I ask nothing of you save to marry me. You may, if you like, look upon me as insane; it is the view toward which I myself incline. However, mine is a domesticated mania and vexes no one save myself; and even I derive no little amusement from its manifestations. Eh, Monsieur Jourdain may laugh at me for a puling lover!" cried John Bulmer; "but, heavens! if only he could see the unplumbed depths of ludicrousness I discover in my own soul! The mirth of Atlas could not do it justice."
Claire meditated for a while, her eyes inscrutable and yet not unkindly. "It shall be as you will," she said at last. "Yes, certainly, I will marry you."
"O Mother of God!" said the Dominican, in profound disgust; "I cannot marry two maniacs." But, in view of John Bulmer's sword and pistol, he went through the ceremony without further protest.
And something embryonic in John Bulmer seemed to come, with the knave's benediction, into flowerage. He saw, as if upon a sudden, how fine she was; all the gracious and friendly youth of her: and he deliberated, dizzily, the awe of her spirited and alert eyes; why, the woman was afraid of him! That sunny and vivid glade had become, to him, an island about which past happenings lapped like a fretted sea. "Dear me!" he reflected, "but I am really in a very bad way indeed."
Now Mistress Bulmer gazed shyly at her husband. "We will go back to Bellegarde," Claire began, "and inform Louis de Soyecourt that I cannot marry the Duke of Ormskirk, because I have already married you, Jean Bulmer,—"
"I would follow you," said John Bulmer, "though hell yawned between us. I employ the particular expression as customary in all these cases of romantic infatuation."
"Yet I," the Friar observed, "would, to the contrary, advise removal from Poictesme as soon as may be possible. For I warn you that if you return to Bellegarde, Monsieur de Soyecourt will have you hanged."
"Reverend sir," John Bulmer replied, "do you actually believe this consideration would be to me of any moment?"
The Friar inspected his countenance. By and by the Friar said: "I emphatically do not. And to think that at the beginning of our acquaintanceship I took you for a sensible person!" Afterward the Friar mounted his mule and left them.
Then silently John Bulmer assisted his wife to the back of one of the horses, and they turned eastward into the Forest of Acaire. Mr. Bulmer's countenance was politely interested, and he chatted pleasantly of the forenoon's adventure. Claire told him so
mething of her earlier memories of Cazaio. So the two returned to Bellegarde. Then Claire led the way toward the western facade, where her apartments were, and they came to a postern-door, very narrow and with a grating.
"Help me down," the girl said. Immediately this was done; Claire remained quite still. Her cheeks were smouldering and her left hand was lying inert in John Bulmer's broader palm.
"Wait here," she said, "and let me go in first. Someone may be on watch. There is perhaps danger—"
"My dear," said John Bulmer, "I perfectly comprehend you are about to enter that postern, and close it in my face, and afterward hold discourse with me through that little wicket. I assent, because I love you so profoundly that I am capable not merely of tearing the world asunder like paper at your command, but even of leaving you if you bid me do so."
"Your suspicions," she replied, "are prematurely marital. I am trying to protect you, and you are the first to accuse me of underhand dealing! I will prove to you how unjust are your notions." She entered the postern, closed and bolted it, and appeared at the wicket.
"The Friar was intelligent," said Claire de Puysange, "and beyond doubt the most sensible thing you can do is to get out of Poictesme as soon as possible. You have been serviceable to me, and for that I thank you: but the master of Bellegarde has the right of the low, the middle, and the high justice, and if my husband show his face at Bellegarde he will infallibly be hanged. If you claim me in England, Ormskirk will have you knifed in some dark alleyway, just as, you tell me, he disposed of Monsieur Traquair and Captain Dungelt. I am sorry, because I like you, even though you are fat."
"You bid me leave you?" said John Bulmer. He was comfortably seated upon the turf.
"For your own good," said she, "I advise you to." And she closed the wicket.
"The acceptance of advice," said John Bulmer, "is luckily optional. I shall therefore go down into the village, purchase a lute, have supper, and I shall be here at sunrise to greet you with an aubade, according to the ancient custom of Poictesme."
The wicket remained closed.
VI
"I will go to Marly, inform Gaston of the entire matter, and then my wife is mine. I have tricked her neatly.
"I will do nothing of the sort. Gaston, can give me the woman's body only. I shall accordingly buy me a lute."
VII
Achille Cazaio on the Taunenfels did not sleep that night….
The two essays [Footnote: The twenty-first chapter of Du Maillot's Hommes Illustres; and the fifth of d'Avranches's Ancetres de la Revolution. Loewe has an excellent digest of this data.] dealing with the man have scarcely touched his capabilities. His exploits in and about Paris and his Gascon doings, while important enough in the outcome, are but the gesticulations of a puppet: the historian's real concern is with the hands that manoeuvered above Cazaio; and whether or no Achille Cazaio organized the riots in Toulouse and Guienne and Bearn is a question with which, at this late day, there can be little profitable commerce.
One recommends this Cazaio rather to the spinners of romance: with his morality—a trifle buccaneerish on occasion—once discreetly palliated, history affords few heroes more instantly taking to the fancy….One casts a hankering eye toward this Cazaio's rumored parentage, his hopeless and life-long adoration of Claire de Puysange, his dealings with d'Argenson and King Louis le Bien-Aime, the obscure and mischievous imbroglios in Spain, and finally his aggrandizement and his flame-lit death, as du Maillot, say, records these happenings: and one finds therein the outline of an impelling hero, and laments that our traffic must be with a stolid and less livelily tinted Bulmer. And with a sigh one passes on toward the labor prearranged….
To-night Cazaio's desires were astir, and consciousness of his own power was tempting him. He had never troubled Poictesme much: the Taunenfels were accessible on that side, and so long as he confined his depredations to the frontier, the Duc de Puysange merely shrugged and rendered his annual tribute; it was not a great sum, and the Duke preferred to pay it rather than forsake his international squabbles to quash a purely parochial nuisance like a bandit, who was, too, a kinsman….
Meanwhile Cazaio had grown stronger than de Puysange knew. It was a time of disaffection: the more violent here and there were beginning to assert that before hanging a superfluous peasant or two de Puysange ought to bore himself with inquiries concerning the abstract justice of the action. For everywhere the irrational lower classes were grumbling about the very miseries and maltreatments that had efficiently disposed of their fathers for centuries: they seemed not to respect tradition: already they were posting placards in the Paris boulevards,—"Shave the King for a monk, hang the Pompadour, and break Machault on the wheel,"—and already a boy of twelve, one Joseph Guillotin, was running about the streets of Saintes yonder. So the commoners flocked to Cazaio in the Taunenfels until, little by little, he had gathered an army about him.
And at Bellegarde, de Soyecourt had only a handful of men, Cazaio meditated to-night. And the woman was there,—the woman whose eyes were blue and incurious, whose face was always scornful.
In history they liken Achille Cazaio to Simon de Montfort, and the Gracchi, and other graspers at fruit as yet unripe; or, if the perfervid word of d'Avranches be accepted, you may regard him as "le Saint-Jean de la Revolution glorieuse." But I think you may with more wisdom regard him as a man of strong passions, any one of which, for the time being, possessed him utterly.
Now he struck his palm upon the table.
"I have never seen a woman one-half so beautiful, Dom Michel. I am more than ever in love with her."
"In that event," the Friar considered, "it is, of course, unfortunate she should have a brand-new husband. Husbands are often thought much of when they are a novelty."
"You bungled matters, you fat, mouse-hearted rascal. You could quite easily have killed him."
The Dominican spread out his hands, and afterward reached for the bottle. "Milanese armor!" said Dom Michel Fregose. [Footnote: The same ecclesiastic who more lately dubbed himself, with Marechal de Richelieu's encouragement, l'Abbe de Trans, and was discreditably involved in the forgeries of Madame de St. Vincent.]
"Yet I am master of Poictesme," Cazaio thundered, "I have ten men to de Soyecourt's one. Am I, then, lightly to be thwarted?"
"Undoubtedly you could take Bellegarde—and the woman along with the castle,—if you decided they were worth the price of a little killing. I think they are not worth it, I strongly advise you to have up a wench from the village, to put out the light, and exercise your imagination."
Cazaio shook his head. "No, Dom Michel, you churchmen live too lewdly to understand the tyranny of love."
"—Besides, there is that trifling matter of your understanding with de Puysange,—and, besides, de Puysange will be here in two days."
Cazaio snapped his fingers. "He will arrive after the fair." Cazaio uncorked the ink-bottle with an august gesture.
"Write!" said Achille Cazaio.
VIII
As John Bulmer leisurely ascended from the village the birds were waking. Whether day were at hand or no was a matter of twittering debate overhead, but in the west the stars were paling one by one, like candles puffed out by the pretentious little wind that was bustling about the turquoise cupola of heaven; and eastward Bellegarde showed stark, as though scissored from a painting, against a sky of gray-and-rose. Here was a world of faint ambiguity. Here was the exquisite tension of dawn, curiously a-chime with John Bulmer's mood, for just now he found the universe too beautiful to put any actual faith in its existence. He had strayed into Faery somehow—into Atlantis, or Avalon, or "a wood near Athens,"—into a land of opalescence and vapor and delicate color, that would vanish, bubble-like, at the discreet tap of Pawsey fetching in his shaving-water; meantime John Bulmer's memory snatched at each loveliness, jealously, as a pug snatches bits of sugar.
Beneath her window he paused and shifted his lute before him. Then he began to sing, exultant in the unreality of everyth
ing and of himself in particular.
Sang John Bulmer,
"Speed forth, my song, the sun's ambassador,
Lest in the east night prove the conqueror,
The day be slain, and darkness triumph,—for
The sun is single, but her eyes are twain.
"And now the sunlight and the night contest
A doubtful battle, and day bides at best
Doubtful, until she waken. 'Tis attest
The sun is single.
"But her eyes are twain,—
And should the light of all the world delay,
And darkness prove victorious? Is it day
Now that the sun alone is risen?
"Nay,
The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,—
Twain firmaments that mock with heavenlier hue
The heavens' less lordly and less gracious blue,
And lit with sunlier sunlight through and through,
"The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,
And of fair things this side of Paradise
Fairest, of goodly things most goodly,"
He paused here and smote a resonant and louder chord. His voice ascended in dulcet supplication.
"Rise, And succor the benighted world that cries, The sun is single, but her eyes are twain!"
"Eh—? So it is you, is it?" Claire was peeping disdainfully from the window. Her throat was bare, and her dusky hair was a shade dishevelled, and in her meditative eyes he caught the flicker of her tardiest dream just as it vanished.
"It is I," John Bulmer confessed—"come to awaken you according to the ancient custom of Poictesme."
Gallantry. Dizain des Fetes Galantes Page 17