"You thought that, Monsieur?" interrupted the marquis, his eyes losing
some of their metallic hardness. "You thought that?" What irony lay in
the taste of this knowledge!
"Monsieur," said the Chevalier with drunken asperity, "permit me to say
that you are interrupting a fine apostrophe! . . . And as a culmination,
he would have me wed the daughter of your mortal enemy, his mistress! It
is some mad dream, Madame; we shall soon awake."
"Even immediately," replied the marquis calmly. The Chevalier had
snuffed more than candles this night. He had snuffed also the belated
paternal spark of affection which had suddenly kindled in his father's
breast. "Your apostrophe, as you are pleased to term the maudlin talk of
a drunken fool, is being addressed to my wife."
"Well?" insolently.
"Your mother, while worthy and beautiful, was not sufficiently noble to
merit Rubens's brush. It is to be regretted, but I never had a portrait
of your mother."
The roisterers burst into song again . . . .
"When Ma'm'selle drinks from her satin shoe
With a Bacchante's love for a Bacchic brew!"
How this rollicking song penetrated the ominous silence which had
suddenly filled the salon! The Chevalier grew rigid.
"What did I understand you to say, Monsieur?" with an unnatural quietness
which somewhat confused the marquis.
"I said that I never had a portrait of your mother. Is that explicit
enough? Yonder Rubens was my wife." The marquis spoke lightly. The
tone hid well the hot wrath which for the moment obliterated his sense of
truth and justice, two qualities the importance of which he had never
till now forgotten. He watched the effect of this terrible thrust, and
with monstrous satisfaction he saw the shiver which took his son in its
chilling grasp and sent him staggering back. "Then you return to Paris
to-morrow? . . . to be the Chevalier du Cévennes till the end? Ah well!"
How often man over-reaches himself in the gratification of an ignoble
revenge! "We all have our pastimes," went on the marquis, deepening the
abyss into which he was finally to fall. "You were mine. I had intended
to send you about some years ago; but I was lonely, and there was
something in your spirit which amused me. You tickled my fancy. But
now, I am weary; the pastime palls; you no longer amuse."
The Chevalier stood in the midst of chaos. He was experiencing that
frightful plunge of Icarus, from the clouds to the sea. He was falling,
falling. When one falls from a great height, when waters roll
thunderously over one's head, strange and significant fragments of life
pass and repass the vision. And at this moment there flashed across the
Chevalier's brain, indistinctly it is true, the young Jesuit's words,
spoken at the Silver Candlestick in Paris. . . . "An object of scorn,
contumely, and forgetfulness; to dream what might and should have been;
to be proved guilty of a crime we did not commit; to be laughed at!"
Spots of red blurred his sight; his nails sank into his palms; his breath
came painfully; there was a straining at the roots of his hair.