Читать книгу The Power And The Glory - Gilbert Parker - Страница 4

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When La Salle left the Château St. Louis, he walked towards the house of Rojet Ranard, Farmer of the King's Revenue, where he was an honored guest. The wife of Ranard was beautiful and her Christian name was Barbe. She, like Ranard, was a Jesuit and full of hatred for the man who had growing power in the country and had vast influence already with the Indians. La Salle had hesitated to accept the invitation, but did so because it might lessen Jesuit opposition; and so far nothing could have been more charming than Monsieur and Madame Ranard's treatment of him. They had a comfortable house just inside St. John's Gate, with a splendid view over the St. Lawrence, and he had been used with handsome familiarity.

Barbe Ranard was fair-haired, buoyant, graceful, slim, and of a vivacious temperament. She was quick of tongue, clever at repartee, and had the manner of the accomplished woman of the type of De Montespan and that class who prey upon the susceptibilities of men and their love of the beautiful and amusing. Barbe Ranard, at twenty-four, had beauty and distinction and was now the mistress of Duchesneau, who guessed why La Salle had been asked to stay with the Farmer of the King's Revenue. The Intendant would do much to destroy La Salle, and this way seemed possible and sure. Ranard, who did not know Duchesneau's relations with his wife—or pretended not to do so—was bent to secure advancement, and by playing up to Duchesneau and the Jesuits, saw his chance. He was a man of slower wit than his wife, but of straggling force and with a soul for mean things as had she, or they could not have plotted as they did.

When La Salle reached Montneuve, he entered full of joy at his interview with Frontenac and was going to his room, when he was met in the hall by his hostess.

She held up a hand in greeting: “Ah, dear monsieur, it is good we meet, for I wish a little talk, if you are not too busy. In my boudoir if you will.”

Her eyes were laughing and innocent and she was becomingly dressed in a severely plain gown of pale gray, cut very low in front and showing soft shy breasts; and there was naught around her gracious neck save the glow of perfect health. Her golden hair hung in profusion, and her lips were like ripe cherries, soft, amorous, and tempting. As she ran up the stairs softly, La Salle could see her dress was pulled up so that her fine ankles showed, and her stockings were of tender pink. She was, as women go, a flower of the garden of Hesperides, and made a picture that to a lesser man than La Salle would have been all captivating. He had eyes for women, for grace and beauty, but there was that far deeper in his life—love of his work—and all else must yield to that.

Inside her boudoir, an exquisite room, brightly colored with silk and linen of grace and sweet design, she motioned him to a sofa, while she took a huge armchair beside the sofa. As La Salle sat down his mind was busy. Why had she brought him? It was as sweet a room as he had ever entered in Canada, and appealed to the sensuous side of him. For a few moments she gazed at him with a curious warm light in her eyes and sweet seduction in her carriage. She was essentially one of the women who helped at last to bring the French Revolution, and who have been at once the flaming morn and the somber sunset of more than one great land. She had brains to go far and she would go far; and this enterprise meant that favor with people in high places which could advance her own and her husband's interests—with the all-powerful Jesuit body, and with court life through Jacques Duchesneau, who stood well in France. She would have played for Frontenac, but he was too old, too uncertain, and he was opposed by the Jesuits, whose career he was retarding in Canada. Besides, Frontenac was not subject to women's wiles. He had, like La Salle, an ambition that was the State and its power. He was not selfish, but he was always, and to the end, the devout lover of France and her advancement. Barbe Ranard read him as such women do, with vital inseeing. She had the gift of the perfect Delilah.

Never had she looked better than she did this afternoon. She had no soul, but she had a marvelously sensitive temperament, and she was full of emotion, but was incapable of fidelity or true feeling. She was not immoral, she was non-moral. She could not see the vileness in her own mind and body. Truth and honor had never been a part of her, and never could be. From her birth she had gone the crooked path. Well born, she had married Rojet Ranard because he was in the Government, and her fixed idea was to get foot on the ladder and let her brains, body, and good fortune do the rest.

After a few moments in which she tried to impress the senses of La Salle, she said: “You have the mind that wins, Sieur de la Salle. You were trained for a Jesuit priest, but the wider things caught you—not the bigger things, but the wider things, and you would now do immense things for the land you love—we both love. I hate to say it, but I have studied you while you have stayed with us, and all I see makes me know the really patriotic thing is in you.”

She blushed slightly and lowered her eyes with the skill of her wonderful duplicity, and she added, almost brokenly: “I should like to help you—oh, I should! You will do so much for France in Canada! Oh!”

La Salle was impressed. It was an age when women played upon the senses of the biggest men. In sudden unsuspicious sympathy he half stretched a hand towards her, and she slid forward on her knees, buried her face in her hands and wept some fickle and easily commanded tears.

He almost touched her, but suddenly he felt it was not right to do so as a guest in the house, or at all, and in a voice of some emotion he said: “You are all too kind, madame. I wish I could accept your help, but I may not—I must not do so.”

“Why must you not?” she sobbed, and bent over so that he could look down between her most attractive breasts and could smell the exquisite perfume she used. It was this act of hers that brought him to his feet in his fight for safety and escape.

“No, no, no I cannot accept your aid. You are not of the women one can meet in affairs of business and let it stay at that. No, no, madame, it must not be. It cannot be.”

She sprang to her feet and threw her hands on his shoulders. “Oh, La Salle, most dear and wonderful La Salle, let me give you my help in all you do. I can influence so many—I can be what no wife could ever be to you. Can you not see, La Salle?”

He withdrew her hands from his shoulders, looked her in the eyes, and felt her utter shamelessness, her disregard of all the conventions of life, the utter rule of sex in her, and he said, firmly, “It shall not be,” and hastened to the door and opened it.

Outside stood Rojet Ranard, who had helped to plan this hideous thing. Glancing back, La Salle saw Barbe with bitter passion in her eyes and lip curled in revolt. With a look of contempt at Ranard he left the house in anger.

“God save us!” he said, in stern appeal. “Is this what I shall have to face? Henceforth those two are against me—and the Jesuits and the Court folk behind them—Duchesneau and his kind here and in Paris.” He went to old quarters he had known before and sent to Montneuve for his clothes.

Behind in Montneuve the humiliated wife said: “Rojet, that man has the nerve of the devil and the blood of an icicle. He has escaped us, and he will go on—curse him, like an eagle flamboyant—unless we do for him in another way. Yet he is handsome, too, in his grim way and I could almost have wished we were not playing a part. He has big things in him or he could not have withstood me. I am not easy to withstand, am I, dear Rojet?”

“No one could withstand you, Barbe, who was not sunk in his own importance. That man is a danger here, and we have failed. I almost wish I had challenged him.”

A queer smile passed over the face of Barbe as she turned her head away. “He is a trained swordsman, Rojet, and you would have had a hard time. You did not mean to kill him, but to drive him from Quebec. It could have been done so easily if he had taken me in his arms—so easily!”

“Easy as eating. Not Frontenac—he is La Salle's friend—but the Intendant and the Jesuits would have made life unbearable for him here. He would have been ruined—and forever!”

“He will be ruined forever yet,” she said. “Do you think a woman ever forgives such a slight? No, no, no! See you, Rojet, I will pursue him wherever he goes, till I defeat him in the end. He shall pay to the last centime for what he did today. Does he think he is bigger than Barbe Ranard? He shall see. I have brains. I have what he has not, duplicity. See you”—the beautiful savage teeth showed in menace, the blue eyes danced fire. “I will fight him every step of his way. He defeated me to-day. I will spend life and time in putting a blight on all he does, I will prevent his fame coming to fruition. When he goes to France—he is going, he told me so yesterday—I will be there.”

“Why should he go to France?” he asked: “What can he do there?”

Her brilliant eyes answered. There flashed into them the look that has entered the brains of such women as Medea, or Lady Macbeth, and she said with ruthless lips: “Why indeed? It will be not so difficult to make France impossible. I see my way—I see it.”

Ranard laughed. “You have resources, Barbe. If you say you will do a thing, it is done one way or another in the end. See, there has lately come into my employ a clever man from the North, Tuke Darois, who hates La Salle, and Du Lhut, the great coureur de bois, and we can use him at need. He has an eye for dark things—I see that.”

“Tuke Darois! I like the ‘Tuke,’ it has dark possibilities. Who is the man? What has been his work?”

“He has been a trapper in the far North. His wife was Scotch and he has a daughter, a very pretty girl of eighteen or so. She is not like him—looks straight and honest; but he! well, behind his calm face is the soul of the devil. He is a most capable accountant, so I employ him. I have clearly instructed him to watch Du Lhut, and I know he hates La Salle—why I know not.”

Barbe smiled. “Good, my Rojet. All comes our way. That man should help in good time—and his daughter, too!”

He shook his head. “No, she is of a different breed. I don't think we can use her.”

“Well, let me try.” Her face took on a look of rancor.

She turned to a table and picked up a letter. “I see one way here—in this letter. Read it. There's no reason why you should not. It is one of many that come into my life. Read it, Rojet.”

He took the letter and read it, and a sour smile passed over his face.

“Nicolas Perrot, the explorer, too, and in love with you. What will come of this? What a fool to write like that!”

“It is not a fool of a letter, though. It tells the honest mind of the man. Suppose I”—she drew his head to her mouth and whispered. “Suppose—that! And when it is done, he cannot compel me—do you see, because by accident you had discovered the part he played—do you not see? La Salle goes to the West before he goes to France. If not there, then here.”

Ranard was a bad man and lived in an age of good and evil, with, on the whole, the dominance of good, yet he almost shrank from the vile plot in her mind. He looked at her—so fair, and yet so black with dishonor behind her radiant face and exquisite hair and luring eyes! He felt stunned, for wickedness should not go with so much charm and soft luxuriance.

“By the eternal, you have the thing that knows not eclipse! You have no soul—”

“Don't say that. I am confessed and pardoned and go on again as before. No soul—eh, la la—”

“Do you confess all your sins?”

“Not all at once. Life is not so short as that. But a sin committed for the Church is forgiven. So I shall be forgiven—always.”

He shook his head in pretended horror. “When shall you see Nicolas Perrot? He is in Quebec, I know.”

“Yes, I saw him on Wednesday, and I can have him here at any time, and with your consent I will.”

“Send for him now.”

“The sooner the better. La Salle has raised what he cannot lay. He shall pay to the utmost.”

Her note was of the briefest, “Dear Monsieur, come at once, please.”

When she had dusted the ink and folded and sealed the letter, she said, “How long do you think La Salle can contend against me?”

Her eyes were still bitter, her cheek was flushed, her lithe figure was tense, and yet, resist it as she would, a longing for La Salle was on her. All the more she would destroy him—the paramount fool!

“As long as he lives, no longer,” said Ranard, with enmity. “His sun does not rise far,” she replied.

She rang a bell and a man-servant entered. “Bear this to M. Nicolas Perrot at Terre Bonne House, and answer no questions. Do you understand?”

The man bowed his head. “Perfectly, madame.”

There was a queer look in Auguste's eyes. He had borne messages before to M. Duchesneau, and he was well paid for his services. If he betrayed his mistress, his life would end, and he knew it. He was a man of sound judgment.

“Come soon, Nicolas,” said Barbe Ranard, aloud, with a satirical smile.

“He will not tarry. I go to my office,” said Ranard.