Chapter 19 Bardelys the Magnificent by Rafael Sabatini
THE FLINT AND THE STEEL
“Mademoiselle will see you, monsieur,” said Anatole at last.
Twice already had he carried unavailingly my request that Roxalanne should accord me an interview ere I departed. On this the third occasion I had bidden him say that I would not stir from Lavedan until she had done me the honour of hearing me. Seemingly that threat had prevailed where entreaties had been scorned.
I followed Anatole from the half-light of the hall in which I had been pacing into the salon overlooking the terraces and the river, where Roxalanne awaited me. She was standing at the farther end of the room by one of the long windows, which was open, for, although we were already in the first week of October, the air of Languedoc was as warm and balmy as that of Paris or Picardy is in summer.
I advanced to the centre of the chamber, and there I paused and waited until it should please her to acknowledge my presence and turn to face me. I was no fledgling. I had seen much, I had learnt much and been in many places, and my bearing was wont to convey it. Never in my life had I been gauche, for which I thank my parents, and if years ago—long years ago—a certain timidity had marked my first introductions to the Louvre and the Luxembourg, that timidity was something from which I had long since parted company. And yet it seemed to me, as I stood in that pretty, sunlit room awaiting the pleasure of that child, scarce out of her teens, that some of the awkwardness I had escaped in earlier years, some of the timidity of long ago, came to me then. I shifted the weight of my body from one leg to the other; I fingered the table by which I stood; I pulled at the hat I held; my colour came and went; I looked at her furtively from under bent brows, and I thanked God that her back being towards me she might not see the clown I must have seemed.
At length, unable longer to brook that discomposing silence—
“Mademoiselle!” I called softly. The sound of my own voice seemed to invigorate me, to strip me of my awkwardness and self-consciousness. It broke the spell that for a moment had been over me, and brought me back to myself—to the vain, self-confident, flamboyant Bardelys that perhaps you have pictured from my writings.
“I hope, monsieur,” she answered, without turning, “that what you may have to say may justify in some measure your very importunate insistence.”
On my life, this was not encouraging. But now that I was master of myself, I was not again so easily to be disconcerted. My eyes rested upon her as she stood almost framed in the opening of that long window. How straight and supple she was, yet how dainty and slight withal! She was far from being a tall woman, but her clean length of limb, her very slightness, and the high-bred poise of her shapely head, conveyed an illusion of height unless you stood beside her. The illusion did not sway me then. I saw only a child; but a child with a great spirit, with a great soul that seemed to accentuate her physical helplessness. That helplessness, which I felt rather than saw, wove into the warp of my love. She was in grief just then—in grief at the arrest of her father, and at the dark fate that threatened him; in grief at the unworthiness of a lover. Of the two which might be the more bitter it was not mine to judge, but I burned to gather her to me, to comfort and cherish her, to make her one with me, and thus, whilst giving her something of my man's height and strength, cull from her something of that pure, noble spirit, and thus sanctify my own.
I had a moment's weakness when she spoke. I was within an ace of advancing and casting myself upon my knees like any Lenten penitent, to sue forgiveness. But I set the inclination down betimes. Such expedients would not avail me here.
“What I have to say, mademoiselle,” I answered after a pause, “would justify a saint descending into, hell; or, rather, to make my metaphor more apt, would warrant a sinner's intrusion into heaven.”
I spoke solemnly, yet not too solemnly; the least slur of a sardonic humour was in my tones.
She moved her head upon the white column of her neck, and with the gesture one of her brown curls became disordered. I could fancy the upward tilt of her delicate nose, the scornful curve of her lip as she answered shortly “Then say it quickly, monsieur.”
And, being thus bidden, I said quickly “I love you, Roxalanne.”
Her heel beat the shimmering parquet of the floor; she half turned towards me, her cheek flushed, her lip tremulous with anger.
“Will you say what you have to say, monsieur?” she demanded in a concentrated voice, “and having said it, will you go?”
“Mademoiselle, I have already said it,” I answered, with a wistful smile.
“Oh!” she gasped. Then suddenly facing round upon me, a world of anger in her blue eyes—eyes that I had known dreamy, but which were now very wide awake. “Was it to offer me this last insult you forced your presence upon me? Was it to mock me with those words, me—a woman, with no man about me to punish you? Shame, sir! Yet it is no more than I might look for in you.”
“Mademoiselle, you do me grievous wrong—” I began.
“I do you no wrong,” she answered hotly, then stopped, unwilling haply to be drawn into contention with me. “Enfin, since you have said what you came to say will you go?” And she pointed to the door.
“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle—” I began in a voice of earnest intercession.
“Go!” she interrupted angrily, and for a second the violence of her voice and gesture almost reminded me of the Vicomtesse. “I will hear no more from you.”
“Mademoiselle, you shall,” I answered no whit less firmly.
“I will not listen to you. Talk if you will. You shall have the walls for audience.” And she moved towards the door, but I barred her passage. I was courteous to the last degree; I bowed low before her as I put myself in her way.
“It is all that was wanting—that you should offer me violence!” she exclaimed.
“God forbid!” said I.
“Then let me pass.”
“Aye, when you have heard me.”
“I do not wish to hear you. Nothing that you may say can matter to me. Oh, monsieur, if you have any instincts of gentility, if you have any pretension to be accounted anything but a mauvais sujet, I beg of you to respect my grief. You witnessed, yourself, the arrest of my father. This is no season for such as scene as you are creating.”
“Pardon! It is in such a season as this that you need the comfort and support that the man you love alone can give you.”
“The man I love?” she echoed, and from flushed that they had been, her cheeks went very pale. Her eyes fell for an instant, then—they were raised again, and their blue depths were offered me. “I think, sir,” she said, through her teeth, “that your insolence transcends all belief.”
“Can you deny it?” I cried. “Can you deny that you love me? If you can—why, then, you lied to me three nights ago at Toulouse!”
That smote her hard—so hard that she forgot her assurance that she would not listen to me—her promise to herself that she would stoop to no contention with me.
“If, in a momentary weakness, in my nescience of you as you truly are, I did make some such admission, I did entertain such feelings for you, things have come to my knowledge since then, monsieur, that have revealed you to me as another man; I have learnt something that has utterly withered such love as I then confessed. Now, monsieur, are you satisfied, and will you let me pass?” She said the last words with a return of her imperiousness, already angry at having been drawn so far.
“I am satisfied, mademoiselle,” I answered brutally, “that you did not speak the truth three nights ago. You never loved me. It was pity that deluded you, shame that urged you—shame at the Delilah part you had played and at your betrayal of me. Now, mademoiselle, you may pass,” said I.
And I stood aside, assured that as she was a woman she would not pass me now. Nor did she. She recoiled a step instead. Her lip quivered. Then she recovered quickly. Her mother might have told her that she was a fool for engaging herself in such a duel with me—me, the veteran of a hundred amorous combats. Yet though I doubt not it was her first assault-at-arms of this description, she was more than a match for me, as her next words proved.
“Monsieur, I thank you for enlightening me. I cannot, indeed, have spoken the truth three nights ago. You are right, I do not doubt it now, and you lift from me a load of shame.”
Dieu! It was like a thrust in the high lines, and its hurtful violence staggered me. I was finished, it seemed. The victory was hers, and she but a child with no practice of Cupid's art of fence!
“Now, monsieur,” she added, “now that you are satisfied that you did wrong to say I loved you, now that we have disposed of that question—adieu!”
“A moment yet!” I cried. “We have disposed of that, but there was another point, an earlier one, which for the moment we have disregarded. We have—you have disproved the love I was so presumptuous as to believe you fostered for me. We have yet to reckon with the love I bear you, mademoiselle, and of that we shall not be able to dispose so readily.”
With a gesture of weariness or of impatience, she turned aside. “What is it you want? What do you seek to gain by thus provoking me? To win your wager?” Her voice was cold. Who to have looked upon that childlike face, upon those meek, pondering eyes, could have believed her capable of so much cruelty?
“There can no longer be any question of my wager; I have lost and paid it,” said I.
She looked up suddenly. Her brows met in a frown of bewilderment. Clearly this interested her. Again was she drawn.
“How?” she asked. “You have lost and paid it?”
“Even so. That odious, cursed, infamous wager, was the something which I hinted at so often as standing between you and me. The confession that so often I was on the point of making—that so often you urged me to make—concerned that wager. Would to God, Roxalanne, that I had told you!” I cried, and it seemed to me that the sincerity ringing in my voice drove some of the harshness from her countenance, some of the coldness from her glance.
“Unfortunately,” I pursued, “it always seemed to me either not yet time, or already too late. Yet so soon as I regained my liberty, my first thought was of that. While the wager existed I might not ask you to become my wife, lest I should seem to be carrying out the original intention which embarked me upon the business of wooing you, and brought me here to Languedoc. And so my first step was to seek out Chatellerault and deliver him my note of hand for my Picardy possessions, the bulk—by far the greater bulk—of all my fortune. My second step was to repair to you at the Hotel de l'Epee.
“At last I could approach you with clean hands; I could confess what I had done; and since it seemed to me that I had made the utmost atonement, I was confident of success. Alas! I came too late. In the porch of the auberge I met you as you came forth. From my talkative intendant you had learnt already the story of that bargain into which Bardelys had entered. You had learnt who I was, and you thought that you had learnt why I wooed you. Accordingly you could but despise me.”
She had sunk into a chair. Her hands were folded in a listless manner in her lap, and her eyes were lowered, her cheeks pale. But the swift heave of her bosom told me that my words were not without effect. “Do you know nothing of the bargain that I made with Chatellerault?” she asked in a voice that held, I thought, some trace of misery.
“Chatellerault was a cheat!” I cried. “No man of honour in France would have accounted himself under obligation to pay that wager. I paid it, not because I thought the payment due, but that by its payment I might offer you a culminating proof of my sincerity.”
“Be that as it may,” said she, “I passed him my word to—to marry him, if he set you at liberty.”
“The promise does not hold, for when you made it I was at liberty already. Besides, Chatellerault is dead by now—or very near it.”
“Dead?” she echoed, looking up.
“Yes, dead. We fought—” The ghost of a smile, of sudden, of scornful understanding, passed like a ray of light across her face. “Pardieu!” I cried, “you do me a wrong there. It was not by my hands that he fell. It was not by me that the duel was instigated.”
And with that I gave her the whole details of the affair, including the information that Chatellerault had been no party to my release, and that for his attempted judicial murder of me the King would have dealt very hardly with him had he not saved the King the trouble by throwing himself upon his sword:
There was a silence when I had done. Roxalanne sat on, and seemed to ponder. To let all that I had said sink in and advocate my cause, as to me was very clear it must, I turned aside and moved to one of the windows.
“Why did you not tell me before?” she asked suddenly. “Why—oh, why—did you not confess to me the whole infamous affair as soon as you came to love me, as you say you did?”
“As I say I did?” I repeated after her. “Do you doubt it? Can you doubt it in the face of what I have done?”
“Oh, I don't know what to believe!” she cried, a sob in her voice. “You have deceived me so far, so often. Why did you not tell me that night on the river? Or later, when I pressed you in this very house? Or again, the other night in the prison of Toulouse?”
“You ask me why. Can you not answer the question for yourself? Can you not conceive the fear that was in me that you should shrink away from me in loathing? The fear that if you cared a little, I might for all time stifle such affection as you bore me? The fear that I must ruin your trust in me? Oh, mademoiselle, can you not see how my only hope lay in first owning defeat to Chatellerault, in first paying the wager?”
“How could you have lent yourself to such a bargain?” was her next question.
“How, indeed?” I asked in my turn. “From your mother you have heard something of the reputation that attaches to Bardelys. I was a man of careless ways, satiated with all the splendours life could give me, nauseated by all its luxuries. Was it wonderful that I allowed myself to be lured into this affair? It promised some excitement, a certain novelty, difficulties in a path that I had—alas!—ever found all too smooth—for Chatellerault had made your reputed coldness the chief bolster of his opinion that I should not win.
“Again, I was not given to over-nice scruples. I make no secret of my infirmities, but do not blame me too much. If you could see the fine demoiselles we have in Paris, if you could listen to their tenets and take a deep look into their lives, you would not marvel at me. I had never known any but these. On the night of my coming to Lavedan, your sweetness, your pure innocence, your almost childish virtue, dazed me by their novelty. From that first moment I became your slave. Then I was in your garden day by day. And here, in this old Languedoc garden with you and your roses, during the languorous days of my convalescence, is it wonderful that some of the purity, some of the sweetness that was of you and of your roses, should have crept into my heart and cleansed it a little? Ah, mademoiselle!” I cried—and, coming close to her, I would have bent my knee in intercession but that she restrained me.
“Monsieur,” she interrupted, “we harass ourselves in vain. This can have but one ending.”
Her tones were cold, but the coldness I knew was forced—else had she not said “we harass ourselves.” Instead of quelling my ardour, it gave it fuel.
“True, mademoiselle,” I cried, almost exultantly. “It can end but one way!”
She caught my meaning, and her frown deepened. I went too fast, it seemed.
“It had better end now, monsieur. There is too much between us. You wagered to win me to wife.” She shuddered. “I could never forget it.”
“Mademoiselle,” I denied stoutly, “I did not.”
“How?” She caught her breath. “You did not?”
“No,” I pursued boldly. “I did not wager to win you. I wagered to win a certain Mademoiselle de Lavedan, who was unknown to me—but not you, not you.”
She smiled, with never so slight a touch of scorn.
“Your distinctions are very fine—too fine for me, monsieur.”
“I implore you to be reasonable. Think reasonably.”
“Am I not reasonable? Do I not think? But there is so much to think of!” she sighed. “You carried your deception so far. You came here, for instance, as Monsieur de Lesperon. Why that duplicity?”
“Again, mademoiselle, I did not,” said I.
She glanced at me with pathetic disdain.
“Indeed, indeed, monsieur, you deny things very bravely.”
“Did I tell you that my name was Lesperon? Did I present myself to monsieur your father as Lesperon?”
“Surely—yes.”
“Surely no; a thousand times no. I was the victim of circumstances in that, and if I turned them to my own account after they had been forced upon me, shall I be blamed and accounted a cheat? Whilst I was unconscious, your father, seeking for a clue to my identity, made an inspection of my clothes.
“In the pocket of my doublet they found some papers addressed to Rene de Lesperon—some love letters, a communication from the Duc d'Orleans, and a woman's portrait. From all of this it was assumed that I was that Lesperon. Upon my return to consciousness your father greeted me effusively, whereat I wondered; he passed on to discuss—nay, to tell me of—the state of the province and of his own connection with the rebels, until I lay gasping at his egregious temerity. Then, when he greeted me as Monsieur de Lesperon, I had the explanation of it, but too late. Could I deny the identity then? Could I tell him that I was Bardelys, the favourite of the King himself? What would have occurred? I ask you, mademoiselle. Would I not have been accounted a spy, and would they not have made short work of me here at your chateau?”
“No, no; they would have done no murder.”
“Perhaps not, but I could not be sure just then. Most men situated as your father was would have despatched me. Ah, mademoiselle, have you not proofs enough? Do you not believe me now?”
“Yes, monsieur,” she answered simply, “I believe you.”
“Will you not believe, then, in the sincerity of my love?”
She made no rely. Her face was averted, but from her silence I took heart. I drew close to her. I set my hand upon the tall back of her chair, and, leaning towards her, I spoke with passionate heat as must have melted, I thought, any woman who had not a loathing for me.
“Mademoiselle; I am a poor man now,” I ended. “I am no longer that magnificent gentleman whose wealth and splendour were a byword. Yet am I no needy adventurer. I have a little property at Beaugency—a very spot for happiness, mademoiselle. Paris shall know me no more. At Beaugency I shall live at peace, in seclusion, and, so that you come with me, in such joy as in all my life I have done nothing to deserve. I have no longer an army of retainers. A couple of men and a maid or two shall constitute our household. Yet I shall account my wealth well lost if for love's sake you'll share with me the peace of my obscurity. I am poor, mademoiselle yet no poorer even now than that Gascon gentleman, Rene de Lesperon, for whom you held me, and on whom you bestowed the priceless treasure of your heart.”
“Oh, might it have pleased God that you had remained that poor Gascon gentleman!” she cried.
“In what am I different, Roxalanne?”
“In that he had laid no wager,” she answered, rising suddenly.
My hopes were withering. She was not angry. She was pale, and her gentle face was troubled—dear God! how sorely troubled! To me it almost seemed that I had lost.
She flashed me a glance of her blue eyes, and I thought that tears impended.
“Roxalanne!” I supplicated.
But she recovered the control that for a moment she had appeared upon the verge of losing. She put forth her hand.
“Adieu, monsieur!” said she.
I glanced from her hand to her face. Her attitude began to anger me, for I saw that she was not only resisting me, but resisting herself. In her heart the insidious canker of doubt persisted. She knew—or should have known—that it no longer should have any place there, yet obstinately she refrained from plucking it out. There was that wager. But for that same obstinacy she must have realized the reason of my arguments, the irrefutable logic of my payment. She denied me, and in denying me she denied herself, for that she had loved me she had herself told me, and that she could love me again I was assured, if she would but see the thing in the light of reason and of justice.
“Roxalanne, I did not come to Lavedan to say 'Good-bye' to you. I seek from you a welcome, not a dismissal.”
“Yet my dismissal is all that I can give. Will you not take my hand? May we not part in friendly spirit?”
“No, we may not; for we do not part at all.”
It was as the steel of my determination striking upon the flint of hers. She looked up to my face for an instant; she raised her eyebrows in deprecation; she sighed, shrugged one shoulder, and, turning on her heel, moved towards the door.
“Anatole shall bring you refreshment ere you go,” she said in a very polite and formal voice.
Then I played my last card. Was it for nothing that I had flung away my wealth? If she would not give herself, by God, I would compel her to sell herself. And I took no shame in doing it, for by doing it I was saving her and saving myself from a life of unhappiness.
“Roxalanne!” I cried. The imperiousness of my voice arrested and compelled her perhaps against her very will.
“Monsieur?” said she, as demurely as you please.
“Do you know what you are doing?”.
“But yes—perfectly.”
“Pardieu, you do not. I will tell you. You are sending your father to the scaffold.”
She turned livid, her step faltered, and she leant against the frame of the doorway for support. Then she stared at me, wide-eyed in horror.
“That is not true,” she pleaded, yet without conviction. “He is not in danger of his life. They can prove nothing against him. Monsieur de Saint-Eustache could find no evidence here—nothing.”
“Yet there is Monsieur de Saint-Eustache's word; there is the fact—the significant fact—that your father did not take up arms for the King, to afford the Chevalier's accusation some measure of corroboration. At Toulouse in these times they are not particular. Remember how it had fared with me but for the King's timely arrival.”
That smote home. The last shred of her strength fell from her. A great sob shook her, then covering her face with her hands “Mother in heaven, have pity on me!” she cried. “Oh, it cannot be, it cannot be!”
Her distress touched me sorely. I would have consoled her, I would have bidden her have no fear, assuring her that I would save her father. But for my own ends, I curbed the mood. I would use this as a cudgel to shatter her obstinacy, and I prayed that God might forgive me if I did aught that a gentleman should account unworthy. My need was urgent, my love all-engrossing; winning her meant winning life and happiness, and already I had sacrificed so much. Her cry rang still in my ears, “It cannot be, it cannot be!”
I trampled my nascent tenderness underfoot, and in its room I set a harshness that I did not feel—a harshness of defiance and menace.
“It can be, it will be, and, as God lives, it shall be, if you persist in your unreasonable attitude.”
“Monsieur, have mercy!”
“Yes, when you shall be pleased to show me the way to it by having mercy upon me. If I have sinned, I have atoned. But that is a closed question now; to reopen it were futile. Take heed of this, Roxalanne: there is one thing—one only in all France can save your father.”
“That is, monsieur?” she inquired breathlessly.
“My word against that of Saint-Eustache. My indication to His Majesty that your father's treason is not to be accepted on the accusation of Saint-Eustache. My information to the King of what I know touching this gentleman.”
“You will go, monsieur?” she implored me. “Oh, you will save him! Mon Dieu, to think of the time that we have wasted here, you and I, whilst he is being carried to the scaffold! Oh, I did not dream it was so perilous with him! I was desolated by his arrest; I thought of some months' imprisonment, perhaps. But that he should die—! Monsieur de Bardelys, you will save him! Say that you will do this for me!”
She was on her knees to me now, her arms clasping my boots, her eyes raised in entreaty—God, what entreaty!—to my own.
“Rise, mademoiselle, I beseech you,” I said, with a quiet I was far from feeling. “There is no need for this. Let us be calm. The danger to your father is not so imminent. We may have some days yet—three or four, perhaps.”
I lifted her gently and led her to a chair. I was hard put to it not to hold her supported in my arms. But I might not cull that advantage from her distress. A singular niceness, you will say, perhaps, as in your scorn you laugh at me. Perhaps you are right to laugh—yet are you not altogether right.
“You will go to Toulouse, monsieur?” she begged.
I took a turn in the room, then halting before her “Yes,” I answered, “I will go.”
The gratitude that leapt to her eyes smote me hard, for my sentence was unfinished.
“I will go,” I continued quickly, “when you shall have promised to become my wife.”
The joy passed from her face. She glanced at me a moment as if without understanding.
“I came to Lavedan to win you, Roxalanne, and from Lavedan I shall not stir until I have accomplished my design,” I said very quietly. “You will therefore see that it rests with you how soon I may set out.”
She fell to weeping softly, but answered nothing. At last I turned from her and moved towards the door.
“Where are you going?” she cried.
“To take the air, mademoiselle. If upon deliberation you can bring yourself to marry me, send me word by Anatole or one of the others, and I shall set out at once for Toulouse.”
“Stop!” she cried. Obediently I stopped, my hand already upon the doorknob. “You are cruel, monsieur!” she complained.
“I love you,” said I, by way of explaining it. “To be cruel seems to be the way of love. You have been cruel to me.”
“Would you—would you take what is not freely given?”
“I have the hope that when you see that you must give, you will give freely.”
“If—if I make you this promise—”
“Yes?” I was growing white with eagerness.
“You will fulfil your part of the bargain?”
“It is a habit of mine, mademoiselle—as witnesses the case of Chatellerault.” She shivered at the mention of his name. It reminded her of precisely such another bargain that three nights ago she had made. Precisely, did I say? Well, not quite precisely.
“I—I promise to marry you, then,” said she in a choking voice, “whenever you choose, after my father shall have been set at liberty.”
I bowed. “I shall start at once,” said I.
And perhaps out of shame, perhaps out of—who shall say what sentiments?—I turned without another word and left her.