Chapter 1 St. Martin's Summer by Rafael Sabatini
THE SENESCHAL OF DAUPHINY
My Lord of Tressan, His Majesty’s Seneschal of Dauphiny, sat at his ease, his purple doublet all undone, to yield greater freedom to his vast bulk, a yellow silken undergarment visible through the gap, as is visible the flesh of some fruit that, swollen with over-ripeness, has burst its skin.
His wig—imposed upon him by necessity, not fashion—lay on the table amid a confusion of dusty papers, and on his little fat nose, round and red as a cherry at its end, rested the bridge of his horn-rimmed spectacles. His bald head—so bald and shining that it conveyed an unpleasant sense of nakedness, suggesting that its uncovering had been an act of indelicacy on the owner’s part—rested on the back of his great chair, and hid from sight the gaudy escutcheon wrought upon the crimson leather. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and whether from that mouth or from his nose—or, perhaps, conflicting for issue between both—there came a snorting, rumbling sound to proclaim that my Lord the Seneschal was hard at work upon the King’s business.
Yonder, at a meaner table, in an angle between two windows, a pale-faced thread-bare secretary was performing for a yearly pittance the duties for which my Lord the Seneschal was rewarded by emoluments disproportionately large.
The air of that vast apartment was disturbed by the sounds of Monsieur de Tressan’s slumbers, the scratch and splutter of the secretary’s pen, and the occasional hiss and crackle of the logs that burned in the great, cavern-like fireplace. Suddenly to these another sound was added. With a rasp and rattle the heavy curtains of blue velvet flecked with silver fleurs-de-lys were swept from the doorway, and the master of Monsieur de Tressan’s household, in a well filled suit of black relieved by his heavy chain of office, stepped pompously forward.
The secretary dropped his pen, and shot a frightened glance at his slumbering master; then raised his hands above his head, and shook them wildly at the head lackey.
“Sh!” he whispered tragically. “Doucement, Monsieur Anselme.”
Anselme paused. He appreciated the gravity of the situation. His bearing lost some of its dignity; his face underwent a change. Then with a recovery of some part of his erstwhile resolution:
“Nevertheless, he must be awakened,” he announced, but in an undertone, as if afraid to do the thing he said must needs be done.
The horror in the secretary’s eyes increased, but Anselme’s reflected none of it. It was a grave thing, he knew by former experience, to arouse His Majesty’s Seneschal of Dauphiny from his after-dinner nap; but it was an almost graver thing to fail in obedience to that black-eyed woman below who was demanding an audience.
Anselme realized that he was between the sword and the wall. He was, however, a man of a deliberate habit that was begotten of inherent indolence and nurtured among the good things that fell to his share as master of the Tressan household. Thoughtfully he caressed his tuft of red beard, puffed out his cheeks, and raised his eyes to the ceiling in appeal or denunciation to the heaven which he believed was somewhere beyond it.
“Nevertheless, he must be awakened,” he repeated.
And then Fate came to his assistance. Somewhere in the house a door banged like a cannon-shot. Perspiration broke upon the secretary’s brow. He sank limply back in his chair, giving himself up for lost. Anselme started and bit the knuckle of his forefinger in a manner suggesting an inarticulate imprecation.
My Lord the Seneschal moved. The noise of his slumbers culminated in a sudden, choking grunt, and abruptly ceased. His eyelids rolled slowly back, like an owl’s, revealing pale blue eyes, which fixed themselves first upon the ceiling, then upon Anselme. Instantly he sat up, puffing and scowling, his hands shuffling his papers.
“A thousand devils! Anselme, why am I interrupted?” he grumbled querulously, still half-asleep. “What the plague do you want? Have you no thought for the King’s affairs? Babylas”—this to his secretary—“did I not tell you that I had much to do; that I must not be disturbed?”
It was the great vanity of the life of this man, who did nothing, to appear the busiest fellow in all France, and no audience—not even that of his own lackeys—was too mean for him to take the stage to in that predilect role.
“Monsieur le Comte,” said Anselme, in tones of abject self-effacement, “I had never dared intrude had the matter been of less urgency. But Madame the Dowager of Condillac is below. She begs to see Your Excellency instantly.”
At once there was a change. Tressan became wide-awake upon the instant. His first act was to pass one hand over the wax-like surface of his bald head, whilst his other snatched at his wig. Then he heaved himself ponderously out of his great chair. He donned his wig, awry in his haste, and lurched forward towards Anselme, his fat fingers straining at his open doublet and drawing it together.
“Madame la Douairiere here?” he cried. “Make fast these buttons, rascal! Quick! Am I to receive a lady thus? Am I—? Babylas,” he snapped, interrupting himself and turning aside even as Anselme put forth hands to do his bidding. “A mirror, from my closet! Dispatch!”
The secretary was gone in a flash, and in a flash returned, even as Anselme completed his master’s toilet. But clearly Monsieur de Tressan had awakened in a peevish humour, for no sooner were the buttons of his doublet secured than with his own fingers he tore them loose again, cursing his majordomo the while with vigour.
“You dog, Anselme, have you no sense of fitness, no discrimination? Am I to appear in this garment of the mode of a half-century ago before Madame la Marquise? Take it off; take it off, man! Get me the coat that came last month from Paris—the yellow one with the hanging sleeves and the gold buttons, and a sash—the crimson sash I had from Taillemant. Can you move no quicker, animal? Are you still here?”
Anselme, thus enjoined, lent an unwonted alacrity to his movements, waddling grotesquely like a hastening waterfowl. Between him and the secretary they dressed my Lord the Seneschal, and decked him out till he was fit to compare with a bird of paradise for gorgeousness of colouring if not for harmony of hues and elegance of outline.
Babylas held the mirror, and Anselme adjusted the Seneschal’s wig, whilst Tressan himself twisted his black mustachios—how they kept their colour was a mystery to his acquaintance—and combed the tuft of beard that sprouted from one of his several chins.
He took a last look at his reflection, rehearsed a smile, and bade Anselme introduce his visitor. He desired his secretary to go to the devil, but, thinking better of it, he recalled him as he reached the door. His cherished vanity craved expression.
“Wait!” said he. “There is a letter must be written. The King’s business may not suffer postponement—not for all the dowagers in France. Sit down.”
Babylas obeyed him. Tressan stood with his back to the open door. His ears, strained to listen, had caught the swish of a woman’s gown. He cleared his throat, and began to dictate:
“To Her Majesty the Queen-Regent—” He paused, and stood with knitted brows, deep in thought. Then he ponderously repeated—“To Her Majesty the Queen Regent—Have you got that?”
“Yes, Monsieur le Comte. ‘To Her Majesty the Queen Regent.’”
There was a step, and a throat-clearing cough behind him.
“Monsieur de Tressan,” said a woman’s voice, a rich, melodious voice, if haughty and arrogant of intonation.
On the instant he turned, advanced a step, and bowed.
“Your humblest servant, madame,” said he, his hand upon his heart. “This is an honour which—”
“Which necessity thrusts upon you,” she broke in imperiously. “Dismiss that fellow.”
The secretary, pale and shy, had risen. His eyes dilated at the woman’s speech. He looked for a catastrophe as the natural result of her taking such a tone with this man who was the terror of his household and of all Grenoble. Instead, the Lord Seneschal’s meekness left him breathless with surprise.
“He is my secretary, madame. We were at work as you came. I was on the point of inditing a letter to Her Majesty. The office of Seneschal in a province such as Dauphiny is helas!—no sinecure.” He sighed like one whose brain is weary. “It leaves a man little time even to eat or sleep.”
“You will be needing a holiday, then,” said she, with cool insolence. “Take one for once, and let the King’s business give place for half an hour to mine.”
The secretary’s horror grew by leaps and bounds.
Surely the storm would burst at last about this audacious woman’s head. But the Lord Seneschal—usually so fiery and tempestuous—did no more than make her another of his absurd bows.
“You anticipate, madame, the very words I was about to utter. Babylas, vanish!” And he waved the scribbler doorwards with a contemptuous hand. “Take your papers with you—into my closet there. We will resume that letter to Her Majesty when madame shall have left me.”
The secretary gathered up his papers, his quills, and his inkhorn, and went his way, accounting the end of the world at hand.
When the door had closed upon him, the Seneschal, with another bow and a simper, placed a chair at his visitor’s disposal. She looked at the chair, then looked at the man much as she had looked at the chair, and turning her back contemptuously on both, she sauntered towards the fireplace. She stood before the blaze, with her whip tucked under her arm, drawing off her stout riding-gloves. She was a tall, splendidly proportioned woman, of a superb beauty of countenance, for all that she was well past the spring of life.
In the waning light of that October afternoon none would have guessed her age to be so much as thirty, though in the sunlight you might have set it at a little more. But in no light at all would you have guessed the truth, that her next would be her forty-second birthday. Her face was pale, of an ivory pallor that gleamed in sharp contrast with the ebony of her lustrous hair. Under the long lashes of low lids a pair of eyes black and insolent set off the haughty lines of her scarlet lips. Her nose was thin and straight, her neck an ivory pillar splendidly upright upon her handsome shoulders.
She was dressed for riding, in a gown of sapphire velvet, handsomely laced in gold across the stomacher, and surmounted at the neck, where it was cut low and square, by the starched band of fine linen which in France was already replacing the more elaborate ruff. On her head, over a linen coif, she wore a tall-crowned grey beaver, swathed with a scarf of blue and gold.
Standing by the hearth, one foot on the stone kerb, one elbow leaning lightly on the overmantel, she proceeded leisurely to remove her gloves.
The Seneschal observed her with eyes that held an odd mixture of furtiveness and admiration, his fingers—plump, indolent-looking stumps—plucking at his beard.
“Did you but know, Marquise, with what joy, with what a—”
“I will imagine it, whatever it may be,” she broke in, with that brusque arrogance that marked her bearing. “The time for flowers of rhetoric is not now. There is trouble coming, man; trouble, dire trouble.”
Up went the Seneschal’s brows; his eyes grew wider.
“Trouble?” quoth he. And, having opened his mouth to give exit to that single word, open he left it.
She laughed lazily, her lip curling, her face twisting oddly, and mechanically she began to draw on again the glove she had drawn off.
“By your face I see how well you understand me,” she sneered. “The trouble concerns Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye.”
“From Paris—does it come from Court?” His voice was sunk.
She nodded. “You are a miracle of intuition today, Tressan.”
He thrust his tiny tuft of beard between his teeth—a trick he had when perplexed or thoughtful. “Ah!” he exclaimed at last, and it sounded like an indrawn breath of apprehension. “Tell me more.”
“What more is there to tell? You have the epitome of the story.”
“But what is the nature of the trouble? What form does it take, and by whom are you advised of it?”
“A friend in Paris sent me word, and his messenger did his work well, else had Monsieur de Garnache been here before him, and I had not so much as had the mercy of this forewarning.”
“Garnache?” quoth the Count. “Who is Garnache?”
“The emissary of the Queen-Regent. He has been dispatched hither by her to see that Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye has justice and enlargement.”
Tressan fell suddenly to groaning and wringing his hands a pathetic figure had it been less absurd.
“I warned you, madame! I warned you how it would end,” he cried. “I told you—”
“Oh, I remember the things you told me,” she cut in, scorn in her voice. “You may spare yourself their repetition. What is done is done, and I’ll not—I would not—have it undone. Queen-Regent or no Queen-Regent, I am mistress at Condillac; my word is the only law we know, and I intend that so it shall continue.”
Tressan looked at her in surprise. This unreasoning, feminine obstinacy so wrought upon him that he permitted himself a smile and a lapse into irony and banter.
“Parfaitement,” said he, spreading his hands, and bowing. “Why speak of trouble, then?”
She beat her whip impatiently against her gown, her eyes staring into the fire. “Because, my attitude being such as it is, trouble will there be.”
The Seneschal shrugged his shoulders, and moved a step towards her. He was cast down to think that he might have spared himself the trouble of donning his beautiful yellow doublet from Paris. She had eyes for no finery that afternoon. He was cast down, too, to think how things might go with him when this trouble came. It entered his thoughts that he had lain long on a bed of roses in this pleasant corner of Dauphiny, and he was smitten now with fear lest of the roses he should find nothing remaining but the thorns.
“How came the Queen-Regent to hear of—of mademoiselle’s—ah—situation?” he inquired.
The Marquise swung round upon him in a passion.
“The girl found a dog of a traitor to bear a letter for her. That is enough. If ever chance or fate should bring him my way, by God! he shall hang without shrift.”
Then she put her anger from her; put from her, too, the insolence and scorn with which so lavishly she had addressed him hitherto. Instead she assumed a suppliant air, her beautiful eyes meltingly set upon his face.
“Tressan,” said she in her altered voice, “I am beset by enemies. But you will not forsake me? You will stand by me to the end—will you not, my friend? I can count upon you, at least?”
“In all things, madame,” he answered, under the spell of her gaze. “What force does this man Garnache bring with him? Have you ascertained?”
“He brings none,” she answered, triumph in her glance.
“None?” he echoed, horror in his. “None? Then—then—”
He tossed his arms to heaven, and stood a limp and shaken thing. She leaned forward, and regarded him stricken in surprise.
“Diable! What ails you?” she snapped. “Could I have given you better news?”
“If you could have given me worse, I cannot think what it might have been,” he groaned. Then, as if smitten by a sudden notion that flashed a gleam of hope into this terrifying darkness that was settling down upon him, he suddenly looked up. “You mean to resist him?” he inquired.
She stared at him a second, then laughed, a thought unpleasantly.
“Pish! But you are mad,” she scorned him. “Do you need ask if I intend to resist—I, with the strongest castle in Dauphiny? By God! sir, if you need to hear me say it, hear me then say that I shall resist him and as many as the Queen may send after him, for as long as one stone of Condillac shall stand upon another.”
The Seneschal blew out his lips, and fell once more to the chewing of his beard.
“What did you mean when you said I could have given you no worse news than that of his coming alone?” she questioned suddenly.
“Madame,” said he, “if this man comes without force, and you resist the orders of which he is the bearer, what think you will betide?”
“He will appeal to you for the men he needs that he may batter down my walls,” she answered calmly.
He looked at her incredulously. “You realize it?” he ejaculated. “You realize it?”
“What is there in it that should puzzle a babe?”
Her callousness was like a gust of wind upon the living embers of his fears. It blew them into a blaze of wrath, sudden and terrific as that of such a man at bay could be. He advanced upon her with the rolling gait of the obese, his cheeks purple, his arms waving wildly, his dyed mustachios bristling.
“And what of me, madame?” he spluttered. “What of me? Am I to be ruined, gaoled, and hanged, maybe, for refusing him men?—for that is what is in your mind. Am I to make myself an outlaw? Am I, who have been Lord Seneschal of Dauphiny these fifteen years, to end my days in degradation in the cause of a woman’s matrimonial projects for a simpering school-girl? Seigneur du Ciel!” he roared, “I think you are gone mad—mad, mad! over this affair. You would not think it too much to set the whole province in flames so that you could have your way with this wretched child. But, Ventregris! to ruin me—to—to—”
He fell silent for very want of words; just gaped and gasped, and then, with hands folded upon his paunch, he set himself to pace the chamber.
Madame de Condillac stood watching him, her face composed, her glance cold. She was like some stalwart oak, weathering with unshaken front a hurricane. When he had done, she moved away from the fireplace, and, beating her side gently with her whip, she stepped to the door.
“Au revoir, Monsieur de Tressan,” said she, mighty cool, her back towards him.
At that he halted in his feverish stride, stood still and threw up his head. His anger went out, as a candle is extinguished by a puff of wind. And in its place a new fear crept into his heart.
“Madame, madame!” he cried. “Wait! Hear me.”
She paused, half-turned, and looked at him over her shoulder, scorn in her glance, a sneer on her scarlet mouth, insolence in every line of her.
“I think, monsieur, that I have heard a little more than enough,” said she. “I am assured, at least, that in you I have but a fair-weather friend, a poor lipserver.”
“Ah, not that, madame,” he cried, and his voice was stricken. “Say not that. I would serve you as would none other in all this world—you know it, Marquise; you know it.”
She faced about, and confronted him, her smile a trifle broader, as if amusement were now blending with her scorn.
“It is easy to protest. Easy to say, ‘I will die for you,’ so long as the need for such a sacrifice be remote. But let me do no more than ask a favour, and it is, ‘What of my good name, madame? What of my seneschalship? Am I to be gaoled or hanged to pleasure you?’ Faugh!” she ended, with a toss of her splendid head. “The world is peopled with your kind, and I—alas! for a woman’s intuitions—had held you different from the rest.”
Her words were to his soul as a sword of fire might have been to his flesh. They scorched and shrivelled it. He saw himself as she would have him see himself—a mean, contemptible craven; a coward who made big talk in times of peace, but faced about and vanished into hiding at the first sign of danger. He felt himself the meanest, vilest thing a-crawl upon this sinful earth, and she—dear God!—had thought him different from the ruck. She had held him in high esteem, and behold, how short had he not fallen of all her expectations! Shame and vanity combined to work a sudden, sharp revulsion in his feelings.
“Marquise,” he cried, “you say no more than what is just. But punish me no further. I meant not what I said. I was beside myself. Let me atone—let my future actions make amends for that odious departure from my true self.”
There was no scorn now in her smile; only an ineffable tenderness, beholding which he felt it in his heart to hang if need be that he might continue high in her regard. He sprang forward, and took the hand she extended to him.
“I knew, Tressan,” said she, “that you were not yourself, and that when you bethought you of what you had said, my valiant, faithful friend would not desert me.”
He stooped over her hand, and slobbered kisses upon her unresponsive glove.
“Madame,” said he, “you may count upon me. This fellow out of Paris shall have no men from me, depend upon it.”
She caught him by the shoulders, and held him so, before her. Her face was radiant, alluring; and her eyes dwelt on his with a kindness he had never seen there save in some wild daydream of his.
“I will not refuse a service you offer me so gallantly,” said she. “It were an ill thing to wound you by so refusing it.”
“Marquise,” he cried, “it is as nothing to what I would do did the occasion serve. But when this thing ‘tis done; when you have had your way with Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye, and the nuptials shall have been celebrated, then—dare I hope—?”
He said no more in words, but his little blue eyes had an eloquence that left nothing to mere speech.
Their glances met, she holding him always at arm’s length by that grip upon his shoulders, a grip that was firm and nervous.
In the Seneschal of Dauphiny, as she now gazed upon him, she beheld a very toad of a man, and the soul of her shuddered at the sight of him combining with the thing that he suggested. But her glance was steady and her lips maintained their smile, just as if that ugliness of his had been invested with some abstract beauty existing only to her gaze; a little colour crept into her cheeks, and red being the colour of love’s livery, Tressan misread its meaning.
She nodded to him across the little distance of her outstretched arms, then smothered a laugh that drove him crazed with hope, and breaking from him she sped swiftly, shyly it almost seemed to him, to the door.
There she paused a moment looking back at him with a coyness that might have become a girl of half her years, yet which her splendid beauty saved from being unbecoming even in her.
One adorable smile she gave him, and before he could advance to hold the door for her, she had opened it and passed out.