Chapter 4 Fortune’s fool by Rafael Sabatini
CHERRY BLOSSOMS
Colonel Holles knelt on the window-seat at the open casement of his parlour at the Paul’s Head. Leaning on the sill, he seemed to contemplate the little sunlit garden with its two cherry trees on which some of those belated blossoms lingered still. Cherry blossoms he was contemplating, but not those before him. The two trees of this little oasis in the City of London had multiplied themselves into a cherry orchard set in Devon and in the years that were gone beyond reclaiming.
The phenomenon was not new to him. Cherry blossoms had ever possessed the power to move him thus. The contemplation of them never failed to bring him the vision that was now spread before his wistful eyes. Mrs. Quinn’s few perches of garden had dissolved into an acre of sunlit flowering orchard. Above the trees in the background to the right a spire thrust up into the blue, surmounted by a weather-vane in the shape of a fish—which he vaguely knew to be an emblem of Christianity. Through a gap on the left he beheld a wall, ivy-clad, crumbling at its summit. Over this a lad was climbing stealthily—a long-limbed, graceful, fair-haired stripling, whose features were recognizable for his own if from the latter you removed the haggard lines that the years and hard living had imprinted. Softly and nimbly as a cat he dropped to earth on the wall’s hither side, and stood there half crouching, a smile on his young lips and laughter in his grey eyes. He was watching a girl who—utterly unconscious of his presence—swept to and fro through the air on a swing that was formed of a single rope passed from one tree to another.
She was a child, no more; yet of a well-grown, lissom grace that deceived folk into giving her more than the bare fifteen years she counted to her age. Hers was no rose-and-lily complexion. She displayed the healthy tan that comes of a life lived in the open far away from cities. Yet one glance into the long-shaped, deeply blue eyes that were the glory of her lovely little face sufficed to warn you that though rustic she was not simple. Here was one who possessed a full share of that feminine guile which is the heritage from Mother Eve to her favoured daughters. If you were a man and wise, you would be most wary when she was most demure.
Swinging now, her loosened brown hair streamed behind her as she flew forward, and tossed itself into a cloud about her face as she went back. And she sang as nearly as possible in rhythm with her swinging:
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!
Where do you tarry?
Whiles here I stay for you
Waiting to marry.
Hey, young love! Ho, young . . .”
The song ended in a scream. Unheard, unsuspected, the stripling had crept forward through the trees. At the top of her backward swing he had caught her about the waist in his strong young arms. There was a momentary flutter of two black legs amid an agitated cloud of petticoat, then the rope swung forward, and the nymph was left in the arms of her young satyr. But only for a moment. Out of that grip she broke in a fury—real or pretended—and came to earth breathless, with flushed cheeks and flashing eye.
“You give yourself strange liberties, young Randal,” said she, and boxed his ears. “Who bade you here?”
“I . . . I thought you called me,” said he, grinning, no whit abashed by either blow or look. “Come, now, Nan. Confess it!”
“I called you? I?” She laughed indignantly. “ ’Tis very likely! Oh, very likely!”
“You’ll deny it, of course, being a woman in the making. But I heard you.” And he quoted for her, singing:
“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!
Where do you tarry?”
“I was hiding on the other side of the wall. I came at once. And all I get for my pains and the risk to a fairly new pair of breeches is a blow and a denial.”
“You may get more if you remain.”
“I hope so. I had not come else.”
“But it’ll be as little to your liking.”
“That’s as may be. Meanwhile there’s this matter of a blow. Now a blow is a thing I take from nobody. For a man there is my sword . . .”
“Your sword!” She abandoned herself to laughter. “And you don’t even own a penknife.”
“Oh, yes I do. I own a sword. It was a gift from my father to-day—a birthday gift. I am nineteen to-day, Nan.”
“How fast you grow! You’ll be a man soon. And so your father has given you a sword?” She leaned against the bole of a tree, and surveyed him archly. “That was very rash of your father. You’ll be cutting yourself, I know.”
He smiled, but with a little less of his earlier assurance. But he made a fair recovery.
“You are straying from the point.”
“The point of your sword, sweet sir?”
“The point of my discourse. It was concerning this matter of a blow. If you were a man I am afraid I should have to kill you. My honour would demand no less.”
“With your sword?” she asked him innocently.
“With my sword, of course.”
“Ugh. Jack the Giant-Killer in a cherry orchard! You must see you are out of place here. Get you gone, boy. I don’t think I ever liked you, Randal. Now I’m sure of it. You’re a bloody-minded fellow for all your tender years. What you’ll be when you’re a man . . . I daren’t think.”
He swallowed the taunt.
“And what you’ll be when you’re a woman is the thing I delight in thinking. We’ll return to that. Meanwhile, this blow . . .”
“Oh, you’re tiresome.”
“You delay me. That is why. What I would do to a man who struck me I have told you.”
“But you can’t think I believe you.”
This time he was not to be turned aside.
“The real question is what to do to a woman.” He approached her. “When I look at you, one punishment only seems possible.”
He took her by the shoulders in a grip of a surprising firmness. There was sudden alarm in those eyes of hers that hitherto had been so mocking.
“Randal!” she cried out, guessing his purpose.
Undeterred he accomplished it. Having kissed her, he loosed his hold, and stood back for the explosion which from his knowledge of her he was led to expect. But no explosion came. She stood limply before him, all the raillery gone out of her, whilst slowly the colour faded from her cheeks. Then it came flowing back in an all-suffusing flood, and there was a pathetic quiver at the corners of her mouth, a suspicious brightness in her drooping eyes.
“Why, Nan!” he cried, alarmed by phenomena so unexpected and unusual.
“Oh, why did you do that?” she cried on a sob.
Here was meekness! Had she boxed his ears again, it would have surprised him not at all. Indeed, it is what he had looked for. But that she should be stricken so spiritless, that she should have no reproof for him beyond that plaintive question, left him agape with amazement. It occurred to him that perhaps he had found the way to tame her; and he regretted on every count that he should not have had recourse before to a method so entirely satisfactory to himself. Meanwhile her question craved an answer.
“I’ve been wanting to do it this twelvemonth,” said he simply. “And I shall want to do it again. Nan, dear, don’t you know how much I love you? Don’t you know without my telling you? Don’t you?”
The fervent question chased away her trouble and summoned surprise to fill its place. A moment she stared at him, and her glance hardened. She began to show signs of recovery.
“The declaration should have preceded the . . . the . . . affront.”
“Affront!” he cried in protest.
“What else? Isn’t it an affront to kiss a maid without a by-your-leave? If you were a man, I shouldn’t forgive you. I couldn’t. But as you’re just a boy,”—her tone soared to disdainful heights—“you shall be forgiven on a promise that the offence is not to be repeated.”
“But I love you, Nan! I’ve said so,” he expostulated.
“You’re too precocious, young Randal. It comes, I suppose, of being given a sword to play with. I shall have to speak to your father about it. You need manners more than a sword at present.”
The minx was skilled in the art of punishing. But the lad refused to be put out of countenance.
“Nan, dear, I am asking you to marry me.”
She jumped at that. Her eyes dilated. “Lord!” she said “What condescension! But d’you think I want a child tied to my apron-strings?”
“Won’t you be serious, Nan?” he pleaded. “I am very serious.”
“You must be, to be thinking of marriage.”
“I am going away, Nan—to-morrow, very early. I came to say good-bye.”
Her eyelids flickered, and in that moment a discerning glance would have detected a gleam of alarm from her blue eyes. But there was no hint of it in her voice.
“I thought you said it was to marry me you came.”
“Why will you be teasing me? It means so much to me, Nan. I want you to say that you’ll wait for me; that you’ll marry me some day.”
He was very close to her. She looked up at him a little breathlessly. Her feminine intuitions warned her that he was about to take a liberty; feminine perversity prompted her to frustrate the intention, although it was one that in her heart she knew would gladden her.
“Some day?” she mocked him. “When you’re grown up, I suppose? Why, I’ll be an old maid by then; and I don’t think I want to be an old maid.”
“Answer me, Nan. Don’t rally me. Say that you’ll wait.”
He would have caught her by the shoulders again. But she eluded those eager hands of his.
“You haven’t told me yet where you are going.”
Gravely he flung the bombshell of his news, confident that it must lend him a new importance in her eyes, and thus, perhaps, bring her into something approaching subjection.
“I am going to London, to the army. My father has procured me a cornetcy of horse, and I am to serve under General Monk, who is his friend.”
It made an impression, though she did not give him the satisfaction of seeing how great that impression was. To do her justice, the army meant no more to her just at that moment than champing horses, blaring trumpets, and waving banners. Of its grimmer side she took as yet no thought: else she might have given his news a graver greeting. As it was, the surprise of it left her silent, staring at him in a new wonder. He took advantage of it to approach her again. He committed the mistake of attempting to force the pace. He caught her to him, taking her unawares this time and seizing her suddenly, before she could elude him.
“Nan, my dear!”
She struggled in his arms. But he held her firmly. She struggled the harder, and, finding her struggles ineffective, her temper rose. Her hands against his breast she thrust him back.
“Release me at once! Release me, or I’ll scream!”
At that and the anger in her voice, he let her go, and stood sheepishly, abashed, whilst she retreated a few paces from him, breathing quickly, her eyes aflash.
“My faith! You’ll be a great success in London! They’ll like your oafish ways up yonder. I think you had better go.”
“Forgive me, Nan!” He was in a passion of penitence, fearing that this time he had gone too far and angered her in earnest. “Ah, don’t be cruel. It is our last day together for Heaven knows how long.”
“Well, that’s a mercy.”
“Ye don’t mean that, Nan? Ye can’t mean that ye care nothing about me. That you are glad I’m going.”
“You should mend your manners,” she reproved him by way of compromise.
“Why, so I will. It’s only that I want you so; that I’m going away—far away; that after to-day I won’t see you again maybe for years. If ye say that ye don’t care for me at all, why, then I don’t think that I’ll come back to Potheridge ever. But if ye care—be it never so little, Nan—if you’ll wait for me, it’ll send me away with a good heart, it’ll give me strength to become great. I’ll conquer the world for you, my dear,” he ended grandiloquently, as is the way of youth in its unbounded confidence. “I’ll bring it back to toss it in your lap.”
Her eyes were shining. His devotion and enthusiasm touched her. But her mischievous perversity must be dissembling it. She laughed on a rising inflection that was faintly mocking.
“I shouldn’t know what to do with it,” said she.
That and her laughter angered him. He had opened his heart. He had been boastful in his enthusiasm, he had magnified himself and felt himself shrinking again under the acid of her derision. He put on a sudden frosty dignity.
“You may laugh, but there’ll come a day maybe when you won’t laugh. You may be sorry when I come back.”
“Bringing the world with you,” she mocked him.
He looked at her almost savagely, white-faced. Then in silence he swung on his heel and went off through the trees. Six paces he had taken when he came face to face with an elderly, grave-faced gentleman in the clerkly attire of a churchman, who was pacing slowly reading in a book. The parson raised his eyes. They were long-shaped blue eyes like Nancy’s, but kindlier in their glance.
“Why, Randal!” he hailed the boy who was almost hurtling into him, being half-blinded by his unshed tears.
The youth commanded himself.
“Give you good-morning, Mr. Sylvester. I . . . I but came to say good-bye . . .”
“Why, yes, my boy. Your father told me . . .”
Through the trees came the girl’s teasing voice.
“You are detaining the gentleman, father, and he is in haste. He is off to conquer the world.”
Mr. Sylvester raised his heavy grey eyebrows a little; the shadow of a smile hovered about the corners of his kindly mouth, his eyes looked a question, humorously.
Randal shrugged. “Nancy is gay at my departure, sir.”
“Nay, nay.”
“It affords her amusement, as you perceive, sir. She is pleased to laugh.”
“Tush, tush!” The parson turned, took his arm affectionately, and moved along with him towards the house. “A mask on her concern,” he murmured. “Women are like that. It takes a deal of learning to understand a woman; and I doubt, in the end, if the time is well spent. But I’ll answer for it that she’ll have a warm welcome for you on your return, whether you’ve conquered the world or not. So shall we all, my boy. You go to serve in a great cause. God bring you safely home again.”
But Randal took no comfort, and parted from Mr. Sylvester vowing in his heart that he would return no more betide what might.
Yet before he quitted Potheridge he had proof that Mr. Sylvester was right. It was in vain that day that Nancy awaited his return. And that night there were tears on her pillow, some of vexation, but some of real grief at the going of Randal.
Very early next morning, before the village was astir, Randal rode forth upon the conquest of the world, fortified by a tolerably heavy purse, and that brand-new sword—the gifts which had accompanied his father’s blessing. As he rode along by the wall above which the cherry blossoms flaunted, towards the grey rectory that fronted immediately upon the road, a lattice was pushed open overhead, and the head and shoulders of Nancy were protruded.
“Randal!” she softly called him, as he came abreast.
He reined in his horse and looked up. His rancour melted instantly. He was conscious of the quickening of his pulses.
“Nan!” His whole soul was in his utterance of the name.
“I . . . I am sorry I laughed, Randal, dear. I wasn’t really gay. I have cried since. I have stayed awake all night not to miss you now.” This was hardly true, but it is very likely she believed it. “I wanted to say good-bye and God keep you, Randal, dear, and . . . and . . . come back to me soon again.”
“Nan!” he cried again. It was all that he could say; but he said it with singular eloquence.
Something slapped softly down upon the withers of his horse. His hand shot out to clutch it ere it fell thence, and he found himself holding a little tasselled glove.
There was a little scream from above. “My glove!” she cried. “I’ve dropped it. Randal, please!” She was leaning far out, reaching down a beseeching hand. But she was still too far above him to render possible the glove’s return. Besides, this time she did not deceive him with her comedy. He took off his hat, and passed the glove through the band.
“I’ll wear it as a favour till I come to claim the hand it has covered,” he told her in a sort of exaltation. He kissed the glove, bowed low, covered himself with a flourish, and touched the horse with his spurs.
As he rode away her voice floated after him, faintly mocking, yet with a choking quaver that betrayed her secret tears.
“Don’t forget to bring the world back with you.”
And that was the last of her voice that he had ever heard.
Five years passed before the day when next he came to Potheridge. Again the cherry trees were in blossom; again he saw them, tossed by the breeze, above the grey wall of the rectory orchard, as he rode forward with high-beating heart, a lackey trotting at his heels.
The elder Holles, who had removed himself permanently to London shortly after his son’s going to Monk, had been dead these two years. If Randal had not accomplished his proud boast of conquering the world, at least he had won himself an important place in it, a fine position in the army, that should be a stepping-stone to greater things. He was the youngest colonel in the service, thanks to his own talents as well as to Monk’s favour—for Monk could never so have favoured him had he not been worthy and so proved himself—a man of mark, of whom a deal was expected by all who knew him. All this he now bore written plainly upon him: his air of authority; his rich dress; the handsome furniture of his splendid horse; the servant following; all advertised the man of consequence. And he was proud of it all for the sake of her who had been his inspiration. From his heart he thanked God for these things, since he might offer them to her.
What would she look like, he wondered, as he rode amain, his face alight and eager. It was three years since last he had heard from her; but that was natural enough, for the constant movements demanded by his soldier’s life made it impossible that letters should reach him often. To her he had written frequently. But one letter only had he received in all those years, and that was long ago, written to him after Dunbar in answer to his announcement that he had won himself a captaincy and so advanced a stage in his conquest of the world.
How would she greet him now? How would she look at him? What would be her first word? He thought that it would be his name. He hoped it might be; for in her utterance of it he would read all he sought to know.
They came to a clattering halt at the rectory door. He flung down from the saddle without waiting for his groom’s assistance, and creaked and clanked across the cobbles to rattle on the oak with the butt of his riding-whip.
The door swung inwards. Before him, startled of glance, stood a lean old crone who in nothing resembled the corpulent Mathilda who had kept the rector’s house of old. He stared at her, some of the glad eagerness perishing in his face.
“The . . . the rector?” quoth he, faltering. “Is he at home?”
“Aye, he be in,” she mumbled, mistrustfully eyeing his imposing figure. “Do ee bide a moment, whiles I calls him.” She vanished into the gloom of the hall, whence her voice reached him, calling: “Master! Master! Here be stranger!”
A stranger! O God! Here all was not as it should be.
Came a quick, youthful step, and a moment later a young man advanced from the gloom. He was tall, comely, and golden-haired; he wore clerkly black and the Geneva bands of a cleric.
“You desired to see me, sir?” he inquired.
Randal Holles stood looking at him, speechless for a long moment, dumbfounded. He moistened his lips at last, and spoke.
“It was Mr. Sylvester whom I desired to see, sir,” he answered. “Tell me,”—and in his eagerness he was so unmannerly as to clutch the unknown parson’s arm—“where is he? Is he no longer here?”
“No,” was the gentle answer. “I have succeeded him.” The young cleric paused. “Mr. Sylvester has been with God these three years.”
Holles commanded himself. “This is bad news to me, sir. He was an old friend. And his daughter . . . Miss Nancy? Where is she?”
“I cannot tell you, sir. She had departed from Potheridge before I came.”
“But whither did she go? Whither?” In a sudden frenzy he shook the other’s arm.
The cleric suffered it in silence, realizing the man’s sudden distraction.
“That, sir, I do not know. I never heard. You see, sir, I had not the acquaintance of Miss Sylvester. Perhaps the squire . . .”
“Aye, aye! The squire!”
To the squire’s he went, and burst in upon him at table in the hall. Squire Haynes, corpulent and elderly, heaved himself up at the intrusion of this splendid stranger.
“God in Heaven!” he cried in amazement. “It’s young Randal Holles! Alive!”
It transpired that the report had run through Potheridge that Randal had been killed at Worcester. That would be at about the time Mr. Sylvester died, and his daughter had left the village shortly thereafter. At another season and in other circumstances Holles might have smiled at the vanity which had led him to suppose his name famous throughout the land. Here to his native Potheridge no echo of that fame had penetrated. He had been reported dead and no subsequent deed of his had come to deny that rumour in this village that was the one spot in all England where men should take an interest in his doings.
Later, indeed, he may have pondered it, and derived from it a salutary lesson in the bridling of conceit. But at the moment his only thought was of Nancy. Was it known whither she had gone?
The squire had heard tell at the time; but he had since forgotten; a parson’s daughter was no great matter. In vain he made an effort of memory for Randal’s sake and upon Randal’s urging. Then he bethought him that perhaps his housekeeper could say. Women retained these trivial matters in their memories. Summoned, the woman was found to remember perfectly. Nancy had gone to Charmouth to the care of a married aunt, a sister of her father’s, her only remaining relative. The aunt’s name was Tenfil, an odd name.
To his dying day Randal would remember that instant ride to Charmouth, his mental anxiety numbing all sense of fatigue, followed by a lackey who at intervals dozed in his saddle, then woke to grumble and complain.
In the end half dead with weariness, yet quickened ever by suspense, they came to Charmouth, and they found the house of Tenfil, and the aunt; but they found no Nancy.
Mrs. Tenfil, an elderly, hard-faced, hard-hearted woman, all piety and no charity, one of those creatures who make of religion a vice for their own assured damnation, unbent a little from her natural sourness before the handsome, elegant young stranger. She was still a woman under the ashes of her years and of her bigotry. But at the mention of her niece’s name the sourness and the hardness came back to her face with interest.
“A creature without godliness. My brother was ever a weak man, and he ruined her with kindness. It was a mercy he died before he came to know the impiety of his offspring—a wilful, headstrong, worldly minx.”
“Madam, it is not her character I seek of you; but her whereabouts,” said the exasperated Randal.
She considered him in a new light. In the elegance and good looks, which had at first commended him, she now beheld the devil’s seal of worldliness. Such a man would seek her niece for no good purpose; yet he was just such a man as her niece, to her undoing, would make welcome. Her lips tightened with saintly, uncharitable purpose. She would make of herself a buckler between this malignant one and her niece. By great good fortune—by a heavenly Providence, in her eyes—her niece was absent at the time. And so in the cause of holiness she lied to him—although of this the poor fellow had no suspicion.
“In that case, young sir, you seek something I cannot give you.”
She would have left it vaguely there, between truth and untruth. But he demanded more.
“You mean, you do not know . . . that . . . that she has left you?”
She braced herself to the righteous falsehood.
“That is what I mean.”
Still he would not rest content. Haggard-faced he drove her into the last ditch of untruth.
“When did she leave you? Tell me that, at least.”
“Two years ago. After she had been with me a year.”
“And whither did she go? You must know that!”
“I do not. All that I know is that she went. Belike she is in London. That, at least, I know is where she would wish to be, being all worldliness and ungodliness.”
He stared at her, a physical sickness oppressing him. His little Nan in London, alone and friendless, without means. What might not have happened to her in two years?
“Madam,” he said in a voice that passion and sorrow made unsteady, “if you drove her hence, as your manner seems to tell me, be sure that God will punish you.”
And he reeled out without waiting for her answer.
Inquiries in the village might have altered the whole course of his life. But, as if the unutterable gods of Mrs. Tenfil’s devotions removed all chances of the frustration of her ends, Randal rode out of Charmouth without having spoken to another soul. To what end should he have done so, considering her tale? What reason could he have to disbelieve?
For six months after that he sought Nancy in all places likely and unlikely. And all that while in Charmouth Nancy patiently and trustfully awaited his coming, which should deliver her from the dreadful thraldom of Aunt Tenfil’s godliness. Some day, she was persuaded, must happen that which she did not know had already happened; that he must seek her in Potheridge, learn whither she was gone, and follow. For she did not share Potheridge’s belief that he was dead, though for a time she had mourned him grievously when first the rumour ran through her native village. Subsequently, however, soon after her migration to Charmouth, a letter from him had reached her there, written some months after Worcester fight, in which he announced himself not only safe and sound, but thriving, conquering the world apace, and counting upon returning laden with it soon, to claim her.
And meanwhile despair was settling upon young Randal. To have lived and striven with but one inspiration and one aim, and to find in the hour of triumph that the aim has been rendered unattainable, is to know one’s self for Fortune’s fool. To a loyal soul such as his the blow was crushing. It made life purposeless, robbed him of ambition and warped his whole nature. His steadfastness was transmuted into recklessness and restlessness. He required distraction from his brooding; the career of arms at home, in time of peace, could offer him none of this. He quitted the service of the Parliament, and went abroad—to Holland, that happy hunting-ground of all homeless adventurers. He entered Dutch service, and for a season prospered in it. But there was a difference, deplorable and grim. He was no longer concerned to build himself a position in the State. Such a thing was impossible in a foreign land, where he was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, a man who made of arms a trade soulless and uninspired. With the mantle of the mercenary he put on a mercenary’s habits. His easily earned gold he spent riotously, prodigally, as was ever the mercenary’s way. He gamed and drank and squandered it on worthless women.
He grew notorious; a man of reckless courage, holding his life cheap, an able leader of men, but a dissolute, hard-drinking, quarrelsome Englander whom it was not safe to trust too far.
The reaction set in at last; but not until five years of this life had corroded his soul. It came to him one day when he realized that he was over thirty, that he had dissipated his youth, and that the path he trod must lead him ultimately to a contemptible old age. Some of the good that slumbered in the depths of his soul welled up to cry a halt. He would go back. Physically and morally he would retrace his steps. He would seize this life that was slipping from him, and remould it to the original intention. For that he would return to England.
He wrote to Monk, who then was the powerfullest man in the realm. But—Fortune’s fool again—he wrote just too late. The restoration was accomplished. It was a few weeks old, no more. For one who had been a prominent Parliament man in the old days, and the son of a Parliament man still more prominent, there was no place by then in English service. Had he but made the application some months sooner, whilst the restoration was still in the balance, and had he then taken sides with Monk in bringing it about, he might by that very act have redeemed the past in Stuart eyes, setting up a credit to cancel the old debt.
The rest you guess. He sank thereafter deeper into his old habits, rendering himself ever more unfit for any great position, and so continued for five horrid years that seemed to him in retrospect an age. Then came the war, and England’s unspoken summons to every son of hers who trailed a sword abroad. Dutch service could no longer hold him. This was his opportunity. At last he would shake off the filth of a mercenary’s life, and go boldly home to find worthy employment for his sword.
Yet, but for the scheming credit accorded him by a tavern-keeper and the interest of a vulgar old woman who had cause to hold him in kindly memory, he might by now have been sent back, to tread once more the path to hell.