Chapter 6 The Gates of Doom by Rafael Sabatini
THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
Through the grounds of Priory Close a brook winds its course on its way to the Abbey River. It flows in a little ravine, which, moat-like, almost completely encircles a wonderful old garden. You approach it by a path that runs through a plantation of firs on the south side of the mansion.
By this path, through the green shade that was shot here and there by golden sunlight, Captain Gaynor took his idle way on the following morning. It brought him to a rustic bridge, some twenty paces long, spanning the gap at a height of fifteen feet or more above the stream. Over this he sauntered leisurely. He paused midway, and leaning upon the rail, he admired the dense tunnel of foliage formed by the intertwining of the trees that stood on either side of the ravine.
It was a cool, sequestered spot, fragrant with the perfume the sun was drawing from the pines. Somewhere near him throbbed the full-throated song of a thrush; below him was the murmur and babble of the brook as it glided swiftly over the mossy boulders of its bed. Never had the Captain lingered in a spot more peaceful. To his senses it seemed invested with an air almost of enchantment. He could understand that to one dwelling there the world and the affairs of men must shrink to infinitesimal proportions, must seem puny and unworthy, and ambition the emptiest of human bubbles.
He could understand, he thought, Sir John's own lukewarmness towards the Cause. The baronet, no doubt, would judge the country's peace from the ineffable peace of these surroundings, and would tremble at the thought of its being disturbed, at the thought of all the bloodshed and misery that must come ere the upheaval was complete and the erstwhile tranquillity restored.
Captain Gaynor sighed thoughtfully, and went on across that enchanted bridge into the enchanted garden beyond. Through another, lesser plantation on the farther side, over a carpet of pine-needles, he came into the blazing sunlight and a riot of colour, backed by colossal boxwood hedges. These hedges were the gardens pride. It was divided by them into a series of quadrangular courts on his right, and they stood at a height of some ten feet, each with an entrance in the form of an arched gap so narrow that but one person could enter at a time.
On the left of the pathway which he followed, and which ran the garden's full length to the distant redbrown wall, was spread an orchard, all pink and white with blossom, and through the trees in the distance he espied his host's niece and daughter.
They stood near the brook, in a conversation that the Captain might have accounted earnest had not the high, trilling note of Evelyn's laughter reached him across the distance. Thereupon he took his way towards them, never dreaming that he came to interrupt an argument whereof he was himself the subject.
It had sprung from Damaris' desire to make an end of the deceit which had been practised yesterday upon their visitor. She had come to Evelyn that morning with expressions of regret for her own share in it, for having consented to it; she had urged the unworthiness of the thing, the loss of dignity that must attend its ultimate dissipation, especially if this were now delayed.
"Let us tell Captain Gaynor," she ended, "that in jest we permitted him to persist in the error into which of his own accord he fell."
"We can tell him tomorrow or the next day," answered Evelyn airily. "Besides, I do not admit that the error was originally his own. That is the incense you offer to your vanity." And thereupon had trilled out that flute-noted laugh which had caught the sauntering Captains ears.
A little colour showed in Damaris' cheeks.
"Confess," Evelyn mocked her, "confess now that your concern is reluctance to show yourself without your gilding."
"You are vastly, cruelly unkind, Evelyn," answered Damaris in gentle rebuke, and this answer took her cousin by surprise. For neither Evelyn nor her mother knew of that happening in the library a week ago, knew or guessed of the wound, the deep, cruel wound that Damaris had sustained in her affection and her pride. Damaris was not of those who wring their hands and cry out their wrongs in public or in private. She had kept her chamber for two days upon the pretext of a passing ailment, and in that time she had schooled herself to the dissimulation of her feelings. Contempt had come to her rescue, the coldly fierce contempt that is the offspring of disillusion. She was conscious even of a certain thankfulness that circumstances had vouchsafed her a glimpse of the real man into whose keeping she would so trustingly have delivered up her life, a thankfulness for the timeliness of that revelation. In time, no doubt, this thankfulness would come to be the only abiding feeling so far as my Lord Pauncefort was concerned. But for the present it had not yet come to dominance over her pain and her sense of utter loss.
Desolation and listlessness were her present portion. But of this the unpercipient Evelyn had no suspicion, for Evelyn studied no countenance searchingly save her own.
"Unkind?" quoth Evelyn. "La! In what now am I unkind?"
"In your estimate of me. If Captain—"
A rustle behind her caused her to turn her head, and thus they became aware of the Captain's approach.
Last night he had come to table in a dove-coloured suit and with heavily powdered hair, looking—save for his bronzed face—the very perfect courtier. This morning he had resumed his military exterior. He wore his laced blue coat, uncompromisingly buttoned from chin to waistband, disdaining the pigeon-breasted mode which left the upper part to gape and reveal a bulging mass of lace and linen. White buckskins and spurred jack-boots encased his legs. He even wore his sword.
Coming up with them he doffed his feathered hat and made a leg with a certain distinct stiffness, craving their leave to bear them company.
It was granted him by Evelyn, with a flutter of eyelids and the demure air of challenge that most men knew in her. And then, with mischievous intent to perpetuate the confusion of identities—
"Evelyn," said she, indicating Damaris, "is all pride in her garden."
"Then," said the Captain, "pride is well placed for once. I have seen many gardens 'twixt here and far Cathay, but never one in which there dwelt a peace so joyous. Madam," he addressed himself to Damaris, and the serious sincerity of his speech robbed it of any construable impertinence, "your garden repays your pride, for I think that it does justice to its mistress."
The brown eyes of Damaris met his own a moment, as if she were appraising the full value of his words; then they passed on; a faint smile crossed her face, which was of the warm, lustreless pallor of old ivory, and slightly she bowed her head as if in courteous acknowledgment.
Now although her eyes had met his own for but a moment, yet in that fleeting glimpse Captain Gaynor had caught the wistfulness that inhabited them, and something within him had leapt in response to something that was near akin to an appeal. This appeal, he knew, was not to himself; it was to nature, to the world, to heal her of a sorrow or to satisfy a longing, he knew not which. But it touched him and in touching seared him and branded him her servant, to heal or satisfy as her need might be when he should come to understand it, and if so be that she would accept the service that should be hers.
Evelyn had looked on with slightly parted lips, a straining anxiety in her glance, born of fear lest Damaris should there and then repudiate the identity once more thrust upon her. With her cousin's silence and its tacit acknowledgment her anxiety passed, and her rippling, ever-ready laugh expressed her pleasure and relief. Also it served to dissemble her vexation that the first compliment to fall from this somewhat chill and distant soldier's lips should, in spite of all, have been addressed to her cousin.
A more sweet and fragrant picture of maidenhood than Evelyn presented this morning it were not easy to discover. She was arrayed in palest lilac, and her waist, amazingly slender in its firm encasement, sprang from a white furbelow that hung about her lightly as a cloud of vapour. The flimsiest of lace tuckers discreetly veiled the white beauties of neck and bosom, which the low cut bodice must otherwise reveal. Her hair, very carefully massed and curled, was of the colour of ripe corn; her eyes, questing, unrestful and provoking, reflected the flawless sky of June; her cheeks put to shame the apple blossom under which they stood. She was soft and silky and very insistently feminine; the very maid, you would suppose, to compel response in a man so very masculine as the Captain. Yet it was to Damaris that he chiefly addressed himself, upon Damaris that his eyes would linger. She stood a full half-head taller than her cousin, who was small and of an exquisite roundness. She was dressed now for riding, in a brown, high-necked habit laced with gold, than which no raiment could have done more justice to her graceful height, and she wore a looped hat of black beaver, from which a golden feather trailed over, to mingle with her dark brown hair. There was in every line of her something cool, determined and well-knit, as Captain Gaynor noted, for all that it was not his way to note the points of any woman.
Their talk was still of that garden and of other gardens which the Captain in his travels had beheld, to all of which Damaris contributed but little, and that little only when she was, herself, directly addressed.
"I knew," he said, "when I stepped upon that bridge that I was coming at last into the enchanted garden that we have all heard of in our early youth, and of whose real existence the bitter, all-desecrating knowledge of later years has made us sceptical."
"And you have discovered its enchantment?" murmured Evelyn, scenting here the prologue to a speech of gallantry.
"I think I have," he answered, with an amazing seriousness, looking straight ahead. He sighed. "The spell of it is already upon me, I think. Did I unwisely linger I fear that it must overwhelm me utterly."
He was so sober, so solemn, that Damaris glanced at him, her keen ears informing her that behind these words of his lay prepared no such trifling speech as her cousin still expected.
"What is it?" she asked. It was the first time she had spontaneously addressed him, and his glance met hers again, held it a moment, and then, still meeting it, seemed to look beyond and away. Thus may the poet or the fanatic look.
"It is," he said, and his voice sank reverently, "it is that God's peace—God's disregarded, priceless gift to man—is here. Somewhere here, too, is the tree of true knowledge, for its essences hang heavily upon the air. To inhale them is to achieve perception of the true meanness of worldly things, the horror of strife and bloodshed, the contempt of ambition, which is but a euphemism for striving selfishness and vainglory. Who that could dwell here would dwell elsewhere? Who that once has breathed deep of this fragrance would ever again suffer the world's stews to offend his nostrils?"
Evelyn—disappointed Evelyn—laughed on her high note, a little mockingly. "I vow, sir," she minced, "that you are vastly poetical!"
His eye, cold and inscrutable, rested upon her for a moment. He bowed.
"I thank you, Miss Hollinstone," said he, "for having broke the spell. Had it persisted it might well have proved the undoing of a poor soldier."
"What is your regiment, sir?" she asked him. She had something of her mother's inconsequence.
"I have had many; but I have none now," was his reply. "My last commission was in the Sultan's army."
"The Sultan?" cried both girls together, so taken aback were they.
"The Grand Turk," he explained easily. "His cavalry was all disjointed, and I undertook the office of instructing it. Also I saw some service against Venice."
Damaris looked at him with incredulous eyes. "You fought against Christians in the service of the Infidel!" she cried.
"I fought against rogues in the service of rogues, ma'am. That is the pure truth of it. For the rest, it is not the mercenary's to do more than choose the service that offers the best pay." He saw the scorn gathering in her glance. But he did not know upon what bitter pastures it had been nourished. He did not know that in his own case, it was the sharper because she accounted that she had been mistaken in him a moment ago when he had talked of the garden.
"And do you always," she asked him, "fight for the side that pays you best?"
"By your leave, ma'am, I should account myself a fool to fight for the other."
He had not winced before her cool, appraising eye, nor the half-veiled contempt of her question. He had his part to play—for the sake of that master to whose service was to be yielded up the fruit of all other services. It wounded him—unreasonably, he held—to appear before her in this light. But the necessities demanded it.
"I have made arms my trade," he explained. "I am a soldier of fortune, and in all my seeming inconsistencies of service I have been consistent at least in that I have served Fortune always—more stoutly," he added ruefully, "than Fortune has served me."
"How odd!" sighed Damaris; for his bold frankness had beaten down much of her nascent scorn, yet not quite all. "How very strange!"
"In what is't strange?" quoth Evelyn, as if defending him.
"Strange that men should sacrifice their best for gold, imperil their lives and pawn their very honour for the sake of profit."
"Not all men," said the Captain, with his wry smile. "There is no lack of those who sacrifice all this to dreams and moonshine—the gratitude of princes, the favour of the people, the love of country, immortal renown and other such intangibilities."
"Do you scorn them?" she challenged him.
"As soldiers, yes," he quibbled. "Their ardour detracts from their value, robs them of the proper calm, and I have found that they make but poor opponents to the trained mercenary, who in battle is all calculation and no heat."
"I speak not of that," said Damaris, "but of their aims, of the mainspring of their actions—in short, their loyalty and devotion to the ideal. Do you scorn that, sir?"
He met her glance quite calmly. "No, ma'am, I do not," said he.
"Then," she cried, warmed a little by the argument upon which she was embarked—and the subject was one very near to her poor, wounded heart these days—"then, surely, you must scorn the others, these mere helots."
"Such as myself?" said he, no shadow of offence in tone or voice. "Believe me, did I do so I should change my ways. I think that it is possible to respect both."
Again she measured him with those cool, appraising eyes. She judged him to be good and clean; honest he had already proved himself by the very frankness of his admissions in the face of a scorn that she had scarce attempted to dissemble. She considered his firm mouth and steely eyes, the very poise of his head and uprightness of his carriage, and from it all she gathered intuitively a sense that he was true metal—a man to be relied upon, a man to whom the weak and the oppressed would turn by very instinct, a man who would never hurt the honour of a fellow-man, a man in whom a woman might place her trust.
Because her intuitions showed her all this in him, she desired to understand a point of view that seemed to contradict it all; perhaps she even thought to combat his views, to reveal to him the unworthiness in his aims which was all so clear to her.
"I cannot think," answered she, "I cannot think that respect is due to one who makes a trade of that which should be the expression of profound convictions. Life is surely as sacred a gift as honour, and to adventure it for gold cannot be other than unworthy. If war must be, if men must fight, surely it should be in defence of liberty, of right, of high ideals. Surely there is naught else can justify the risk of life; and to risk life from any other mainspring must be at least a little—base."
She would have added more, but meeting his glance again, seeing him so calm and so entirely unruffled, the ghost of a smile hovering upon his tight lips, she checked. A wave of colour swept across her face. "Forgive me," she begged, "if I have said more than I should. After all, I think I am not so much reproving—to which, indeed, I have no shadow of right—as seeking information."
He laughed gently, on that deep musical note of his. "Indeed, I am relieved," said he. "For I began to fear you lacked for charity in your judgment."
"Indeed, yes," put in Evelyn, who perceived at last a chance of intervention. "And particularly now that you are come to offer your sword to your own country."
"Nay, but that is worse," he exclaimed. "It is to say that I see the error of my ways, and am come to mend them?"
"And is't not so?" she asked.
"Why, no," said he. But it was to Damaris that he seemed to speak. "It is that I lack employment elsewhere."
He found her troubled eyes regarding him with less of scorn than pity now, and it was that glance he answered when he said: "And yet I do not say that if I found a cause that were worth serving for its own sake I should be slow to serve it, perhaps even to my loss."
"I think you would," said Evelyn, those questing, provoking eyes of hers enveloping him in their regard.
He bowed somewhat formally in acknowledgment. "Meanwhile," said he, "I must beware the seduction of this enchanted garden ere its magic prove the undoing of a wandering mercenary."
A liveried groom approached them through the trees, and Evelyn, who was the first to see him, announced his coming, and its object.
"Here is Gibbs, sweet cousin," said she, "to inquire if you will ride the nag you bade him saddle."
She conceived that at last she would be rid of Damaris and would have the Captain entirely to herself. From this you are not to gather that the captain, per se, was of any account to her. He was of account in that he was a male, and so, thought she, a proper person to burn incense on the altar of her little vanity; further he was of account that she might make good upon him her challenge to her cousin—a challenge which at the moment was proving a source of considerable alarm to her.
But it so chanced that the Captain had not come forth in jack-boots and spurs to saunter all the morning in a garden. He too was minded to ride, as he now announced.
"And so, Miss Kynaston," he ended, addressing Damaris, "if you will suffer me to be your escort, you may repay me by acting as my guide over a countryside with which I am unacquainted. You see that in all things I am true to my mercenary's character."
She hesitated a moment, whereupon he bowed submissively, as to a refusal.
"It was presumptuous in me to proffer even for payment a service which I had not first ascertained to be desired," he said. "Ladies, I am your obedient, grateful servant."
He swept them both a bow, and was turning to depart, when Damaris stayed him.
"You are very quick, sir, to suppose me churlish."
Evelyn's eyes were sparkling angrily, and Damaris observed it, but was not deterred. It were a gross discourtesy to a guest to allow him to depart thus. "I shall be glad to ride with you, sir," she smiled, "upon the terms you name."
What time the furious and humiliated Evelyn—for humiliated she felt herself by the turn events were taking—was inveighing to her sympathetic mother against the shameless wiles of Damaris and her brazen conduct towards the other sex, Damaris and the Captain rode through the green lanes of Surrey attended by the groom Gibbs, who followed at a respectful distance.
It proved a fruitful ride for both of them, and for Damaris even more than for him. She drew him into talk of himself, of his travels, the countries he had seen and the many services in which his mercenary's sword had been engaged. And he talked frankly and entertainingly. The absence of that boastfulness of exploits so usual in his kind went far to impress her favourably, confirming much of the judgment of him which already she had formed.
That ride did much to heal the bruises that her gentle heart had taken a week ago. In the Captain's company she seemed to be regaining something of that buoyancy which but yesterday she fancied had left her for all time.
The image of Pauncefort faded in her mind to a proper insignificance. She drew a parallel between him and this man beside her, and she seemed to discover that if once she had set his lordship upon a pedestal and gone near to worshipping him, it was because in the seclusion in which her youth had been passed it had been hers never to meet a real man.
But at the root of all was that foolish compact she had made with Evelyn, which she had so keenly regretted and to which that very morning she had sought to set an end. Had she but done so, how differently must she now be feeling, with what suspicions, with what convictions of unworthy motives in him must she now be regarding the frank and pleasant comradeship of this soldier of fortune; how the regard he had been quick to show her must have but served to increase the bitterness she had been carrying in her heart—a bitterness of which, all being as it was, he was gradually and surely effacing all trace.
She rejoiced now in that compact—rejoiced as only one who had been through her torment of disillusion could rejoice. What matter that its ultimate disclosure must be attended by some loss of dignity? Here was one who was a self-proclaimed mercenary, a man whose life was dedicated to Fortune's service. In such a one the pursuit of the wealthy heiress Damaris Hollinstone was the thing to be expected. How potent then must have been the magnet that had drawn him as completely from her whom he believed to be that person as though she had never been in existence.
The fact is that Captain Gaynor had come into the life of Damaris Hollinstone in an hour of crisis. Coming then, the flattery of his obvious preference and regard, which in another season—whether he believed her to be Damaris or Evelyn—would have been to her a very trifling matter, was now a flattery most sweet and healing.
By the time they reached Priory Close again, Damaris was actually grateful in her heart to Evelyn for the deception that earlier had vexed her. And she was as reluctant now as earlier she had been eager, to set a term to it.