Chapter 14 The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini
ADVENTURES OF CATHERINE
On the following morning, of a sultry day of August, the Count of Horn went riding on the Cours la Reine, where the world of fashion was wont to parade on horseback and in coaches, seeking the cool by the river and the shade of the chestnuts.
He was without purpose beyond the need for action and movement that assails so many when out of humour. He came to suppose, however, that he must have been inspired by fate to take horse that morning, for ahead of him, on a beautiful white mare that was by now as well known as her rider, he beheld the slim, elegant, upright figure of Catherine Law.
She rode attended by a groom, who followed a couple of lengths behind her. That she should ride there was no matter for surprise, for it was the frequency with which he had trotted down the Cours la Reine beside her which had first supplied food for scandal.
But that she should presently greet him with a smile of alluring welcome was matter for surprise, indeed, considering the fierce terms on which at Sceaux, for his excessive enterprise, she had last dismissed him.
In his amazement he drew rein so violently as almost to bring his horse upon its haunches. Then, finding that she, too, had halted and that she maintained the invitation of her smile, he ranged alongside of her, hat in hand, his head humbly bowed.
"This is gracious, madame. Exalting. It permits me to hope that I am forgiven a rashness into which I was betrayed by worship?"
"I have forgotten it," she said, and added: "I have something to say to you. You may ride with me if it be your pleasure."
"My pleasure! Oh, madame, the poor word to express my emotion."
She laughed lightly, and touched her mare with her whip. As they moved forward side by side, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure that her groom remained out of earshot.
"Let me confess at once," she said, "that I have ridden here daily for a week in the hope of meeting you."
This was to carry him from amazement to amazement. "Madame..."
"That is not to be misunderstood. Circumstances have arisen to suggest that we should become allies."
"Ah, that with all my heart, madame."
"There is the need," she gravely assured him. "Great need. For our own protection." And she added the reason without waiting to be asked. "Your Countess, Monsieur le Comte, is on terms that are too intimate with my husband."
He was so taken aback as to forget his manners. "Ah, bah! To what gossip have you been listening? She does not so much as know him."
"Does she not? Yet she comes to visit him at the Hôtel de Nevers, and she calls him by his Christian name. I tell you what I have discovered. If she tells you that she does not know him, that is further evidence of the guilty nature of their relations."
The oath with which he received the news was merely an expression of his surprise. "Pray when was this?" he asked, his tone still incredulous.
"A fortnight since. On Monday of the week before last."
Reflecting that that was the day on which the agents of the Parliament had gone to the Hôtel de Nevers to arrest Law, only to find that their bird had flown, he asked himself was it possible that he now held, at last, the explanation of that flight.
If what Catherine told him were true, it must be that he had to thank his Countess for warning Law. But how, he asked himself further, could she have known what was intended? At once he found the answer. He remembered how he had boasted to her what, by his contriving, would be done to the Scot. Noailles, it seemed, after all, had not been without grounds on which to suspect him of indiscretion.
He drew rein in his sudden agitation. "Ah! The traitress," he exclaimed. "She betrays me, then!"
He appalled his companion by a fury of which she entirely misconceived the source. "No, no. That is not what I say. It is impossible to believe that it is already so."
"Not for me. God! What a fool I've been not to have guessed it." But in a measure as she conveyed conviction to him she found it slipping from herself.
"I will not...I do not wish to believe it," she protested. "All my hope is that there is yet time to prevent this thing. That is why I appeal to you. Between us we could...Surely we could frustrate their wicked hopes."
"Their wicked hopes?" He perceived at last how they were at cross-purposes. "Shall we ride on?" he invited, and after they had set their horses in motion again he remained silent, taking thought.
"You see," she said presently, "what I mean when I say that we should be allies?"
"Of course I see." He was in no haste to clear up her misapprehension. In fact he was beginning to wonder what profit he might find in it. Meanwhile he drew a bow at a venture. "And there's something else I see: that the jade has all but ruined me by her jealousy. By all time devils, madame, between your husband and my wife it is likely to go hard with me, as with you. We are both abused. You may well speak of an alliance. What else is left us if we are to prevail against those betrayers?"
He checked, perceiving that his vehemence was drawing upon them the inquisitive, questioning eyes of some of those they passed. He drew still nearer and dropped his voice. "This is not a matter that we can discuss in public here in the Cours la Reine. It is too grave. Tell me, when can I come to you?"
This scared her. "Not to the Hôtel de Nevers. John would know."
"For that I care nothing. But I cannot enter his house considering what lies between us, nor can I ask you to come to mine. What then?" He considered for a moment. "I have a sure friend, one Colonel de Mille, a Piedmontese, who has a lodging he would lend me in the Place du Roule. It is opposite the Church of St Philippe, over a glover's shop, at the sign of a red hand." Without waiting for her assent he added the question: "When will you come?"
She changed colour; her breathing quickened. "But I could not. You must see that I could not. It is impossible."
"Ah, madame, what is it that you fear? Detection? Take your precautions. Come at dusk in a hackney coach."
"But if it were to become known? What would be thought? Oh, you should not propose it."
"Nor should I if I knew of a safe alternative. But if we are to resolve this ugly thing, if we are to study how to fight this infamy, a meeting there must be. Perhaps you have a friend whom you can trust."
She had not, she confessed, almost in tears, and so, yielding to a little more persuasion, driven by jealousy, stifling misgivings, she consented to come that evening to the Place du Roule.
She took the precaution of going veiled and closely hooded and in a hackney coach, as Horn had suggested, to that dingy house.
A slatternly old woman admitted her to the gloom of a narrow passage, where the air was fouled by a conjunction of evil smells. With a leering assurance that she was impatiently awaited by the Colonel's friend, the woman led the way up a creaking staircase. The mephitic atmosphere took Catherine in the throat, and with the dim illumination and the repellent guide, brought her a sense of being soiled and degraded by the adventure.
Her pulses quickened by a vague apprehension and in ever-growing reluctance, she came to the room above, where the Count awaited her. It was small and meanly furnished, but at least it was well lighted by a four-branched candlestick set on a shabby console under a flyblown mirror. The young Count, tall, handsome and very brave in blue velvet with thin gold lace, seemed in himself to supply an adornment that partly redeemed the sordid setting.
He moved eagerly to receive her, yet with a reassuring deference. He was voluble in gratitude to her for coming, conducted her to a settee of faded tapestry, and offered her wine from a flask which with a dish of cakes had been placed beside the candlebranch.
"No, no. Nothing, I thank you." She was definite in her rather breathless refusal. "You'll understand that I must not stay. My coach is waiting. You will have given thought to our case. You will have decided what measures we should take."
"Thought!" he echoed. "I have thought of nothing else since I left you this morning; but a decision is not so easy. My wife has gone to Saint Germain. She had left when I returned, so that I had no chance to speak to her. The only way I could find to serve you would be definitely to remove her to the country, to place the little fool beyond the reach of your abominable husband."
"Oh, yes. Yes." Her hands were joined, her eyes raised eagerly to his. "Yes. That might be the way."
"Ah!" He sighed, and sank to the settee beside her, yet leaving as much distance between them as the seat permitted. "But it is not certain. I could try persuasion, and I will. Unhappily I lack the means to compel obedience, especially since your husband, out of his cursed jealousy, has reduced me by his swindling tricks so that I have hardly a louis to call my own."
"Out of jealousy?" She was puzzled. "Because of your wife?"
"Oh, no. Because of you, madame."
"Because of me?"
"Is it possible that you did not even suspect that you are the innocent cause of my misfortunes? It should be plain. Monsieur Lass does not want for perspicacity. He was quick to perceive how it was--how it is--with me, how deeply I have come to worship you."
"And he resented it?"
There was a sudden note of eagerness in her voice which he could not understand. It was as if this were news that she would welcome. He shrugged. "Naturally. Whatever licence he may claim in the pursuit of his own gallantries, however indifferent he may be, madame, to your feelings, yet he will not suffer himself to be made ridiculous. He regards you as his chattel, and he will brook no damage to his property."
Her flush, her angry gasp told him how swift was the action of this poison. So he continued to pour it: "That, in fact, is what he had the effrontery to tell me. Yet when I offered him the satisfaction usual between gentlemen, even waiving the question of my birth and station, the poltroon refused it."
"You...You would have fought for me!" She was in consternation. "You would have put your life in danger..."
"Could I employ it more nobly? If you do not know that it is the least that I would do for you, then you do not know me at all, and it is no wonder that you have misunderstood me." There was a disquieting throb of passion in his voice. "In effect, however, Monsieur Lass preferred the weapons of his loathly trade, and by those he has accomplished my ruin. But although my worship of you has cost me more than a million, you are not to suppose that I regret a louis of it. For I swear to you, that having conceived this worship, I would not be without it to recover twice what I have sacrificed, which is, in fact, every louis I possessed."
Here, coming from a man of such noble parts, was matter to quicken the pulses of any but the most level-headed woman; and in some measure it quickened Catherine Law's. Her glance was troubled. "You...you are not to speak so." If it was a protest, it was also a prayer.
"Why not? Why are we ever required to repress the truth?" In his warmth he drew a little nearer. "What is there to impose restraint upon me, married to that cold, treacherous compatriot of yours, or upon you whose husband has no sense of any duty to you?" She was raising a hand to check him, but he swept impetuously on. "We are fools, Catherine; fools to be troubling to prevent something that may not be prevented, that it may already be too late to prevent."
"No, no!" It was almost a wail. "I'll not believe that. And, fools or not, we must persevere. It is what I came here to consider with you."
"And I have considered it from every aspect, but can find no course of action."
"But you spoke of removing the Countess of Horn from Paris..."
"And I warned you that I cannot constrain her."
"Yet you will endeavour? Is there no inducement you could offer, no attraction elsewhere with which you could tempt her? Oh, give it thought, I beg you. Surely, surely you can discover a way to set a barrier between them."
"Because you ask me I must. Give me a little time yet. Perhaps Lady Stair would help me. She has become attached to Margot, and if I represent that it is a question of saving her from the designs of Lass..."
"You have it," she broke in. "That surely is the way."
"Let me consider further," he begged, and drew nearer still, so that he brought up against her.
As if the contact were frightening, she came instantly to her feet.
"I must go." Again she was a little breathless. "It is not safe to linger. I...I might be questioned."
With hands that trembled, she hastily lowered her veil and drew up the hood of her long cloak, whilst he stood deferentially before her. He could not but observe that he had scared her, and he was too skilled to increase her fears by any rash insistence. "We must confer soon again," he said. "As soon as I have found a way."
She looked round that abominable room, and inwardly shuddered at the thought of a return to it. "I pray that it may not be necessary. It is not safe. If it were known...If I were followed..."
"Yet it would be wise that you should know what I propose. It might well require your assistance. I'll send you word. Oh, but guardedly, have no fear." He took up the candlebranch. "I will light you down."
When he had watched her flutter like a frightened bird to her coach, he climbed the stairs again, never heeding the obscene cackle of the hag who kept the house, or her comment on the unusual brevity of beauty's visit. Back in de Mille's room, he held the candlebranch aloft to survey it. He realized that it could arouse only repugnance in a dainty, fastidious soul nurtured in the sybaritic luxury with which her husband surrounded her. But if he took no satisfaction in quarters that certainly made up no Temple of Venus, yet he thought he might rest content with the comedy he had played, with the richness of his invention, and with the restraints he had imposed upon it and upon himself.
No later than the morrow Fate played into his hands by furnishing him a sound pretext for asking her to come to him again. It happened that he visited the opera in a party organized by Madame de Sabran, and that the Regent also chanced to be present, accompanied in his box, as had sometimes happened of late, by Mr Law.
Espying the Count of Horn, and perhaps not merely offended to see him, but annoyed that he should be in the company of one of the Regent's own leading favourites, His Highness spoke to La Vrillière, who was in attendance.
"Is that man without the wit to take a hint, or is it out of effrontery that he lingers here? See that he receives an order in the morning to take himself into the country and not to come within fifty leagues of the Court unless he is bidden. You may add that if he is still reluctant to leave Paris we can find him a lodging here. In the Bastille."
Of this, word came to Catherine Law towards noon of the next day, in a note conveyed to her as she was stepping into her carriage, by a flower girl, in a bunch of carnations.
When a footman would have thrust her aside, the girl raised her voice in appeal, holding up her posy. "Mes beaux oeillets, madame! Fresh from the gardens of Horn. From the gardens of Horn, madame!"
To Catherine's servants this might be without significance; but not to Catherine. "Let her come," she ordered. Taking the posy, she bore it to her nostrils. "They are sweetly perfumed, child." She gave her a piece of silver, and left her calling down blessings upon the gracious lady's head.
Sitting well back in the coach, Catherine unwrapped the paper sheath from the stems of the flowers, and found within it the note she expected:
Calamity has descended upon me, to thwart my endeavours. I am ordered into immediate exile, and must go not later than tomorrow. This no doubt at the prompting of JL, who desires my removal. It is important that we confer before I leave. I shall be waiting this evening.
It bore no signature, and none was needed. It filled her with dismay. Once the Count were removed, and assuming that his wife did not accompany him, there would be no one and nothing to stand between the Countess and Catherine's husband. The circumstance, conveyed in the note, that Horn's exile was of John Law's contriving, was only too credible and desperately alarming.
So, repellent though the notion might be of again visiting that horrible house in the Place du Roule, Catherine braced herself to it.
She was not to suspect that the rage of the gentleman she found awaiting her was purely histrionic. Nothing could have appeared more natural than that he should be distraught to find himself banished at the instances of a cunning rival who desired a clear field. She was not to suspect his secret certainty that the only betrayal of which his wife was guilty was the betrayal to Monsieur Lass of the Parliament's intrigue against him. True, he could discover no explanation of why she should have warned her fellow countryman, other than sheer malice towards himself; but with this he was satisfied, convinced, in spite of Catherine's details, that the Countess could have had no previous acquaintance with Law.
"Ah, madame," was his plaint, "this is monstrous, terrible. We are the victims of a wicked pair who enjoy the advantage of being well served by authority. As surely as I owe my banishment to your husband, just as surely has he been prompted to procure it by my wife. Not content with having ruined me utterly, with having robbed me of my last liard, that wicked man is now to rob me of my honour."
He stood over her, a tragic figure, whilst she once more occupied the faded settle, and reflected genuinely his spurious grief. From a velvet bag she drew a bundle of banknotes. "This banishment," she said, "from what you've told me is made worse by your financial distress. This may relieve it at least a little. It is only three thousand louis, all that I can bring you now without being detected."
"Madame!" There was horror in his voice. It was an outcry of protest or refusal.
"It belongs to you. It is a little part of all that of which you have been robbed, so you need not scruple to take it. Do not offend me by refusing."
"Madame!" he cried again, and it was almost a sob. He sank to the settle beside her, impulsively he caught her wrists and bore to his lips the hand that held the notes. "The money...What is the money to me? But the gesture...My God, Catherine, that is everything. It brings me to tears that you should have this thought for me."
"Take it. Take it," she insisted.
"In my need I am so mean as to allow myself to be persuaded. But I take it only as a loan..."
"No loan. It belongs to you, and you shall have more."
The promise was easy of fulfilment out of her husband's unstinting liberality.
"Yet from you, it must be no more than a loan. For what Monsieur Lass owes me I shall render my accounts to himself when the time comes." He took the bundle and tossed it carelessly on to the console behind them. Then he was again kissing the hands he had not relinquished, kissing them with a passionate fervour that began to disturb her. She sought to withdraw them; but his clasp was firm. "Your goodness intoxicates me. That you should have had this lovely thought of me, of my necessities, moves me to the depths of my poor soul. How shall I prove my gratitude; my gratitude and my deep love?"
Again she strove to release her hands. "If we are to be allies..." she was beginning, and her tone was of intercession.
"Allies certainly. But more, far more than allies. Let me prove my devotion, my worship. What need those betrayers matter to us when we have each other?"
"You are not to speak so, monsieur."
"How else? And why not? Our loyalties should be only for each other? Ah, Catherine!" He loosed her hands at last, but only to embrace her and draw her, struggling, against him.
White and trembling, a piteous entreaty in her lovely eyes, her hands now straining against his breast, she implored him to be calm, to release her. "I should not have come," she said. "I should have known to what I exposed myself. Do not make me sorry that I trusted you."
Instantly he let her go. He drew back, and rose. "How can you be at once so kind and so cruel? You give thought for my trivial needs." He waved a contemptuous hand towards the money on the console. "Yet you deny my deeper ones." Abruptly he was on his knees beside her. "Ah, Catherine, have you no pity? You see me almost swooning at your feet, yet you repulse me. You give me money! Dear God, do you think I thank you for that when you deny me all else, when you withhold yourself? I was grateful only whilst I supposed that it was an earnest of your love, of your response to the passion that is burning me up."
"Hush, hush!" she murmured, as she might have urged a child. "This is not right..."
"Not right!" He was tempestuous. "Then all is wrong. Is it not right to listen to our hearts? Catherine, dear Catherine, in all the world there is nothing that is more right." Again his arms enlaced her, his head upon her breast, and whilst she stiffened, she no longer attempted to release herself. "Why need it vex our minds," he continued, "if those disloyal ones should have their way, when it is ours to avenge ourselves by repaying them in the same coin?"
He raised his head and leaned forward, boldly seeking her lips. But from this her hands again defended her. Troubled by his gusty passion, and panting in his clasp, she still protested. "If...If I knew that repayment was due--if I were certain."
"Can you still doubt it?"
"I must. We have no proof. After all, it is only what we suspect." Then on a firmer tone: "I am an honest woman," she declared, "and very loath to be other. Only...only proof of John's infidelity could change me. If I had that I should not care. But before I am an outraged wife who avenges herself, I must be certain of the outrage." She broke from him. It was as if she had found an argument that put an end to hesitancy. She thrust him violently away, moved aside and rose. "If your note brought me dismay, it also brought me hope that you had found a way to...to prevent the accomplishment of this betrayal. If that is not so, I must wonder why you should have brought me here again."
Horn realized at last that he was dealing with a woman who under all her levity still loved her husband enough to recoil from infidelity. But in spite of that, and whilst inwardly raging, he persisted. "I brought you so that I might warn you of what has happened to me."
"And nothing more?"
"There was my need, my overwhelming need, to see you again before I go."
To this she chose to pay no need. "Have I at least your promise that you will endeavour to take the Countess of Horn away?"
He looked down on her from his fine height, and his dark liquid eyes were sadly reproachful. "How you crucify me!" he complained. "How you are at pains to let me see that all your concern is for this worthless husband of yours."
"My concern is for myself, as I have shown you. And now you must let me go. Tell me only where you are to be found if I should need you."
He sighed and passed a hand wearily across his brow before replying. "I shall go to Sceaux when I leave tomorrow."
"But that is not fifty leagues away."
"No. I must take the risk, so that for your sake I shall still be near you if you should need me, as I shall constantly pray that you may."
"But you will be in danger."
"Gladly if it earns me your sweet concern." He shrugged the notion away. "If I go from Sceaux before you send for me, you shall have word of it."
She bowed her head, murmuring her thanks. Her hands were drawing up her hood. "Now light me down the stairs."
He did not move. He was pondering her with glowing eyes. "Already! What an anxiety to be gone, to leave me. Ah, give me the sweetness of your presence for a few moments yet. I do not even know when I shall see you next. Do not be so avaricious of yourself."
Her uneasiness was mounting once more under this torrential pleading, apprehensive of worse to follow. His hand pulled down the hood which she had now adjusted. His arms were again about her.
"No, no!" she begged.
But his clasp held her so tightly against him that she could not even struggle. "Ah, Catherine, Catherine, don't deny me."
Paralysed in that firm embrace, which pinned her arms to her sides, half swooning in panic, she felt herself lifted bodily and borne helpless across the chamber.
"For pity's sake let me go," she feebly moaned. "Oh, this is base! Base!"
His only answer was a whisper fierce and urgent. "Hush! Hush!"
He reached the settle, and flung her down upon it. To do so, however, his hold slackened, and as if revived by that measure of release, once more she strove against him.
They fell to wrestling so furiously that the slamming of the street door went unheeded by them.
It was not until a fumbling, clattering step upon the stairs and a raucous snatch of song came to disturb his frenzy, that he suddenly checked and fell back a pace to listen. Whilst, as for her, those approaching sounds, which in that place at any other time must have filled her with panic, now actually brought relief.
Horn rapped out an ugly oath, and after a moment's breathless listening pause, turned and sped to the door, with intent to make it fast. But already he was too late. As he reached it, it was flung violently open, and a large, gaudy man of middle age stood blinking on the threshold.
At the spectacle that met him--the Count breathless and livid, and the lady frantically restoring order in her disarray, whilst panting and trembling she supported herself against the end of the settle from which she had risen--a slow grin took shape on Colonel de Mille's flushed face.
"Seems I intrude," he chuckled. He strove to be solemn, failed, and loosed a cackling laugh. He advanced a pace or two, reeled slightly aside on unsteady feet, swept off his hat, and bowed. "Serviteur, madame." He turned sheepishly to Horn. "Devil take me, Monsieur le Comte, I'd forgot you were here."
"Devil take you, indeed, you sot," snarled Horn.
"Eh, now that's damned uncivil. I don't care for it."
As they faced each other in truculence, Catherine perceived that her way to the door was clear. With shaking hands she dragged the hood over her head, pulled her cloak about her, and sped to the threshold. Instinctively Horn moved to intercept her, only to find the Colonel in his way.
"Stand aside, you drunken dog."
Far from obeying, annoyed by the epithet, de Mille leaned upon him, using his weight, which was considerable. "Sorry if I intrude. As I've said. Sorry. Curse me for a marplot if you will. That I can forgive. But don't be uncivil. Don't say I'm drunk. And don't call me a dog. I might bite you." Still stupidly barring Horn's way to the door, he chuckled again. "What's troubling you? Your poor little shy pullet? Bah! Let her go if she wants to. Never hold a woman against her will. I never do. Not worth it. Poor sport. Let her go."
The sounds from below told Horn that, in fact, she was as good as gone already. For a moment he stood cursing de Mille.
Then abruptly he turned aside with a laugh that still held some anger. "You were damned inopportune, Mille. But perhaps it's no matter. She has yet to conquer her coyness. That will keep for another occasion."
But Catherine, huddled shuddering and panting in the depths of her hired coach, was crying aloud, "Oh, vile! Vile!" and vowing that no other occasion should there ever be.