Chapter 19 The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini
THE HONOUR OF THE COUNT OF HORN
Paris had been agog that same evening with the news of yesterday's arrest of the Prince of Cellamare and the hunt for the others in the conspiracy in which he had been engaged. When word of it reached the ears of Colonel de Mille, who was aware from Horn's indiscretions of the Count's part in those dangerous activities, he conceived it a friend's duty to get word of it to Horn so that betimes he might place himself in safety. Because uncertain of the Count's whereabouts, not knowing whether he was still at Sceaux, he decided to seek the Countess in order to inform himself. Although it was very late when he reached this decision he made up his mind to go to her at once, even if it should entail dragging her from her bed.
Coming down the Rue d'Argenteuil at about an hour after midnight, he beheld issuing from the Count's house and silhouetted against the light of a lantern, a tall figure, which he supposed to be Horn's. He lengthened his stride and raised his voice.
"Hi! Monsieur le Comte! Hi!"
But paying no heed, the tall figure stepped into a waiting sedan chair. The chairmen took up their burden, and with the lantern-bearer marching ahead, the chair moved off.
Still shouting and still unheeded, the Colonel reached the house. The porter, to whom he was known, paused in the act of closing the door to inform him that the Count of Horn was not in Paris and that the gentleman who had just left was a Monsieur du Jasmin.
"Monsieur du Jasmin!" the Colonel echoed. "An odd name. Was he seeking Monsieur le Comte?"
"No, my Colonel. He was visiting Madame la Comtesse."
"Parbleu!" said de Mille, and checked on a further exclamation of shocked surprise.
What next he did was in obedience to his instincts for never neglecting to gather information that might conceivably be turned to account. He went off at speed on the trail of that sedan chair, guided by the lantern that was swinging now in the distance. It might be profitable to know who, in effect, was this Monsieur du Jasmin, who visited Madame at midnight.
The porter closed and locked the door at last, for the night as he supposed. But within some ten minutes he was brought back to it by a loud knocking. This time he was confronted by a man heavily cloaked, who thrusting him aside stepped past him and let the cloak fall open as soon as he was within.
"Monsieur le Comte!" ejaculated the porter in surprise. "Why, only a moment ago Monsieur le Colonel de Mille was here and I told him that you were not in Paris."
Horn paid no heed. His manner was fevered, breathless. "Madame la Comtesse?" he asked sharply. "She is at home?"
"Madame will have retired for the night, I think."
That appeared to be enough, for the Count went leaping up the wide, dimly lighted staircase, two steps at a time.
His wife's maid stood before him in the antechamber with word that Madame la Comtesse was in bed. With a mumbled answer he took up a lighted candlebranch from a side table, and still cloaked and hatted entered the bedchamber unannounced.
The Countess was reclining, propped by pillows, her soul still quivering from the emotional storm through which she had passed. She raised herself and turned sharply to survey this rude intruder.
"You!" she said, and a subtler ear than his might have gathered from the monosyllable that none could have been less welcome at that moment. "Why are you here? What do you want? Why do you break in on me in this gross way?"
"You'll have to forgive me," he rasped. She saw that he was pale and that there was a wildness in his air. "It's not a time for madrigals. If I've ventured to break the ban and come to Paris, it should not be necessary to tell you that the matter is serious. It's a case of life and death in fact."
"Whose life, pray, and whose death?"
"Whose? Mordieu! Whose but mine? I am in mortal danger, madame. So let that excuse my brusqueness."
"Is it also the reason why you keep your hat on?"
"It's not my hat that matters, madame, but my head."
"Whilst you retain it you might at least uncover it. Still..."
"Oh, curse my hat!" He swept it off and cast it from him with an obedience that might have surprised her if she had not already guessed the source of his manifest panic and the reason for his presence. "I am a hunted man. I am entangled in that cursed plot of the Maines and that old fool Cellamare. You'll have heard that it has been discovered. Cellamare and the Maines and some others have already been arrested. The evidence is in the hands of the Regent, and amongst it there's a letter I was mad enough to be persuaded to write to the King of Spain. Unless I can place myself at once beyond the reach of the Lieutenant-General I am a dead man."
"Then why are you here? Why have you ventured into Paris?"
It was a moment before he could control the rage that surged in him at this cool indifference to the deadly peril he disclosed. At last he found his voice to answer her. "I...I had to come. I need your help. I am without money, and I must have money if I am to escape. For God's sake don't look at me like that, Margot. It's not the moment. I know my faults. I know I've a cursed nature. But underneath it all I've loved you, Margot, and if you'll help me now, in this desperate pass, I swear to God you shall have no cause to complain of me hereafter. Our separation need be only temporary, and..."
"That is what I fear," she interrupted. An ineffable smile curled her lip. "The past exists. The future does not. And I know you too well by now to suppose that once this danger is behind you..."
"Don't say it, Margot. Don't say it!"
"Indeed, there is no need. Instead I might ask you for a better reason than you have given why I should help you."
"My God!" he cried, his temper rising again. "Do you realize what you are saying? What sort of a woman are you? Can you lie there unmoved on your bed when my very life is threatened? After all, madame, I am your husband."
"You remember it, do you?"
"I do," he roared, whipped to passion by this outrageous coldness. "And I have a husband's rights. The right to command what I have been weakly content to beg from you."
She smiled into that flushed, distorted face, those blazing eyes. "I said that I might ask you for a better reason than you have given. Not that I should ask it. Nor need you suppose that I am moved by the reason that you give me now, which is not so much a reason as a sort of threat. You shall have what you need. Not for your reasons, but for my own."
Before that promise he judged it wise to smother his wrath. His tone became conciliatory.
"They will be sound reasons, I am sure, Margot. I know the goodness of your heart."
She slipped from the bed to seek in the drawer of a little table a small bunch of keys. Whilst rummaging there, because standing between him and the candlebranch which he had set down, her night rail was rendered diaphanous by the light. At this vision of her, his expression changed. The sensualist awoke in him, subduing even his anxieties. He fetched a sigh. His voice was suddenly soft as a caress.
"How lovely you are, Margot!"
The words and the tone sent a shudder through her very soul. She moved swiftly aside so that a tall secretaire became interposed between them, screening her to the height of her breast. She bent to insert the key, leaving visible no more than her russet head.
He came nearer by a step. His voice continued subdued, on a pleading note. "After all, my dear, why so much rancour? There may have been differences between us; but they are only a ruffling of the surface. Underneath, God knows, we are made to understand each other. I could never tell you all that you inspire in me. I may have committed follies. I know I have. I admit it readily. But if you conceived the tenderness of my feelings for you, you would be more patient with me. For I love you so much, my dear. In the moment that I first beheld you I knew you for my woman."
He had been advancing as he spoke, until now there was only the secretaire between them, and a great fear of him such as she had never known, a fear and a sense of nausea arose in her. She strove to control the tumult of her breast, to dissemble the horror that shook her at the thought of being so utterly in his power, at the mercy of this untimely amorousness.
From a drawer of the secretaire she had taken a rouleau of gold pieces and a bundle of banknotes. In a secret recess under that same drawer lay Horn's letter to King Philip. Already her fingers were upon the spring that governed it, with intent to give him the letter, and so deliver him from his worst fear, when she checked on the sudden perception of the potent weapon she possessed against her needs.
She commanded herself, sternly to meet his glance and to keep her voice level. "Here you should find a thousand louis. It is all that I have under my hand. It should suffice you for the present." She placed the money on top of the secretaire. "Take it, and please go."
He stuffed the rouleau into one pocket, the notes into another. His eyes were intent upon her. "I open my heart, then, in vain to you. 'Take it and go,' eh? Dismissed like a dog. And what if I should not choose to go? I have some right here, I believe."
She steeled herself to answer coldly. "That is possible. But your danger is certain. This is the last place to which you should have come, certainly the last in which you should linger, for it is the first in which you will be sought since they have failed to find you at Sceaux."
"At Sceaux?"
"Were you not there? And have not all who were at Sceaux already been arrested? If they are hunting you, as you say, having failed to find you there, this is the next place where they will look for you."
For a moment he appeared daunted. Then, recovering, with an abrupt gesture of disdain, "Ah, bah!" he cried. "At this hour? Even the Lieutenant-Criminel must sleep sometimes."
"Do you deceive yourself with that?" She drew a bow at a venture. "The Baron de Nesle was of your party, was he not? He must have fled from Sceaux at the first rumour of discovery, and like you he made the mistake of coming to Paris. He was dragged from his bed by the Lieutenant's archers at three o'clock yesterday morning."
His change of countenance announced that the shaft had gone home. "Thousand devils! Is that true?"
It was not. But he had shown her that the falsehood might safely be maintained. "How else should I know that de Nesle was one of you? Ah! You begin to see that every moment is spent here at your peril. You'll go at once unless you want to put the rope round your neck with your own hands."
He shuddered at the image this evoked. And then, on an inspiration, to the lash of fear she added that of cupidity. "So lose no time. Let me have word of where you are, so that I may send you further supplies."
That made an end of his desire to linger, indeed, of all desire but the desire to be gone. She must be right, he admitted with a foul oath. And at last, with curt thanks, less for the favours received than for the hope of more to follow, he recovered his hat and departed, leaving her almost swooning in relief from the loathing he had inspired.
It had begun to snow when he reached the street, and close-wrapped in his cloak he made his way down to the Rue St Honoré. In that great artery, after a moment's hesitation, he turned westward, and followed the long length of it and so up the faubourg to St Philippe du Roule. It had occurred to him that he should be safe for the night with his friend de Mille.
Despite the hour he was not kept waiting at the Colonel's door. It was opened to him almost at once by de Mille in person, still fully dressed and carrying a candle, which his hand sheltered from the draught.
He expressed his surprise in an oath. "Is it you, Count? Come in, come in. A moment sooner and you'd not have found me. I am only just home. And it's your affairs have kept me abroad on this foul night."
In the vestibule the Count shook the snow from cloak and hat. "My affairs?"
"To be sure. I've news for you. But come up."
He went ahead, holding his candle high, to light his guest.
Above in the dingy room that brought memories to Horn of his last frustrated interview with Catherine Law, the Colonel poured him a glass of Burgundy and laced it with brandy. "This will warm you, and, faith, you'll need warming."
Horn took it gratefully enough, assuming that de Mille alluded to the chill of the place, for there were only cold ashes in the untidy grate. He drank the half of it and smacked his lips. "What is this news of yours?"
"You won't like it." The Colonel paused, then, brutally, announced: "You're a cuckold. That's the news."
Horn stared at the half-sneering grin on those thick lips.
"You're drunk, de Mille, of course. That's not the sort of jest I care for."
"Jest! Listen, my friend. You'll know that that business of the Maines has blown up?"
"Of course I know it. I slipped away from Sceaux only just in time to avoid being caught there. But what has that to do with it?"
"I'll tell you. I happened to go to the Rue d'Argenteuil to ask where I might find you, so as to warn you. It was long after midnight when I got there, just as a man whom I supposed at first to be yourself was slinking out of the house. From the porter I learnt that he had been with Madame la Comtesse--a fellow calling himself du Jasmin. As your friend, in your interest, I desired to know who might be the gentleman with so odd a name. I went after his chair. And where do you suppose it led me? To the Hôtel de Nevers! This man who was shut up with madame in the dead of night, and who gives a false name, is your dear friend Lass. I leave you to draw your own conclusions."
Horn stood very still, his white face set and inscrutable. It was natural that his first thought should be for Catherine Law's announcement that it was the Countess of Horn who had betrayed to Law the Parliament's intentions. Whilst this he had believed, her further assertion that there was an intimacy between Law and the Countess he had, for ends of his own, merely affected to believe. If, when de Mille's tale was added to that, still more were needed to convince him, he conceived that he had it in the utter indifference to his danger which his wife had just manifested and in the contemptuous manner of her response to his prayer for assistance. No wonder that the traitress, still throbbing from the embraces of her lover, should have used him with that insulting coldness.
Upon this conviction passionate speech burst from him at last. "As God lives I'll kill that scoundrel with my hands. He shall find that I am not the man to lie still under dishonour."
"That's right. Think of your honour." And the Count, moving savagely about the chamber, was too distraught to ask himself if he was mocked by this Colonel who knew so much about him. "A spry fellow your Scot, and a humorous. Whilst you're at pains to seduce his wife, he pays you in advance and in kind. If anyone but you were in question I could almost admire his impudence."
"I don't admire yours," growled Horn. "Devil take your foul tongue." He continued to pace the room in his simmer of rage. "I'll kill the loathly dog. Kill him. But first I'll have a word to say to Madame la Comtesse, which that slut shall remember for as long as she lives."
Thus the outraged Count of Horn proposed. But after a raging sleepless night in de Mille's quarters, by an unhappy coincidence, he reached the Rue d'Argenteuil next morning at the same time as a detachment of military police that happened inopportunely to be seeking him there.
Denied the satisfaction of even seeing his Countess and delivering himself of all that he had rehearsed, he was thrust into a coach and driven off to the Bastille.
Naturally he feared the worst, and it was not until some days later that he learnt to his surprise that he was imprisoned, not as he had supposed for his share in the Cellamare conspiracy, but simply for rupture of ban. In the perquisitions made at Sceaux it was discovered that he had been present there, and it was only because he was within the fifty leagues to which he had been banished that his arrest had been ordered, that he had been sought and found in the Rue d'Argenteuil, and had been flung into prison without any sort of trial. He was mystified but far from relieved. Impatient to be revenged, he recalled that someone had said that vengeance is a dish best eaten cold, and he took what comfort he could from that.