Chapter 21 The Gamester by Rafael Sabatini
THE GOAD
At about the time of the publication of that edict which was to hoist John Law to the very pinnacle of achievement, rendering him the economic master of France and wielder of an intoxicating power, the Earl and Countess of Stair paid a visit to the Laird of Lauriston and his lady which was not without importance. On the part of his lordship the visit, under its social aspect, possessed an official significance.
Mr Law was by now too great a man to be overlooked by foreign powers. The vast dominion he had gathered into his hands, so that all the trade of France and her colonies must flow as he directed, made it desirable not only for individuals but even for nations to conciliate him.
There is abundant evidence that the Earl of Stair had received instructions from his government in this sense. He came, then, with proposals of commercial relations to be established between England and France, with offers of service to Mr Law in England, not merely general but also particular in the matter of lifting the ban against him.
Mr Law received these inspired advances with a perfect, noncommittal suavity, inwardly unmoved.
With the angular Countess, however, it was a very different story. The news she gave him left him placid only on the surface. Her kinswoman, the Countess of Horn, had just arrived in Paris, brought back from the Dordogne by the need to concert with Lord Stair as British ambassador measures concerned with her English estates.
"She is not likely to remain here long, nor to show herself, considering the imprisonment of her disgraceful husband."
She paused as if awaiting Mr Law's comment, her close-set, shrewish eyes intent upon his discouraging impassivity. As he offered none beyond an acknowledging inclination of the head, she went on.
"Madame de Horn has confided to me that you are a very old friend--a friend of the days of that scapegrace Beau Wilson."
The sly smile and the unfortunate allusion were both detestable to him. His sternness induced her to offer him a sigh. "It was as I feared. The poor soul has no more fortune in her second husband than in her first. But there! I tell you this because it is my dearest wish that in her unhappy circumstances she should quit France and go home to England, and I have thought that you, as her friend and having her interests at heart, might add your persuasions to mine. I have a hope that your influence might bring about what all her friends desire for her."
"I fear that your ladyship flatters me by exaggerating that influence," he answered gravely.
"I can't believe it, Mr Law. I protest I can't. And, anyway, I hope that you will make the attempt--unless," she added, with a renewal of the smile he found so hateful, "unless, of course, you should prefer that she remain in France."
"It is beyond me to imagine why your ladyship conceives I might prefer it."
"Ah!" Her smile grew into a laugh. The shrill note of it drew Catherine's attention from his lordship, and Mr Law was almost startled by her pallor.
"What is amusing, Lady Stair?"
Her ladyship was arch. "That is a secret, my dear; and a wise wife should not pry too closely into her husband's secrets."
"Lady Stair confesses her lack of wisdom," his lordship jested. Catherine did not heed him. Her eyes were searching her husband's face. They found its stony composure suspicious. But she kept her questions until their visitors had left.
"Lord Stair tells me that the Countess of Horn is back in Paris." Her voice was strained and unsteady. "Does that happen to be Lady Stair's amusing secret?"
"That is how she was so foolish as to describe it."
She considered him with a crooked smile. "I marvel at the effrontery of that woman to show herself here when her husband is in disgrace in the Bastille."
"Did not Dalrymple tell you that she came especially to seek his good offices in the matter of her English property?"
"He told me that. Yes. And something else that I have been far from suspecting: that her property in England is the estate of Harpington. Isn't that the title of the woman who was your mistress until she became King William's?"
Mentally he reeled under the blow. Outwardly he miraculously preserved his self-control. "That I would have married her had the chance been mine you have always known. That she was ever my mistress is a lie. You have never ceased to attribute mistresses to me, Catherine, and I have never wasted breath to deny your suspicions, however fatuous. But where Margaret Ogilvy is concerned I tell you again that it is blackest falsehood."
"That will be why you are so sharp-set to defend her whilst so indifferent in the case of others."
"To be sure suspicion must feed upon itself and swell by what it feeds on."
"Suspicion! If it's a suspicion it feeds upon what you supply. Why did you never tell me that this woman is Margaret Ogilvy? Why conceal it if you had nothing else to conceal? And she had the effrontery to seek you here--here in my house! Suspicion, you say!" She laughed bitterly. "You had better know that it is a suspicion shared by the Count of Horn. Indeed, not a suspicion--a conviction for which he will yet call you to account. You'll tell me perhaps that it is only suspicion that for the sake of that abominable woman you murdered Edward Wilson?"
"Murdered!" He shrugged despairingly, shaken from his calm. "It was, then, to a murderer and a seducer that you came in Amsterdam? Believing so much evil of me yet you did not hesitate to seek me."
"Because I loved you--God help me for a fool. I followed you to comfort you in your need. To my undoing."
"You came to comfort me?" His lip curled. "To comfort me with the tale that the woman I loved was the King's mistress?"
"To cure you of your infatuation for a strumpet, as it should have done if you had any proper pride. To care for you in your loneliness and exile, as God knows I have cared for you, only to be so illrequited that I have wished myself dead these years." Then in a sudden increase of passion she railed at him. "Go to your woman. Go! She is here in Paris, waiting for you. Why else has she come? Do you think I don't realize that the need to consult Lord Stair is no more than a pretext? Go to her then! Go!"
She flung out of the room on that, and he made no attempt to stay her, realizing how far beyond the reach of argument she was placed by the violence that possessed her spirit.
He was left in an emotional disturbance as deep as any that he had known in a dozen years and more. It rested upon the anger he had repressed and perhaps a little upon the knowledge that Margaret was again within his reach. The temptation to seek her must in any case have assailed him, but it could never have been as overmastering as it was rendered by the cruel terms in which Catherine had loosened such tenuous bonds of duty to her as he still retained.
It was in this distracted state of mind that he came to his work-room, where he found his brother and Angus McWhirter waiting.
"We're here to see you, John, about opening the lists for the new issue. I've drawn up the notice we discussed, for your approval. Make sure that the terms are correct, then settle the amount to be issued, so that Angus may take it to the Bank."
Mr Law, at his writing table, bent over the sheet his brother placed before him. The figures swam under his blood-injected eyes. He passed a hand wearily across his brow, as if to brush away the emotions that were clouding thought. He read the document twice.
"It should serve, I think," he said at last, as he handed it back.
His brother stared at him. "God's sake, John! Are you ailing?"
"Ailing? No."
"But the figures, man. You've not settled them."
"Ah, yes. The figures." He thought a moment, only to discover that he was in no case to think. He recalled that he had decided and agreed with the Regent that, in order not to deluge the market, the issue should be a gradual one. "Say we make it a half-milliard. That should suffice for a commencement. A third of the total, isn't it?"
He wrote the figure at the foot of the document, and again proffered it.
"And the terms?" asked William. "Are you settled in your mind that they are to be as before; that is, with faculty to acquire them by instalments? Yesterday you mentioned a doubt."
"Did I?" He raised a dull glance. He sought to recall what the doubt could have been, failed, and shook his head, his manner incomprehensibly vague. "No. I think it will serve. As before. Why not? You can publish it in the morning, Angus, and make ready for a siege."
"Ay, ay, I'll be ready, never fear, Mr Law."
They left him, and he sat back to think, but not of the gigantic operation he was launching. Had his mind been on that, and his brain of its normal clarity, he could not have failed to perceive that he had made his first miscalculation, and one that carried in itself the seeds of disaster.
But his mind was swinging like a pendulum between Catherine and Margaret, between resentment and longing, each emotion serving as fuel for the other. Catherine charged Margaret with being his mistress, and by the malevolent intensity of her persuasion almost begot in him the desire to make it true.
There was yet another poison Catherine had distilled for him, that now served to quicken this desire. The need to consult Stair, she had said, had been no more than a pretext to bring Margaret back to Paris, within his reach. It might be so. He did not quite believe that it was, not even when he recalled the leers of Lady Stair. But he certainly desired to believe it.
According to Catherine that rascal Horn was of the same mind as herself. So that his wife and Margaret's husband shared the foul conviction. If he were to yield to the temptation that assailed him now at the thought of Margaret's accessibility, he would be doing no more than justify those two in their persuasion...
That was the goad that drove him, soon after dark, alone and on foot to the Rue d'Argenteuil.