Book I Chapter 5 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT
A tainted family, the Duc de Lionne had said. How much, wondered Morlaix, had that taint to do with the mystery that enveloped him? How much had it to do with the visit paid him by the brothers Chesnières? Ten days were sped since that visit, and the brothers had not reappeared in Bruton Street. The Chevalier de St. Gilles was the next heir to this Marquisate of Chavaray, to which Morlaix had so unexpectedly succeeded. Setting that aside, there was a danger that this succession might make an end of those revenues from Chavaray upon which the Duc de Lionne had informed him that the Chesnières were living. Here was something to colour those suspicions of O'Kelly's, which had seemed so fantastic. Could it be that the Chevalier, already informed of the death of Étienne de Chesnières, had desired to test Morlaix's strength, with a view, perhaps, to picking a quarrel with him and disposing of him in a legitimate manner?
Morlaix cursed the Marquisate of Chavaray and the inheritance which had brought him such odious thoughts and marred the peace of mind upon which he set so high a value. He found it peculiarly ironical that the station he had desired for himself--so vainly, as it then seemed--when announcing his name and quality to Germaine de Chesnières, should prove so disturbing when it was unexpectedly thrust upon him.
He was fully informed by now touching the family of which he had become the head. His father, Bertrand de Morlaix de Chesnières, at the age of seventy-four had married in second nuptials, the girl of eighteen who had been Quentin's mother. Bertrand's only brother, Gaston, had had three children. Of the elder of these, who was also a Gaston de Chesnières, were born Armand, the present Chevalier de St. Gilles, and his brother Constant. Germaine was the only child of the second son, Claude de Chesnières, who by marriage had acquired the considerable contiguous property of Grands Chesnes, to which Germaine was now the heiress. She was, therefore, their cousin-german, whilst all three were the second cousins of Quentin himself. The view that he must take of them seemed to hang upon whether they were aware of the relationship in which he stood to them. Meanwhile he must resist the hateful suspicion that if that knowledge was possessed by the brothers it was also shared by Germaine and by her, for the unworthy purposes of her cousins, left unacknowledged to him.
This was something that he hoped that circumstances would disclose to him. In that hope, he kept his counsel, and pursued the normal tenor of his ways.
Some three mornings later, passing, in an interval between lessons, into the ante-chamber, as was his habit, to greet the company assembled there, he espied to his amazement in that chattering throng Mademoiselle de Chesnières. He made his way to her at once.
"My house is honoured, Mademoiselle."
She sank before him in a curtsy. "It was inevitable that sooner or later, sir, I should come to do homage to your fame. I have to thank Madame de Liancourt."
"You mean that I have." His eyes were upon her with a singular searching gravity.
The little Duchess surged at her elbow, with Bellanger in attendance. "A shameless intrusion, Monsieur de Morlaix. But naught would content the child but that she must see for herself the most famous rendezvous in London."
Mademoiselle's cheeks flushed under his steady glance. A little frown flickered between her brows. She was quick to protest. "Oh, but not all idle curiosity."
"I should be proud to think that interest had some part in it. But perhaps you come as the deputy of your family."
"A deputy?" Again her brows were wrinkled, her eyes questioning.
"I have been expecting Monsieur de St. Gilles to come again. He was proposing to enter my academy."
"He has been here?"
"What's to surprise you, Mademoiselle?" wondered Bellanger. "Sooner or later the Académie Morlaix is the Mecca of every émigré."
"But odd that he should not have told us."
"A matter too insignificant, perhaps." Morlaix was smiling, yet still she found his eyes disturbingly watchful. "The only oddness is that he should not have returned, having engaged himself to do so."
"Perhaps I can explain that. My cousin has received a summons from Holland, from Monsieur de Sombreuil, to join his regiment there. In these last days he has been preparing for departure."
"All is clear, then," said Morlaix.
"Save the discourtesy of not informing you."
"Oh, that!" Morlaix shrugged. "One does not stand on ceremony with fencing-masters. M. de St. Gilles scarcely owes me so much."
She flushed, in annoyance this time. "You do yourself injustice, Monsieur de Morlaix. Besides, the question is one of what he owes to himself."
O'Kelly put his head round the door. "Will you be coming, Quentin? His Highness is waiting for you."
"Most apt," the Duchess laughed, a dimple in each soft round cheek. "The Prince to wait upon the prince of fencing-masters. France is honoured in you, Monsieur de Morlaix."
He was bowing to them. "Give me leave, ladies. Barlow will supply your needs. Pray command him. You will find friends here." His hand indicated the little groups of idlers. "His Highness will not fence for more than twenty minutes. Let me hope to find you here when the lesson is over. I leave them in your care, Vicomte."
"But who am I," Bellanger deprecated, with a hint of tartness, "to serve as deputy for the prince of fencing-masters?"
Morlaix did not stay to answer. With here a bow and there a lift of the hand to answer those who greeted him, he sped to his Royal pupil.
When he came back, Mademoiselle de Chesnières was no longer there, and he was left wondering whether he deplored this more for its own sake or because it deprived him of the chance of further probing.
The opportunity to probe, however, was not long to be denied him.
Two days later there came to him a note from Madame de Chesnières.
"Monsieur my cousin," she wrote, "we discover that you have been less than frank with us. Pray come and sup with us to-morrow night, so that you may make me your apologies. You may send an answer by my messenger." Followed her signature and an address in Carlisle Street, and that was all.
It was a communication at once puzzling and enlightening. His hinted lack of frankness explained itself, and from the rest he gathered that the masks were to be off. What he could not surmise was why this particular moment should have been chosen for that revelation. So he went on the morrow to discover.
He found them nobly housed in that still fashionable quarter, and he was amused to think that these haughty cousins maintained at his charges so handsome an establishment, since it was by revenues properly belonging to him and improperly deflected to them that they supported it.
A white-stockinged footman, liveried and powdered, conducted him up the softly carpeted staircase, and throwing wide the doors of the drawing-room startled him by the announcement:
"Monsieur le Marquis de Chavaray."
He had dressed himself with that care for his appearance which was amongst his qualities, in his black and silver, with a foam of lace at throat and wrists and the light dusting of powder to his hair, and moving with his lithe swordsman's grace, he stepped into the view of the waiting company a figure to fit the announcement.
Madame de Chavaray rustled forward, her sons moving more slowly to follow, whilst Mademoiselle remained in the background beside a slight, short young man of a lively, eager countenance.
"Shall I forgive you your deception, Marquis?" Madame was archly simpering.
He bowed over her hand. "I practised none, Madame."
"Oh, fie! Did you not deny that you were a Chesnières."
"I merely did not assert it, and that because I was not aware of it."
"Not aware of it?" St. Gilles thrust in. "But how is that possible?"
"Just as it was possible for you to lie in the same ignorance," he answered, looking the Chevalier between the eyes.
"Ah, no, no. It is scarcely the same thing. A man must know who he is where others may not."
"You may accept my word for it that it was not in my knowledge." He offered no explanation, and a touch of hauteur made a barrier to demands for it.
"But clearly you know it now," observed Constant.
"I learnt it within a few days of being honoured by your visit." And point-blank, he asked: "How long has it been known to you?"
"Let the Chevalier de Tinténiac answer that," said Gilles, and with a gesture inviting forward the slight stranger, presented him.
No more than the name was necessary to make him known even to one so aloof from politics as Quentin. Wherever émigrés gathered in those days no name was more famous than that of Tinténiac, the dashing, daring gallant Breton Royalist, hero of a dozen battles, who had been the lieutenant of the great Marquis de la Rouërie in the organization of the royalist forces of Brittany, and was now lieutenant to La Rouërie's successor, the Comte de Puisaye.
Alert and quick of movement as he was neat of figure, Tinténiac came forward with Mademoiselle.
"I brought the news of Étienne de Chesnières' death from France two days ago, Monsieur le Marquis." And he added, "I have just arrived, and I made haste to felicitate the Chevalier de St. Gilles, believing him to be the heir. Instead, Monsieur, permit me now to offer these felicitations to you."
"You are gracious, sir." They bowed mutually.
For a moment Quentin felt himself shamed for having harboured suspicions so unworthy. Then he remembered that it was now close upon three months since Étienne's death, and thought he understood why St. Gilles had chosen to let Tinténiac answer for him. That Tinténiac had brought the news he could well believe. But that it was known long before Tinténiac brought it he must believe also. St. Gilles, observing a queer punctilio, would not utter a falsehood which he would not hesitate to leave to be inferred.
"It is almost odd that in close upon three months no word of it should have come to you from Angers." Quentin was thinking of Lafont, the steward of Chavaray from whom his cousins received supplies. His tone, however, was casually innocent of implications.
"Scarcely odd," smiled St. Gilles, "when you consider the difficulties of communication between two countries now at war. There are--alas!--few Tinténiacs to brave these dangerous crossings."
"What I find more odd," said Mademoiselle, "is that knowing this when I came to your academy, you said no word of it. Indeed, I seem to recall a false humility, an insistence upon the negligible station of a fencing-master."
"That, Mademoiselle, is because such my station must continue. This succession . . ." He waved it away. "What is it in these days? So nominal as not to be worth proclaiming."
Madame and her sons all spoke at once.
They were aghast. They did not understand. How could he describe it as nominal, when those vast estates but awaited his claim to them. He answered, laughing, much as he had answered Sharpe.
"You seem to suggest that I should cross to France, so that there I may choose between being guillotined or shut up in a madhouse."
They were vehement in their protests. They cited the law which so strongly favoured him as one established abroad before '89. Was it possible that because of idle fears, a negligible risk, he would suffer the great estates of Chavaray to pass into the national possession, as must happen if he did not prefer his claim.
"Will you guarantee that they will not so pass if I do prefer it? Is it so difficult in France to-day to trump up charges against a man of great possessions?" He smiled. "If there must be a confiscation, I would rather that it be of Chavaray than of my head."
Tinténiac was amused. Mademoiselle watched Quentin gravely. As for the others their looks reflected no satisfaction.
"You cannot have considered, my dear cousin," St. Gilles told him in a tone of remonstrance, "that you owe a duty to the house of which you are now the head."
"Does that duty include rendering myself a headless head?"
"Does a trifle frighten you, then?" wondered Constant, with his ready sneer.
"The guillotine is not a trifle when looked at from the lunette. But frighten is a word I do not like. And I have never reckoned folly to be a part of valour."
"It is not a folly, sir," Constant retorted, "to fulfil the trust that comes to you. For you are no more than a trustee, a life tenant of Chavaray. To take the title and to be afraid to take the estates is to make yourself an object of derision. To be Marquis of nothing, is to be a Marquis pour rire, a Marquis of . . . of Carabas."
"That is precisely why I continue to be simply and humbly Morlaix the fencing-master. I had no thought to proclaim myself Marquis of anything. That explains, I hope, my reticence to you, Mademoiselle my cousin. I am content with my humble estate."
"But you no longer have the right to be," Constant insisted. "To make no effort to save Chavaray from confiscation, to allow it to pass out of the family is to be false to the trust imposed upon you, to take no thought for those who are to come after you."
Quentin's eyes strayed slowly to St. Gilles. Under his quiet smile, St. Gilles started and reddened.
"I read your thought, sir. It is scarcely worthy. I am on the point of departure for Holland, to join Sombreuil's army, destined to raise in France the Royal Standard. My brother Constant will go from England with the Loyal Émigrant of which regiment he is an officer. We go to fight a forlorn hope . . ."
"Faith, not so forlorn," Tinténiac interjected.
"Brave hearts may not ordinarily admit it. But the moment is not ordinary. We go to offer up our lives upon the altar of the cause to which our birth compels us, as it compels you, Monsieur le Marquis, to offer everything. So that it is unlikely that we shall be of those who come after you."
"Morituri te salutant," murmured Quentin to that lofty farewell of one about to die.
Anger flashed from the eyes of Constant. But St. Gilles merely smiled. "Regard it so if you choose. It is none so wide perhaps of the fact." And with malice, as it seemed to Quentin, he added: "Remains our cousin Germaine."
At that she protested sharply. "Nay, nay. Leave me out of your accounts."
Quentin turned to her. "Does Mademoiselle desire me to make this attempt?"
It was a moment before she answered him, a moment in which she considered him with steady brooding eyes. "And if I did? Would you go?"
He answered her almost before he knew what he had said. "Unhesitatingly."
"Then in God's name bid him," sneered Constant, "for the honour of the name."
Quentin wheeled sharply on the brothers. "I'll make a bargain with you. For the honour of the name." There was a sudden queer touch of exaltation in his manner. "Renounce your rights of succession in favour of Mademoiselle de Chesnières, and I will start for France as soon as it can be arranged."
They stared at him dumbfounded, Tinténiac with arms akimbo, and eyes mischievously bright, considered them expectantly.
"Well?" Quentin demanded. "Do you hesitate to forgo chances that you account so slender, for the honour of the name?"
St. Gilles made a gesture of impatience, and half turned from him.
"The proposal is scarcely a sane one."
"A fantastically mad one," Constant added.
"It is one that answers you, I think, when you tax me with a lack of courage," said Quentin. "On those terms I'll prove my courage to you."
"Oh, no, no," Madame was interposing. "No one questions your courage, my dear cousin. It is your . . . your . . ." She struggled for words, her fingers writhing as if in quest of them. "It is your sense of . . . of the Chesnières' tradition that is lacking."
"I was not reared in it, you see."
"That's true, pardi!" swore Constant, his tone offensive. His temper was on edge, as it had been on that Sunday in the fencing-school when Quentin had demonstrated his mastery, and anger was an emotion that Constant had never learnt to curb or dissemble.
Mademoiselle intervened. She was a trifle disdainful of them all. "I think this has gone far enough. We have little right to be so importunate with our cousin. It is for him to decide what he will do."
"And Monsieur le Marquis decides that he will remain a Marquis de Carabas."
"A fencing-master, Monsieur de Chesnières; a fencing-master," Quentin corrected him. "An honourable profession although it compels a man to labour under disabilities. For instance, it is not for him to meet insult as might another. But then he scarcely needs to heed the insults of any man who, realizing this, still offers them."
He spoke easily, even sweetly; but his words had the effect of freezing the brothers into a glowering silence. Tinténiac came laughing to the rescue.
"He can always, like the great Danet, choose weapons other than those of his craft. There was a boaster in Paris who took advantage of him too often. One day, Danet, being out of patience, turned upon him. 'I may not send you the length of my sword,' said he, 'but I tell you that you are a fool and a coward, and if you want satisfaction you shall have it with a pack of cards and a single pistol. We'll cut once, and the man who cuts the higher card shall have the pistol. He may then please himself whether and how he shoots the loser.' The fellow being the fool and coward that Danet called him, extricated himself on the pretext that those were not the weapons of a gentleman. 'But for the future,' said Danet, 'let it be known that they are the weapons of a fencing-master.' He was given peace from the fellow after that."
It was a timely turning of the conversation. But the remainder of the evening was scarcely a happy one. A restraint remained; it brooded over the supper table, nor did the flow of the wine appreciably relieve it. Inevitably their talk turned to Tinténiac's Royalist activities, and the little Chevalier was eloquent upon the valour of the Chouans and their skill in the guerrilla warfare they were conducting whilst impatient for the general rising. But even this was productive of some acrid passages. The brothers permitted themselves to voice the disparagement of Puisaye so common then among the émigré nobles. Tinténiac, as Puisaye's lieutenant and close friend, could not let it pass in silence. He insisted with feeling upon the great work of Puisaye; not only underground in the West of France, but with the British Government whose support he alone had known how to enlist on behalf of the Princes.
Upon this St. Gilles was uncompromising. "I take shame that it should be so, Chevalier, that the cause of the noblesse of France should be controlled by an upstart, a Republican, a swindling adventurer, a mountebank."
Tinténiac smiled tolerantly. "You merely repeat the abuse of those who would have done what he has done but that they have not his courage, his energy or his address." He sighed. "It is a poor recompense for such heroic labours. An upstart, you say. But his birth is as good as yours or mine."
St. Gilles raised his brows. His brother laughed coarsely. Tinténiac, however, persisted, unruffled. "He is called a Republican. A good many gentlemen have been that, who have now seen the error of it. You'll not deny that he has atoned."
"We are not yet at the end," grumbled Constant. "His big promises are still to be fulfilled."
"Be sure he will fulfil them. His plans are too soundly laid for failure. And then, a mountebank, you say. I pray God that I may prove just such a mountebank as he. To the peasants of Brittany, Normandy and Maine, the Count Joseph, as they call him, is a god. A lift of his hand can raise three hundred thousand men who are ready to follow him into Hell. It is given to few of us to accomplish that. And those who hope to see the monarchy restored in France, believe me, will be sadly at fault if they do not take Monsieur de Puisaye seriously, and support him loyally."
"He possesses a warm advocate," Mademoiselle commended him, smiling, and Quentin, observing her, admired her fineness.
"A worshipper, Mademoiselle."
St. Gilles laughed. "It becomes a religious question, then. And those are not for discussion at table."
But the restraint abode, and Quentin welcomed the evening's end, and the hackney coach that was fetched to take him home. It was only when on the point of leaving, that for one brief moment in the drawing-room he found himself alone with Germaine, away from the group into which the other four had fallen.
"I have the misfortune," he said, "to be under your disapproval."
"Shall I disapprove of what I do not understand? I am not by nature rash, I hope, Monsieur my cousin."
The sweetness he discovered in her brought a wistfulness into his glance.
"You find me obscure?"
"Indeed, mysterious."
He shook his head. "The mystery is not in me. It is about me."
"It is as I thought." She nodded the fair head so admirably poised on her white neck. "You suspect our intentions. I find that odd, for I cannot conceive the shape of your suspicions. It is not good to be suspicious, cousin Quentin. The suspicious are seldom happy, for they are seldom at peace. Suspicion creates devils to torment us."
"It is not in my nature if I know myself. But neither, I hope, am I prone to be credulous, for that is to stumble into pitfalls."
"There are no pitfalls here," she answered him.
"Do you assure me of it?"
His tone drew her eyes to his once more. "Would my assurance satisfy you?"
"In all things," he answered with a fervour that visibly startled her.
She was suddenly very grave. A tinge of colour mounted to her cheeks. "Then . . . then I must go warily. I will answer you that I know of none, and can imagine none."
She saw a light as of quickened, exultant life, leap to the grey eyes that pondered her. "That answers for yourself. And it is all I need. The rest are naught."
It was a reply that left her frowning as her aunt came to join them.