Book I Chapter 6 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
MONSIEUR DE PUISAYE
At parting that night with Tinténiac, Quentin expressed the hope of another meeting at which their chance acquaintance might be improved. So cordially was it received by the Chevalier that Quentin counted upon seeing it fulfilled. But hardly as promptly as it occurred. For that was no later than the following evening, just as the academy was about to close.
Tinténiac came accompanied by a man of commanding presence, very tall, loose-limbed and erect, carrying his handsome head with an air of conscious pride, and moving with a measured grace that was almost histrionic. From his manifest vigour, his age might have been guessed at forty, though in reality he counted some ten years more. His face, tanned by exposure, was long and narrow, lofty of brow and square of chin. The eyes of so deep a blue as to seem almost black were set deep under upward-slanting eyebrows that rendered sardonic his expression. The mouth was straight and firm, but when the lips parted in a smile, this brought so much gentle charm into his countenance that it seemed to change completely from the disdainful sternness of its repose. He wore his own hair, of a reddish brown and turning grey at the temples, in a simple queue. His dress, from his wide-brimmed black hat to his Hessian boots, could not have been more simple than it was, yet as worn by him it carried a suggestion of elaborateness. His riding-coat of a light blue with silver buttons was very full in the skirt, and his white nankeens outlined the vigorous muscles of his long legs.
Morlaix, still in his fencing garments, observed his stately advance down that long room with an admiring interest quickened at closer quarters by a something familiar in the man's face, an elusive likeness to someone he had once known.
Then Tinténiac was presenting him.
"You'll account that I have lost no time in seeking you. It is due to the insistence of Monsieur le Comte de Puisaye, who believes that he can serve you."
"And certainly desires to do so," said the stranger, sweeping him a bow.
"Monsieur de Puisaye!" Surprised, Morlaix looked with deep interest upon this man who might be said to hold the West of France, and therefore the fortunes of the monarchy, in his hands; this man who offering himself to Pitt, not as a suppliant, but as a valuable ally in the war with the French Republic, had persuaded the British Minister to lend his powerful aid to the enterprise that was afoot, and who, being appointed by the Princes, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal and Catholic Army of Brittany, was become an object of bitter jealousy to the émigré nobility. Despite the fact that the aim of his labours was to end their exile and restore them to their possessions, they could not forgive him for achieving what none of them was capable of achieving, or for being, themselves, constrained, by the rank bestowed upon him by the Princes, to serve under his orders.
Whilst Morlaix considered him with the interest his fame deserved, he became conscious of being himself the object of a scrutiny more intent and searching than he could remember ever to have experienced. Then the smile broke, with all its singular charm, and a lean hand was holding Quentin's in a grip that proclaimed the Count's unusual vigour.
"On my soul, Fate is hardly to be forgiven for having left me unconscious of your existence in all my comings and goings of the past six months. Only by merest chance do I discover it now from Tinténiac."
Quentin, so schooled in imperturbability that it was wrought into the nature of him, went near, and unaccountably, to embarrassment. It may have been due to the unwavering, insistent stare of those dark eyes.
"You desire to flatter me, Monsieur. My obscure existence can scarcely matter to you."
"Aha! There speaks your ignorance." His hand was at last relinquished. "You are to regard me as an old friend, pardi! For your mother's people were my friends when I was a lad in garrison at Angers more than a quarter of a century ago. There is nothing for which the child of Margot Lesdiguières may not count upon me. Voila! Now you begin to understand the eagerness with which I seek you, the vexation at not having sought you sooner." Those smouldering eyes were considering him again. "Not to have known! Ah! devil take me, but that is unforgivable." Then he laughed, and clapped Quentin's shoulder with a familiarity that jarred the fencing master. "But we'll repair that now. We must become good friends, great friends, is it not?"
"Naturally, Monsieur. A friend of my mother's. . . . Saving for those she made in England, you are the first I have ever known. I have to thank you, Monsieur de Tinténiac. Our meeting yesterday was more fortunate even than I accounted it."
Puisaye paced away a little, looking about him. "You prosper, I learn. You enjoy even royal patronage. I find you well established, oh, and well housed. That is excellent. Excellent!"
Quentin reflected that he would have admired a greater reserve. He cavilled that M. de Puisaye put himself too readily at his ease, presumed a little upon that ancient friendship for Madame de Morlaix. Nevertheless, he summoned Barlow, ordered wine, and conducted his visitors to the lounge above the little garden.
The Count sank with a sigh of satisfaction to a deep chair, and stretched his long limbs. "One is very well here, pardi! I understand that you should be content, as Tinténiac tells me. But, devil take me, a heritage such as Chavaray is not to be neglected."
The Chevalier interposed hurriedly, reading resentment in the contraction of Quentin's brows.
"Monsieur le Comte will tell you how you may secure it without incurring the dangers that are making you hesitate. That, in fact, is the real purpose of this visit, Monsieur de Morlaix."
"Do dangers make him hesitate?" cried Puisaye. "Ah, bah! I'll not believe it. With that nose and chin, that eagle's glance! That is not the man to shirk a danger, any more than I am."
To Quentin the flattery seemed gross. He was not being favourably impressed. The flamboyance about this man offended his reticent nature. But he answered civilly.
"You will remember, Chevalier, that last night I discriminated to St. Gilles between courage and sheer folly. I do not shrink, I hope, from ordinary risks. But I do not lay a helpless neck under the knife."
"As they would have you do, no doubt, those people of the family of Chesnières," said Puisaye. "I am glad to hear you had the sense not to be taken in their trap."
"Their trap?" quoth Quentin.
"What else? Is it possible, after all, that you doubt it? They talked, I hear, of the honour of the name, and your duty to it. The honour of the name! Of the name or Chesnières! Dieu me damne! There's not much honour to it for anyone to safeguard."
"It happens to be my name, sir," Quentin gently reproved him.
But Puisaye was not to be reproved. "Parbleu! I paid you the compliment of forgetting it." He waved the point aside with an eloquent hand, and ran on: "Those subtle gentlemen would have persuaded you to go to France and get yourself guillotined. A convenient way of murdering you so that St. Gilles might succeed to Chavaray."
Now whilst this was akin to the very suspicion Quentin had harboured, yet to hear it bluntly voiced by this stranger was an irritation.
"How would St. Gilles succeed if the estates were confiscated to the nation, as they would be on the conviction that must precede my guillotining?"
"How?" Puisaye laughed.
"That," said Tinténiac, "is what Monsieur le Comte has come to tell you."
"But what other can you suppose to have been their purpose?" cried the Count. "Or did you think they love you, then, these rascals?" A note of mordant scorn and hatred crept now into his voice. "A vile, degenerate house, the house of Chesnières, my friend. In four generations it has produced only cripples, imbeciles or scoundrels."
"It has produced me," Quentin reminded him.
For an instant Puisaye looked disconcerted. Then his vigorous laugh rang out again. "Devil take me! I will keep forgetting it."
"We shall be better friends, Monsieur, if you'll remember it," was the quiet answer.
A swift gleam of anger flashed from the dark eyes, and was gone. Puisaye shrugged, and waved his hand again. He was very free of gesture.
"Bien! I'll remember."
He took up the glass that had been poured for him, held it to the light a moment to judge the colour of the wine, then quaffed it and smacked his lips appreciatively. "You are well served, too. I should not have guessed there was so well-sunned a wine in England. It grew ten years or more ago on the banks of the Garonne." As Quentin did not seem to take the hint, he reached for the decanter, and brimmed himself another goblet. "But to your business. You are not to imagine that you would be safe in France even before you are in possession of the heritage. To announce your claim to it would be to find yourself laid by the heels and in the dead-cart."
"But the law, then?"
"You conceive that there is law in France. To be sure there is. But who trusts to it walks upon a bog. The terms of a statute matter nothing when those who administer it are scoundrels. They'll give it any sense they choose. It is just on this that your fine cousins were counting."
"But," Quentin objected, "if I am disposed of, which you assume to be their aim, they, as émigrés, cannot inherit. Confiscation must follow."
"So it must. And the estates would be sold as national property. But your cousins would do just that which I counsel you to do. There are plenty of greedy, corrupt knaves in authority in France who are fattening upon the national calamity; men who are prepared to act secretly as agents of the rightful owners of confiscated property. If it were broken up and dispersed in petty lots, it must be difficult to reassemble it when the time comes and the monarchy is restored. To prevent this, these agents lend their names to the rightful owners, buy in the property for them at prices purely nominal. The incredible depreciation of the paper currency of the Republic makes it easy for anyone with a little gold. Having bought it--for a consideration to themselves, of course--these rascals will hold it against the day when this nightmare is at an end. Your cousins, I fancy, possess a faithful servant in the steward at Chavaray, a rascal whom they will no doubt reward for the supplies he has been furnishing them dishonestly out of the property of the late Étienne. I am well informed, you see. That fellow would, no doubt, discover for them a likely agent and supply the necessary means."
"Well informed, indeed," Quentin agreed, and his tone betrayed some of the surprise he felt that a stranger should be so intimately acquainted with the affairs of Chavaray. But his surmise of the intentions of the brothers Chesnières, Quentin accounted shrewdly exact. It supplied a full explanation of all that had puzzled him in their attitude.
Watching Quentin's frowning, thoughtful face, Puisaye asked him: "Would it not ease your mind to have the matter handled so?"
"But who would so handle it for me? Where am I to find a man in France to undertake it?"
"That is perhaps how I can serve you. Believe me, I should be happy to do so. In a few days I shall be returning to Brittany to make sure that all is ready for the general rising. It would be an easy matter for me to pay a visit to Angers, and arrange that the estates be bought for you when through your failure to appear within the time prescribed their confiscation is decreed. It will not be long, I trust, before we shall have swept the sansculottes to Hell, and so made it possible for you to enter into possession in your own person. What do you say to that?"
"That you overwhelm me," Quentin answered frankly, conscious even then that it was an understatement. "This interest in a stranger, sir . . ."
"I'll beg that you'll not so describe yourself." Puisaye was emphatic. "Cordieu! Is it nothing that I am an old friend of your mother's people, of your mother herself?"
"You know, sir, that my mother is no longer here to thank you."
"I know. I know. Tinténiac has told me." His brow was clouded. "If it had happened that I had come to England during her lifetime I must long since have made your acquaintance. I take it, then, that you agree to let me serve you. You will need, of course, to place funds at my disposal."
"Funds?" Quentin eyed him sharply. It was as if a gleam of light had suddenly been shed upon the mystification he discovered in a stranger's concern that was as unsolicited as it appeared exaggerated. After all, Quentin knew his world. He had only Puisaye's own word for that ancient bond of friendship with the Lesdiguières, and as lately as last night he had heard him described as a swindling adventurer. Of Tinténiac, too, he knew nothing, when all was said. The man enjoyed an heroic fame as an active Royalist. But like all men of his class in these days, he would be reduced to neediness, a condition that drives men to queer shifts so as to supply themselves. Even the project which Puisaye expounded, whilst so plausible, might be no more than a fiction for all that Quentin knew. "What funds would be needed?" he asked at last.
Puisaye was airy. "A million or two of livres. Ah, don't let the sound alarm you. So worthless is the currency of the Republic that some two thousand English pounds in gold would more than equal it."
"Not so much, perhaps. But much for a poor fencing-master."
Puisaye seemed taken aback. "Poor?" He laughed. "My friend, I do not find that you have an air of poverty."
He could hardly have found words more unfortunate. Quentin remembered the man's interest in the academy's prosperity, the probing half-questions which he had almost resented.
"Believe me, sir, I am touched by your interest in my affairs; but too conscious of having done nothing to deserve it, it is unthinkable that I should take advantage of it."
He saw the colour rise under the tan of Puisaye's narrow countenance, and then recede again, leaving it of a deathly pallor. The anger that momentarily glared from his eyes gave way to a look of pain and wonder. The smooth suavity of Quentin's tone had not deceived him.
"By God! He takes me for an escroc." He got up as he spoke.
Tinténiac laughed uncomfortably. "You suffer the fate of those who offer unsolicited assistance."
"To have my face slapped by . . . by Margot's child! That is . . . Oh, but no matter what it is. The fault is mine, for being importunate."
"Sir," Quentin begged him, "do not regard it so. I am sensible of your excellent intentions. It is only, as I have said, that I cannot bring myself to trespass upon your good nature."
As if he felt himself mocked by the urbanity of that emotionless voice, Puisaye yielded suddenly to anger. "Suspicion is among the meanest traits. I am sorry to discover it in you."
Quentin inclined his head a little. "I am pained to deserve your disapproval, Monsieur le Comte. If you have affairs elsewhere, pray do not stand on ceremony."
Puisaye's lips twitched oddly in his white face. He advanced, clenching his hands, and for a moment Quentin thought that a blow was coming. Then Puisaye recovered. He bowed from the hips, theatrically, with an arm outflung.
"I take my leave, Monsieur le Marquis. Pray forgive the intrusion. Come, Tinténiac."
Tinténiac made a leg. "Serviteur," he murmured with a curling lip, and marched off in the wake of the tall, swaggering Count.
Quentin remained by the table in the embrasure, and as they passed down the long room, Puisaye's voice floated back to him, laden with indignation.
"I could have forgiven the cub if he had but had the manners to say that he could not find the money!"