Book III Chapter 11 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
MARGOT'S CHILD
In that spacious book-lined room whence all the others had departed, Quentin turned solemn, almost fearful, eyes upon Puisaye.
"Monsieur le Comte, I require to know . . . Are you sending Chesnières before a firing-party because of his dereliction of duty, or because of what was doing here when you arrived?"
Puisaye did not at once reply. His hands behind him, he paced away to the window and back before speaking, and then it was to evade the question. "Since he deserves death on either count, what matter?"
"You answer too lightly, sir." White and stern, Quentin's tone was one of reproof.
"Name of God! Why this concern? There have been attempts enough on your life by this Monsieur Constant. There was Boisgelin's; there was Lafont's; and no doubt there were others less apparent. It is time that Chesnières paid."
From this Quentin took his answer, and it brought a vehemence into his manner. "You are not required, sir, to pay my debts. I do not tolerate it."
Puisaye raised his brows. His glance was sardonic. "Be it so. He is being shot, then, for his insubordination."
"You say so now. But you persuade me otherwise."
"I persuade you?"
"Your tone, your attitude; oh, and things that have happened in the past."
"You mean, of course, the attempts upon your life."
"I mean other things. Above all what he said just now, swearing it, 'in the face of death.' Would he go before his Maker with a false oath on his lips? Do you think I could tolerate to have this man put to death for my profit?"
"You would prefer him to live for your ruin. Very noble. But I tell you again that he is being shot for insubordination." Puisaye came closer, and set a friendly hand upon Quentin's shoulder. "Why torment yourself, child?"
Quentin answered him in a dull resentment.
"Because there is so much in all this, so much about my own self that I do not understand; things of which I have had no more than puzzling glimpses. I am struggling to see the truth behind the hostility of these cousins of mine."
"Is that so difficult to understand, men being what they are? Chavaray is one of the noblest heritages in France, or will be when normal times return. It is not lightly to be relinquished by men who have always believed themselves heirs to it."
"Why have they believed that? Didn't they know of my existence?"
"It is possible that they did not."
"Ah! But only if my mother had concealed it, as she concealed from me that I was heir to Chavaray. Why? Why should a mother conspire to deprive her son of his heritage? I know of one only answer."
"And that?" Puisaye was suddenly stern.
"Her knowledge that he is not entitled to it. If that were so, then what Constant swore is true. I am an impostor, a Marquis pour rire, a Marquis de Carabas, as he named me long ago."
"Bah! Are you so easily imposed upon by assertion? Have you no evidence in your possession? You possess certificates, of your mother's marriage to Bertrand de Chesnières and of your own birth at Chavaray."
"If that were all. But there are some facts to set against the documents. My father . . . Bertrand de Chesnières was in his seventy-fourth year when he married my mother, a girl of twenty. It was only seven years later, when he was past eighty, that I was born."
"And then? You were born in wedlock. Your claim to the marquisate is legally unassailable."
"Legally, yes. I have been told that that is precisely why the Chesnières assailed it in other ways."
Puisaye's hand fell away from Quentin's shoulder. He stood back, pondering him from under frowning brows. "Since when have you harboured such notions as these?"
"Since Constant made oath here before they dragged him out."
"Pshaw! What is the fellow's oath worth? To what can he swear? To an assumption, a suspicion, like your own. On that assumption these Chesnières would have murdered you in one way or another. And you are so soft-hearted as to find it necessary to justify them, even at the cost of doing so little honour to your mother's memory."
"Do you know of any reason why my mother should have run away from Chavaray after Bertrand's death, and gone to hide herself and me in England?"
Puisaye may have perceived that the question was rhetorical; but not on that account did he leave it unanswered. "Name of God! Isn't it plain? To remove you from just such vindictiveness as that which has pursued you since you succeeded to Étienne de Chesnières."
Quentin stared in surprise. "That is what you assume?"
"It is what I know. You are to remember that, as I've told you before, I was garrisoned in Angers in those days, and I was intimate with the Lesdiguières. That is why I took so deep an interest in you, Quentin, when once I had found you. That is why I sought to make a friend of you, or, at least, to be a friend to you. Listen now."
He turned away, and thereafter as he talked, he paced the room in long, slow steps.
"Old Lesdiguières, who was intendant to the lords of Chavaray, was an ambitious old scoundrel who sacrificed his daughter to his cursed worldliness. The septuagenarian Bertrand de Chesnières, rheumy and gout-ridden, in an expiring flicker of a lasciviousness he had never learnt to curb, cast his bleary eyes upon your mother. Her crafty, vigilant father saw his chance to make a great lady of her. He handled old Bertrand with such villainous astuteness that, to the dismay of the old gentleman's family, they were married."
Quentin who had found a chair, and sat huddled in it, elbows on knees and his chin in his hands, listened avidly, and missed no accent of the stinging bitterness in which Puisaye spoke, as if this were a tale which he found it impossible to tell dispassionately.
"Considering Étienne's crippled condition, Bertrand's nephew, Gaston de Chesnières, had long regarded himself as the heir. His brother Claude, the father of Germaine de Chesnières, made an eleventh-hour attempt to prevent the marriage. But Bertrand, even in his dotage, was not a man to be thwarted, and there was that old devil Lesdiguières at his elbow, to sustain and guide him.
"Afterwards, Gaston, the father of Armand and Constant, never lost an opportunity of humiliating and slighting the young Marquise. He allowed her to see very clearly what she might expect at his hands when once he should be Marquis of Chavaray and head of the family. For considering Bertrand's age and infirmities, he was at least confident that no issue of that marriage would ever interfere with his succession. When, some seven years later, your birth came to destroy his prospects, he made the country ring with the rage that possessed him. He went in fury to the courts demanding that they should declare the illegitimacy of the new-born heir. When the courts confessed themselves powerless to interfere, he made appeal to the King. But the result was the same. Infuriated by these rebuffs, he went about vowing openly that he would take for himself the justice that was denied him.
"So far I was a witness of what I tell you. Of the rest I can speak only from what I learnt later and what is easily surmised. For my regiment was ordered overseas, to the Antilles, and I had gone with it. But it needs little imagination to conceive what a time of anguish must have followed for your mother. It endured for four years. Then Bertrand died, and she found herself utterly unprotected; for by then, her father, too, was dead. Her terror of what might be done by Gaston and his sons, Armand and Constant, who were then in adolescence, must so completely have broken her spirit, that she resolved to carry you beyond their reach and into hiding."
At a standstill now, he paused there before concluding: "Their conduct towards you since Étienne's death serves to show that the malevolence that drove her forth has been fully and bitterly alive in the house of Chesnières."
Silence followed. Puisaye resumed his pacing, mechanically, his face dark with thought, his chin on his breast, as if he were looking physically into that past which his words had evoked. At last Quentin spoke.
"You are singularly well informed."
"It so happens."
"And yet there are gaps in the story."
"Naturally."
"Will you hear how my imagination fills them?"
The Count wheeled, squarely to face him, his glance keen and searching. Then a wave of his fine hand invited Quentin to proceed.
"When the Marquise, my mother, in those first childless years of her marriage was brought to fear what must happen in a widowhood that could not be long delayed, it might occur to her that her only chance of protection from that rancour, from being cast out, lay in the possession of a child. As a mother of the next heir after Étienne, of the next marquis, she will have supposed that her widowed position would be secure, unassailable."
There was an interrogative note to his statement; and, having made it, he paused as if for a reply, watching Puisaye.
As none came, he resumed. "It is not difficult to imagine that she may have had a lover of her own age, one perhaps from whom her father's damnable ambition had separated her. Don't you agree?"
"Proceed, proceed," he was sharply bidden.
"The child came: the son so ardently desired. But the immediate consequences of his arrival would show her how grievously she had miscalculated. And so, as you have told me, when Bertrand de Chesnières died and she found herself defenceless, she was content to abandon everything for herself and her child, so that she might place him beyond the resentment of the men of Chesnières, whom she had thought so easily to cheat."
He paused there, his eyes steadily upon Puisaye, who had not moved whilst he had been speaking. "Do you not think, sir," he asked, "that that is how things happened?"
For once he observed signs of faltering in that man of indomitable self-assurance. "I . . . I think . . . it may have happened somewhat in that fashion."
Quentin leaned farther forward. Sharp as the crack of a whip came his next question. "Do you know that it did?"
A deathly pallor gradually overspread the Count's haggard face, and then, as if his will snapped suddenly under stress, the answer came: "Yes. I know."
Quentin stood up, and for a long silent moment those two men confronted each other, eye to eye, something of dread in the regard of each. In that moment was resolved for Quentin the puzzle of the haunting elusive likeness presented by Puisaye to some countenance that he had seen. He knew now that it was his own mirror that had shown it to him.
He spoke, and the hoarseness of his voice surprised him. "You mean, of course, that you are my father."
Puisaye's countenance contracted as if from a blow. He sucked in his breath, and wrung his hands. "Ah! God of God!" Then he recovered his poise. He lowered his head and made a gesture of resignation. "Impossible to deny it," he confessed.
Quentin betrayed no excitement. "It explains many things," was his cool comment. "Only the assurance that I was Bertrand de Chesnières' son can have prevented me from suspecting it."
At that very moment the roar and crash of a volley of musketry made the windows rattle. He started half round. "What was that?"
Terrible in his resumption of imperturbability, Puisaye answered him. "The end of the last claimant that stands between you and the Marquisate of Chavaray."
"My God!" Quentin's eyes were filled with horror. "Was that why you had him shot? Was it?"
"Believe me, I should not have boggled at it," the Count answered in cold contempt. "But it was not necessary. I but executed the sentence passed by Tinténiac. Remember that. The fool has expiated an offence through which some thousands of lives were lost and a great cause has perished."
"If I could believe you!" Quentin almost wailed in his angry distress. "If I could believe you! But it will not serve."
"What the devil is there to trouble you? Mordieu! You have had no part in this. Your conscience may sleep in peace. My shoulders are broad enough to bear the burden of it. Be content that there is none now to dispute your title, Monsieur le Marquis."
"Dare you say that? Dare you mock me with it knowing that I have no right to it?"
"You are wrong. You have every right. A legal right that no one can dispute, and a moral right, earned by your mother's sufferings."
Quentin uttered a short, loud laugh. He made a gesture as of thrusting something from him. "I am the son of the man who has cleared away the last legitimate Chesnières so as to make room for an impostor. Is that something I could ever forget?" Passionately he ran on: "Sir, you would have dealt more fairly by me had you told me this on that day when first you visited me in London. You should not have assumed that I take after my parents. You should have remembered that it was possible that I might, after all, be honest."
Puisaye had winced under the bitter taunt. Now an ironical smile crept to his tight lips.
"I should be proud of you, I suppose. Not only for this honesty of which you make a boast, but also for the hardness you display. Fine, manly qualities both. But is all that has gone to make you Marquis of Chavaray to be thrown away? Are you not, after all, lord of Chavaray by right of purchase? Had you forgotten? Or isn't that enough for this incorruptible honesty of yours?"
"Not as long as a Chesnières lives to inherit." There was a stern finality in his tone.
Puisaye's brows met over eyes that reflected only pain. His glance seemed to burn its way into Quentin's mind. "Aye! You're an inflexible dog." Then he laughed, not without bitterness. He turned aside. "I was born, I think, for frustration," he complained. "I touch nothing but it withers; no man has toiled more relentlessly, planned more soundly, fought more dauntlessly. Yet in every endeavour of mine there has been some incalculable adventitious factor to baulk me in the end." He resumed his pacing. "Heartbreak has been my portion, from the day when as a young soldier at Angers I saw your mother, whom I worshipped, forced into repulsive nuptials with the senile Chavaray. Through you I thought to avenge her fate; for it seemed to me a sweet vengeance to set you back in the place for which she bore you and from which she was compelled by fear to remove you. I cherished the thought that if she looked down on us from Heaven, she would feel herself repaid for her sufferings, and would bless me with her approval for having played a father's part by you: for having preserved you, guarded you and guided you to that heritage so dearly bought for you by her. For ever since I so fortuitously discovered you that has been my lodestar. Even to-night, Quentin, my tutelary duty towards you is the main reason of my presence here. The punishment of Constant de Chesnières was no more than incidental. What really brought me was the knowledge of your presence and the hope to serve you whilst the power is still mine. How timely was my coming shows how well I was inspired."
Quentin hung his head. "Indeed, indeed, had you not come. . . . It is I who would have been the target of that volley."
"I comfort myself with that, and blame myself for my failure otherwise. I have talked too much, admitted too much. But my senses took me by surprise; my emotions weakened my will; temptation defeated me. For it was beyond my power to resist the temptation to acknowledge myself your father when you claimed me. What would you, Quentin? I am accounted hard. I have so accounted myself. But it has remained for my son to show me how hard a man should really be."
"God knows you do me wrong, sir." Quentin's voice almost broke on the words, and what more he would have said was choked in him. He advanced to proffer a hand, and the next moment found himself engulfed and crushed in the embrace of that towering, powerful man.
"Child! Child!" the deep rich voice was sobbing. "Margot's child!"