Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “From what, sir?”

  “Ah — who shall say that? My history and my rearing have been such that had I bowed before them, I had become the most gloomy, melancholy man that steps this gloomy, melancholy world. By now I might have found existence insupportable, and so — who knows? I might have set a term to it. But I had the wisdom to prefer laughter. Humanity is a delectable spectacle if we but have the gift to observe it in a dispassionate spirit. Such a gift have I cultivated. The squirming of the human worm is interesting to observe, and the practice of observing it has this advantage, that while we observe it we forget to squirm ourselves.”

  “The bitterness of your words belies their purport.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “But proves my contention. That I might explain myself, you made me for a moment serious, set me squirming in my turn.”

  She moved a little, and he fell into step beside her. A little while there was silence.

  Presently— “You find me, no doubt, as amusing as any other of your human worms,” said she.

  “God forbid!” he answered soberly.

  She laughed. “You make an exception in my case, then. That is a subtle flattery!”

  “Have I not said that I had judged you to be an exceptional woman?”

  “Exceptionally foolish, not a doubt.”

  “Exceptionally beautiful; exceptionally admirable,” he corrected.

  “A clumsy compliment, devoid of wit!”

  “When we grow truthful, it may be forgiven us if we fall short of wit.”

  “That were an argument in favor of avoiding truth.”

  “Were it necessary,” said he. “For truth is seldom so intrusive as to need avoiding. But we are straying. There was a score upon which you were inquisitive, you said; from which I take it that you sought knowledge at my hands. Pray seek it; I am a well, of knowledge.”

  “I desired to know — Nay, but I have asked you already. I desired to know did you deem me a very pitiful little fool?”

  They had reached the privet hedge, and turned. They paused now before resuming their walk. He paused, also, before replying. Then:

  “I should judge you wise in most things,” he answered slowly, critically. “But in the matter to which I owe the blessing of having served you, I do not think you wise. Did you — do you love Lord Rotherby?”

  “What if so?”

  “After what you have learned, I should account you still less wise.”

  “You are impertinent, sir,” she reproved him.

  “Nay, most pertinent. Did you not ask me to sit in judgment upon this matter? And unless you confess to me, how am I to absolve you?”

  “I did not crave your absolution. You take too much upon yourself.”

  “So said Lord Rotherby. You seem to have something in common when all is said.”

  She bit her lip in chagrin. They paced in silence to the lawn’s end, and turned again. Then: “You treat me like a fool,” she reproved him.

  “How is that possible, when, already I think I love you.”

  She started from him, and stared at him for a long moment. “You insult me!” she cried angrily, conceiving that she understood his mind. “Do you think that because I may have committed a folly I have forfeited all claim to be respected — that I am a subject for insolent speeches?”

  “You are illogical,” said Mr. Caryll, the imperturbable. “I have told you that I love you. Should I insult the woman I have said I love?”

  “You love me?” She looked at him, her face very white in the white moonlight, her lips parted, a kindling anger in her eyes. “Are you mad?”

  “I a’n’t sure. There have been moments when I have almost feared it. This is not one of them.”

  “You wish me to think you serious?” She laughed a thought stridently in her indignation. “I have known you just four hours,” said she.

  “Precisely the time I think I have loved you.”

  “You think?” she echoed scornfully. “Oh, you make that reservation! You are not quite sure?”

  “Can we be sure of anything?” he deprecated.

  “Of some things,” she answered icily. “And I am sure of one — that I am beginning to understand you.”

  “I envy you. Since that is so, help me — of your charity! — to understand myself.”

  “Then understand yourself for an impudent, fleering coxcomb,” she flung at him, and turned to leave him.

  “That is not explanation,” said Mr. Caryll thoughtfully. “It is mere abuse.”

  “What else do you deserve?” she asked him over her shoulder. “That you should have dared!” she withered him.

  “To love you quite so suddenly?” he inquired, and misquoted: “‘Whoever loved at all, that loved not at first sight?’ Hortensia!”

  “You have not the right to my name, sir.”

  “Yet I offer you the right to mine,” he answered, with humble reproach.

  “You shall be punished,” she promised him, and in high dudgeon left him.

  “Punished? Oh, cruel! Can you then be —

  “‘Unsoft to him who’s smooth to thee?

  Tigers and bears, I’ve heard some say,

  For proffered love will love repay.”’

  But she was gone. He looked up at the moon, and took it into his confidence to reproach it. “’Twas your white face beglamored me,” he told it aloud. “See, how execrable a beginning I’ve made, and, therefore, how excellent!” And he laughed, but entirely without mirth.

  He remained pacing in the moonlight, very thoughtful, and, for once, it seemed, not at all amused. His life appeared to be tangling itself beyond unravelling, and his vaunted habit of laughter scarce served at present to show him the way out.

  CHAPTER VI. HORTENSIA’S RETURN

  Mr. Caryll needs explaining as he walks there in the moonlight; that is, if we are at all to understand him — a matter by no means easy, considering that he has confessed he did not understand himself. Did ever man make a sincere declaration of sudden passion as flippantly as he had done, or in terms-better calculated to alienate the regard he sought to win? Did ever man choose his time with less discrimination, or his words with less discretion? Assuredly not. To suppose that Mr. Caryll was unaware of this, would be to suppose him a fool, and that he most certainly was not.

  His mood was extremely complex; its analysis, I fear, may baffle us. It must have seemed to you — as it certainly seemed to Mistress Winthrop — that he made a mock of her; that in truth he was the impudent, fleering coxcomb she pronounced him, and nothing more. Not so. Mock he most certainly did; but his mockery was all aimed to strike himself on the recoil — himself and the sentiments which had sprung to being in his soul, and to which — nameless as he was, pledged as he was to a task that would most likely involve his ruin — he conceived that he had no right. He gave expression to his feelings, yet chose for them the expression best calculated to render them barren of all consequence where Mistress Winthrop was concerned. Where another would have hidden those emotions, Mr. Caryll elected to flaunt them half-derisively, that Hortensia might trample them under foot in sheer disgust.

  It was, perhaps, the knowledge that did he wait, and come to her as an honest, devout lover, he must in honesty tell her all there was to know of his odd history and of his bastardy, and thus set up between them a barrier insurmountable. Better, he may have thought, to make from the outset a mockery of a passion for which there could be no hope. And so, under that mocking, impertinent exterior, I hope you catch some glimpse of the real, suffering man — the man who boasted that he had the gift of laughter.

  He continued a while to pace the dewy lawn after she had left him, and a deep despondency descended upon the spirit of this man who accounted seriousness a folly. Hitherto his rancor against his father had been a theoretical rancor, a thing educated into him by Everard, and accepted by him as we accept a proposition in Euclid that is proved to us. In its way it had been a make-believe rancor, a rancor on principle, for he had been m
ade to see that unless he was inflamed by it, he was not worthy to be his mother’s son. Tonight had changed all this. No longer was his grievance sentimental, theoretical or abstract. It was suddenly become real and very bitter. It was no longer a question of the wrong done his mother thirty years ago; it became the question of a wrong done himself in casting him nameless upon the world, a thing of scorn to cruel, unjust humanity. Could Mistress Winthrop have guessed the bitter self-derision with which he had, in apparent levity, offered her his name, she might have felt some pity for him who had no pity for himself.

  And so, to-night he felt — as once for a moment Everard had made him feel — that he had a very real wrong of his own to avenge upon his father; and the task before him lost much of the repugnance that it had held for him hitherto.

  All this because four hours ago he had looked into the brown depths of Mistress Winthrop’s eyes. He sighed, and declaimed a line of Congreve’s:

  “‘Woman is a fair image in a pool; who leaps at it is sunk.’”

  The landlord came to bid him in to supper. He excused himself. Sent his lordship word that he was over-tired, and went off to bed.

  They met at breakfast, at an early hour upon the morrow, Mistress Winthrop cool and distant; his lordship grumpy and mute; Mr. Caryll airy and talkative as was his habit. They set out soon afterwards. But matters were nowise improved. His lordship dozed in a corner of the carriage, while Mistress Winthrop found more interest in the flowering hedgerows than in Mr. Caryll, ignored him when he talked, and did not answer him when he set questions; till, in the end, he, too, lapsed into silence, and as a solatium for his soreness assured himself by lengthy, wordless arguments that matters were best so.

  They entered the outlying parts of London some two hours later, and it still wanted an hour or so to noon when the chaise brought up inside the railings before the earl’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  There came a rush of footmen, a bustle of service, amid which they alighted and entered the splendid residence that was part of the little that remained Lord Ostermore from the wreck his fortunes had suffered on the shoals of the South Sea.

  Mr. Caryll paused a moment to dismiss Leduc to the address in Old Palace Yard where he had hired a lodging. That done, he followed his lordship and Hortensia within doors.

  From the inner hall a footman ushered him across an ante-chamber to a room on the right, which proved to be the library, and was his lordship’s habitual retreat. It was a spacious, pillared chamber, very richly panelled in damask silk, and very richly furnished, having long French windows that opened on a terrace above the garden.

  As they entered there came a swift rustle of petticoats at their heels, and Mr. Caryll stood aside, bowing, to give passage to a tall lady who swept by with no more regard for him than had he been one of the house’s lackeys. She was, he observed, of middle-age, lean and aquiline-featured, with an exaggerated chin, that ended squarely as boot. Her sallow cheeks were raddled to a hectic color, a monstrous head-dress — like that of some horse in a lord mayor’s show — coiffed her, and her dress was a mixture of extravagance and incongruity, the petticoat absurdly hooped.

  She swept into the room like a battleship into action, and let fly her first broadside at Mistress Winthrop from the threshold.

  “Codso!” she shrilled. “You have come back! And for what have you come back? Am I to live in the same house with you, you shameless madam — that have no more thought for your reputation than a slut in a smock-race?”

  Hortensia raised indignant eyes from out of a face that was very pale. Her lips were tightly pressed — in resolution, thought Mr. Caryll, who was very observant of her — not to answer her ladyship; for Mr. Caryll had little doubt as to the identity of this dragon.

  “My love — my dear—” began his lordship, advancing a step, his tone a very salve. Then, seeking to create a diversion, he waved a hand towards Mr. Caryll. “Let me present—”

  “Did I speak to you?” she turned to bombard him. “Have you not done harm enough? Had you been aught but a fool — had you respected me as a husband should — you had left well alone and let her go her ways.”

  “There was my duty to her father, to say aught of—”

  “And what of your duty to me?” she blazed, her eyes puckering most malignantly. She reminded Mr. Caryll of nothing so much as a vulture. “Had ye forgotten that? Have ye no thought for decency — no respect for your wife?”

  Her strident voice was echoing through the house and drawing a little crowd of gaping servants to the hall. To spare Mistress Winthrop, Mr. Caryll took it upon himself to close the door. The countess turned at the sound.

  “Who is this?” she asked, measuring the elegant figure with an evil eye. And Mr. Caryll felt it in his bones that she had done him the honor to dislike him at sight.

  “It is a gentleman who — who—” His lordship thought it better, apparently, not to explain the exact circumstances under which he had met the gentleman. He shifted ground. “I was about to present him, my love. It is Mr. Caryll — Mr. Justin Caryll. This, sir, is my Lady Ostermore.”

  Mr. Caryll made her a profound bow. Her ladyship retorted with a sniff.

  “Is it a kinsman of yours, my lord?” and the contempt of the question was laden with a suggestion that smote Mr. Caryll hard. What she implied in wanton offensive mockery was no more than he alone present knew to be the exact and hideous truth.

  “Some remote kinsman, I make no doubt,” the earl explained. “Until yesterday I had not the honor of his acquaintance. Mr. Caryll is from France.”

  “Ye’ll be a Jacobite, no doubt, then,” were her first, uncompromising words to the guest.

  Mr. Caryll made her another bow. “If I were, I should make no secret of it with your ladyship,” he answered with that irritating suavity in which he clothed his most obvious sarcasms.

  Her ladyship opened her eyes a little wider. Here was a tone she was unused to. “And what may your business with his lordship be?”

  “His lordship’s business, I think,” answered Mr. Caryll in a tone of such exquisite politeness and deference that the words seemed purged of all their rudeness.

  “Will you answer me so, sir?” she demanded, nevertheless, her voice quivering.

  “My love!” interpolated his lordship hurriedly, his florid face aflush. “We are vastly indebted to Mr. Caryll, as you shall learn. It was he who saved Hortensia.”

  “Saved the drab, did he? And from what, pray?”

  “Madam!” It was Hortensia who spoke. She had risen, pale with anger, and she made appeal now to her guardian. “My lord, I’ll not remain to be so spoken of. Suffer me to go. That her ladyship should so speak of me to my face — and to a stranger!”

  “Stranger!” crowed her ladyship. “Lard! And what d’ye suppose will happen? Are you so nice about a stranger hearing what I may have to say of you — you that will be the talk of the whole lewd town for this fine escapade? And what’ll the town say of you?”

  “My love!” his lordship sought again to soothe her. “Sylvia, let me implore you! A little moderation! A little charity! Hortensia has been foolish. She confesses so much, herself. Yet, when all is said, ’tis not she is to blame.”

  “Am I?”

  “My love! Was it suggested?”

  “I marvel it was not. Indeed, I marvel! Oh, Hortensia is not to blame, the sweet, pure dove! What is she, then?”

  “To be pitied, ma’am,” said his lordship, stirred to sudden anger, “that she should have lent an ear to your disreputable son.”

  “My son? My son?” cried her ladyship, her voice more and more strident, her face flushing till the rouge upon it was put to shame, revealed in all its unnatural hideousness. “And is he not your son, my lord?”

  “There are moments,” he answered hardily, “when I find it difficult to believe.”

  It was much for him to say, and to her ladyship, of all people. It was pure mutiny. She gasped for air; pumped her brain for words. Meantime, his
lordship continued with an eloquence entirely unusual in him and prompted entirely by his strong feelings in the matter of his son. “He is a disgrace to his name! He always has been. When a boy, he was a liar and a thief, and had he had his deserts he had been lodged in Newgate long ago — or worse. Now that he’s a man, he’s an abandoned profligate, a brawler, a drunkard, a rakehell. So much I have long known him for; but to-day he has shown himself for something even worse. I had thought that my ward, at least, had been sacred from his villainy. That is the last drop. I’ll not condone it. Damn me! I can’t condone it. I’ll disown him. He shall not set foot in house of mine again. Let him keep the company of his Grace of Wharton and his other abandoned friends of the Hell Fire Club; he keeps not mine. He keeps not mine, I say!”

  Her ladyship swallowed hard. From red that she had been, she was now ashen under her rouge. “And, is this wanton baggage to keep mine? Is she to disgrace a household that has grown too nice to contain your son?”

  “My lord! Oh, my lord, give me leave to go,” Hortensia entreated.

  “Ay, go,” sneered her ladyship. “Go! You had best go — back to him. What for did ye leave him? Did ye dream there could be aught to return to?”

  Hortensia turned to her guardian again appealingly. But her ladyship bore down upon her, incensed by this ignoring; she caught the girl’s wrist in her claw-like hand. “Answer me, you drab! What for did you return? What is to be done with you now that y’ are soiled goods? Where shall we find a husband for you?”

  “I do not want a husband, madam,” answered Hortensia.

  “Will ye lead apes in hell, then? Bah! ’Tis not what ye want, my fine madam; ’tis what we can get you; and where shall we find you a husband now?”

  Her eye fell upon Mr. Caryll, standing by one of the windows, a look of profound disgust overplaying the usually immobile face. “Perhaps the gentleman from France — the gentleman who saved you,” she sneered, “will propose to take the office.”

  “With all my heart, ma’am,” Mr. Caryll startled them and himself by answering. Then, perceiving that he had spoken too much upon impulse — given utterance to what was passing in his mind— “I but mention it to show your ladyship how mistaken are your conclusions,” he added.