“Ah!” chuckled Mr. Green. “What now, sir? What now? By what fresh piece of acrobatics will you get out of that?”
“Ye’re a fool,” said Mr. Caryll with calm contempt, and fetched out his snuff-box. “D’ye dream that one witness will suffice to establish so grave a charge? Pah!” He opened his snuff-box to find it empty, and viciously snapped down the lid again. “Pah!” he said again, “ye’ve cost me a whole boxfull of Burgamot.”
“Why did ye throw it in my face?” demanded Mr. Green. “What purpose did ye look to serve but one of treason? Answer me that!”
“I didn’t like the way ye looked at me. ’Twas wanting respect, and I bethought me I would lessen the impudence of your expression. Have ye any other foolish questions for me?” And he looked again from Green to Rotherby, including both in his inquiry. “No?” He rose. “In that case, if you’ll give me leave, and—”
“You do not leave this house,” Rotherby informed him.
“I think you push hospitality too far. Will you desire your lackey to return me my sword? I have affairs elsewhere.”
“Mr. Caryll, I beg that you will understand,” said his lordship, with a calm that he was at some pains to maintain, “that you do not leave this house save in the care of the messengers from the secretary of state.”
Mr. Caryll looked at him, and yawned in his face. “Ye’re prodigiously tiresome,” said he, “did ye but know how I detest disturbances. What shall the secretary of state require of me?”
“He’ll require you on a charge of high treason,” said Mr. Green.
“Have you a warrant to take me?”
“I have not, but—”
“Then how do you dare detain me, sir?” demanded Mr. Caryll sharply. “D’ye think I don’t know the law?”
“I think you’ll know a deal more of it shortly,” countered Mr. Green.
“Meanwhile, sirs, I depart. Offer me violence at your peril.” He moved a step, and then, at a sign from Rotherby, the lackey’s hands fell on him again, and forced him back and down into his chair.
“Away with you for the warrant,” said Rotherby to Green. “We’ll keep him here till you return.”
Mr. Green grinned at the prisoner, and was gone in great haste.
Mr. Caryll lounged back in his chair, and threw one leg over the other. “I have always endeavored,” said he, “to suffer fools as gladly as a Christian should. So since you insist, I’ll be patient until I have the ear of my Lord Carteret — who, I take it, is a man of sense. But if I were you, my lord, and you, my lady, I should not insist. Believe me, you’ll cut poor figures. As for you, my lord, ye’re in none such good odor, as it is.”
“Let that be,” snarled his lordship.
“If I mention it at all, I but do so in your lordship’s own interests. It will be remembered that ye attempted to murder me once, and that will not be of any great help to such accusations as you may bring against me. Besides which, there is the unfortunate circumstance that it’s widely known ye’re not a man to be believed.”
“Will you be silent?” roared his lordship, in a towering passion.
“If I trouble myself to speak at all, it is out of concern for your lordship,” Mr. Caryll insisted sweetly. “And in your own interest, and your ladyship’s, too, I’d counsel you to hear me a moment without witnesses.”
His tone was calculatedly grave. Lord Rotherby looked at him, sneering; not so her ladyship. Less acquainted with his ways, the absolute confidence and unconcern of his demeanor was causing her uneasiness. A man who was perilously entrammelled would not bear himself so easily, she opined. She rose, and crossed to her son’s side.
“What have you to say?” she asked Mr. Caryll.
“Nay, madam,” he replied, “not before these.” And he indicated the servants.
“’Tis but a pretext to have them out of the room,” said Rotherby.
Mr. Caryll laughed the notion to scorn. “If you think that — I give you my word of honor to attempt no violence, nor to depart until you shall give me leave,” said he.
Rotherby, judging Mr. Caryll by his knowledge of himself, still hesitated. But her ladyship realized, in spite of her detestation of the man, that he was not of the temper of those whose word is to be doubted. She signed to the footmen.
“Go,” she bade them. “Wait within call.”
They departed, and Mr. Caryll remained seated for all that her ladyship was standing; it was as if by that he wished to show how little he was minded to move.
Her ladyship’s eye fell upon Hortensia. “Do you go, too, child,” she bade her.
Instead, Hortensia came forward. “I wish to remain, madam,” she said.
“Did I ask you what you wished?” demanded the countess.
“My place is here,” Hortensia explained. “Unless Mr. Caryll should, himself, desire me to depart.”
“Nay, nay,” he cried, and smiled upon her fondly — so fondly that the countess’s eyes grew wider. “With all my heart, I desire you to remain. It is most fitting you should hear that which I have to say.”
“What does it mean?” demanded Rotherby, thrusting himself forward, and scowling from one to the other of them. “What d’ye mean, Hortensia?”
“I am Mr. Caryll’s betrothed wife,” she answered quietly.
Rotherby’s mouth fell open, but he made no sound. Not so her ladyship. A peal of shrill laughter broke from her. “La! What did I tell you, Charles?” Then to Hortensia: “I’m sorry for you, ma’am,” said she. “I think ye’ve been a thought too long in making up your mind.” And she laughed again.
“Lord Ostermore lies above stairs,” Hortensia reminded her, and her ladyship went white at the reminder, the indecency of her laughter borne in upon her.
“Would ye lesson me, girl?” she cried, as much to cover her confusion as to vent her anger at the cause of it. “Ye’ve an odd daring, by God! Ye’ll be well matched with his impudence, there.”
Rotherby, singularly self-contained, recalled her to the occasion.
“Mr. Caryll is waiting,” said he, a sneer in his voice.
“Ah, yes,” she said, and flashing a last malignant glance upon Hortensia, she sank to a chair beside her, but not too near her.
Mr. Caryll sat back, his legs crossed, his elbows on his chair-arms, his finger-tips together. “The thing I have to tell you is of some gravity,” he announced by way of preface.
Rotherby took a seat by the desk, his hand upon the treasonable letters. “Proceed, sir,” he said, importantly. Mr. Caryll nodded, as in acknowledgment of the invitation.
“I will admit, before going further, that in spite of the cheerful countenance I maintained before your lordship’s friend, the bumbailiff, and your lackeys, I recognize that you have me in a very dangerous position.”
“Ah!” from his lordship in a breath of satisfaction, and
“Ah!” from Hortensia in a gasp of apprehension.
Her ladyship retained a stony countenance, and a silence that sorted excellently with it.
“There is,” Mr. Caryll proceeded, marking off the points on his fingers, “the incident at Maidstone; there is your ladyship’s evidence that I was the bearer of just such a letter on the day that first I came here; there is the dangerous circumstance — of which Mr. Green, I am sure, will not fail to make a deal — of my intimacy with Sir Richard Everard, and my constant visits to his lodging, where I was, in fact, on the occasion when he met his death; there is the fact that I committed upon Mr. Green an assault with my snuff box for motives that, after all, admit of but one acceptable explanation; and, lastly, there is the circumstance that, apparently, if interrogated, I can show no good reason why I should be in England at all, where no apparent interest has called me or keeps me.
“Now, these matters are so trivial that taken separately they have no value whatever; taken conjointly, their value is not great; they do not contain evidence enough to justify the hanging of a dog. And yet, I realize that disturbed as the times are, fearful of s
edition as the government finds itself in consequence of the mischief done to public credit by the South Sea disaster, and ready as the ministry is to see plots everywhere and to make examples, pour discourager les autres, if the accusation you intend is laid against me, backed by such evidence as this, it is not impossible — indeed, it is not improbable — that it may — ah — tend to shorten my life.”
“Sir,” sneered Rotherby, “I declare you should have been a lawyer. We haven’t a pleader of such parts and such lucidity at the whole bar.”
Mr. Caryll nodded his thanks. “Your praise is very flattering, my lord,” said he, with a wry smile, and then proceeded: “It is because I see my case to be so very nearly desperate, that I venture to hope you will not persevere in the course you are proposing to adopt.”
Lord Rotherby laughed noiselessly. “Can you urge me any reasons why we should not?”
“If you could urge me any reasons why you should,” said Mr. Caryll, “no doubt I should be able to show you under what misapprehensions you are laboring.” He shot a keen glance at his lordship, whose face had suddenly gone blank. Mr. Caryll smiled quietly. “There is in this something that I do not understand,” he resumed. “It does not satisfy me to suppose, as at first might seem, that you are acting out of sheer malice against me. You have scarcely cause to do that, my lord; and you, my lady, have none. That fool Green — patience — he conceives that he has suffered at my hands. But without your assistance Mr. Green would be powerless to hurt me. What, then, is it that is moving you?”
He paused, looking from one to the other of his declared enemies. They exchanged glances — Hortensia watching them, breathless, her own mind working, too, upon this question that Mr. Caryll had set, yet nowhere finding an answer.
“I had thought,” said her ladyship at last, “that you promised to tell us something that it was in our interest to hear. Instead, you appear to be asking questions.”
Mr. Caryll shifted in his chair. One glance he gave the countess, then smiled. “I have sought at your hands the reasons why you should desire my death,” said he slowly. “You withhold them. Be it so. I take it that you are ashamed of them; and so, their nature is not difficult to conjecture.”
“Sir—” began Rotherby, hotly, half-starting from his seat.
“Nay, let him trundle on, Charles,” said his mother. “He’ll be the sooner done.”
“Instead,” proceeded Mr. Caryll, as if there had been no interruption, “I will now urge you my reasons why you should not so proceed.”
“Ha!” snapped Rotherby. “They will need to be valid.”
Mr. Caryll twisted farther round, to face his lordship more fully. “They are as valid,” said he very impressively — so impressively and sternly that his hearers felt themselves turning cold under his words, filled with some mysterious apprehension. “They are as valid as were my reasons for holding my hand in the field out yonder, when I had you at the mercy of my sword, my lord. Neither more nor less. From that, you may judge them to be very valid.”
“But ye don’t name them,” said her ladyship, attempting to conquer her uneasiness.
“I shall do so,” said he, and turned again to his lordship. “I had no cause to love you that morning, nor at any time, my lord; I had no cause to think — as even you in your heart must realize, if so be that you have a heart, and the intelligence to examine it — I had no cause to think, my lord, that I should be doing other than a good deed by letting drive my blade. That such an opinion was well founded was proven by the thing you did when I turned my back upon you after sparing your useless life.”
Rotherby broke in tempestuously, smiting the desk before him. “If you think to move us to mercy by such—”
“Oh, not to mercy would I move you,” said Mr. Caryll, his hand raised to stay the other, “not to mercy, but to horror of the thing you contemplate.” And then, in an oddly impressive manner, he launched his thunderbolt. “Know, then, that if that morning I would not spill your blood, it was because I should have been spilling the same blood that flows in my own veins; it was because you are my brother; because your father was my father. No less than that was the reason that withheld my hand.”
He had announced his aim of moving them to horror; and it was plain that he had not missed it, for in frozen horror sat they all, their eyes upon him, their cheeks ashen, their mouths agape — even Hortensia, who from what already Mr. Caryll had told her, understood now more than any of them.
After a spell Rotherby spoke. “You are my brother?” he said, his voice colorless. “My brother? What are you saying?”
And then her ladyship found her voice. “Who was your mother?” she inquired, and her very tone was an insult, not to the man who sat there so much as to the memory of poor Antoinette de Maligny. He flushed to the temples, then paled again.
“I’ll not name her to your ladyship,” said he at, last, in a cold, imperious voice.
“I’m glad ye’ve so much decency,” she countered.
“You mistake, I think,” said he. “’Tis respect for my mother that inspires me.” And his green eyes flashed upon the painted hag. She rose up a very fury.
“What are you saying?” she shrilled. “D’ye hear the filthy fellow, Rotherby? He’ll not name the wanton in my presence out of respect for her.”
“For shame, madam! You are speaking of his mother,” cried Hortensia, hot with indignation.
“Pshaw! ’Tis all an impudent lie — a pack of lies!” cried Rotherby. “He’s crafty as all the imps of hell.”
Mr. Caryll rose. “Here in the sight of God and by all that I hold most sacred, I swear that what I have said is true. I swear that Lord Ostermore — your father — was my father. I was born in France, in the year 1690, as I have papers upon me that will prove, which you may see, Rotherby.”
His lordship rose. “Produce them,” said he shortly.
Mr. Caryll drew from an inner pocket of his coat the small leather case that Sir Richard Everard had given him. From this he took a paper which he unfolded. It was a certificate of baptism, copied from the register of the Church of St. Antoine in Paris.
Rotherby held out his hand for it. But Mr. Caryll shook his head. “Stand here beside me, and read it,” said he.
Obeying him, Rotherby went and read that authenticated copy, wherein it was declared that Sir Richard Everard had brought to the Church of St. Antoine for baptism a male child, which he had declared to be the son of John Caryll, Viscount Rotherby, and Antoinette de Maligny, and which had received in baptism the name of Justin.
Rotherby drew away again, his head sunk on his breast. Her ladyship was seated, her eyes upon her son, her fingers drumming absently at the arms of her chair. Then Rotherby swung round again.
“How do I know that you are the person designated there — this Justin Caryll?”
“You do not; but you may. Cast your mind back to that night at White’s when you picked your quarrel with me, my lord. Do you remember how Stapleton and Collis spoke up for me, declared that they had known me from boyhood at Oxford, and had visited me at my chateau in France? What was the name of that chateau, my lord — do you remember?”
Rotherby looked at him, searching his memory. But he did not need to search far. At first glance the name of Maligny had seemed familiar to him. “It was Maligny,” he replied, “and yet—”
“If more is needed to convince you, I can bring a hundred witnesses from France, who have known me from infancy. You may take it that I can establish my identity beyond all doubt.”
“And what if you do?” demanded her ladyship suddenly. “What if you do establish your identity as my lord’s bastard? What claim shall that be upon us?”
“That, ma’am,” answered Mr. Caryll very gravely, “I wait to learn from my brother here.”
CHAPTER XXI. THE LION’S SKIN
For a spell there was utter silence in that spacious, pillared chamber. Mr. Caryll and her ladyship had both resumed their chairs: the former spuriously calm; the lat
ter making no attempt to conceal her agitation. Hortensia leant forward, an eager spectator, watching the three actors in this tragicomedy.
As for Rotherby, he stood with bent head and furrowed brow. It was for him to speak, and yet he was utterly at a loss for words. He was not moved at the news he had received, so much as dismayed. It dictated a course that would interfere with all his plans, and therefore a course unthinkable. So he remained puzzled how to act, how to deal with this unexpected situation.
It was her ladyship who was the first to break the silence. She had been considering Mr. Caryll through narrowing eyes, the corners of her mouth drawn down. She had caught the name of Maligny when it was uttered, and out of the knowledge which happened to be hers — though Mr. Caryll was ignorant of this — it set her thinking.
“I do not believe that you are the son of Mademoiselle de Maligny,” she said at last. “I never heard that my lord had a son; I cannot believe there was so much between them.”
Mr. Caryll stared, startled out of his habitual calm. Rotherby turned to her with an exclamation of surprise. “How?” he cried. “You knew, then? My father was—”
She laughed mirthlessly. “Your father would have married her had he dared,” she informed them. “’Twas to beg his father’s consent that he braved his banishment and came to England. But his father was as headstrong as himself; held just such views as he, himself, held later where you were concerned. He would not hear of the match. I was to be had for the asking. My father was a man who traded in his children, and he had offered me, with a jointure that was a fortune, to the Earl of Ostermore as a wife for his son.”
Mr. Caryll was listening, all ears. Some light was being shed upon much that had lain in darkness.
“And so,” she proceeded, “your grandfather constrained your father to forget the woman he had left in France, and to marry me. I know not what sins I had committed that I should have been visited with such a punishment. But so it befell. Your father resisted, dallying with the matter for a whole year. Then there was a duel fought. A cousin of Mademoiselle de Maligny’s crossed to England, and forced a quarrel upon your father. They met, and M. de Maligny was killed. Then a change set in in my lord’s bearing, and one day, a month or so later, he gave way to his father’s insistence, and we were wed. But I do not believe that my lord had left a son in France — I do not believe that had he done so, I should not have known it; I do not believe that under such circumstances, unfeeling as he was, he would have abandoned Mademoiselle de Maligny.”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 210