Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Sir John sat very still. Slowly the colour faded from his face. His lips parted, but he made no sound. Then he began to tremble from head to foot.

  “There, there! Tut, tut!” cried the doctor, slipping his spectacles once more on to his nose, and observing his visitor. “I told you ’twould startle you. Ye would have it in plain terms.”

  “I...” The baronet gulped. “I am quite myself, sir,” he said, striving valiantly to master his agitation. He drew out a handkerchief, and mopped his clammy brow. “But I confess you startled me. In fact, I hardly understand you even now. Do you mean that Harry Gaynor is — is alive?”

  “Not only alive, but almost well. Mending rapidly. In a day or two he will be in case to go his ways again.”

  There followed a silence which the professor did not attempt to interrupt. He understood that such news as this must be given time for assimilation by any ordinary brain.

  “But this is a miracle!” cried Sir John presently, yet he spoke without heartiness. Obviously he was still incredulous; obviously he still but half understood the thing he had been told.

  “Tut!” clucked the professor. “There are no miracles in nature. A miracle is a thing out of nature; and the thing I tell you is a thing in nature. Sufficiently rare to look like a miracle; but no miracle at all.

  “Where is he?” was Sir John’s next question, his voice trembling.

  “Above stairs, awaiting you,” was the answer, and it was an answer that seemed to dispel at last the mists that were obfuscating the baronet’s understanding.

  Harry Gaynor was alive, above-stairs, and awaiting him. Those facts he grasped clearly, and for the moment nothing more. He came instantly to his feet.

  “Why was I not told of this before? Why did your letter convey no hint of it?”

  “You must ask the Captain,” said the professor, smiling. “I would have communicated with his friends at once. But he would not have it. A very cautious fellow for all his recklessness. But I detain you, eh? This way, sir.”

  He led Sir John from the room and up a steep, dark staircase. He paused on the narrow landing above, and after a preliminary tap he threw open a door. The baronet entered and then halted abruptly, as if in spite of what he had been told he still could not believe his eyes which showed him Captain Gaynor in a quilted bed-gown standing smiling to receive him.

  Behind him the doctor had closed the door on the outside, leaving the two friends alone.

  “Harry!” cried Sir John, his voice husky.

  “My dear Sir John!” said the Captain, and he held out a hand in welcome. But the baronet, under the impulse of his overmastering feelings, thrust aside the hand, and, opening wide his arms, clasped the young man to his heart.

  “My boy, my boy!” he mumbled brokenly, and the tears stood in his eyes. “We have wept you dead, and you are restored to us alive.”

  Presently, when the Captain had soothed Sir John’s emotion and brought him by slow degrees to the full acceptance of this amazing state of things, they sat and talked at length, and Gaynor expounded his plans, which were concerned with little more than his immediate departure from England.

  “The law may run that a man shall not suffer twice for the same offence,” he said, “but I am by no means sure that an exception might not be made in the case of a dangerous Jacobite agent, that the Government might not find ways of disposing of me did it leak out that I have escaped my doom.”

  “Yes, yes,” the baronet agreed. “You are wise in that. You will need money, perhaps?”

  “I have,” was the answer, “a letter of credit upon Childes, under which I can draw something a little short of two thousand guineas. But I think it would be wiser not to use it. For all that the identification of Captain Jenkyn with Captain Gaynor might not have been complete, yet it is generally understood, no doubt that they are one and the same, and Childes might account it their duty to advise the Government.”

  “You are right,” said Sir John. “You must use my purse to any extent you need.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the Captain replied, without hesitation. “A hundred guineas will suffice to get me to Rome.”

  “I will bring you the sum tomorrow.”

  “Then, I think, if Dr Blizzard will permit it, I will set out on the following day. And now of yourself, Sir John?”

  Sir John looked at him, and marvelled that there had been so far no word of Damaris; yet he thought he understood the Captain’s hesitation. “Damaris,” he said slowly, “will be as one born again when I bear her these glad tidings.”

  He saw the clear-cut young face grow white, and he observed the falter in the voice that asked him: “She — she has grieved?”

  “Grieved, lad? She has been almost as lifeless as we deemed yourself. Oh, but this will be great medicine. It will bring back the roses to her cheeks, and the sparkle to her eyes. And” — he stopped short, smitten of a sudden by a great thought— “it will make an end of all danger of any such sacrifice as she has been contemplating.”

  “Sacrifice? What sacrifice?”

  Too late Sir John perceived that his words had exceeded prudence. He could not now withdraw, and so he was forced to confide in Captain Gaynor, to lay his own troubles before him. Nor was he reluctant so to do; for upon the young man’s resourcefulness he founded a faint hope that some way might yet be perceived, not apparent to Sir John himself, out of the danger that hung over him.

  Captain Gaynor listened inscrutably to the tale that Sir John unfolded; the only outward sign he made was to nod shortly when the baronet pointed out the quality of the mesh in which Pauncefort was enfolding him. When Sir John had done the young man rose, and with hands clasped behind him, head bent in thought, he slowly paced the length of the chamber from door to window and back again. He was profoundly touched by the nobility of Damaris in her proposed sacrifice and the nobility of Sir John in his determination to frustrate her.

  “For the present,” Sir John had said, in conclusion, “I have succeeded in persuading her that, far from removing the peril, she will but increase it by consenting to marry that villain. If to this were added the knowledge that you have been so incredibly, so miraculously, spared, I think our work would be complete; for I am convinced there would be an end to the despair upon which her courage of self-sacrifice is founded.”

  “It — it amounts to that?” cried the Captain incredulously.

  “My dear Harry, had you heard her say to me, ‘I am but a husk — all that was myself perished at Tyburn,’ you had so gauged the depth of that despair that you had been moved to tears.”

  He was not far from moved to them by the repetition of those words. He paced on, resolving all that Sir John had told him, seeking a way through this baffling tangle. At last, as he approached the window for the second time, he paused and his face lighted.

  A course which he had earlier considered but which he had discarded as too desperate where it was only calculated to serve himself, recurred to him now. It was a reckless, adventurous audacious course, which yet might succeed by virtue of its very audacity. He threw back his head and laughed his full-throated, musical laugh. Sir John looked up, almost startled by the sound.

  “I think,” said the young man, “that it was high time that Captain Gaynor should come to life again.”

  Sir John, completely bewildered, continued to stare at him, whereupon that keen face became once more inscrutable.

  “Look you, Sir John,” he cried, “this danger of yours has been exaggerated to you. Let us say that they arrest you. To convict you they must still prove that Captain Gaynor and Captain Jenkyn were one and the same man, and that fact has not yet been entirely established.”

  “Pish!” said the baronet. “From the moment that it becomes necessary to advance proof of that, the Government can have no difficulty in doing so.”

  “Let us say that it can; let us say that witnesses could be found — though, I confess, I know not whence. The Government must still prove that you knew of my connect
ion with the Jacobite movement, that you knew me for an agent of the King over the Water, and that I did not impose upon you as I imposed upon so many others — including Mr Second Secretary Templeton.”

  “Oh, Harry, Harry! These are but straws that will never float me through those waters, and you know it.”

  “I do not know it,” said Harry, and he was smiling now. “But, even so, I have a sort of raft in the background that may serve you better.”

  “What is it?”

  The Captain reflected a moment. Then— “I have yet a little work to do upon it to render it seaworthy,” he said thoughtfully “But I hope to have all in readiness by tomorrow, when you come again. I will tell you then.”

  And, despite Sir John’s entreaties, not another word would the soldier add until the morrow, when Sir John not only promised to return but to bring Damaris with him, a promise which kept the Captain awake for most of the night in mingling joy and fear at the coming meeting.

  But on the morrow, which was Tuesday, there was no sign of Sir John. The Captain had made the best of himself with the black suit in which he had been taken and hanged — the only suit he had. He had procured flowers — baskets of roses and tall virginal lilies — to deck his chamber for so wondrous an occasion. The morning went in preparation; the afternoon in expectation; the evening in sick disappointment and vain clingings to hope even after the candles had been lighted. Eventually he went to bed, still buoyed by the conviction that they must come tomorrow.

  But the morrow again went by in the same manner, and still there was neither sight nor sign of Sir John.

  On the Thursday morning, worn out by this suspense, utterly unable to bear more of it, the Captain borrowed the anatomist’s apprentice, who, on that former occasion, had carried a message to Priory Close, and despatched him this time with a request by word of mouth for news.

  The youngster returned with a tale of a desolated house and the information that Sir John had been arrested on returning home on the Monday night.

  The Captain drew a deep breath at the news; not a breath of dismay, but of resolve, almost of relief. He thanked the messenger, and when the lad had gone he turned to the anatomist, who sat with him.

  “Decidedly,” he said grimly, “it is time I came to life again. What’s o’clock?”

  “Eh?” said the professor. “O’clock? Why, ‘twill be nearly two.”

  “Then it is time I took my leave of you.”

  “Tut!” clucked the professor, rising. “D’ye mean ye’re going, eh? Where are ye going?”

  “Back to life,” said Harry Gaynor.

  “But in your condition?” cried the dismayed anatomist, who was reluctant to part with so amiable a guest. “Y’amaze me!”

  “What ails my condition?” Gaynor asked him. “Look at me,” he commanded.

  Down came the spectacles from the professor’s forehead to his nose.

  “Ye’ve a somewhat feverish air,” said he.

  “That is anticipation,” said the patient. He took the doctor’s hand. “There is a debt between us, my friend, that it would tax me to discharge.”

  “Tut — tut!”

  “Ye’ve been more than friend to me. And I hope that friends we may remain, and that if at any time Harry Gaynor has it in his power to serve you ye’ll not forget to make him happy by acquainting him with the circumstance.”

  “My dear sir, my dear lad! Tut — tut! Tut — tut!”

  “I leave your hospitable and kindly roof, sir, with profound regret. But this is not a parting. We remain friends, and” — he hesitated an instant— “there is the matter of the charges to which you have been put—”

  “Sir!” the doctor exploded in the simulation of a towering rage. “Am I a vintner? Do I keep a tavern?”

  The Captain pressed his hands. “Forgive me,” he said. “My inability to repay the real debt rendered me the more eager in the matter of this other trivial one.”

  “Not another word or ye’ll affront me, eh!”

  They parted the best of friends in the world, and, after the Captain had gone, that lonely anatomist realised for the first time in all his absorbed and studious years that his house in the Gray’s Inn Road was dingy, dull and dismal.

  The Captain in his black suit and a hat that had been procured for him by the professor’s apprentice, with a couple of guineas in his pocket borrowed from Dr Blizzard at parting, walked briskly down the road across Holborn and on until he came into the slush and filth of Temple Bar.

  Here he hired him a chair, and was carried to that inn in Chandos Street where he had alighted a fortnight ago, and where his baggage would still be lying.

  Chapter 20. MR TEMPLETON IN RETIREMENT

  Sir Richard Tollemache Templeton, in his distant lonely seat in Devonshire, received from his cousin, the Second Secretary, a letter which produced in him the greatest consternation.

  MY DEAR TOLLEMACHE [wrote the Second Secretary], — De profundis — out of the very depths of despondency I write to you, smitten down by a malignancy of fortune which I find it difficult even now to credit should have encompassed me. It has demanded of me the resignation of that high office which I held under the Crown, and today I am a man who hides his head in shame from the gloating stare of the vulgar, whose envy is ever gladdened by the spectacle of one fallen from high estate. It is a full week since the untoward event befell which has been the occasion of this overwhelming disaster, yet it is only today that I am able sufficiently to take heart and summon the courage necessary to indite to you this miserable epistle, giving you, as is your due as the head of our honourable house, news of my condition. It solaces me almost, my dear Tollemache, that in such an hour, with the burden of ridicule and disgrace upon my shoulders, I am able to reflect that some of the blame for this attaches to yourself as well. You are not to suppose by this that I presume to censure you. We have both been the sport of malign Fate and of a villain who has already expiated on the gallows the perversity of his existence. But that you should have been cozened with me, that my cozening should in part have been a natural sequel to your own, rather than an independent error of mine, is a helpful reflection to me in this dark hour. But for this merciful circumstance I should never be able to show you my face again, I should not, indeed, have the courage to indite these lines to you. The villain to whom I am referring, my dear Tollemache, is one who imposed himself upon you and abused the confidence with which, a little indiscriminatingly, I fear (though it is an error to which all men are liable), you honoured him. I speak of Henry Gaynor — or the man who called himself by that name. Strong in my faith in his loyalty, a faith rooted in your own absolute assurance of it, I defended him to the utmost of my strength when imputations were cast upon that loyalty, when it was first whispered that he was none other than the elusive Jacobite agent who has been known by the name — for want of knowledge of his real one — of Captain Jenkyn. So positive, you will remember, were these assurances of yours that I stood between that man and arrest, pledging my credit and my very honour for his loyalty. But, as I have said, we have both been most grossly abused. There came a moment when it was impossible to defend him any longer. His arrest was ordered and effected and regarding himself as lost he took the course so common with desperate men who are cornered: he weakly confessed his treason and meekly submitted to his fate. He was hanged a week ago, as he more richly deserved than any man I have known of. Need I add more? Need I tell you how this honour of mine which I had pledged was all but lost to me by my rashness, how nothing remained me but to resign my office and retire before the storm of contempt and ridicule which my lord Carteret directed upon my luckless head? I am a broken man, my dear Tollemache, and never was there one in greater need of sympathy and pity, never one more lonely Though I hide me from the world, here among my books, I cannot hide me from Emily, whose tongue these days is as a sword of sharpness to my flesh. I can write no more. But if you will take pity on my loneliness, and permit me to come to you in Devonshire for a season,
until this matter shall be forgotten and I can again show my face among men, I shall be your deeply grateful as I am your affectionate and unfortunate cousin, EDWARD TEMPLETON.

  To Sir Richard this news had been altogether incredible. That Lord Carteret, persisting in the absurd mistake, or urged on by mistaken advisers, should, in spite of all, have gone the length of arresting Harry Gaynor as Captain Jenkyn was not perhaps surprising. But that Harry Gaynor — the Harry Gaynor he knew, of whose career he conceived that he was acquainted with every phase, whose every year, indeed, was accounted for by his credentials — that this man should have admitted himself to be the Jacobite agent in question was impossible to believe.

  Sir Richard scouted the notion. His cousin was mad, or else some monstrous error lay at the bottom of the affair.

  He did not trouble to answer the letter. So overwhelmed was he by its contents that two days after its receipt — so soon as he could set in order certain affairs on his estate that demanded his immediate attention — he set out for London. He arrived there two days later, having travelled post-haste all the way, and the very Thursday that saw Captain Gaynor leave the house of Professor Blizzard saw Sir Richard’s dusty chaise drawn up before his cousin’s door in Old Palace Yard.

  He found the Second Secretary in his library. Edward Templeton was in deshabille, although it was already past noon. He wore a bed-gown of wine-coloured satin, and his cropped head was hidden in a nightcap of the same hue. His long countenance seemed to have grown longer, sallower and hollower in these last few days. His chaps hung dolefully. He looked uncommonly like a bloodhound that has been whipped, and his deep-set eyes were singularly dolorous. To look at him was to perceive that here was a fellow who pitied himself damnably.

  He was standing to receive his cousin, and he went to meet him with both hands held out.