Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  The Redon experiment had justified itself from the first. Stimulated and encouraged by this, Andre-Louis worked day and night during the month that they spent in that busy little town. The moment had been well chosen, for the trade in chestnuts of which Redon is the centre was just then at its height. And every afternoon the little theatre was packed with spectators. The fame of the troupe had gone forth, borne by the chestnut-growers of the district, who were bringing their wares to Redon market, and the audiences were made up of people from the surrounding country, and from neighbouring villages as far out as Allaire, Saint-Perrieux and Saint-Nicholas. To keep the business from slackening, Andre-Louis prepared a new scenario every week. He wrote three in addition to those two with which he had already supplied the company; these were “The Marriage of Pantaloon,” “The Shy Lover,” and “The Terrible Captain.” Of these the last was the greatest success. It was based upon the “Miles Gloriosus” of Plautus, with great opportunities for Rhodomont, and a good part for Scaramouche as the roaring captain’s sly lieutenant. Its success was largely due to the fact that Andre-Louis amplified the scenario to the extent of indicating very fully in places the lines which the dialogue should follow, whilst here and there he had gone so far as to supply some of the actual dialogue to be spoken, without, however, making it obligatory upon the actors to keep to the letter of it.

  And meanwhile as the business prospered, he became busy with tailors, improving the wardrobe of the company, which was sorely in need of improvement. He ran to earth a couple of needy artists, lured them into the company to play small parts — apothecaries and notaries — and set them to beguile their leisure in painting new scenery, so as to be ready for what he called the conquest of Nantes, which was to come in the new year. Never in his life had he worked so hard; never in his life had he worked at all by comparison with his activities now. His fund of energy and enthusiasm was inexhaustible, like that of his good humour. He came and went, acted, wrote, conceived, directed, planned, and executed, what time M. Binet took his ease at last in comparative affluence, drank Burgundy every night, ate white bread and other delicacies, and began to congratulate himself upon his astuteness in having made this industrious, tireless fellow his partner. Having discovered how idle had been his fears of performing at Redon, he now began to dismiss the terrors with which the notion of Nantes had haunted him.

  And his happiness was reflected throughout the ranks of his company, with the single exception always of Climene. She had ceased to sneer at Scaramouche, having realized at last that her sneers left him untouched and recoiled upon herself. Thus her almost indefinable resentment of him was increased by being stifled, until, at all costs, an outlet for it must be found.

  One day she threw herself in his way as he was leaving the theatre after the performance. The others had already gone, and she had returned upon pretence of having forgotten something.

  “Will you tell me what I have done to you?” she asked him, point-blank.

  “Done to me, mademoiselle?” He did not understand.

  She made a gesture of impatience. “Why do you hate me?”

  “Hate you, mademoiselle? I do not hate anybody. It is the most stupid of all the emotions. I have never hated — not even my enemies.”

  “What Christian resignation!”

  “As for hating you, of all people! Why... I consider you adorable. I envy Leandre every day of my life. I have seriously thought of setting him to play Scaramouche, and playing lovers myself.”

  “I don’t think you would be a success,” said she.

  “That is the only consideration that restrains me. And yet, given the inspiration that is given Leandre, it is possible that I might be convincing.”

  “Why, what inspiration do you mean?”

  “The inspiration of playing to so adorable a Climene.”

  Her lazy eyes were now alert to search that lean face of his.

  “You are laughing at me,” said she, and swept past him into the theatre on her pretended quest. There was nothing to be done with such a fellow. He was utterly without feeling. He was not a man at all.

  Yet when she came forth again at the end of some five minutes, she found him still lingering at the door.

  “Not gone yet?” she asked him, superciliously.

  “I was waiting for you, mademoiselle. You will be walking to the inn. If I might escort you...”

  “But what gallantry! What condescension!”

  “Perhaps you would prefer that I did not?”

  “How could I prefer that, M. Scaramouche? Besides, we are both going the same way, and the streets are common to all. It is that I am overwhelmed by the unusual honour.”

  He looked into her piquant little face, and noted how obscured it was by its cloud of dignity. He laughed.

  “Perhaps I feared that the honour was not sought.”

  “Ah, now I understand,” she cried. “It is for me to seek these honours. I am to woo a man before he will pay me the homage of civility. It must be so, since you, who clearly know everything, have said so. It remains for me to beg your pardon for my ignorance.”

  “It amuses you to be cruel,” said Scaramouche. “No matter. Shall we walk?”

  They set out together, stepping briskly to warm their blood against the wintry evening air. Awhile they went in silence, yet each furtively observing the other.

  “And so, you find me cruel?” she challenged him at length, thereby betraying the fact that the accusation had struck home.

  He looked at her with a half smile. “Will you deny it?”

  “You are the first man that ever accused me of that.”

  “I dare not suppose myself the first man to whom you have been cruel. That were an assumption too flattering to myself. I must prefer to think that the others suffered in silence.”

  “Mon Dieu! Have you suffered?” She was between seriousness and raillery.

  “I place the confession as an offering on the altar of your vanity.”

  “I should never have suspected it.”

  “How could you? Am I not what your father calls a natural actor? I was an actor long before I became Scaramouche. Therefore I have laughed. I often do when I am hurt. When you were pleased to be disdainful, I acted disdain in my turn.”

  “You acted very well,” said she, without reflecting.

  “Of course. I am an excellent actor.”

  “And why this sudden change?”

  “In response to the change in you. You have grown weary of your part of cruel madam — a dull part, believe me, and unworthy of your talents. Were I a woman and had I your loveliness and your grace, Climene, I should disdain to use them as weapons of offence.”

  “Loveliness and grace!” she echoed, feigning amused surprise. But the vain baggage was mollified. “When was it that you discovered this beauty and this grace, M. Scaramouche?”

  He looked at her a moment, considering the sprightly beauty of her, the adorable femininity that from the first had so irresistibly attracted him.

  “One morning when I beheld you rehearsing a love-scene with Leandre.”

  He caught the surprise that leapt to her eyes, before she veiled them under drooping lids from his too questing gaze.

  “Why, that was the first time you saw me.”

  “I had no earlier occasion to remark your charms.”

  “You ask me to believe too much,” said she, but her tone was softer than he had ever known it yet.

  “Then you’ll refuse to believe me if I confess that it was this grace and beauty that determined my destiny that day by urging me to join your father’s troupe.”

  At that she became a little out of breath. There was no longer any question of finding an outlet for resentment. Resentment was all forgotten.

  “But why? With what object?”

  “With the object of asking you one day to be my wife.”

  She halted under the shock of that, and swung round to face him. Her glance met his own without, shyness now; there was a harde
ning glitter in her eyes, a faint stir of colour in her cheeks. She suspected him of an unpardonable mockery.

  “You go very fast, don’t you?” she asked him, with heat.

  “I do. Haven’t you observed it? I am a man of sudden impulses. See what I have made of the Binet troupe in less than a couple of months. Another might have laboured for a year and not achieved the half of it. Shall I be slower in love than in work? Would it be reasonable to expect it? I have curbed and repressed myself not to scare you by precipitancy. In that I have done violence to my feelings, and more than all in using the same cold aloofness with which you chose to treat me. I have waited — oh! so patiently — until you should tire of that mood of cruelty.”

  “You are an amazing man,” said she, quite colourlessly.

  “I am,” he agreed with her. “It is only the conviction that I am not commonplace that has permitted me to hope as I have hoped.”

  Mechanically, and as if by tacit consent, they resumed their walk.

  “And I ask you to observe,” he said, “when you complain that I go very fast, that, after all, I have so far asked you for nothing.”

  “How?” quoth she, frowning.

  “I have merely told you of my hopes. I am not so rash as to ask at once whether I may realize them.”

  “My faith, but that is prudent,” said she, tartly.

  “Of course.”

  It was his self-possession that exasperated her; for after that she walked the short remainder of the way in silence, and so, for the moment, the matter was left just there.

  But that night, after they had supped, it chanced that when Climene was about to retire, he and she were alone together in the room abovestairs that her father kept exclusively for his company. The Binet Troupe, you see, was rising in the world.

  As Climene now rose to withdraw for the night, Scaramouche rose with her to light her candle. Holding it in her left hand, she offered him her right, a long, tapering, white hand at the end of a softly rounded arm that was bare to the elbow.

  “Good-night, Scaramouche,” she said, but so softly, so tenderly, that he caught his breath, and stood conning her, his dark eyes aglow.

  Thus a moment, then he took the tips of her fingers in his grasp, and bowing over the hand, pressed his lips upon it. Then he looked at her again. The intense femininity of her lured him on, invited him, surrendered to him. Her face was pale, there was a glitter in her eyes, a curious smile upon her parted lips, and under its fichu-menteur her bosom rose and fell to complete the betrayal of her.

  By the hand he continued to hold, he drew her towards him. She came unresisting. He took the candle from her, and set it down on the sideboard by which she stood. The next moment her slight, lithe body was in his arms, and he was kissing her, murmuring her name as if it were a prayer.

  “Am I cruel now?” she asked him, panting. He kissed her again for only answer. “You made me cruel because you would not see,” she told him next in a whisper.

  And then the door opened, and M. Binet came in to have his paternal eyes regaled by this highly indecorous behaviour of his daughter.

  He stood at gaze, whilst they quite leisurely, and in a self-possession too complete to be natural, detached each from the other.

  “And what may be the meaning of this?” demanded M. Binet, bewildered and profoundly shocked.

  “Does it require explaining?” asked Scaramouche. “Doesn’t it speak for itself — eloquently? It means that Climene and I have taken it into our heads to be married.”

  “And doesn’t it matter what I may take into my head?”

  “Of course. But you could have neither the bad taste nor the bad heart to offer any obstacle.”

  “You take that for granted? Aye, that is your way, to be sure — to take things for granted. But my daughter is not to be taken for granted. I have very definite views for my daughter. You have done an unworthy thing, Scaramouche. You have betrayed my trust in you. I am very angry with you.”

  He rolled forward with his ponderous yet curiously noiseless gait. Scaramouche turned to her, smiling, and handed her the candle.

  “If you will leave us, Climene, I will ask your hand of your father in proper form.”

  She vanished, a little fluttered, lovelier than ever in her mixture of confusion and timidity. Scaramouche closed the door and faced the enraged M. Binet, who had flung himself into an armchair at the head of the short table, faced him with the avowed purpose of asking for Climene’s hand in proper form. And this was how he did it:

  “Father-in-law,” said he, “I congratulate you. This will certainly mean the Comedie Francaise for Climene, and that before long, and you shall shine in the glory she will reflect. As the father of Madame Scaramouche you may yet be famous.”

  Binet, his face slowly empurpling, glared at him in speechless stupefaction. His rage was the more utter from his humiliating conviction that whatever he might say or do, this irresistible fellow would bend him to his will. At last speech came to him.

  “You’re a damned corsair,” he cried, thickly, banging his ham-like fist upon the table. “A corsair! First you sail in and plunder me of half my legitimate gains; and now you want to carry off my daughter. But I’ll be damned if I’ll give her to a graceless, nameless scoundrel like you, for whom the gallows are waiting already.”

  Scaramouche pulled the bell-rope, not at all discomposed. He smiled. There was a flush on his cheeks and a gleam in his eyes. He was very pleased with the world that night. He really owed a great debt to M. de Lesdiguieres.

  “Binet,” said he, “forget for once that you are Pantaloon, and behave as a nice, amiable father-in-law should behave when he has secured a son-in-law of exceptionable merits. We are going to have a bottle of Burgundy at my expense, and it shall be the best bottle of Burgundy to be found in Redon. Compose yourself to do fitting honour to it. Excitations of the bile invariably impair the fine sensitiveness of the palate.”

  CHAPTER VII. THE CONQUEST OF NANTES

  The Binet Troupe opened in Nantes — as you may discover in surviving copies of the “Courrier Nantais” — on the Feast of the Purification with “Les Fourberies de Scaramouche.” But they did not come to Nantes as hitherto they had gone to little country villages and townships, unheralded and depending entirely upon the parade of their entrance to attract attention to themselves. Andre-Louis had borrowed from the business methods of the Comedie Francaise. Carrying matters with a high hand entirely in his own fashion, he had ordered at Redon the printing of playbills, and four days before the company’s descent upon Nantes, these bills were pasted outside the Theatre Feydau and elsewhere about the town, and had attracted — being still sufficiently unusual announcements at the time — considerable attention. He had entrusted the matter to one of the company’s latest recruits, an intelligent young man named Basque, sending him on ahead of the company for the purpose.

  You may see for yourself one of these playbills in the Carnavalet Museum. It details the players by their stage names only, with the exception of M. Binet and his daughter, and leaving out of account that he who plays Trivelin in one piece appears as Tabarin in another, it makes the company appear to be at least half as numerous again as it really was. It announces that they will open with “Les Fourberies de Scaramouche,” to be followed by five other plays of which it gives the titles, and by others not named, which shall also be added should the patronage to be received in the distinguished and enlightened city of Nantes encourage the Binet Troupe to prolong its sojourn at the Theatre Feydau. It lays great stress upon the fact that this is a company of improvisers in the old Italian manner, the like of which has not been seen in France for half a century, and it exhorts the public of Nantes not to miss this opportunity of witnessing these distinguished mimes who are reviving for them the glories of the Comedie de l’Art. Their visit to Nantes — the announcement proceeds — is preliminary to their visit to Paris, where they intend to throw down the glove to the actors of the Comedie Francaise, and to show the worl
d how superior is the art of the improviser to that of the actor who depends upon an author for what he shall say, and who consequently says always the same thing every time that he plays in the same piece.

  It is an audacious bill, and its audacity had scared M. Binet out of the little sense left him by the Burgundy which in these days he could afford to abuse. He had offered the most vehement opposition. Part of this Andre-Louis had swept aside; part he had disregarded.

  “I admit that it is audacious,” said Scaramouche. “But at your time of life you should have learnt that in this world nothing succeeds like audacity.”

  “I forbid it; I absolutely forbid it,” M. Binet insisted.

  “I knew you would. Just as I know that you’ll be very grateful to me presently for not obeying you.”

  “You are inviting a catastrophe.”

  “I am inviting fortune. The worst catastrophe that can overtake you is to be back in the market-halls of the country villages from which I rescued you. I’ll have you in Paris yet in spite of yourself. Leave this to me.”

  And he went out to attend to the printing. Nor did his preparations end there. He wrote a piquant article on the glories of the Comedie de l’Art, and its resurrection by the improvising troupe of the great mime Florimond Binet. Binet’s name was not Florimond; it was just Pierre. But Andre-Louis had a great sense of the theatre. That article was an amplification of the stimulating matter contained in the playbills; and he persuaded Basque, who had relations in Nantes, to use all the influence he could command, and all the bribery they could afford, to get that article printed in the “Courrier Nantais” a couple of days before the arrival of the Binet Troupe.

  Basque had succeeded, and, considering the undoubted literary merits and intrinsic interest of the article, this is not at all surprising.

  And so it was upon an already expectant city that Binet and his company descended in that first week of February. M. Binet would have made his entrance in the usual manner — a full-dress parade with banging drums and crashing cymbals. But to this Andre-Louis offered the most relentless opposition.