Léonie demanded details, and he afforded them. It was just such a story as I had expected to hear. Dalliance was to the Vicomte as the breath of his nostrils — a necessity of life. The trouble that in Paris it had visited upon him had not taught him any salutary lesson; in the provinces he had resumed the pastime, and heaven alone knows how many banal affairs he had not scattered in his passage through Languédoc. But here at this inn at Les Martyrs he had entered upon one that was to bring him more serious consequences. Whilst in hiding there, protected by this staunch Orléaniste, Dangeau, he had amused himself by making love to Sophie. To him it could be no more than amusement; but it was an amusement of which the poor girl — not being a fine lady of Court — knew nothing. To her it was a serious matter, and she accepted each well-worn phrase of gallantry in its literal sense, as a true expression of sentiment. Realising at last the indiscretion of his behaviour, Villebon had sought to beat a retreat. But at the first sign of this, old Dangeau had stepped forward. He had observed, and in his simplicity taken as earnest the Vicomte’s wooing of his daughter — for those montagnards of Languédoc have a curious ignorance of the distinctions of rank that prevail in other provinces — and he was not minded that this debonair young rebel should break his daughter’s heart. He had protested against the Vicomte’s departure; he had reasoned with him touching Sophie, and I am satisfied that the musketoon was advanced as a weighty piece of logic. Moreover, Villebon realised that Dangeau might even avenge himself by delivering him up to the King, and he had no appetite for being broken on the wheel, so that out of fear he had temporised by a promise to marry Sophie so soon as he might conveniently do so.
“But,” the Vicomte concluded, with a deprecatory smile, “you will agree, Mademoiselle, that it were a heavy price to pay for the amusement of expressing a few pretty sentiments.”
“I own it heavy, but you must pay it, Monsieur,” she said, whereat I stared at her in my amazement.
“’Tis a good jest, that,” he laughed, displaying his fine teeth.
“It is no jest at all, Monsieur.”
His jaw dropped, and he eyed her in bewilderment, sobered by her sternness.
“But, Mademoiselle, I am betrothed to you!”
“We will not speak of that again, if you please,” she answered coldly. And, ashamed, he hung his head, realising that indeed for one who had promised marriage to Dangeau’s daughter to speak of being betrothed to Mademoiselle de Montivry was an insolence too gross.
They wrangled awhile after that: she telling him that he must wed the girl, he laughing the notion to scorn.
“You pledged your word,” she cried at last, burning with indignation — for she was beginning to know this very choice Vicomte. “In my hearing you renewed the pledge. Will you be dishonoured?”
At that he abandoned mockery, and grew solemn as a father-confessor. He expostulated with her, whereupon she turned to threats and to the bargain which she had come to drive with him.
“Monsieur de Villebon,” said she, “at Jarnages, this afternoon, we passed a company of the King’s dragoons. They are closing round this part of the Cevennes, and at this hour your escape will already be impossible. By morning you will be a prisoner. Your fate you can guess, Monsieur.”
He turned pale at that. On the battlefield he may have been brave as a lion; but the thought of the wheel gave his stomach an unpleasant turn.
“Now, Monsieur, attend to this. I have it in my power to save your life. I can open a way for you into Spain, and within three years I can promise your return to France, where you shall find your estates unsequestrated. But before I do this for you I will see you wedded to Sophie Dangeau.”
“How will you fulfil all these fine promises?” he asked, amazed.
“I do not lie, Monsieur. I have said that I can do it. Be that sufficient. Will you accept my conditions, or will you be taken to Toulouse and the scaffold? Resolve yourself.”
For all that his heart was numb with fear, he still sought to temporise. But Mademoiselle was obdurate. When he advanced that Sophie was not a wife he could take to Paris, she answered him that there was no need for it. Indeed, Paris would be unhealthy for him for years to come. There was his estate in Picardy. Let him take her there when he returned from Spain, and let him spend the first year of their wedded life in preparing her to become a creditable Vicomtesse. In the end the gallant Villebon was beaten and forced to yield.
He was barely in time, for scarcely had he accepted Léonie’s terms when the door opened to admit Dangeau, with a scared face.
“Les Martyrs is surrounded by dragoons, Vicomte,” he announced.
“Trust to me,” said Léonie. Then turning to Dangeau— “The Vicomte,” she informed him, “is safe, but he will be compelled to start at sunrise for Spain. Your daughter, he will tell you, goes with him as his wife. There is no time to lose, and you had best send for Monsieur le Curé at once.”
While the priest was being sought the dragoons arrived, and the officer in command entered the inn and formally arrested Villebon. But Mademoiselle took the Captain aside, with the result that five minutes later he desired the mystified Vicomte to be in readiness to start for Spain at daybreak under his escort.
We saw the nuptials solemnised that night, and when as day was breaking the troop was ready to conduct the Vicomte across the border, Léonie took him aside.
“So far I have done what I promised,” she said, “and you may rest assured that I shall keep my word till the end. When the three years of your exile are at an end you shall receive a pardon warranting your return to France. But this I promise you only on condition that you are good to that child, and that you make her a worthy husband. Fail me in that, and you are not likely to see France again as long as you live.”
Solemnly he swore to resign himself to what he now accounted his destiny. With that oath he took his leave of Léonie and accompanied by his wife he set out in the charge of the dragoons.
When at last he was gone —
“An eventful night, Guy, was it not?” quoth Léonie. “And I think that we both acquitted ourselves well. I have wronged you in the past, my friend, for you fought like a lion.”
“The greatest fight was yours — on that girl’s behalf,” I answered.
“Nay, Guy, not on her behalf; on my own. It was my liberty from Villebon which I was fighting for.”
“You are wonderful, Léonie,” I cried, adding with a sigh— “I wish with all my heart that I had not promised you a week ago, in my garden at Choisy, never to speak of love again.”
She looked at me for a moment with a smile so tender and kind that a doubt surged wildly through my mind. Then holding out both hands to me she turned my doubts to certainty.
“We will go back to your garden at Choisy, Guy; and if you should elect to break your promise, I’ll think you none the less a very gallant gentleman.”
THE DRIVER OF THE HEARSE
The Queenslander, 1 November 1919
When I tell you that I am an obstinate sceptic on the question of supernatural manifestations you will not expect me to offer you any explanation of the facts I am about to lay before you. I am of those who will not accept a facile supernatural explanation of events, however much they may appear to be inexplicable otherwise, until it has been demonstrated beyond possibility of cavil that natural causes are excluded. Such demonstration is humanly impossible, the limitations of human knowledge and human intelligence being what they are. Therefore, I have neither explanation nor theory to offer you. I merely chronicle the facts as they occurred within my own witnessing.
To begin with she was the last woman of my acquaintance whom I should describe as spirituelle; although I know it to be held that the possession of what I believe are described as “mediumistic powers” does not in itself imply any acute order of intelligence. She was just a gentle, sweet-natured slip of a girl of three or four and twenty, with the normal more or less mechanical accomplishments of her kind. She spoke French execrably; kne
w enough music to realise what an indifferent performer she was on the piano, and not enough about painting to save her from copying the works of third-rate artists, and having them afterwards framed at considerable expense in the hope that we would accept them for decorative purposes. It was the only thing she did to annoy me in the six months she spent with us, the only thing that ever went seriously near to marring the serenity of my relations with my wife, whose sister she was.
It was during that visit to us that she met Gastonleigh at somebody or other’s At Home, whereupon Gastonleigh became an assiduous visitor at my house. He was a charming fellow with excellent instincts, the average supply of brains, and more than the average of good manners. Also he was young, well set up and personable, and deputising as I did, in a sense, for Susan’s father I did not hesitate to consider him in every sense a most desirable son-in-law. I was still young enough to be in sympathy with young lovers, and I hoped the course of the affair would be smooth for the sake of Susan. The difficulty lay in getting them comfortably into wedlock. From the beginning I foresaw trouble with his people. Susan is the daughter of a moderately wealthy, unimpugnably respectable, but — from the Gastonleigh point of view — deplorably plebeian Chicago middleman. The Gastonleighs never forget, or allow anybody else to forget, that they are of royal blood, however curiously diluted. They belong to the quite considerable group which is Britain’s more or less putative heritage from the monarch appropriately called the Merry. All things considered — especially the frail seventeenth century lady chiefly concerned — it is not an origin to which I should, myself, be disposed to draw too much attention. But the Gastonleighs are true to their blood in that — like their ancestress — they take broad views on these matters. The swarthy, sardonic face of King Charles II smirks down upon you from the drawing room overmantel at Severnholme Place, and the Gastonleighs — especially the female members of the family — unfailingly refer to the royal satyr as “grandpapa.”
You will conceive, therefore, what a shudder it was that ran through Severnholme Place when the heir to the title announced that he was committed to a mesalliance. He had cabled to Susan’s father, and Susan’s father, also by cable, had constituted me his proxy. Whereupon I had bestowed his consent and blessing upon the children.
The family took it very badly. There were threats of disinheriting Gastonleigh — wild, unconsidered threats, for the bulk of the property was securely entailed. When, finding that they could do nothing material to bring him to what they called reason, they attempted other means of coercion, Lady Severnholme announced — and her angular daughters echoed the sentiment on their own behalf — that nothing would ever induce her to receive this daughter of a Chicago pork-packer. As a matter of fact, my father-in-law is not a pork-packer, but the term has an unpleasant ring; which renders it an admirable instrument of invective. When Gastonleigh, suavely and exasperatingly keeping his temper, persisted nevertheless in his intention, her ladyship had recourse to writing a letter to Susan which would have given ample grounds for an action for criminal libel.
It was the last straw. Susan had her pride, and that pride had been very considerably bruised by the Gastonleighs already. She had more than once threatened to break the engagement and her own heart at one blow, and this time she announced it as her irrevocable determination. It took Gastonleigh a week to make her revoke it. Even then I do not think he would have succeeded without my collaboration. I used trite enough arguments I reminded her that she was not marrying Lady Severnholme, or Lady Severnholme’s angular daughters. They might be as offensive as they pleased at present; but the sweetest revenge was to marry Gastonleigh in spite of them. Once safely married to the heir to the title, she would be in a position to whistle the pack to heel, particularly as the fairly human old earl seemed disposed to accept the situation.
Her great brown eyes — she had the most alluring eyes in all the world — considered me with wistful doubt.
“You believe that? I wish I could. Have you ever heard of the evil eye?”
“What on earth...?” I was beginning, for she is not usually irrelevant.
“Of course you don’t. You’re too...too sensible.” This was sarcasm. “You’ll probably laugh when I tell you that I am convinced of the power of the will for good or evil, that I believe that where any one wishes you ill with all the strength of his soul, you are in danger of suffering evil. Lady Severnholme must be very ill-disposed and malevolent towards me, or she could never have brought herself to write me such a letter. It...it frightens me, Tom.”
I had her at my mercy. Gastonleigh’s fight was fought and won.
“So that’s it!” I crowed. “You are afraid — afraid of shadows.”
“Oh, not of shadows.” She was very solemn.
“But afraid of something, anyhow. Hitherto I have respected you, Susan I have believed that you were concerned for Gastonleigh, that you feared to complicate his life unduly. Instead, it seems that you are concerned only for yourself, afraid of something to yourself. And because of this you are prepared to let that splendid fellow suffer as he is suffering.”
It startled her. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. You may be right. Perhaps it is because I am a coward. But I can’t help it. I have had a sense of evil hanging over me ever since I received that letter. I feel that wicked old woman’s malevolent will exercised against me, and I...”
“Fudge!” I interrupted her. “Let her exercise it, by all means. She can’t hurt you half as much as you’ll hurt her when you become Lady Gastonleigh.”
My wife agreeing with me, Susan allowed herself to be persuaded. But the sense of evil abode with her, and increased as the time of the marriage drew nearer.
“Once Bob and I are married” she told me one day, “I know this cloud will be lifted.”
“How do you know?” I inquired.
“I just know.”
There is no arguing with a woman who talks like that. “Capital,” I agreed. “The thing to do is to shorten this engagement as far as is decently possible.”
I said this as much in her own interests as in mine, for I could see there was to be no peace for me until Gastonleigh took Susan away. At last the wedding was fixed for the first week in October. It was to be a quiet one in view of the uncompromising attitude of the Gastonleigh family; nevertheless we decided that my wife and I should take Susan up to town and let her be married from the Hotel Britannia.
One evening, exactly a fortnight before the day appointed for the wedding, Susan was standing at the window of my study, looking out for Gastonleigh who was coming down from town by the six-thirty train. Suddenly I caught from her the sound of a sharp, apprehensive exclamation. I heard it subconsciously, for I was writing busily at the moment. And it may have been some four or five minutes later before my consciousness received it, and I looked up. With her back to the window, she was facing me across the wide room.
“What is it?” I asked her.
She shuddered before replying, and the shudder was still in her voice when she spoke.
“Oh! Such an evil omen!” I was disposed to be impatient. The child saw omens now in everything. “Didn’t you see it?”
“How could I? I was busy writing, Susan. What was it?”
“A hearse.”
“Oh well, people do die, you know, and it’s necessary to bury them.”
“But it stopped at the gate, and the driver looked at me over the top of it — such a dark, wicked face!”
“Really?” I spoke casually, judging it the best way to deal with nerves in the condition of her own. “They are usually such fat, rosy, jolly chaps. Have you ever noticed it?”
She began to sob. It was very exasperating. I threw down my pen, and went to comfort her. I attempted seriously, to take her to task, showing her the folly of allowing idiotic fancies to paralyse her reason. She listened very patiently. “I am sure you’re right, Tom, and it’s awfully — awfully good of you to be so patient with me—”
“I’m
not!” I said. “I have no patience with you at all.”
“I will try to...I really will try. But” — her lip trembled and the brown eyes grew troubled again— “but I am sure I shall never marry Bob. Something dreadful will happen to me. I know it. I feel it. Lady Severnholme—”
“There you go again! Is this how you try, Susan?” After that she did try, as she promised, and in the days that followed she largely succeeded. She was becoming more like the bright, laughing girl that had stolen the heart from Gastonleigh, and I was congratulating myself that at last the prospect of a happy marriage was overcoming the effect of a mass of ill-considered, ill-digested reading on the subject of the supernatural.
And then exactly a week later the trouble broke out worse than ever. It was just after tea. We were sitting round the fire in my wife’s boudoir, when Susan, who had wandered aimlessly across to the window, uttered a gasp that was almost a suppressed scream. I sprang to my feet in alarm.
“It’s there again — the hearse.”
I crossed quickly to the window, and looked out. There was nothing to be seen. I said so. She turned, and looked again, verifying that it was as I told her.
“He must have driven on,” she said.
“I didn’t hear him. Did you, Margaret?” I asked my wife.
“No, I heard nothing.”
And then I did an extremely foolish thing. I threw up the window, and looked out. We command a view of half a mile of road through that Kentish village on either side of the house. Not a vehicle was anywhere in sight upon it. Susan would not believe me. She came to verify the fact for herself, and it was only when I saw her deathly pallor that I realised the harm that I had done.
“No hearse?” she said, her voice low with sudden fear. “It wasn’t there at all! But I saw it, I saw it, Tom. Oh!”
It was idle of my wife and me to get her in a chair by the fire, and then seek to argue with her that what she had seen was but a reflection of her own overwrought imagination, the result of having allowed the hearse seen a week before to have made so ridiculous an impression upon her.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 490