Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Realizing that as a consequence of this her reign in Warsaw was at an end, she took her departure while Casanova was absent in Kieff. But before she went she sowed a seed that should yield her a rich harvest of vengeance upon the Venetian, to whom she attributed her misfortune.

  That harvest the unsuspecting Casanova returned to gather, after an absence of six weeks. He came back to find himself shunned on every hand, and since not only Branicki’s friends, but his very enemies — those who lately had been most assiduous in their attentions to himself — now received him with the most studied coldness, he came to conclude that some cause other than the duel was responsible for this.

  Everywhere the same impolite phrase greeted him: “We did not expect to see you in Warsaw again. Why have you returned?”

  “To pay my debts,” was the invariable answer with which he turned his back upon his questioners.

  He went to court. The Russian ambassador, with whom he had been on very friendly terms, bowed frigidly and passed him. The king, from whom he had looked for so much, looked through him as if he were made of glass, whereupon he withdrew, dissembling his chagrin.

  Branicki had left Warsaw, and Tomatis, too, was absent, but Lubomirski remained, and from Lubomirski, who had been his friend, Casanova sought an explanation. But even Lubomirski had changed, though not to the extent of the others.

  “It is merely a manifestation of the national character,” the prince informed him in answer to his questions. “We are an inconstant people. Your fortune was made if you had known how to seize the opportunity. Now it is too late, and there is only one course open to you — —”

  “To depart,” Casanova interrupted angrily. “Very well.”

  But it was one thing to talk of going, and another thing to go. He had not the means. The two hundred ducats with which he had gone to Kieff he had spent with characteristic prodigality, assured that his purse would be amply replenished on his return to Warsaw. He went home to find an anonymous letter, which repeated Lubomirski’s advice, and gave him at last the explanation of the attitude towards him of Warsaw society. It informed him of certain things that the king had been told concerning him; that he was a sharper and a rogue; that he had been burnt in effigy in Paris on account of certain malpractices in connection with his organization of the State lotteries, with which he had laid the foundations of his sometime fortune — now notoriously dissipated in evil living; that he had been guilty of innumerable swindles in London, which had necessitated his abrupt departure from England; and that for similar reasons he dared not show his face in Italy, and much also beside of a like nature.

  He suspected — no doubt with reason — that this letter was from La Binetti, and that it was she herself who had put about these calumnies. Calumnies they were, all the more deadly and insidious because in each statement made there was just a grain of truth; and of all lies none is so difficult to refute as a truth untruly told. He must go; there was no alternative. Yet how was he to go in the present state of his finances?

  To aggravate his despair, he was visited next morning by Sulaskowski, the General who had acted as Branicki’s second, with a message from his majesty, ordering Casanova to leave Warsaw within eight days.

  Stung by the order, Casanova angrily replied that he was not disposed to obey. “If the king should employ force to compel me, I shall protest against his violence before all the world. Pray tell him so.”

  “Sir,” was the calm reply, “I am not instructed to convey any answer of yours to the king, but merely to acquaint you with his majesty’s order.” And upon that Sulaskowski ceremoniously took his leave.

  When Casanova had mastered his rage he sat down and composed a letter to the king.

  “My honour,” he wrote, “does not permit me to obey, as I should wish, your Majesty’s order to quit your capital, as I have had the misfortune to contract here some debts which must be satisfied before I leave, and I do not at present possess the necessary resources.”

  This letter Casanova sent to the king by the hand of Prince Lubomirski. On the morrow Lubomirski brought him the royal answer.

  “His Majesty wishes me to say that in sending you his order to quit Warsaw he was far from suspecting that you were short of money. I am to add that this order is given to you entirely in your own interest, and that his majesty is anxious to know you safely out of a capital where your enemies are multiplying daily, and where you are daily receiving provocations. His majesty commends the prudence with which you have ignored these provocations, but realizing that there must be a limit to your patience desires you to accept this slight recompense for the services you rendered him before your unfortunate affair with Count Branicki.” And he handed Casanova an order on the treasury for 1,000 ducats.

  This was so liberal a sugar-coating to the pill that Casanova swallowed it now with gratitude. He wrote a letter of sincere thanks to Stanislas-Auguste, accepted the travelling-chaise which Lubomirski offered him as a parting gift, and set out in it next day, taking the road to Würtemberg.

  Thus fortune came to him out of misfortune, and the world lay open to him once more.

  CASANOVA IN MADRID

  Of all the hazards into which Casanova was led by his insatiable addiction to gallantry and his gluttony of adventure none is more extravagant than that which befell him during his visit to Madrid in 1767. It presents features of unusual interest to students of his complex psychology. To begin with, he fell in love with a hand. It is true that he assures us that it was a hand of quite exceptional beauty. Let us suppose it — as no doubt it was — long and perfectly tapering and of an alabaster whiteness. Yet it remains a hand, and nothing more.

  Virilely handsome, very tall, of a spare, athletic grace of figure, and magnificent ever in his dress — seeming here in Spain the more magnificent by contrast with the sober modes of this Inquisition-ridden country — he did not look his age by a dozen years. Yet the fact remains that he was forty, that he had lived harder, perhaps, than any man of his time, that he had known adversity in many shapes, and love in many more. Therefore it is the more surprising that this hard-bitten, flamboyant adventurer of ripe experience and jaded appetites should have been inflamed — and to such absurd lengths, as you shall see — by just four white fingers and a thumb.

  Not even had there been the sense of touch to quicken his infatuation. He had not so much as enjoyed the satisfaction of beholding that hand at close quarters. Between him and it the whole width of a street intervened — the Calle de la Cruz, in which he had his lodging. The hand belonged to a lady of quality — at least, so he judged from its size and texture — dwelling in the house immediately opposite; and he was permitted to see it twice daily at that distance, in the act of adjusting a green, slatted shutter of the type known as “Venetian.”

  That was all; and yet not quite all. There was, in addition, his own ardent imagination, which — working by processes akin to those of our modern naturalists, who will reconstruct you a saurian from a single tooth — constructed for that hand a body and soul. The only difference is that whereas the scientist works to reproduce the real, the poet — and no mean poet was Casanova — labours to create the ideal. It was, we must suppose, with the ideal here that he had fallen so madly in love.

  This is, admittedly, but a clumsy endeavour to explain what otherwise must seem a lunacy. To an extent, of course, a lunacy it must remain; an obsessing madness that kept him a prisoner in his lodging, neglectful of the powerful letters of introduction he had brought, oblivious of all that he had meant to do and see in the Spanish capital.

  Fearful of quitting his lodging for an hour, lest in that hour the owner of the hand might elect to give a fuller disclosure of herself, Casanova became a recluse, and, thus, an object of suspicion. For suspicions were easily aroused in Spain. The Holy Office was mistrustful of all strangers, most mistrustful of those who did not show themselves freely. And Casanova’s was by now an European reputation. Many — too many — of the facts of his wild life
were widely known; and best known of all, perhaps, was the fact that once, upon a charge of magic, he had fallen into the clutches of the Inquisitors of State in Venice. It behoved him to be prudent; and to be prudent was his intention. He could not guess that it was an imprudence to bury himself in his lodging, which contained of his own nothing beyond some trunks of most elegant French clothes and a box of books, chiefly the Latin and Greek authors who were his inseparable companions.

  Calchas, the Spanish valet he had hired in Madrid, an impudent rogue with a rare talent for hairdressing, recommended to him by Count Aranda, began to grow uneasy on his behalf. Perfectly aware of, and secretly amused by, the true facts of the case, Calchas sought to give his master a hint. Unfortunately he was clumsy in his method.

  At work one morning upon Casanova’s luxuriant chestnut hair, in which as yet there was no single thread of silver to be detected, he opened fire.

  “For what, I ask myself,” said he, in the detestable mixture of French and Spanish that he used with his foreign employer, “is all this combing and curling and pomading? Each morning I dress your head as if for a levee at Court, and each day you go no further than these four walls. It is to waste my labour, Excellency.”

  “You are paid for your labour, scoundrel.”

  “If you bought pictures from a painter or verses from a poet merely to put them into the fire, would he account it sufficient that you paid him?”

  “You are neither a poet nor a painter,” said Casanova. “You are just a valet, probably a thief, and certainly a fool. It pleases me to have my hair well dressed. That is enough for you.”

  “Ouf!” said Calchas, and turned aside to take the curling-tongs from the spirit flame. But he was irrepressible. “And then this bewildering consideration of apparel. Yesterday it was the pink and silver; today the blue taffetas; tomorrow it will be the black and gold; and the next day some other splendours. And why? Why? I ask myself, why? To keep your chamber, as you do, a dressing-gown and a head /en papillote/ would do as well. The world will be talking, Excellency.”

  “So will you, which is much more immediately irritating. Get on with my hair, Calchas. It is growing late.”

  “But late for what, name of Heaven! Late for what?” And then, very slyly, he added, “Doña Dolores de la Fuente does not rise for another hour.”

  Casanova’s full black eyes fixed the valet, intrigued.

  “And who may be Doña Dolores de la Fuente?”

  “But do you really not know?” The valet stood arrested, his tongs poised above the chestnut head. “It is the name of the lady in the palace opposite.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Had Calchas troubled to look in the mirror he would have seen that his master’s swarthy, aquiline countenance had grown unusually forbidding. Presently Casanova spoke, very precise and coldly.

  “It is only fair to warn you, Calchas, that I am a man easily provoked.”

  “Oh, but that is all too evident. For that, it seems, that a mere hand suffices.”

  “Ah! A hand!” said Casanova ominously.

  “Had it been an ankle now — —”

  The impudent Calchas got no further. Casanova rose suddenly to his great height, and soundly boxed the rascal’s ears. Calchas dropped the hot tongs, which in falling seared Casanova’s hand. If more had been wanting to inflame the passion of this man, so violent once he was aroused, that accident supplied it. First, he took the valet by the scruff of the neck and shook him until it seemed to Calchas that his teeth were rattling in his head. Next he ran him across the room, and flung wide the door.

  “Out of this, you Spanish rat! And don’t let me see your face again, or I will break it into little pieces.”

  He heaved him out, and sped him with a final kick. The stairs were immediate and precipitous. Calchas flung out hands to clutch the baluster, missed it, and went crashing down the flight.

  Casanova stood at the stairhead to survey the damage. With a groan Calchas gathered himself up, and rose, feeling himself. He was unbroken, but very bruised and sore, and in a great rage. He stood there, in his shirtsleeves, furiously demanding his coat and his wages.

  In a whirl of words, which reflected horribly, and I hope unjustly, upon the rascal’s pedigree, Casanova warned him that if he returned he would do so at the peril of his life.

  Calchas did not return. He stood there a moment, gibbering with that singular fertility of morphological blasphemy in which a Spaniard has no rival. Then, at length, he departed, screaming threats of vengeance, which Casanova’s limited knowledge of Spanish did not permit him perfectly to understand. It was perhaps as well for Calchas.

  After that, Casanova had to submit to the further annoyance of dressing his own hair, and performing unaided the remainder of his elaborate toilet. But fate had a compensation in store for him. That morning as he stood at his post at the window, intent upon the shutters across the narrow street, they opened wide at last, as if in answer to his mute and constant prayer, and he beheld the creature of his amorous dreams fully revealed for the first time — a pale and thoughtful Castilian beauty, to whom his ardent imaginings had done poor justice.

  Although it was his first glimpse of her, yet it is inconceivable that she was not by now familiar with his own face and figure. Daily now, for a week or more, whilst revealing of herself no more than the white hand which had wrought the mischief, must she have been able to study him at her ease through the slats that so completely screened her. Studying him thus, she must have come to perceive his infatuation, whilst construing it as founded upon far more than was the actual case.

  Arguing thus, he argued further that her self-disclosure proclaimed a measure of acceptance. That and the vision of this lovely woman, whose imagined simulacrum had for days obsessed him, ravished his senses utterly. Under the stress of his deep emotion, he carried a hand to his lips and then to his heart, and stood thus, in an attitude of ecstatic worship.

  On her side, woman-like, she betrayed no consciousness of his existence. For a long moment she continued to stand revealed, but statuesque, unseeing, no trace of emotion, or even of perception, ruffling the virginal serenity of her proud pale face. Then, as abruptly as they had opened, the shutters closed again, leaving Casanova with a sense that the light had suddenly gone out. Darkness, desolation and longing encompassed his soul once more.

  That is what comes of being endowed with a poetic temperament.

  And now his case was become more hopeless than before. In the three or four days that followed he scarcely dared to leave his window. And yet his unremitting devotion went unrewarded until the evening of the fourth day. Then, at last, towards the hour of the Angelus, the shutters were again flung back, and again it was vouchsafed him to feast his eyes upon that vision of Castilian loveliness. And now, although there was still no sign of recognition in her wistful countenance, yet her eyes looked straight across and met his own.

  He felt, he says, as if on the point of fainting from emotion. And then, with almost startled suddenness, she put forth that long white hand, and closed the shutters as abruptly as before. His consciousness, which had been all concentrated in his eyes, released thereby to diffuse itself again through his other senses, apprised him of a sound of steps beating upon the evening stillness. He looked out, and beheld a man close-wrapped in a brown cloak, his face concealed by a wide-brimmed hat, coming briskly down the street.

  This man halted at a little side door of the mansion opposite, unlocked it and passed in, leaving Casanova in a passion of jealousy, through which vibrated the question whether the sudden closing of the shutters might not have been connected with this arrival.

  He watched at his post all through the night — a starry, luminous summer night. And when, at last, the dawn drove him, dejected and exhausted, to his bed, the man in the brown cloak had not re-emerged.

  Again it would be towards the hour of the Angelus on the following evening when next he beheld her. Paler and more wistfully appealing than ever did she ap
pear to him now. She leaned her elbow on the sill of her window and quite openly and intently regarded him, as if returning some of the passionate longing conveyed to her by his burning glance.

  Again he pressed his hands — both hands this time — upon his aching heart.

  And now, at last, his wildest hopes were fanned by an unmistakable response. She smiled — vaguely, tenderly, almost questioningly, as it seemed to him. Whereupon, entirely carried away, he flung out his arms in a gesture of invocation.

  To restrain him, to enjoin discretion, she put her fingers to her lips. Next, leaning further forward, she held out a key and a letter, as if proffering them; then she drew back into the shadows of the room.

  A practised gallant such as Casanova could not doubt her meaning for a moment. In the twinkling of an eye you behold him bareheaded in the quiet street under her window, his pulses drumming with expectancy. And almost at once the little package of key and letter thudded softly at his feet. He stooped to seize it, looked up to find the shutter already closed again, and fled back at once to his own lodgings to acquaint himself with the contents of that unsigned note.

  “Are you a man of gentle birth?” she wrote. “Are you brave and discreet? Are you disposed to serve an unfortunate lady in her need? Because I believe you to be all this, I send you the key of the side-door. Come to me at midnight. I shall be waiting for you. Above all, be secret.”

  You conceive his ecstasy. He pressed the faintly fragrant note to his lips, then from his window signified his acquiescence in pantomime addressed to the closed shutters. They opened wide enough to admit the passage of her white hand in token that he was understood.

  Thereafter he summoned what patience he could to help him through the time of waiting. He tells us that he spent two hours that night upon his toilet — the lack of a valet, no doubt, complicated the intricate operation — and that he brought to it all the care and selection desirable in such circumstances. Nor did he overlook the risks with which this business might be fraught; for, after all, he was no callow lad of twenty plunging recklessly to his first assignation. Yet if the bitter voice of experience suggested perils, vanity and the spirit of adventure combined to remind him that he had sought and accepted the invitation, and that he could not draw back now save at the cost of being ridiculous and contemptible in her eyes.