He compromised in the matter. And when, with pulses throbbing, he went forth on the stroke of midnight to unlock the little door, he went armed under his lover’s finery.
As he stood in the complete darkness of the passage within, he caught the rustle of a gown, and instantly felt her at his side. His hand was taken in the grasp of slender little fingers whose coldness almost chilled his spirit. In silence he suffered himself to be conducted through an inner door, down a dimly lighted passage, then up a broad staircase, and finally into an ante-room, nobly proportioned and superbly finished.
In mid-chamber, upon a walnut table, whose surface was polished to the smoothness of glass, a dozen candles burned in a massive silver branch. Their light revealed her fully to him at last, and here at close quarters he found her even lovelier than he had already deemed her.
She was deathly pale, and the great eyes that now returned his ardent gaze were pools of wistfulness ineffable. Limp and trembling, she sank into a chair, whereupon he went down on his knees before her, and with no word spoken yet between them, he bore to his fevered lips the cold hand she yielded him. And then, transported by her white beauty and the oddness of the adventure, he loosed the bridle of his tempestuous gallantry.
“Lady, I love you!” he cried. “My heart, my life — all that I have, and am — are yours!”
She regarded him almost sadly; very faintly she smiled.
“You have never even spoken to me until this moment. And those are your first words to me! How can I believe you?”
“Put me to the test — to any test!” he cried impetuously.
“If I were to take you at your word?” said she, her smile growing in wistfulness and inscrutability.
“It is what I implore of you!”
“And if I first demand of you an oath of secrecy, an oath never to reveal what may pass here between us?”
“It is superfluous. I am a man of honour. None the less, I pledge you my word, since you demand it.”
She drew a fluttering breath.
“Be it so, then,” she said softly, and rose. “Come with me.”
His hand tight-clasped in hers, he came up from his knees, and obediently accompanied her across the room. There she opened a door and ushered him into another chamber, in the middle of which stood a great bed, with curtains of heavy gold brocade drawn tightly about it.
This room, like the other, was lighted by a cluster of candles in a branch that stood upon a richly carved console. In addition, at the foot of the bed, there were two tall gilded candlesticks with a single taper alight in each.
By the bed she came at last to a halt, and stood mutely gazing at him.
From bewildered that he had been, a sense of dread began now to pervade him as he regarded her. For never in his life had he looked into a face that expressed so much anguish and despair.
“What ails you?” he asked her, his voice hoarse. “You are trembling!”
“It is not from fear,” she said. “But you? You do not tremble. You are calm and master of yourself. Look, then!” Abruptly, violently, she swept aside the heavy curtains. “Look!”
He looked, and although he did not tremble even then, yet fear clutched his heart. For what he beheld was a man lying supine upon that splendid bed. He stepped back quickly, sucking in his breath, and his fingers instinctively sought the hilt of his hidden poniard.
Then he realized in horror why that figure continued supine and so indifferent, with eyes staring up at the canopy overhead. The man was dead.
Casanova observed that he was young and handsome, noted the disarray of his garments, and other signs that death had come upon him sudden and violently, and, finally, the two tapers at the bed’s foot, which assumed a new significance.
His horror grew. He looked at the woman, and found her watching him with glittering eyes.
“What does it mean?” he asked her fearfully.
“It means that justice has been done,” said she. “Though I must die for it, I could not have acted differently. I loved him, and he was false.”
Casanova shuddered, and there and then completely shed the unreasoning passion with which she had inspired him. Remembering that this was Spain, where jealousy is proverbially fierce and pitiless, he would strive to judge her mercifully. But it was not for a man of his temperament to desire a closer acquaintance with one who went to such lengths in punishing infidelity.
Not that he considered himself by temperament unfaithful. Somewhere in the course of his voluminous and frank confessions he defends himself vigorously against any possible imputations of that kind. He was, he assures us, merely inconstant, and at long and convincing length he draws an interesting distinction between inconstancy and infidelity. But understanding of his academic arguments cannot be expected of such women as Dolores. And made suddenly and grimly aware of this, his passion for her turned at once to ice.
He moved away, his face almost as ghastly as that of the corpse.
“My Heaven!” he groaned. “How horrible!”
Instantly she was beside him, clutching his arm, her siren voice plaintively beseeching.
“You are a man of honour! You promised secrecy! You swore to serve me!”
He bowed, stiff and formal.
“What do you ask of me, madame?” he demanded, ready to do, for the sake of his pledged word, the service to which there was no longer any spur of love.
“Deliver me of this,” she answered. “Take it away. The river flows beyond the wall of my garden. Carry it thither, and so rid me of it.”
She was on her knees to him, passionately interceding. In supplication she clasped his hands and embraced his knees. Tears flowed from her lovely eyes; despair rang in her voice. And he, the gallant who had come so hot-foot to her beckoning, stood stiffly there in his magnificent purple suit, frozen with horror. At last he spoke, dramatically, tragically, as the situation demanded.
“Madame, I pledged you my word. You are perhaps asking for my life. No matter, I give it to you!”
Convulsively she wrung his hands.
“You are noble! You are great!” she cried. “You know how to compel a woman’s love.”
But the love of Doña Dolores was the last thing that Casanova desired at the moment to compel. He desired, above all, to have done with this grisly business and be gone.
“Calm yourself, madame. Every moment increases the danger of discovery. Let us make haste.”
He shook off her detaining hands, stepped to the bed, and resolutely shouldered the ghastly burden.
“Your servants?” he enquired.
“I have but two. They are faithful, and they sleep. Go cautiously, lest you awaken them.”
And then, as he advanced a step, that body across his stalwart shoulder:
“No, no!” she whispered fiercely. “I cannot suffer it. If you are discovered thus, you are ruined!”
It was the first unselfish word she had uttered, and it awakened a response in him.
“And you, madame, are lost if this body remains here.”
With that he went forward towards the door, stepping firmly under his load, for he was strong and the dead man slim and light. Dolores followed him, lighting him with the candlebranch. Thus they went down the stairs to the door opening upon the garden. Beyond this she did not accompany him. She stood there under the lintel, perhaps awaiting his return, whilst he, staggering a little now, went through the garden, out by the gate, and down the lane that sloped to the river. He came at last to the water’s edge, and shot his burden into the stream, whereafter, without further thought for Doña Dolores, he went home.
He spent the remainder of the night devoured by uneasiness, considering means of quitting Madrid at the earliest moment.
Next morning he was arrested. An alcalde, accompanied by half a dozen alguaziles, invaded his lodging whilst he was still abed. They ransacked his room and placed his effects under seal, then ordered him to dress himself and go with them.
It required all his fo
rtitude and all his considerable histrionic talent to dissemble his abject terror. But he contrived to appear calm and composed, if pale — which might be attributed to indignation — when he haughtily demanded of the alcalde an explanation of this outrage.
The alcalde leered contemptuously out of a sallow, blue-cheeked face.
“Of course, you play the comedy of injured innocence,” said he. “It is usual. It does not impress me.”
“It may impress you to know that I am a friend of Count Aranda, President of the Council of Castile.”
It was an overstatement, of course. He had seen the count but twice; once when he had presented his letter of introduction, and once again, later, when he had dined at his Excellency’s house. And although the count — out of regard for the foreign personage who had supplied Casanova with those credentials — had received him affably and treated him with consideration, yet this hardly justified him in counting Don Miguel de Aranda among his intimates. That, however, was no reason why he should not make use of this powerful name to intimidate the alcalde. Unfortunately the alcalde declined to be intimidated.
“I have my duty to perform!” he said, snapping his lips, and that was the end of the matter.
They carried off their prisoner to the foul gaol of Buen Retiro. There they deposited him in the mephitic atmosphere of a filthy chamber tenanted by some forty prisoners of the vilest kind. The first night that he spent there was something that he remembered to the end of his days. Huddled in a corner and devoured by fleas, not daring to close his eyes lest his infamous prison-mates should rob him whilst he slept, the splendid Giacomo di Casanova contemplated at leisure the miserable predicament into which his excessive appetite for philandering had landed him. He saw himself — he, the scholar, poet, soldier, philosopher and man of the world, who had ruffled it in courts and been the intimate of princes, whose name and whose fame were known throughout Europe — miserably ending his glorious, hazardous life like a common felon at the hands of a Spanish hangman.
I spare you a more detailed picture of his alternating rage and despair in the days that followed. His wide experience and knowledge of men helped him presently to mitigate his lot, but only by a very little. By bribing a young gaoler, whose countenance he rightly conjectured to belong to a thief, he was able with the little gold upon him to procure some food and wine that at least did not nauseate his fastidious palate.
Day followed day in that unspeakable confinement, and each day brought its dread of magisterial examination. Yet ten days passed, and still the authorities made no sign. Despair took possession of him completely. It happened often, he knew, that criminals were overlooked and left to rot, forgotten in the gaols to which they had been consigned. Such a fate — to spend the remainder of his days in these horrible surroundings — would be even worse than the gallows.
And then on the morning of the eleventh day of his imprisonment, the young gaoler, whose protection he had purchased, slipped a note into his hand. Wondering, he opened it in a corner with trembling fingers under cover of his hat; then stuffing it, spread out, into the crown, he read:
My Friend, — By the time this reaches you I shall be out of Spain. You are relieved from your pledge of secrecy, and I exhort you to seek your own safety by a full and frank confession. I am afflicted by the thought of your situation. Forgive and forget your unfortunate D.
He put on the hat with the letter still inside it, and crushed it viciously down upon his brows. His haggard, unshaven face was white, and his lips twitched.
Forgive and forget! He would do neither the one nor the other as long as he lived — which, after all, might not be very long. He made a resolve that if ever he got safely out of this predicament, his relations with the other sex would be of the utmost circumspection.
The devil, you see, was very sick indeed. Almost he yearned for the womanless peace of monastic seclusion.
Towards noon that day he stirred himself to action. He did now what he might have done before but that fear and his pledged word between them had paralysed his will. He wrote a letter to Count Aranda. It was couched in characteristically impetuous terms:
My Lord, — You cannot know that I am being assassinated in the most abominable gaol of your abominable country. In no civilized nation of the world would a man of my quality, whatever his offence, be cast among the cut-throats and pariahs that tenant this prison of Buen Retiro. I appeal to your Excellency’s sentiments of humanity to order me either to be set at liberty or put to death, so as to spare me the necessity of committing suicide. Giacomo di Casanova.
That intemperate letter he consigned to his friendly gaoler, who on this occasion needed no further spur than that supplied by the superscription to see that it reached its august destination.
Within twenty-four hours the sordid prison of Buen Retiro was visited by a resplendent officer, dispatched by Count Aranda to escort thence Monsieur Casanova. An hour later, the ravages in his toilet more or less repaired, Casanova stood in the presence of the most powerful man in Spain, the ugly little fellow who dared to dispute even the power of the fathers of the Inquisition, and who by a stroke of the pen had banished the Jesuits from Castile.
Without rising from his writing-table, the great Minister looked up to greet his visitor with something between a frown and a smile.
“Monsieur Casanova,” he said, “you have written me a very impertinent letter, in which you hardly show yourself the man of wit that you are reputed; for you should know that one seldom succeeds anywhere by impertinence.”
“I abase myself in apology, Excellency. It was written in the exasperation resulting from ten days in that horrible prison.”
The count’s face cleared.
“If I mentioned it,” he said more affably, “it was so that you may realize that my consenting to see you, notwithstanding, is a proof of the consideration in which I hold you. You were at least correct in your assumption that I had no knowledge of your position. I was beginning to wonder that you did not show yourself when I received your letter. I have since informed myself of your case, and I deplore profoundly the thing that has happened to you.”
Casanova gathered a rich harvest of hope from so much courtesy.
“Your Excellency cannot deplore it more profoundly than I do myself. I give you my word of honour that I am the helpless victim of circumstances. And I thank you more profoundly than I can say for allowing me to come before you and state my case as one man of honour to another, instead of as a felon to a magistrate. Absolved at last from the pledge of secrecy that bound me, I am fortunately able now to place all the facts before you without any reservation. They are these:”
And headlong, without giving the count time to interpose a single word, he plunged into a detailed account of the events at the house of Doña Dolores.
When he had done Count Aranda considered him in silence for a moment, his face utterly blank. Then he uttered a queer little laugh.
“But this is a very extraordinary tale, Monsieur Casanova.”
Casanova bristled instantly.
“Your Excellency does not imply a doubt of any particular?”
“Oh, far from it! Very far from it, indeed. It affords us the only logical explanation of the disappearance of Don Sebastian de Carbajal. Also it explains Doña Dolores de la Fuente’s sudden desire for foreign travel, a desire which she duped me into furthering. I was simpleton enough to assume that Don Sebastian had gone secretly abroad, and that it was her intention to follow and join him.” He smiled wryly. “You reveal to me, Monsieur Casanova, that we are both of us the dupes of that unscrupulously clever woman.”
“I /reveal/ to your Excellency — —” Casanova checked, and with fallen jaw, dismay spreading on his swarthy face, he stared at the President of the Council. Then, a gleam of dreadful light breaking upon his dark bewilderment: “Does your Excellency mean,” he cried, “that I have disclosed something that was not known?”
“That, indeed, is what you have done.”
> Uninvited, crushed by the weight of his sudden despair, Casanova sat down. In a small voice he asked:
“Will your Excellency tell me, then, in Heaven’s name why I was arrested?”
“For being in possession of forbidden books.”
The astounding answer made chaos of Casanova’s already distracted mind.
“Forbidden books?” he faltered. “I?”
The count explained briefly.
“Upon receiving your letter yesterday, I sent at once for the alcalde. He informed me that in arresting you he had acted on behalf of the Holy Office, upon a charge laid against you by a valet named Calchas, whom you dismissed with violence. Your recluse habits were already rendering you suspect, and upon proceeding to your lodging the alcalde found there corroboration of the accusation laid. He is a fool, of course, a devout man, very ardent in matters that come within the purview of the Inquisition — and in his ignorance he took your Greek Iliad, with its unknown characters, to be a work of magic. I have told him quite plainly what I think of him, and you need apprehend no further trouble on that score.”
“But on the score of this other matter?” cried Casanova in despair. “This far graver matter in which I have so rashly betrayed my part?”
Count Aranda sighed.
“There again you have hardly shown yourself the man of wit that you are reputed.”
“I have put a rope round my neck!”
Casanova rose in his agitation. He stood, stricken and pale, the last vestige of his assurance gone.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 546