The Sword of Islam

by Rafael Sabatini

  I drained the glass gladly enough.

  “Another?” he questioned, raising the decanter again. “It’s the very distilled essence of courage.”

  I refused, and again I begged him to remain with me. But he would not, and he explained his obstinacy.

  “The fact of the matter is, Dennison, that it’s frightened I am, myself. I am quite frank. I am scared — for the first time in my life. So you’ll understand that it’s quite impossible for me not to return to that room. You see, ’tisn’t cowardly to be scared, Dennison, but it’s infernally cowardly to run away when you’re scared; and Jack Edgeworth isn’t going to turn coward — not for all the disembodied Jacobites in the universe.” And with that he swung on his heel, and marched back into the tapestried chamber, slamming the door after him.

  I heard him cross to the fireplace, and I heard the creak of his chair as he settled down. He had made the difference between us pitilessly clear. We were both frightened, but I was the only coward of the two. And a coward I must remain, for his confessing to his fears did not tend to give me courage. Rather it glued me where I was, determined that nothing should take me into the tapestried room again that night. It was a determination I was later to disregard. But for the moment I hugged it to myself.

  Now the genial warmth of the fire, combining with the effect of the brandy I had drunk, induced a pleasant torpor. For a little while I resisted it; but in the end I succumbed to the extent of resting my head on the tall back of my chair. From that moment I re­member nothing until I was very wide awake again, startled without yet knowing the reason for it, my pulses throbbing at the gallop, and my ears straining to listen for something that I knew must come.

  I must have slept some hours, for the fire was burning low, and the room had grown chilly.

  Suddenly the thing I instinctively awaited came.

  Through the wall from the tapestried chamber I heard Edgeworth calling my name in a terrified, choking voice. “Dennison! Dennison!”

  I sprang up at the sound, and I felt as if I had been suddenly plunged into cold water. Horror fettered me where I stood.

  And then came the sound of a falling body — just outside the door of communication, just where the murdered lady had fallen. I distinguished a swishing, dragging noise, a groan, and, finally — and most terrific of all — a faint cackle of indescribably malicious laughter.

  For a spell I continued to stand there, staring with wild eyes at the closed door, expecting I knew not what to make its horrible appearance. At last, as the silence continued, I shattered the trammels that paralysed me, and sprang forward. I lifted the latch, and pushed. But the door would not give. There was something against it.

  And on the instant Sir James’s words recurred to me: “Her maid attempted to go to her assistance, but found it impossible to open the door. . . . She may have been prevented by her mistress’s body, which lay against it.”

  My hand fell from the latch, limp with fear. I backed away from the door, cursing my own and Edgeworth’s folly in tampering with this dreadful matter.

  Then I almost cried out in fresh terror. Something was coming under the door — something black and gleaming, and narrow as the blade of a table-knife. Fascinated and uncomprehending, I watched it. As it advanced it began to take a sinuous course, but when it reached an irregularity in the blocked floor it slowly spread there, and at last I began to understand its nature. It was fluid, and it was not black, but red — deep red. It was blood!

  At once it flashed through my mind that just so must the blood of the murdered woman have crept under the door which her maid could not open on that night eighty years ago, even as I could not open it to-night.

  The murder was being re-enacted by ghostly murderer and ghostly victim, down to the minutest detail. But was the victim a ghostly one?

  My fears for Edgeworth surged up again, and they conquered my horror to the extent of enabling me to take up the lamp and quit the room by the door leading to the corridor. Outside the tapestried room I hesitated for a moment. I rapped on the panels.

  “Edgeworth!” I called. “Edgeworth!”

  There was no answer — no sound. Realising that if I delayed, my courage might desert me again, I seized the handle and flung the door open.

  From the threshold, holding the lamp on high, I beheld the disorder of the room. The table had been overturned and all light extinguished. The cards and the candles were scattered on the floor, and prone near the door in the panelling, his legs against it, lay Edgeworth. His right arm was flung straight out, and his head rested sideways upon it.

  That he was dead the first glimpse of his livid face assured me. Further, there was no movement in the horrid, glistening puddle in which he lay; so that it was quite plain that the blood had ceased to flow from whatever wound had been dealt him.

  All this I noted in the one brief glance I stayed to bestow upon the room. Then, still lacking the courage to enter, I fled shouting down the corridor, towards the servants’ quarters.

  Within five minutes I returned accompanied by the butler and one of the footmen, who had been aroused and had promptly responded to my call.

  Thus reinforced, I led the way into that room of horror. They checked a moment at the sight that met them. Then the butler approached the body, whilst I held the lamp on high. He knelt a moment beside Edgeworth. I saw his broad shoulders tremble, and he looked up at me with a grin which at first I imagined to be of sheer horror, but to which was presently added a chuckle.

  First in bewilderment, then in slowly dawning comprehension, I stared at the thing he held up for my inspection. It was a broken Burgundy bottle. The blood upon the floor was blood of grapes.

  An explanation is scarcely needed. Edgeworth, to bolster up his failing courage, had emptied the decanter of brandy. He must have been on the very point of succumbing to it when he took up one of the bottles of Burgundy. It would be at that moment that he stumbled against the table, and the crash of its fall was the sound that had awakened me. In the dark he had called out to me with the last glimmer of consciousness; he had even attempted to reach the door of communication; and then the brandy had felled him — utterly, inertly drunk. In falling he had broken the bottle, and it was almost a miracle that he had not hurt himself upon it.

  He attempted next day to cover up his behaviour by a cock-and-bull story of a supernatural visitor. But the ridicule with which he and I were covered as ghost-investigators was not encouraging. In self-defence I cited the incident of the tapping on the shutter, and even succeeded in impressing them with it. But when the shutters were examined it was discovered that a long strip of iron from one of the hinges had become loose and had been used by the gale as a knocker.

  And yet there are times when, thinking it all over again, I am not satisfied. I remember the uncanny eerieness of the place, and I catch myself wondering once more whether, after all, supernatural causes may not have been finding expression in natural effects.

  THE BAKER OF ROUSILLON

  It was in Brumaire of the year 2 of the French Republic, One and Indivisible — November of 1793 by the calendar of slaves — that, whilst on my way to rejoin my regiment — then before Toulon — I was detained in Rousillon by orders of no less a personage than Robespierre himself, and billeted for three days upon a baker and dealer in wines of the name of Bonchatel.

  This Bonchatel proved an excellent host. He was a man of whimsical and none too loyal notions concerning the Republic, and to me he expressed those notions with an amusing and dangerous frankness, explaining his indiscretion in so trusting me by the statement that he knew an officer was not a mouchard.

  Had not Fate decreed that Bonchatel should have an enemy who gave him some concern, it is likely I had found him a yet pleasanter host — though it is also likely that he had continued a baker to the end of his days. As it was, he would fall ever and anon into fits of abstraction; his brow would be clouded, and his good-humoured mouth screwed with concern. To the dullest it might have b
een clear that he nursed a secret sorrow.

  “Citizen-Captain,” said he on the second day of my sojourn at his house, “you have the air of a kind-hearted man, and I will confide in you a matter that vexes me not a little, and fills me at times with the gravest apprehensions.”

  And with that he proceeded to relate how a ruffianly cobbler, originally named Coupri, but now calling himself Scævola to advertise his patriotism, who — by one of the ludicrous turns in the machinery of the Revolution — had been elected President of the Committee of Public Safety of Rousillon, had cast the eyes of desire upon Amélie (Bonchatel’s only daughter) and sought her to wife. Ugly as the Father of Sin himself, old and misshapen, the girl had turned in loathing from his wooing, whilst old Bonchatel had approved her attitude, and bidden the one-time cobbler take his suit to the devil.

  “I saved my child then,” my host concluded, “but I am much afraid that it was no more than a postponement. This Scævola swore that I should bitterly regret it, and since then he has spared no effort to visit trouble upon me. Should he succeed, and should the Committee decree my imprisonment, or my death even, upon some trumped-up charge, I shudder to think of what may befall my poor Amélie.”

  I cheered the man as best I might, making light of his fears and endeavouring to prove them idle. Yet idle they were not. I realised it then, knowing the power that such a man as Scævola might wield, and I was to realise it yet more keenly upon the morrow.

  I was visited in the afternoon of the next day by a courier, who brought me a letter from “the Incorruptible,” wherein he informed me that he would be at Rousillon that night at ten o’clock. He bade me wait upon him at the Mairie, keeping his coming a secret from all without exception.

  Now between my receipt of that letter and the advent in Rousil­lon of the all-powerful Robespierre there was played out in the house of Bonchatel a curious comedy that had tragedy for a setting.

  Scarce was my courier departed, when into the shop lounged an unclean fellow in a carmagnole, who demanded a two-pound loaf of bread. Misliking his looks, Bonchatel asked to see his money, where­upon, with a curse upon all aristo-bakers who did not know a patriot and a true man when they saw one, the fellow produced a soiled and greasy assignat for twenty francs, out of which he bade him take payment. But Bonchatel shook his head.

  “If you will have my bread, my friend, you must pay money for it.”

  “Name of a name, citizen,” roared the other, “what am I offer­ing you?”

  “A filthy scrap of worthless paper,” returned Bonchatel, stung to so fittingly describe it by the other’s insolence.

  There was an evil gleam in the patriot’s bloodshot eye.

  “Now, by St. Guillotine, I would citizen Scævola had heard those words, and you would have done your future baking in another oven, wherein you would have played the rôle of the loaf,” he rejoined. “Do you, miserable federalist that you are, dare to apply such terms to an assignat of the French Republic?

  “My friend,” said Bonchatel, endeavouring to hedge, “I spoke hastily, maybe. But tell me: to whom shall I tender that paper in my turn? Who will accept it as money?”

  “Why, any man that is not a traitor to the Nation.”

  “Then it must be that there are none but traitors in France. See you, my friend, I have upstairs a trunk full of these notes, which have been tendered me of late, and which I have taken, but which none will take from me.”

  “The Republic will cash them, failing all others,” cried the customer.

  “The Republic?” blazed Bonchatel, with fresh indiscretion. “Out of empty coffers?”

  “Look you, citizen-baker,” said the other, with that air of exaggerated toleration that marks a temper at its lowest ebb. “I am not come here to talk politics, but to buy bread. Will you or will you not sell it me?”

  “I will gladly, for payment of coin.”

  “You definitely refuse this assignat?”

  “Definitely.”

  The patriot gathered up the rejected note, folded it with ­os­tentation, and moved towards the door. On the threshold he turned. “You will be sorry for this, citizen,” he threatened, and was gone.

  Poor Bonchatel looked at me out of a face that had grown very pale. “You see, Captain, how I am persecuted,” he complained.

  “I see that you have behaved in a very unwise and hot-headed manner,” I answered, though not unkindly. “Surely you had done better to have given this fellow the loaf he wanted, rather than take the consequences of his complaint to the Revolutionary Committee.”

  “Give him the loaf?” returned Bonchatel. “But that would not have been all! I should have been forced also to give him change in silver for his twenty francs.”

  “Even that might be easier to suffer than —” I stopped.

  “Than the guillotine, you would say, Captain. But, my faith, if I must die, I would as soon be guillotined as starved; and if this state of things is to continue I must assuredly come to penury ere long. I did not exaggerate when I told him that I had a boxful of assignats. They have been forced upon me in this manner, and unless I am to be utterly ruined I must cry halte-là, once and for all, and refuse paper that I cannot in my turn convert into money without turning informer. Let them guillotine me and make an end of it,” he concluded stoically, as he dropped into a chair.

  “And your daughter?” I ventured.

  “Ah, Bon Dieu, yes. What is to become of her, misérable that I am!”

  The tyranny and injustice of the thing revolted me. Was there nought I might do? Then, in a flash, I remembered Robespierre’s approaching visit. I would appeal to him. Yet when he came to learn the charge that was advanced against Bonchatel he would be little likely to pity him. I thought hard whilst Bonchatel sat cursing his fate and praying for the damnation of Scævola, yet without at the moment arriving at any solution of the difficulty.

  At eight o’clock that night there came a loud knocking at Bonchatel’s door, and a moment later the baker, very pale and trembling, entered my room. “He is here, Captain,” he cried. “Scævola himself has come, and he has brought the whole Committee with him.”

  “Peste,” I ejaculated, “he has himself well attended, this cobbler-president. You had best admit them, my friend,” I added, and as I spoke I was thinking busily.

  “My boy has gone to open. What shall I do, Captain? Can you give me no help?” In his despair he was rocking his arms to and fro.

  “Tell me,” I inquired, “is the Committee of Rousillon given to extreme measures?”

  “The Committee of Rousillon is Scævola. What he wills, the others do — and they call this liberty and equality. God help poor France!”

  “What manner of men are they?”

  “The very flower of the gutter — the very scum of Rousillon, else would they never have elected Scævola their president.”

  “Are they men who would easily be tempted to a meal?”

  “Aye are they — famished as rats, hungry as they are unclean.”

  “And thirsty?”

  “Thirsty as the desert, and as drunken as France herself — poor, poor France!”

  “Bonchatel,” said I, “attend to what I am about to say.” And in as few words as I could, I gave him sounder advice than ever a man purchased in the shop of an attorney. He listened to me with brightening eye; he chuckled when I had done, and softly rubbed his palms together; and when he turned to go below he had regained his composure, and walked with the elastic gait of a young man.

  I followed him down, and in his shop I found the committee of ten — a dirty company that would have put to the blush even those wild, ragged brigands that marched from Marseilles to Paris in the summer of ’92.

  They greeted Bonchatel with sullen, unfriendly glances, that boded ill. Then, seeing me, Scævola stood forward, and hailed me in the name of the Republic as choicely sent to witness how the Committee of Public Safety of Rousillon dealt with a traitor. He was, I think, the foulest-looking creature to whi
ch ever the name of man was applied. Certainly no pride of office had inspired in him a desire for cleanliness. He wore a blouse, greasy, patch-relieved breeches, wooden sabots, and the eternal red cap of the patriot. His waist was untidily cinctured by the tricolor sash of office, which acted as belt for a rusty hanger and receptacle for a brace of horse-pistols. His brow was low, his eyes small and cunning, and the rest of his face enveloped in a coarse, straggling, iron-grey beard.

  Clearly he set the fashions for his companions, who differed from him only in slight details; the general air was the same.

  “Citizen Bonchatel,” he began, in a voice of thunder, “know you the object of this visit?”

  “You are not come, I take it, to buy bread?” Bonchatel inquired meekly.

  “We do not buy bread — the children of France do not buy bread from traitors.”

  “Traitors?” echoed my host. “This to me? Citizens, you are come hither to make merry.”

  A sardonic grin spread on Scævola’s face. “We are come hither to do justice,” he amended viciously. “Answer me, citizen: did you an hour ago refuse to accept, in payment for the loaf which he came here to purchase, the assignat tendered you by a citizen of the French Republic?”

  “I — refuse an assignat?” gasped Bonchatel like an actor born.

  “Did you, or did you not?”

  “But what a question? If there is a form of money that takes my fancy, it is this paper-money of the Republic. It is so — so convenient, Citizen-President, so light, so — so eminently portable. Why, I have converted all my poor savings into assignats. I —”

  “Enough lies!” burst out Scævola, showing his fangs.

  “Lies? Oh, citizen, what lie is it has been carried to you? — for I see now that you are in earnest. Assuredly some malicious, ill-disposed person would do poor Bonchatel an injury. And I mind me now that I lack not enemies in Rousillon, concerning whom it has for some time been my intention to appeal to our enlightened Committee, so that justice may be done me. I take this opportunity of your presence here, citizens, upon the investigation of a charge that is utterly unfounded, to lay before you my very serious complaint.”