Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Crispin breathed once more. Ashburn’s scrutiny was explained.

  “The same, sir,” he answered, with a smile and a fresh bow. “Your servant, sir; and yours, madam.”

  Cynthia looked with interest at the lank, soldierly figure. She, too, had heard — as who had not? — wild stories of this man’s achievements. But of no feat of his had she been told that could rival that of his escape from Worcester; and when, that same evening, Kenneth related it, as they supped, her low-lidded eyes grew very wide, and as they fell on Crispin, admiration had taken now the place of interest.

  Romance swayed as great a portion of her heart as it does of most women’s. She loved the poets and their songs of great deeds; and here was one who, in the light of that which they related of him, was like an incarnation of some hero out of a romancer’s ballad.

  Kenneth she never yet had held in over high esteem; but of a sudden, in the presence of this harsh-featured dog of war, this grim, fierce-eyed ruffler, he seemed to fade, despite his comeliness of face and form, into a poor and puny insignificance. And when, presently, he unwisely related how, when in the boat he had fainted, the maiden laughed outright for very scorn.

  At this plain expression of contempt, her father shot her a quick, uneasy glance. Kenneth stopped short, bringing his narrative abruptly to a close. Reproachfully he looked at her, turning first red, then white, as anger chased annoyance through his soul. Galliard looked on with quiet relish; her laugh had contained that which for days he had carried in his heart. He drained his bumper slowly, and made no attempt to relieve the awkward silence that sat upon the company.

  Truth to tell, there was emotion enough in the soul of him who was wont to be the life of every board he sat at to hold him silent and even moody.

  Here, after eighteen years, was he again in his ancestral home of Marleigh. But how was he returned? As one who came under a feigned name, to seek from usurping hands a shelter ‘neath his own roof; a beggar of that from others which it should have been his to grant or to deny those others. As an avenger he came. For justice he came, and armed with retribution; the flame of a hate unspeakable burning in his heart, and demanding the lives — no less — of those that had destroyed him and his. Yet was he forced to sit a mendicant almost at that board whose head was his by every right; forced to sit and curb his mood, giving no outward sign of the volcano that boiled and raged within his soul as his eye fell upon the florid, smiling face and portly, well-fed frame of Gregory Ashburn. For the time was not yet. He must wait; wait until Joseph’s return, so that he might spend his vengeance upon both together.

  Patient had he been for eighteen years, confident that ere he died, a just and merciful God would give him this for which he lived and waited. Yet now that the season was at hand; now upon the very eve of that for which he had so long been patient, a frenzy of impatience fretted him.

  He drank deep that night, and through deep drinking his manner thawed — for in his cups it was not his to be churlish to friend or foe. Anon Cynthia withdrew; next Kenneth, who went in quest of her. Still Crispin sat on, and drank his host’s health above his breath, and his perdition under it, till in the end Gregory, who never yet had found his master at the bottle, grew numb and drowsy, and sat blinking at the tapers.

  Until midnight they remained at table, talking of this and that, and each understanding little of what the other said. As the last hour of night boomed out through the great hall, Gregory spoke of bed.

  “Where do I lie to-night?” asked Crispin.

  “In the northern wing,” answered Gregory with a hiccough.

  “Nay, sir, I protest,” cried Galliard, struggling to his feet, and swaying somewhat as he stood. “I’ll sleep in the King’s chamber, none other.”

  “The King’s chamber?” echoed Gregory, and his face showed the confused struggles of his brain. “What know you of the King’s chamber?”

  “That it faces the east and the sea, and that it is the chamber I love best.”

  “What can you know of it since, I take it, you have never seen it!”

  “Have I not?” he began, in a voice that was awful in its threatening calm. Then, recollecting himself, and shaking some of the drunkenness from him: “In the old days, when the Marleighs were masters here,” he mumbled, “I was often within these walls. Roland Marleigh was my friend. The King’s chamber was ever accorded me, and there, for old time’s sake, I’ll lay these old bones of mine to-night.”

  “You were Roland Marleigh’s friend?” gasped Gregory. He was very white now, and there was a sheen of moisture on his face. The sound of that name had well-nigh sobered him. It was almost as if the ghost of Roland Marleigh stood before him. His knees were loosened, and he sank back into the chair from which he had but risen.

  “Aye, I was his friend!” assented Crispin. “Poor Roland! He married your sister, did he not, and it was thus that, having no issue and the family being extinct, Castle Marleigh passed to you?”

  “He married our cousin,” Gregory amended. “They were an ill-fated family.”

  “Ill-fated, indeed, an all accounts be true,” returned Crispin in a maudlin voice. “Poor Roland! Well, for old time’s sake, I’ll sleep in the King’s chamber, Master Ashburn.”

  “You shall sleep where you list, sir,” answered Gregory, and they rose.

  “Do you look to honour us long at Castle Marleigh, Sir Crispin?” was Gregory’s last question before separating from his guest.

  “Nay, sir, ’tis likely I shall go hence to-morrow,” answered Crispin, unmindful of what he said.

  “I trust not,” said Gregory, in accents of relief that belied him. “A friend of Roland Marleigh’s must ever be welcome in the house that was Roland Marleigh’s.”

  “The house that was Roland Marleigh’s,” Crispin muttered. “Heigho! Life is precarious as the fall of a die at best an ephemeral business. To-night you say the house that was Roland Marleigh’s; presently men will be saying the house that the Ashburns lived — aye, and died — in. Give you good night, Master Ashburn.”

  He staggered off, and stumbled up the broad staircase at the head of which a servant now awaited, taper in hand, to conduct him to the chamber he demanded.

  Gregory followed him with a dull, frightened eye. Galliard’s halting, thickly uttered words had sounded like a prophecy in his ears.

  CHAPTER XIII. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF KENNETH

  When the morrow came, however, Sir Crispin showed no signs of carrying out his proposal of the night before, and departing from Castle Marleigh. Nor, indeed, did he so much as touch upon the subject, bearing himself rather as one whose sojourn there was to be indefinite.

  Gregory offered no comment upon this; through what he had done for Kenneth they were under a debt to Galliard, and whilst he was a fugitive from the Parliament’s justice it would ill become Gregory to hasten his departure. Moreover, Gregory recalled little or nothing of the words that had passed between them in their cups, save a vague memory that Crispin had said that he had once known Roland Marleigh.

  Kenneth was content that Galliard should lie idle, and not call upon him to go forth again to lend him the aid he had pledged himself to render when Crispin should demand it. He marvelled, as the days wore on, that Galliard should appear to have forgotten that task of his, and that he should make no shift to set about it. For the rest, however, it troubled him but little; enough preoccupation did he find in Cynthia’s daily increasing coldness. Upon all the fine speeches that he made her she turned an idle ear, or if she replied at all it was but petulantly to interrupt them, to call him a man of great words and small deeds. All that he did she found ill done, and told him of it. His sober, godly garments of sombre hue afforded her the first weapon of scorn wherewith to wound him. A crow, she dubbed him; a canting, psalm-chanting hypocrite; a Scripture-monger, and every other contumelious epithet of like import that she should call to mind. He heard her in amazement.

  “Is it for you, Cynthia,” he cried out in his surprise, “the
child of a God-fearing house, to mock the outward symbols of my faith?”

  “A faith,” she laughed, “that is all outward symbols and naught besides; all texts and mournings and nose-twangings.”

  “Cynthia!” he exclaimed, in horror.

  “Go your ways, sir,” she answered, half in jest, half in earnest. “What need hath a true faith of outward symbols? It is a matter that lies between your God and yourself, and it is your heart He will look at, not your coat. Why, then, without becoming more acceptable in His eyes, shall you but render yourself unsightly in the eyes of man?”

  Kenneth’s cheeks were flushed with anger. From the terrace where they walked he let his glance roam towards the avenue that split the park in twain. Up this at that moment, with the least suspicion of a swagger in his gait, Sir Crispin Galliard was approaching leisurely; he wore a claret-coloured doublet edged with silver lace, and a grey hat decked with a drooping red feather — which garments, together with the rest of his apparel, he had drawn from the wardrobe of Gregory Ashburn. His advent afforded Kenneth the retort he needed. Pointing him out to Cynthia:

  “Would you rather,” he cried hotly, “have me such a man as that?”

  “And, pray, why not?” she taunted him. “Leastways, you would then be a man.”

  “If, madam, a debauchee, a drunkard, a profligate, a brawler be your conception of a man, I would in faith you did not account me one.”

  “And what, sir, would you sooner elect to be accounted?”

  “A gentleman, madam,” he answered pompously.

  “I think,” said she quietly, “that you are in as little danger of becoming the one as the other. A gentleman does not slander a man behind his back, particularly when he owes that man his life. Kenneth, I am ashamed of you.”

  “I do not slander,” he insisted hotly. “You yourself know of the drunken excess wherewith three nights ago he celebrated his coming to Castle Marleigh. Nor do I forget what I owe him, and payment is to be made in a manner you little know of. If I said of him what I did, it was but in answer to your taunts. Think you I could endure comparison with such a man as that? Know you what name the Royalists give him? They call him the Tavern Knight.”

  She looked him over with an eye of quiet scorn.

  “And how, sir, do they call you? The pulpit knight? Or is it the knight of the white feather? Mr. Stewart, you weary me. I would have a man who with a man’s failings hath also a man’s redeeming virtues of honesty, chivalry, and courage, and a record of brave deeds, rather than one who has nothing of the man save the coat — that outward symbol you lay such store by.”

  His handsome, weak face was red with fury.

  “Since that is so, madam,” he choked, “I leave you to your swaggering, ruffling Cavalier.”

  And, without so much as a bow, he swung round on his heel and left her. It was her turn to grow angry now, and well it was for him that he had not tarried. She dwelt with scorn upon his parting taunt, bethinking herself that in truth she had exaggerated her opinions of Galliard’s merits. Her feelings towards that ungodly gentleman were rather of pity than aught else. A brave, ready-witted man she knew him for, as much from the story of his escape from Worcester as for the air that clung to him despite his swagger, and she deplored that one possessing these ennobling virtues should have fallen notwithstanding upon such evil ways as those which Crispin trod. Some day, perchance, when she should come to be better acquainted with him, she would seek to induce him to mend his course.

  Such root did this thought take in her mind that soon thereafter — and without having waited for that riper acquaintance which at first she had held necessary — she sought to lead their talk into the channels of this delicate subject. But he as sedulously confined it to trivial matter whenever she approached him in this mood, fencing himself about with a wall of cold reserve that was not lightly to be overthrown. In this his conscience was at work. Cynthia was the flaw in the satisfaction he might have drawn from the contemplation of the vengeance he was there to wreak. He beheld her so pure, so sweet and fresh, that he marvelled how she came to be the daughter of Gregory Ashburn. His heart smote him at the thought of how she — the innocent — must suffer with the guilty, and at the contemplation of the sorrow which he must visit upon her. Out of this sprang a constraint when in her company, for other than stiff and formal he dared not be lest he should deem himself no better than the Iscariot.

  During the first days he had spent at Marleigh, he had been impatient for Joseph Ashburn’s return. Now he found himself hoping each morning that Joseph might not come that day.

  A courier reached Gregory from Windsor with a letter wherein his brother told him that the Lord General, not being at the castle, he was gone on to London in quest of him. And Gregory, lacking the means to inform him that the missing Kenneth was already returned, was forced to possess his soul in patience until his brother, having learnt what was to be learnt of Cromwell, should journey home.

  And so the days sped on, and a week wore itself out in peace at Castle Marleigh, none dreaming of the volcano on which they stood. Each night Crispin and Gregory sat together at the board after Kenneth and Cynthia had withdrawn, and both drank deep — the one for the vice of it, the other (as he had always done) to seek forgetfulness.

  He needed it now more than ever, for he feared that the consideration of Cynthia might yet unman him. Had she scorned and avoided him and having such evidences of his ways of life he marvelled that she did not — he might have allowed his considerations of her to weigh less heavily. As it was, she sought him out, nor seemed rebuffed at his efforts to evade her, and in every way she manifested a kindliness that drove him almost to the point of despair, and well-nigh to hating her.

  Kenneth, knowing naught of the womanly purpose that actuated her, and seeing but the outward signs, which, with ready jealousy, he misconstrued and magnified, grew sullen and churlish to her, to Galliard, and even to Gregory.

  For hours he would mope alone, nursing his jealous mood, as though in this clownish fashion matters were to be mended. Did Cynthia but speak to Crispin, he scowled; did Crispin answer her, he grit his teeth at the covert meaning wherewith his fancy invested Crispin’s tones; whilst did they chance to laugh together — a contingency that fortunately for his sanity was rare — he writhed in fury. He was a man transformed, and at times there was murder in his heart. Had he been a swordsman of more than moderate skill and dared to pit himself against the Tavern Knight, blood would have been shed in Marleigh Park betwixt them.

  It seemed at last as if with his insensate jealousy all the evil humours that had lain dormant in the boy were brought to the surface, to overwhelm his erstwhile virtues — if qualities that have bigotry for a parent may truly be accounted virtues.

  He cast off, not abruptly, but piecemeal, those outward symbols — his sombre clothes. First ’twas his hat he exchanged for a feather-trimmed beaver of more sightly hue; then those stiff white bands that reeked of sanctity and cant for a collar of fine point; next it was his coat that took on a worldly edge of silver lace. And so, little by little, step by step, was the metamorphosis effected, until by the end of the week he came forth a very butterfly of fashion — a gallant, dazzling Cavalier. Out of a stern, forbidding Covenanter he was transformed in a few days into a most outrageous fop. He walked in an atmosphere of musk that he himself exhaled; his fair hair — that a while ago had hung so straight and limp — was now twisted into monstrous curls, a bunch of which were gathered by his right ear in a ribbon of pale blue silk.

  Galliard noted the change in amazement, yet, knowing to what follies youth is driven when it woos, he accounted Cynthia responsible for it, and laughed in his sardonic way, whereat the boy would blush and scowl in one. Gregory, too, looked on and laughed, setting it down to the same cause. Even Cynthia smiled, whereat the Tavern Knight was driven to ponder.

  With a courtier’s raiment Kenneth put on, too, a courtier’s ways; he grew mincing and affected in his speech, and he — whose ut
terance a while ago had been marked by a scriptural flavour — now set it off with some of Galliard’s less unseemly oaths.

  Since it was a ruffling gallant Cynthia required, he swore that a ruffling gallant should she find him; nor had he wit enough to see that his ribbons, his fopperies, and his capers served but to make him ridiculous in her eyes. He did indeed perceive, however, that in spite of this wondrous transformation, he made no progress in her favour.

  “What signify these fripperies?” she asked him, one day, “any more than did your coat of decent black? Are these also outward symbols?”

  “You may take them for such, madam,” he answered sulkily. “You liked me not as I was—”

  “And I like you less as you are,” she broke in.

  “Cynthia, you mock me,” he cried angrily.

  “Now, Heaven forbid! I do but mark the change,” she answered airily. “These scented clothes are but a masquerade, even as your coat of black and your cant were a masquerade. Then you simulated godliness; now you simulate Heaven knows what. But now, as then, it is no more than a simulation, a pretence of something that you are not.”

  He left her in a pet, and went in search of Gregory, into whose ear he poured the story of his woes that had their source in Cynthia’s unkindness. From this resulted a stormy interview ‘twixt Cynthia and her father, in which Cynthia at last declared that she would not be wedded to a fop.

  Gregory shrugged his shoulders and laughed cynically, replying that it was the way of young men to be fools, and that through folly lay the road to wisdom.

  “Be that as it may,” she answered him with spirit, “this folly transcends all bounds. Master Stewart may return to his Scottish heather; at Castle Marleigh he is wasting time.”

  “Cynthia!” he cried.