“Father,” she pleaded, “why be angry? You would not have me marry against the inclinations of my heart? You would not have me wedded to a man whom I despise?”
“By what right do you despise him?” he demanded, his brow dark.
“By the right of the freedom of my thoughts — the only freedom that a woman knows. For the rest it seems she is but a chattel; of no more consideration to a man than his ox or his ass with which the Scriptures rank her — a thing to be given or taken, bought or sold, as others shall decree.”
“Child, child, what know you of these things?” he cried. “You are overwrought, sweetheart.” And with the promise to wait until a calmer frame of mind in her should be more propitious to what he wished to say further on this score, he left her.
She went out of doors in quest of solitude among the naked trees of the park; instead she found Sir Crispin, seated deep in thought upon a fallen trunk.
Through the trees she espied him as she approached, whilst the rustle of her gown announced to him her coming. He rose as she drew nigh, and, doffing his hat, made shift to pass on.
“Sir Crispin,” she called, detaining him. He turned.
“Your servant, Mistress Cynthia.”
“Are you afraid of me, Sir Crispin?”
“Beauty, madam, is wont to inspire courage rather than fear,” he answered, with a smile.
“That, sir, is an evasion, not an answer.”
“If read aright, Mistress Cynthia, it is also an answer.”
“That you do not fear me?”
“It is not a habit of mine.”
“Why, then, have you avoided me these three days past?”
Despite himself Crispin felt his breath quickening — quickening with a pleasure that he sought not to account for — at the thought that she should have marked his absence from her side.
“Because perhaps if I did not,” he answered slowly, “you might come to avoid me. I am a proud man, Mistress Cynthia.”
“Satan, sir, was proud, but his pride led him to perdition.”
“So indeed may mine,” he answered readily, “since it leads me from you.”
“Nay, sir,” she laughed, “you go from me willingly enough.”
“Not willingly, Cynthia. Oh, not willingly,” he began. Then of a sudden he checked his tongue, and asked himself what he was saying. With a half-laugh and a courtier manner, he continued, “Of two evils, madam, we must choose the lesser one.”
“Madam,” she echoed, disregarding all else that he had said. “It is an ugly word, and but a moment back you called me Cynthia.”
“Twas a liberty that methought my grey hairs warranted, and for which you should have reproved me.”
“You have not grey hairs enough to warrant it, Sir Crispin,” she answered archly. “But what if even so I account it no liberty?”
The heavy lids were lifted from her eyes, and as their glance, frank and kindly, met his, he trembled. Then, with a polite smile, he bowed.
“I thank you for the honour.”
For a moment she looked at him in a puzzled way, then moved past him, and as he stood, stiffly erect, watching her graceful figure, he thought that she was about to leave him, and was glad of it. But ere she had taken half a dozen steps:
“Sir Crispin,” said she, looking back at him over her shoulder, “I am walking to the cliffs.”
Never was a man more plainly invited to become an escort; but he ignored it. A sad smile crept into his harsh face.
“I shall tell Kenneth if I see him,” said he.
At that she frowned.
“But I do not want him,” she protested. “Sooner would I go alone.”
“Why, then, madam, I’ll tell nobody.”
Was ever man so dull? she asked herself.
“There is a fine view from the cliffs,” said she.
“I have always thought so,” he agreed.
She inclined to call him a fool; yet she restrained herself. She had an impulse to go her way without him; but, then, she desired his company, and Cynthia was unused to having her desires frustrated. So finding him impervious to suggestion:
“Will you not come with me?” she asked at last, point-blank.
“Why, yes, if you wish it,” he answered without alacrity.
“You may remain, sir.”
Her offended tone aroused him now to the understanding that he was impolite. Contrite he stood beside her in a moment.
“With your permission, mistress, I will go with you. I am a dull fellow, and to-day I know not what mood is on me. So sorry a one that I feared I should be poor company. Still, if you’ll endure me, I’ll do my best to prove entertaining.”
“By no means,” she answered coldly. “I seek not the company of dull fellows.” And she was gone.
He stood where she had left him, and breathed a most ungallant prayer of thanks. Next he laughed softly to himself, a laugh that was woeful with bitterness.
“Fore George!” he muttered, “it is all that was wanting!”
He reseated himself upon the fallen tree, and there he set himself to reflect, and to realize that he, war-worn and callous, come to Castle Marleigh on such an errand as was his, should wax sick at the very thought of it for the sake of a chit of a maid, with a mind to make a mock and a toy of him. Into his mind there entered even the possibility of flight, forgetful of the wrongs he had suffered, abandoning the vengeance he had sworn. Then with an oath he stemmed his thoughts.
“God in heaven, am I a boy, beardless and green?” he asked himself. “Am I turned seventeen again, that to look into a pair of eyes should make me forget all things but their existence?” Then in a burst of passion: “Would to Heaven,” he muttered, “they had left me stark on Worcester Field!”
He rose abruptly, and set out to walk aimlessly along, until suddenly a turn in the path brought him face to face with Cynthia. She hailed him with a laugh.
“Sir laggard, I knew that willy-nilly you would follow me,” she cried. And he, taken aback, could not but smile in answer, and profess that she had conjectured rightly.
CHAPTER XIV. THE HEART OF CYNTHIA ASHBURN
Side by side stepped that oddly assorted pair along — the maiden whose soul was as pure and fresh as the breeze that blew upon them from the sea, and the man whose life years ago had been marred by a sorrow, the quest of whose forgetfulness had led him through the mire of untold sin; the girl upon the threshold of womanhood, her life all before her and seeming to her untainted mind a joyous, wholesome business; the man midway on his ill-starred career, his every hope blighted save the one odious hope of vengeance, which made him cling to a life he had proved worthless and ugly, and that otherwise he had likely enough cast from him. And as they walked:
“Sir Crispin,” she ventured timidly, “you are unhappy, are you not?”
Startled by her words and the tone of them, Galliard turned his head that he might observe her.
“I, unhappy?” he laughed; and it was a laugh calculated to acknowledge the fitness of her question, rather than to refute it as he intended. “Am I a clown, Cynthia, to own myself unhappy at such a season and while you honour me with your company?”
She made a wry face in protest that he fenced with her.
“You are happy, then?” she challenged him.
“What is happiness?” quoth he, much as Pilate may have questioned what was truth. Then before she could reply he hastened to add: “I have not been quite so happy these many years.”
“It is not of the present moment that I speak,” she answered reprovingly, for she scented no more than a compliment in his words, “but of your life.”
Now either was he imbued with a sense of modesty touching the deeds of that life of his, or else did he wisely realize that no theme could there be less suited to discourse upon with an innocent maid.
“Mistress Cynthia,” said he as though he had not heard her question, “I would say a word to you concerning Kenneth.”
At that she turned upon him with a pout.
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“But it is concerning yourself that I would have you talk. It is not nice to disobey a lady. Besides, I have little interest in Master Stewart.”
“To have little interest in a future husband augurs ill for the time when he shall come to be your husband.”
“I thought that you, at least, understood me. Kenneth will never be husband of mine, Sir Crispin.”
“Cynthia!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, lackaday! Am I to wed a doll?” she demanded. “Is he — is he a man a maid may love, Sir Crispin?”
“Indeed, had you but seen the half of life that I have seen,” said he unthinkingly, “it might amaze you what manner of man a maid may love — or at least may marry. Come, Cynthia, what fault do you find with him?”
“Why, every fault.”
He laughed in unbelief.
“And whom are we to blame for all these faults that have turned you so against him?”
“Whom?”
“Yourself, Cynthia. You use him ill, child. If his behaviour has been extravagant, you are to blame. You are severe with him, and he, in his rash endeavours to present himself in a guise that shall render him commendable in your eyes, has overstepped discretion.”
“Has my father bidden you to tell me this?”
“Since when have I enjoyed your father’s confidence to that degree? No, no, Cynthia. I plead the boy’s cause to you because — I know not because of what.”
“It is ill to plead without knowing why. Let us forget the valiant Kenneth. They tell me, Sir Crispin” — and she turned her glorious eyes upon him in a manner that must have witched a statue into answering her— “that in the Royal army you were known as the Tavern Knight.”
“They tell you truly. What of that?”
“Well, what of it? Do you blush at the very thought?”
“I blush?” He blinked, and his eyes were full of humour as they met her grave — almost sorrowing glance. Then a full-hearted peal of laughter broke from him, and scared a flight of gulls from the rocks of Sheringham Hithe below.
“Oh, Cynthia! You’ll kill me!” he gasped. “Picture to yourself this Crispin Galliard blushing and giggling like a schoolgirl beset by her first lover. Picture it, I say! As well and as easily might you picture old Lucifer warbling a litany for the edification of a Nonconformist parson.”
Her eyes were severe in their reproach.
“It is always so with you. You laugh and jest and make a mock of everything. Such I doubt not has been your way from the commencement, and ’tis thus that you are come to this condition.”
Again he laughed, but this time it was in bitterness.
“Nay, sweet mistress, you are wrong — you are very wrong; it was not always thus. Time was—” He paused. “Bah! ’Tis the coward cries “time was”! Leave me the past, Cynthia. It is dead, and of the dead we should speak no ill,” he jested.
“What is there in your past?” she insisted, despite his words. “What is there in it so to have warped a character that I am assured was once — is, indeed, still — of lofty and noble purpose? What is it has brought you to the level you occupy — you who were born to lead; you who—”
“Have done, child. Have done,” he begged.
“Nay, tell me. Let us sit here.” And taking hold of his sleeve, she sat herself upon a mound, and made room for him beside her on the grass. With a half-laugh and a sigh he obeyed her, and there, on the cliff, in the glow of the September sun, he took his seat at her side.
A silence prevailed about them, emphasized rather than broken by the droning chant of a fisherman mending his nets on the beach below, the intermittent plash of the waves on the shingle, and the scream of the gulls that circled overhead. Before the eyes of his flesh was stretched a wide desert of sky and water, and before the eyes of his mind the hopeless desert of his thirty-eight years.
He was almost tempted to speak. The note of sympathy in her voice allured him, and sympathy was to him as drink to one who perishes of thirst. A passionate, indefinable longing impelled him to pour out the story that in Worcester he had related unto Kenneth, and thus to set himself better in her eyes; to have her realize indeed that if he was come so low it was more the fault of others than his own. The temptation drew him at a headlong pace, to be checked at last by the memory that those others who had brought him to so sorry a condition were her own people. The humour passed. He laughed softly, and shook his head.
“There is nothing that I can tell you, child. Let us rather talk of Kenneth.”
“I do not wish to talk of Kenneth.”
“Nay, but you must. Willy-nilly must you. Think you it is only a war-worn, hard-drinking, swashbuckling ruffler that can sin? Does it not also occur to you that even a frail and tender little maid may do wrong as well?”
“What wrong have I done?” she cried in consternation.
“A grievous wrong to this poor lad. Can you not realize how the only desire that governs him is the laudable one of appearing favourably in your eyes?”
“That desire gives rise, then, to curious manifestations.”
“He is mistaken in the means he adopts, that is all. In his heart his one aim is to win your esteem, and, after all, it is the sentiment that matters, not its manifestation. Why, then, are you unkind to him?”
“But I am not unkind. Or is it unkindness to let him see that I mislike his capers? Would it not be vastly more unkind to ignore them and encourage him to pursue their indulgence? I have no patience with him.”
“As for those capers, I am endeavouring to show you that you yourself have driven him to them.”
“Sir Crispin,” she cried out, “you grow tiresome.”
“Aye,” said he, “I grow tiresome. I grow tiresome because I preach of duty. Marry, it is in truth a tiresome topic.”
“How duty? Of what do you talk?” And a flush of incipient anger spread now on her fair cheek.
“I will be clearer,” said he imperturbably. “This lad is your betrothed. He is at heart a good lad, an honourable and honest lad — at times haply over-honest and over-honourable; but let that be. To please a whim, a caprice, you set yourself to flout him, as is the way of your sex when you behold a man your utter slave. From this — being all unversed in the obliquity of woman — he conceives, poor boy, that he no longer finds favour in your eyes, and to win back this, the only thing that in the world he values, he behaves foolishly. You flout him anew, and because of it. He is as jealous with you as a hen with her brood.”
“Jealous?” echoed Cynthia.
“Why, yes, jealous; and so far does he go as to be jealous even of me,” he cried, with infinitely derisive relish. “Think of it — he is jealous of me! Jealous of him they call the Tavern Knight!”
She did think of it as he bade her. And by thinking she stumbled upon a discovery that left her breathless.
Strange how we may bear a sentiment in our hearts without so much as suspecting its existence, until suddenly a chance word shall so urge it into life that it reveals itself with unmistakable distinctness. With her the revelation began in a vague wonder at the scorn with which Crispin invested the notion that Kenneth should have cause for jealousy on his score. Was it, she asked herself, so monstrously unnatural? Then in a flash the answer came — and it was, that far from being a matter for derision, such an attitude in Kenneth lacked not for foundation.
In that moment she knew that it was because of Crispin; because of this man who spoke with such very scorn of self, that Kenneth had become in her eyes so mean and unworthy a creature. Loved him she haply never had, but leastways she had tolerated — been even flattered by — his wooing. By contrasting him now with Crispin she had grown to despise him. His weakness, his pusillanimity, his meannesses of soul, stood out in sharp relief by contrast with the masterful strength and the high spirit of Sir Crispin.
So easily may our ideals change that the very graces of face and form that a while ago had pleased her in Kenneth, seemed now effeminate attributes, well-attuned to a vacillatin
g, purposeless mind. Far greater beauty did her eyes behold in this grimfaced soldier of fortune; the man as firm of purpose as he was upright of carriage; gloomy, proud, and reckless; still young, yet past the callow age of adolescence. Since the day of his coming to Castle Marleigh she had brought herself to look upon him as a hero stepped from the romancers’ tales that in secret she had read. The mystery that seemed to envelop him; those hints at a past that was not good — but the measure of whose evil in her pure innocence she could not guess; his very melancholy, his misfortunes, and the deeds she had heard assigned to him, all had served to fire her fancy and more besides, although, until that moment, she knew it not.
Subconsciously all this had long dwelt in her mind. And now of a sudden that self-deriding speech of Crispin’s had made her aware of its presence and its meaning.
She loved him. That men said his life had not been nice, that he was a soldier of fortune, little better than an adventurer, a man of no worldly weight, were matters of no moment then to her. She loved him. She knew it now because he had mockingly bidden her to think whether Kenneth had cause to be jealous of him, and because upon thinking of it, she found that did Kenneth know what was in her heart, he must have more than cause.
She loved him with that rare love that will urge a woman to the last sacrifice a man may ask; a love that gives and gives, and seeks nothing in return; that impels a woman to follow the man at his bidding, be his way through the world cast in places never so rugged; cleaving to him where all besides shall have abandoned him; and, however dire his lot, asking of God no greater blessing than that of sharing it.
And to such a love as this Crispin was blind — blind to the very possibility of its existence; so blind that he laughed to scorn the idea of a puny milksop being jealous of him. And so, while she sat, her soul all mastered by her discovery, her face white and still for very awe of it, he to whom this wealth was given, pursued the odious task of wooing her for another.
“You have observed — you must have observed this insensate jealousy,” he was saying, “and how do you allay it? You do not. On the contrary, you excite it at every turn. You are exciting it now by having — and I dare swear for no other purpose — lured me to walk with you, to sit here with you and preach your duty to you. And when, through jealousy, he shall have flown to fresh absurdities, shall you regret your conduct and the fruits it has borne? Shall you pity the lad, and by kindness induce him to be wiser? No. You will mock and taunt him into yet worse displays. And through these displays, which are — though you may not have bethought you of it — of your own contriving, you will conclude that he is no fit mate for you, and there will be heart-burnings, and years hence perhaps another Tavern Knight, whose name will not be Crispin Galliard.”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 29
