Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  And when presently she had come from her chamber, she had been greeted with the story of a rebellion in the village, and an attempted assassination of her father. The ringleader, she was told, had been brought to the Chateau, and he was even then in the courtyard and about to be hanged by the Marquis. Curious to behold this unfortunate, she had stepped out on to the balcony where already an idle group had formed. Inexpressible had been her shock upon seeing him that lay below, his white face upturned to the heavens, his eyes closed.

  “Is he dead?” she asked, when presently she had overcome her feelings.

  “Not yet Mademoiselle,” answered the graceful Chevalier de Jacquelin, toying with his solitaire. “Your father is bringing him to life that he may send him back to death.”

  And then she heard her father’s voice behind her. The Marquis had stepped out on to the balcony to ascertain whether La Boulaye had yet regained consciousness.

  “He seems to be even now recovering,” said someone.

  “Ah, you are there, Suzanne,” cried Bellecour. “You see your friend the secretary there. He has chosen to present himself in a new role to-day. From being my servant, it seems that he would constitute himself my murderer.”

  However unfilial it might be, she could not stifle a certain sympathy for this young man. She imagined that his rebellion, whatever shape it had assumed, had been provoked by that weal upon his face; and it seemed to her then that he had been less than a man had he not attempted to exact some reparation for the hurt the whip had inflicted at once upon his body and his soul.

  “But what is it that he has done, Monsieur?” she asked, seeking more than the scant information which so far she had received.

  “Enough, at least, to justify my hanging him,” answered Bellecour grimly. “He sought to withstand my authority; he incited the peasants of Bellecour to withstand it; he has killed Blaise, and he would have killed me but that I preferred to let him kill my horse.”

  “In what way did he seek to withstand your authority!” she persisted.

  He stared at her, half surprised, half angry.

  “What doers the manner of it signify?” he asked impatiently. “Is not the fact enough? Is it not enough that Blaise is dead, and that I have had a narrow escape, at his hands?”

  “Insolent hound that he is!” put in Madame la Marquise — a fleshly lady monstrously coiffed. “If we allow such men as thus to live in France our days are numbered.”

  “They say that you are going to hang him,” said Suzanne, heedless of her mother’s words, and there was the faintest note of horror in her voice.

  “They are mistaken. I am not.”

  “You are not?” cried the Marquise. “But what, then, do you intend to do?”

  “To keep my word, madame,” he answered her. “I promised that canaille that if he ever came within the grounds of Bellecour I would have him flogged to death. That is what I propose.”

  “Father,” gasped Suzanne, in horror, a horror that was echoed by the other three or four ladies present. But the Marquise only laughed.

  “He will be; richly served,” she approved, with a sage nod of her pumpkin-like head-dress— “most richly served.”

  A great pity arose now in the heart of Mademoiselle, as her father went below that he might carry out his barbarous design. She was deaf to the dainty trifles which the most elegant Chevalier de Jacquelin was murmuring into her ear. She stood, a tall, queenly figure, at the balcony’s parapet and watched the preparations that were being made.

  She heard her father’s harshly-voiced commands. She saw them literally tear the clothes from the unfortunate secretary’s back, and lash him — naked to the waist — to the pump that stood by the horse-trough at the far end of the yard. His body was now hidden from her sight, but his head appeared surmounting the pillar of the pump, his chin seeming to rest upon its summit, and his face was towards her. At his side stood a powerful knave armed with a stout, leather-thonged whip.

  “How many strokes, Monseigneur?” she heard the man inquire.

  “How many?” echoed the Marquise. “Do I know how many it will take to make an end of him? Beat him to death, man. Allons! Set about it.”

  She saw the man uncoil his lash and step forward. In that instant Caron’s eyes were raised, and they met hers across the intervening space. He smiled a valedictory smile that seemed to make her heart stand still. She and her mother were now the only women on the balcony. The others had made haste to withdraw as soon as La Boulaye had been pilloried. The Marquise remained because she seemed to find entertainment in the spectacle. Suzanne remained because horror rooted her to the spot — horror and a great pity for this unfortunate who had looked so strong and brave that morning, when he had had the audacity to tell her that he loved her.

  The lash sang through the air, quivered, hummed, and cut with a sickening crackle into the young man’s flesh.

  The hideous sound roused her. She shuddered from head to foot, and turning she put her hands to her face and rushed within, followed by the Marquise’s derisive laughter.

  “Mon Dieu! It is horrible! Horrible!” she cried as she sank into the nearest chair, and clapped her hands to her ears. But she could not shut it out. Still she heard the humming of the whip and the cruel sound of the falling blows. Mechanically she counted them, unconsciously almost, and at twenty she heard them cease. Was it over? Was he dead, this poor unfortunate? Moved by a curiosity that was greater than her loathing, she rose and went to the threshold of the balcony.

  “Is it ended?” she asked.

  “Ended?” echoed Monsieur de Jacquelin, with a shrug. “It is scarce begun, it seems. The executioner is pausing for breath, that is all. The fellow has not uttered a sound. He is as obstinate as a mule.”

  “As enduring as a Spartan,” more generously put in the Vicomte, her brother. “Look at him, Suzanne.”

  Almost involuntarily she obeyed, and moved forward a step that she might behold him. A face, deathly pale, she saw, which in the sunshine glistened with the sweat of agony that bedewed it; but the lips were tightly closed and the countenance grimly expressionless. Even as she looked she heard her father command the man to lay on anew. Then, as before, his eyes met hers; but this time no smile did she see investing them.

  Again the whip cracked and fell. She drew back, but his glance seemed to haunt her even when she no longer saw his face. A sudden resolution moved her, and in a frenzy of anger and compassion she flung out of the room. A moment later she burst like a beautiful virago into the courtyard.

  “Stop!” she commanded shrilly, causing both her father and the executioner to turn, and the latter pausing in his hideous work. But a glance from the Marquis bade him resume, and resume he did, as though there had been no interruption.

  “What is this?” demanded Bellecour, half amused, half vexed, whilst a sudden new light leapt to the eyes of La Boulaye, which but a moment back had been so full of agony.

  But Mademoiselle never paused to answer her father. Seeing the executioner proceeding, despite her call to cease, she sprang upon him, caught him by the arms and wrested the whip from hands that dared not resist her.

  “Did I not bid you stop?” she blazed, her face white, her eyes on fire; and raising the whip she brought it down upon his head and shoulders, not once but half-a-dozen times in quick succession, until he fled, howling, to the other side of the horse trough for shelter. “It stings you, does it” she cried, whilst the Marquis, from angered that at first he had been, now burst into a laugh at her fury and at this turning of tables upon the executioner. She made shift to pursue the fellow to his place of refuge, but coming of a sudden upon the ghastly sight presented by La Boulaye’s lacerated back, she drew back in horror. Then, mastering herself — for girl though she was, her courage was of a high order — she turned to her father.

  “Give this man to me, Monsieur,” she begged.

  “To you!” he exclaimed. “What will you do with him?”

  “I will see that you
are rid of him,” she promised. “What more can you desire? You have tortured him enough.”

  “Maybe. But am I to blame that he dies so hard?”

  She answered him with renewed insistence, and unexpectedly she received an ally in M. des Cadoux — an elderly gentleman who had been observing the flogging with disapproval, and who had followed her into the courtyard.

  “He is too brave a man to die like this, Bellecour,” put in the newcomer. “I doubt if he can survive the punishment he has already received. Yet I would ask you, in the name of courage, to give him the slender chance he may have.”

  “I promised him he should be flogged to death—” began the Marquis, when Des Cadoux and Mademoiselle jointly interrupted him to renew their intercessions.

  “But, sangdieu,” the Marquis protested “you seem to forget that he has killed one of my servants.”

  “Why, then, you should have hanged him out of hand, not tortured him thus,” answered Des Cadoux shortly.

  For a moment it almost seemed as if the pair of them would have fallen a-quarrelling. Their words grew more heated, and then, while they were still wrangling, the executioner came forward to solve matters with the news that the secretary had expired. To Bellecour this proved a very welcome conclusion.

  “Most opportunely!” he laughed “Had the rascal lived another minute I think we had quarrelled, Cadoux.” He turned to the servant, “You are certain that it is so?” he asked.

  “Look, Monsieur,” said the fellow, as he pointed with his whip to the pilloried figure of La Boulaye. The Marquis looked, and saw that the secretary had collapsed, and hung limp in his bonds, his head fallen back upon his shoulders and his eyes closed.

  With a shrug and a short laugh Bellecour turned to his daughter.

  “You may take the carrion, if you want to. But I think you can do no more than order it to be flung into a ditch and buried there.”

  But she had no mind to be advised by him. She had the young man’s body cut down from the pump, and she bade a couple of servants convey it to the house of Master Duhamel, she for remembered that La Boulaye and the old pedagogue were friends.

  “An odd thing is a woman’s heart,” grumbled the Marquis, who begrudged La Boulaye even his last act of mercy. “She may care never a fig for a man, and yet, if he has but told her that he loves her, be he never so mean and she never so exalted, he seems thereby to establish some measure of claim to her.”

  CHAPTER IV. THE DISCIPLES OF ROUSSEAU

  The Marquis of Bellecour would, perhaps have philosophised less complacently had he known that the secretary was far from dead, and that what the executioner had, genuinely enough, mistaken for death was no more than a passing swoon. Under ordinary circumstances he might not have been satisfied to have taken the fellow’s word; he would himself have ascertained the truth of the statement by a close inspection of the victim. But, as we have seen, the news came as so desirable a solution to the altercation that was waxing ‘twixt himself and Des Cadoux that he was more than glad to avail himself of it.

  The discovery that Caron lived was made while they were cutting him down from his pillory, and just as the Marquis was turning to go within. A flutter of the eyelids and a gasp for breath announced the fact, and the executioner was on the point of crying out his discovery when Mademoiselle’s eyes flashed him a glance of warning, and her voice whispered feverishly:

  “Hush! There are ten louis for each of you if you but keep silent and carry him to Master Duhamel as I told you.”

  The secretary opened his eyes but saw nothing, and a low moan escaped him. She shot a fearful glance at the retreating figure of her father, whilst Gilles — the executioner — hissed sharply into his ear:

  “Mille diables! be still, man. You are dead.”

  Thus did he escape, and thus was he borne — a limp, agonised, and bleeding mass, to the house of Duhamel. The old schoolmaster received them with tears in his eyes — nor were they altogether tears of sorrow, for all that poor Caron’s mangled condition grieved him sorely; they were in a measure tears of thankfulness; for Duhamel had not dared hope to see the young man alive again.

  At the pedagogue’s door stood a berline, and within his house there was a visitor. This was a slight young man of medium stature, who had not the appearance of more than twenty-five years of age, for all that, as a matter of fact, he was just over thirty. He was dressed with so scrupulous a neatness as to convey, in spite of the dark colour of his garments, an impression almost of foppishness. There was an amplitude about his cravat, an air of extreme care about the dressing of his wig and the powdering of it, and a shining brightness about his buttons and the buckles of his shoes which seemed to proclaim the dandy, just as the sombreness of the colour chosen seemed to deny it. In his singularly pale countenance a similar contradiction was observable. The weak, kindly eyes almost appeared to give the lie to the astute prominence of his cheekbones; the sensitiveness of the mouth seemed neutralised by the thinness of the lips, whilst the oddly tip-tilted nose made a mock of the austerity of the brow.

  He was perfectly at ease in his surroundings, and as La Boulaye was carried into the schoolmaster’s study and laid on a couch, he came forward and peered curiously at the secretary’s figure, voicing an inquiry concerning him.

  “It is the young man of whom I was telling you, Maximilien,” answered Duhamel. “I give thanks to God that they have not killed him outright. It is a mercy I had not expected from those wolves, and one which, on my soul, I cannot understand.”

  “Monsieur,” said Gilles, “will understand it better perhaps if I tell you that the Marquis believes him to be dead. He was cut down for dead, and when we discovered that he still lived it was Mademoiselle who prevailed upon us to save him. She is paying us to keep the secret, but not a fortune would tempt me if I thought the Seigneur were ever likely to hear of it. He must be got away from Bellecour; indeed, he must be got out of Picardy at once, Monsieur. And you must promise me that this shall be done or we will carry him back to the Chateau and tell the Marquis that he has suddenly revived. I must insist, Monsieur; for if ever it should transpire that he was not dead the Seigneur would hang us.”

  The stranger’s weak eyes seemed to kindle in anger, and his lips curled until they exaggerated the already preposterous tilt of his nose.

  “He would hang you, eh?” said he. “Ma foi, Duhamel, we shall change all this very soon, I promise you.”

  “God knows it needs changing,” growled Duhamel. “It seems that it was only in the Old Testament that Heaven interfered with human iniquity. Why it does not rain fire and brimstone on the Chateau de Bellecour passes the understanding of a good Christian. I’ll swear that in neither Sodom nor Gomorrah was villainy more rampant.”

  The stranger plucked at his sleeve to remind him of the presence of the servants from the Chateau. Duhamel turned to them.

  “I will keep him concealed here until he is able to get about,” he assured them. “Then I shall find him the means to leave the province.”

  But Gilles shook his head, and his companion grunted an echo of his disapproval.

  “That will not serve, master,” he answered sullenly. “What if the Seigneur should have word of his presence here? It is over-dangerous. Someone may see him. No, no, Either he leaves Bellecour this very night, and you swear that he shall, or else we carry him back to the Chateau.”

  “But how can I swear this?” cried Duhamel impatiently.

  “Why, easily enough,” put in the stranger. “Let me take him in my berline. I can leave him at Amiens or at Beauvais, or any one of the convenient places that I pass. Or I can even carry him on to Paris with me.”

  “You are very good, Maximilien,” answered the old man, to which the other returned a gesture of deprecation.

  In this fashion, then, was the matter settled to the satisfaction of the Seigneur’s retainers, and upon having received Duhamel’s solemn promise that Caron should be carried out of Bellecour, and, for that matter, out of Picard
y, before the night was spent, they withdrew.

  Within the schoolmaster’s study he whom Duhamel called Maximilien strode to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bent, his chin thrust forward, denouncing the seigneurial system, of whose atrocity he had received that evening instances enough — for he had heard the whole story of La Boulaye’s rebellion against the power of Bellecour and the causes that had led to it.

  “We will mend all this, I promise you, Duhamel,” he was repeating. “But not until we have united to shield the weak from oppression, to restrain the arrogant and to secure to each the possession of what belongs to him; not until all men are free and started upon equal terms in the race of life; not until we shall have set up rules of justice and of peace, to which all — rich and poor, noble and simple alike — shall be obliged to conform. Thus only can we repair the evil done by the caprice of fortune, which causes the one to be born into silk and the other into fustian. We must subject the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties, collecting our forces into the supreme power to govern us all impartially by the same laws, to protect alike all members of the community, to repel our common foes and preserve us in never-ending concord. How many crimes, murders, wars, miseries, horrors shall thus be spared us, Duhamel? And it will come; it will come soon, never fear.”

  Caron stirred on the couch where Duhamel was tending him, and raised his head to glance at the man who was voicing the doctrines that for years had dwelt in his heart.

  “Dear Jean Jacques,” he murmured.

  The stranger turned sharply and stepped to the young man’s side.

  “You have read the master?” he inquired, with a sudden, new-born interest in the secretary.

  “Read him?” cried Carom forgetting for the moment the sore condition of his body in the delight of discovering one who was bound to him by such bonds of sympathy as old Rousseau established.