She surveyed him with an eye that pierced this miserable artifice. She disdained him any answer other than: “Will you go now, sir?”
He stared at her as if this fresh dismissal were beyond belief. He played his part with vigour and intensity.
But it was quite futile. Yet in the face of his indifferent audience he maintained it, enheartened by the confidence that his finest line was yet to utter; saving this skilfully for his climax, a climax that should overwhelm and conquer her for all her present scorn of him.
“No,” he answered, “I will not go. My place is here beside my affianced wife.”
“Your — ?” She checked, her cheeks aflame. “You do well, I think, to remind me of my shame. But that is past. I am your affianced wife no longer.”
“Ah?” he said. He was quite himself by now, betraying no least sign of heat. “Since when this change?”
He got his answer pat. “Since you, yourself, failed in wit to conceal from me that it was my fortune, not myself, you wooed.”
He considered her, and his eyes were melancholy. He sighed. “I feared you had thus misunderstood me!”
“Oh, I did not misunderstand you,” she answered. “I understood you for the first time. And that is how it happens that Captain Gaynor’s further revelation of your ways does not surprise me.”
This was a blow between the eyes. But his lordship did not stagger under it. He preserved a calm front. “For that, too,” said he “you shall contritely and of your own free will yet seek my pardon.”
“I?” Her contempt withered him. “Oh, will you go!”
And seeing him still making no shift to depart: “I think,” said the Captain, “this lady bids you go. Must I compel you to obey her?”
“Very well,” he said to Damaris, entirely ignoring the Captain. “Very well.” He bowed to her. “Another season will perhaps serve me better. I should indeed prefer to clear myself in your eyes when there are no witnesses at hand. Yet ere I go, I will ask you to remember that however you may have misunderstood my motives, you are pledged to me, and I have not redeemed you from that pledge.”
“Myself have cancelled it,” she answered him. “I will not wed a thief.”
“Ha!” cried the Captain. “’Tis the very word — the very word I sought. A thief! Ha!”
The swarthy face flushed heavily, the eyes were venomous in the glance they flashed upon the Captain. My lord drew a deep breath with a little hissing sound, thereby acknowledging the hit.
“How wanton can a woman be when her mood is cruel!” he exclaimed. “How wanton is her injustice! This injustice; madam,” he continued sadly, his head bowed, “yourself shall come to acknowledge. As I know you to be a true and generous woman where you are not misled, so do I know that you will sue for pardon to me. You think to fling me aside because you imagine — oh, so mistakenly, dear God! — that I was a fortune hunter, that (in your own cruel words) I wooed your fortune and not yourself. And yet — and yet, such is a woman’s blindness — you replace me by one who is an avowed adventurer, a self-confessed fortune-hunter, a mercenary in all things; one who openly and without disguise or shame sought to win you for what you’re like to bring him in worldly estate.”
He had begun at last to play his trumps, and Captain Gaynor stiffened as he listened, stiffened in sudden horror of a picture that leapt before the eyes of his memory.
“Have you quite done?” was all Damaris’ acknowledgment of his lordship’s scathing words.
“Quite, if you do not believe me,” he answered with grim confidence.
Had she but preserved silence, had she but maintained her haughty indifference, all might yet have been well. There would have been no more to say, and, his rebuff complete, he must have taken his departure. But, woman-like, she must have the last word in this; she must come down a little from those frosty heights to utter it, and in uttering it must open the door to more.
“I do not believe you,” she said, to which he returned the obvious answer:
“And if I could prove it to you?”
“Prove it?” she cried, and now her pride and confidence in her lover were as much to blame as any other sentiments. “Prove it? You poor deceiver! Why, I can prove the very contrary. Until this hour, until he knew that he had won me — for I am his, my lord — he did not know my name; he deemed me Evelyn Kynaston, as a result of a poor deceit we put upon him; and for that I thank heaven, since it gives me this easy means of showing how fully I account you what Captain Gaynor says you are.”
But his lordship brushed the insult aside. It was insignificant, then; a mere piece of detail. The fact to which it was attached arrested him. For a second it checkmated him. And then he saw how it might be turned to account.
“He thought you Miss Kynaston?” he cried. “He has succeeded in making you credit even that? Now what a most complete and finished liar have we here!” Then, in a voice of thunder, a voice whose very weight and volume seemed to increase the burden of his overpowering words, he let her have it.
“Why, this man” — and he shook a quivering finger at the Captain— “this dastard came here of set intent to woo you, ere ever he had seen you. In his own words, ma’am, he knew not whether you were tall or short, dark or fair, plump or lean, neither did he care; he knew you for the wealthiest heiress in all England, and in no other way did he desire to know you.” He swung upon the Captain, smiling grimly. “You see that I have treasured the remembrance of your every word, sir.”
“You hound! You jackal!” said the Captain through his teeth.
But my lord ran on: “And because he knew me betrothed to you; because he knew me in straits for money, in the clutches of a merciless usurer, a debtor’s goal awaiting me, he availed himself of my despair to propose to me that I should play him for the right to wed you, which was mine. To my undying shame, I confess that I succumbed. He set you against ten thousand guineas, and he lost. Yet in spite of that, so false a dastard is he, he cannot abide by that issue of the cards, but comes here to steal a thing which is doubly lost to him in honour. And yet you call me a thief, and fling yourself into the arms of such a thief as that!”
He paused, and still she answered nothing. Her calm was impregnable. She just looked at him with eyes of coldest scorn, eyes that seemed to say she but suffered him to talk that he might be done the sooner, that she but waited to be rid of his unwelcome presence. Yet he had not quite done. The card was played; but its force and value were not yet realised.
“I have been in a very hell of shame since I lent myself — induced in my despair — to such a thing. But however shameful you may deem me, I am not shameful as is he. I at least desired you because first and last I loved you. It was not your fortune that I staked upon the board when I gambled for my right to wed you — not your fortune, but my very life, my every hope. But he — Well! I have told you what words he uttered. He will not deny them if you ask him. He cannot, bold liar though he is.”
He had finished. If he had ruined himself, at least he had ruined the Captain. And yet for himself he had a glimmer of hope. If on the recoil from himself she had tumbled into the Captain’s mercenary arms, might he not win her yet upon this second recoil that must inevitably follow now? It was just possible, and he had the means, he thought, to compel Sir John’s assistance. He could not think that he had talked in vain. He preened himself upon his knowledge of the ways of women, and here he was confident of having taken a course that no woman could disregard. Yet, it seems, there was one woman whom he had not gauged. For all that Damaris answered him even now was: “Will you go at last, sir; or can you think of aught else to say — though I warn you ‘twill be so much wasted breath.”
He gasped and blenched. His eyes bulged as he stared at her.
“You — you do not believe me?” he cried, as he had cried before, but without the confidence that had informed the earlier question.
“Believe you?” she said, and smiled. “I see that you have thought me mad.”
“As
k him!” he barked, and flung out a hand again towards Gaynor.
“There is not the need,” she said, with quiet confidence.
For a moment he continued to stare at her — her loyalty — her foolish, headstrong loyalty had defeated him, he thought. How she must love this fellow Gaynor that no doubt of him could find admittance to her mind however spurred.
“You are right,” he said at last. “There is not the need to ask.” And he, too, was smiling, never so wickedly. “You have but to look. Look!” he commanded. “Look in his face and see for yourself what is written there; see for yourself whether I have lied. Oh, indeed, there is no need to ask.”
She looked as he bade her. Captain Gaynor’s continued silence under that long and formidable accusation occurred to her, perhaps, to cause her at last to do his lordship’s bidding and turn her head to look upon her lover’s face.
What she saw there struck all her proud confidence to earth, left her frozen and panic-stricken. His face was as the face of a dead man; the very eyes were gone lustreless, and they could not meet her own.
“Harry,” she said, and the steadiness of her voice surprised her. She considered that steadiness almost critically, just as she considered the circumstance that this was the first occasion on which she used his name; and to think that she must use it to ask him — to ask him! — to refute a grotesque and foolish accusation. Yet ask him she must, which meant that the accusation had ceased of a sudden to seem to her grotesque and foolish. She was as one who looked on at herself and at her fellow-actors in this scene. It was as if her spirit were disembodied, to become a cold and critical spectator.
“Harry, you will tell me that he lies. That is all that you need tell me.”
“Were I the man to have done what he says I have done, then I should be a liar, too, and I should not scruple to answer you as you desire,” he said. His voice was husky and unsteady.
She did not understand. There was a confusing paradox in his words. She weighed them in her mind, repeated them to herself, and found them meaningless. She said so.
“But you mean that it is untrue?” she pleaded.
“Untrue, as there is a God above me,” he answered, “yet every word of it is true.”
She drew away from him. In the half-benumbed condition of her mind she could set but one interpretation upon his stricken condition, his husky, vibrant voice; she saw nothing but subterfuge and quibble in his words.
“True?” she echoed. “You gamed for me?”
He did not answer. He stood rigid, with hands clenched at his sides. The temptation to explain assailed him for a moment; but he allowed it to pass on unheeded and despised, as she must despise it did he attempt to offer it. It were, he realised, but to make himself seem viler and more pitiful. It could not be believed, could carry no conviction; rather must every word of such explanation as he had to offer seem the obvious pretence put forward by a rogue and liar; every word and act that had passed between them since his coming must add confirmation to the thing that Pauncefort told her, since fundamentally that thing was true — the blackest, foulest, untruest truth that was ever uttered.
She waited, then, in vain, waited until his silence bore the only answer.
“O God, pity me!” she wailed. She stumbled, and put a hand to her brow. He flung out a hand to save her, and that act revived her; with fresh panic she shrank from the touch of it as though it had been redhot iron, and in shrinking she stiffened and regained a wonderful composure.
Torn, lacerated, anguished, she stood before these beasts who had fought for her and mangled her very soul in the strife, and she determined in her pride to let them see nothing of her hurt.
She turned very quietly, and with figure erect, though her head drooped a little, she passed down the narrow alley of that court.
“Damaris!” cried Pauncefort as she approached him, his flaming eyes devouring her. But before her glance he quailed and fell back. There was something awful and forbidding there that he dared not brave.
She continued on her way unhindered further. But as she was passing underneath the archway in the hedge she heard her name again.
“Damaris! Damaris!”
It was the cry of one in mortal agony. It was a voice that had grown more dear to her than any human voice, than the sum of all other human voices. She might account him vile and faithless; but his call could still, it seemed, compel her. For she paused and turned her head — turned to him that lovely, stricken face, those deep brown eyes in which so lately he had seen his own reflection, those pale trembling lips that so lately he had kissed. Thus, her head turned, she waited, hoping madly even now against all reasonable hope.
“One thing, at least, believe, O Damaris!” he cried. “One thing I swear — and it is a thing that should efface all else. Until this hour I did not know that you were Damaris Hollinstone. That much I do swear by the God above us, Who is my witness.”
If that were so, then indeed did it efface all else, as he had said. If that were so, then all else could matter nothing. She tried to think, to weigh his words. And then, to help to falsify her scales, came a little wicked, scornful laugh from my Lord Pauncefort.
“Of course,” scoffed his lordship, “the gentleman must be believed. Has he not deserved to be? Is he not the very soul of honour?”
That gave her the right perspective, she opined; and listlessly she continued on her way, and so out of their sight.
Like a sleep-walker she made her way to the house and ascended the broad steps. Straight and evenly she held upon her course, up the great staircase, to her own chamber. By the narrow white bed she sank down upon her knees. Then pent-up nature had its way at last and, kneeling there, she swooned away. And thus, perhaps, she saved her reason.
Outside, in the rose-garden, my Lord Pauncefort and Captain Gaynor eyed each other in silence for a moment after Damaris had vanished. The Captain listened to her footsteps intently until they had faded in the distance. Then, as if some arresting influence were removed, as if a spell were shattered, he shook himself and his sword flashed lividly from its scabbard.
“Now, you — you lackey!” he snarled. “It is my turn.” And on the words he sprang, trampling a bed of roses in his haste to come upon his enemy.
Pauncefort would have avoided this. He was no coward, but to fight a man in the Captain’s white-heat of rage were utter suicide. He saw his death in the blazing eyes that looked out of that livid, distorted countenance.
He flung up a hand to arrest the other’s attention. “This is neither time nor place,” he cried, “and the man that prevails will be indicted for murder.”
The Captain laughed.
“Send your friends to wait upon me,” his lordship insisted, “and you shall have what satisfaction you desire.”
But as well might he, like Canute, have attempted to arrest the tide.
“Draw, damn you,” was his answer. “Draw, or I spit you as you stand.”
As my lord still hesitated, that long, thin blade flashed up and its point came level with his heart. The sweat broke out cold upon his brow. He drew perforce, and threw himself on guard.
The Captain pressed him wildly, a maniac, panting, sobbing, jeering as he fought. He was terrific, and terror of him went deep into his lordship’s soul. He was vengeance incarnate, a bloodhound upon its prey; and in imagination already my lord felt that bright, cruel steel tearing at his throat.
“What place or season could be better?” the Captain mocked him, as he drove his lordship back into a rose bed, across it, and plump into another, that dancing point hovering ever with its deadly menace along the line of his lordship’s Adam’s apple. “You are fastidious indeed, if my lady’s rose-garden will not suit you for a death-bed; a dunghill would better meet your merits.”
His lordship crashed backwards through a rose-bush, stumbled, recovered and fought on in desperate defence. He had caught a sound of running feet to hearten him. The Captain heard them too, a moment later.
�
��You hear them running,” he mocked the other. “So run your sands. Your wages are due, my lord, and shall be paid you — thus!” He beat aside the other’s impotent blade, and his own point leapt out to end the matter. But as it leapt, his lordship leapt too, back and aside, and then fled in utter panic.
“O coward!” roared the Captain. “Coward that cannot even face his death. Take it, then, from behind.” And he sprang to follow. His foot caught and tangled in the root of a brier. He plunged forward, and fell upon his face. As he struggled to rise a hand came to help him, a hand which retained its hold upon his arm after assisting him to his feet.
As through a mist he saw the weather-beaten face of one of the gardeners; another stood on his other side. He strove to throw off the grip that held him. But the second man came to the assistance of the first. Between them they overpowered him and deprived him of his sword, muttering apologies the while for the force they were employing.
My Lord Pauncefort, limp and breathless, leaned against a hedge, and looked on, until one of the gardeners respectfully advised him to be gone. Acting upon that excellent advice, he sheathed his sword and withdrew, mopping his livid brow.
“You may go now,” Gaynor called after him, “but do not think to escape. It is but a postponement.”
Lord Pauncefort, something recovered by now, turned to his antagonist.
“In a regular manner I will meet you when you will,” he panted. “I shall expect you.” And upon that he took his departure.
Chapter 14. THE ROAD TO TYBURN
That afternoon Captain Gaynor, once more completely master of himself, and showing no least outward sign of the storm through which his spirit had so lately passed, of the rage that for a while had so entirely governed him, took his leave of Lady Kynaston, informing her that business of some urgency compelled him to depart at once without awaiting Sir John’s return.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 263
