“But, my lord, I protest—”
“You are interrupting me, I think,” Lord Wellington rebuked him coldly, and under the habit of obedience and the magnetic eye of his lordship the captain lapsed into anguished silence.
“I am of opinion, gentlemen,” his lordship addressed the court, “that this affair has gone quite far enough. Miss Armytage’s testimony has saved a deal of trouble. It has shed light upon much that was obscure, and it has provided Captain Tremayne with an unanswerable alibi. In my view — and without wishing unduly to influence the court in its decision — it but remains to pronounce Captain Tremayne’s acquittal, thereby enabling him to fulfil towards this lady a duty which the circumstances would seem to have rendered somewhat urgent.”
They were words that lifted an intolerable burden from Sir Harry’s shoulders.
In immense relief, eager now to make an end, he looked to right and left. Everywhere he met nodding heads and murmurs of “Yes, Yes.” Everywhere with one exception. Sir Terence, white to the lips, gave no sign of assent, and yet dared give none of dissent. The eye of Lord Wellington was upon him, compelling him by its eagle glance.
“We are clearly agreed,” the president began, but Captain Tremayne interrupted him.
“But you are wrongly agreed.”
“Sir, sir!”
“You shall listen. It is infamous that I should owe my acquittal to the sacrifice of this lady’s good name.”
“Damme! That is a matter that any parson can put right,” said his lordship.
“Your lordship is mistaken,” Captain Tremayne insisted, greatly daring. “The honour of this lady is more dear to me than my life.”
“So we perceive,” was the dry rejoinder. “These outbursts do you a certain credit, Captain Tremayne. But they waste the time of the court.”
And then the president made his announcement
“Captain Tremayne, you are acquitted of the charge of killing Count Samoval, and you are at liberty to depart and to resume your usual duties. The court congratulates you and congratulates itself upon having reached this conclusion in the case of an officer so estimable as yourself.”
“Ah, but, gentlemen, hear me yet a moment. You, my lord—”
“The court has pronounced. The matter is at an end,” said Wellington, with a shrug, and immediately upon the words he rose, and the court rose with him. Immediately, with rattle of sabres and sabretaches, the officers who had composed the board fell into groups and broke into conversation out of a spirit of consideration for Tremayne, and definitely to mark the conclusion of the proceedings.
Tremayne, white and trembling, turned in time to see Miss Armytage leaving the hall and assisting Colonel Grant to support Lady O’Moy, who was in a half-swooning condition.
He stood irresolute, prey to a torturing agony of mind, cursing himself now for his silence, for not having spoken the truth and taken the consequences together with Dick Butler. What was Dick Butler to him, what was his own life to him — if they should demand it for the grave breach of duty he had committed by his readiness to assist a proscribed offender to escape — compared with the honour of Sylvia Armytage? And she, why had she done this for him? Could it be possible that she cared, that she was concerned so much for his life as to immolate her honour to deliver him from peril? The event would seem to prove it. Yet the overmastering joy that at any other time, and in any other circumstances, such a revelation must have procured him, was stifled now by his agonised concern for the injustice to which she had submitted herself.
And then, as he stood there, a suffering, bewildered man, came Carruthers to grasp his hand and in terms of warm friendship to express satisfaction at his acquittal.
“Sooner than have such a price as that paid—” he said bitterly, and with a shrug left his sentence unfinished.
O’Moy came stalking past him, pale-faced, with eyes that looked neither to right nor left.
“O’Moy!” he cried.
Sir Terence checked, and stood stiffly as if to attention, his handsome blue eyes blazing into the captain’s own. Thus a moment. Then:
“We will talk of this again, you and I,” he said grimly, and passed on and out with clanking step, leaving Tremayne to reflect that the appearances certainly justified Sir Terence’s resentment.
“My God, Carruthers! What must he think of me?” he ejaculated.
“If you ask me, I think that he has suspected this from the very beginning. Only that could account for the hostility of his attitude towards you, for the persistence with which he has sought either to convict or wring the truth from you.”
Tremayne looked askance at the major. In such a tangle as this it was impossible to keep the attention fixed upon any single thread.
“His mind must be disabused at once,” he answered. “I must go to him.”
O’Moy had already vanished.
There were one or two others would have checked the adjutant’s departure, but he had heeded none. In the quadrangle he nodded curtly to Colonel Grant, who would have detained him. But he passed on and went to shut himself up in his study with his mental anguish that was compounded of so many and so diverse emotions. He needed above all things to be alone and to think, if thought were possible to a mind so distraught as his own. There were now so many things to be faced, considered, and dealt with. First and foremost — and this was perhaps the product of inevitable reaction — was the consideration of his own duplicity, his villainous betrayal of trust undertaken deliberately, but with an aim very different from that which would appear. He perceived how men must assume now, when the truth of Samoval’s death became known as become known it must — that he had deliberately fastened upon another his own crime. The fine edifice of vengeance he had been so skilfully erecting had toppled about his ears in obscene ruin, and he was a man not only broken, but dishonoured. Let him proclaim the truth now and none would believe it. Sylvia Armytage’s mad and inexplicable self-accusation was a final bar to that. Men of honour would scorn him, his friends would turn from him in disgust, and Wellington, that great soldier whom he worshipped, and whose esteem he valued above all possessions, would be the first to cast him out. He would appear as a vulgar murderer who, having failed by falsehood to fasten the guilt upon an innocent man, sought now by falsehood still more damnable, at the cost of his wife’s honour, to offer some mitigation of his unspeakable offence.
Conceive this terrible position in which his justifiable jealousy — his naturally vindictive rage — had so irretrievably ensnared him. He had been so intent upon the administration of poetic justice, so intent upon condignly punishing the false friend who had dishonoured him, upon finding a balm for his lacerated soul in the spectacle of Tremayne’s own ignominy, that he had never paused to see whither all this might lead him.
He had been a fool to have adopted these subtle, tortuous ways; a fool not to have obeyed the earlier and honest impulse which had led him to take that case of pistols from the drawer. And he was served as a fool deserves to be served. His folly had recoiled upon him to destroy him. Fool’s mate had checked his perfidious vengeance at a blow.
Why had Sylvia Armytage discarded her honour to make of it a cloak for the protection of Tremayne? Did she love Tremayne and take that desperate way to save a life she accounted lost, or was it that she knew the truth, and out of affection for Una had chosen to immolate herself?
Sir Terence was no psychologist. But he found it difficult to believe in so much of self-sacrifice from a woman for a woman’s sake, however dear. Therefore he held to the first alternative. To confirm it came the memory of Sylvia’s words to him on the night of Tremayne’s arrest. And it was to such a man that she gave the priceless treasure of her love; for such a man, and in such a sordid cause, that she sacrificed the inestimable jewel of her honour? He laughed through clenched teeth at a situation so bitterly ironical. Presently he would talk to her. She should realise what she had done, and he would wish her joy of it. First, however, there was something else to
do. He flung himself wearily into the chair at his writing-table, took up a pen and began to write.
CHAPTER XIX. THE TRUTH
To Captain Tremayne, fretted with impatience in the diningroom, came, at the end of a long hour of waiting, Sylvia Armytage. She entered unannounced, at a moment when for the third time he was on the point of ringing for Mullins, and for a moment they stood considering each other mutually ill at ease. Then Miss Armytage closed the door and came forward, moving with that grace peculiar to her, and carrying her head erect, facing Captain Tremayne now with some lingering signs of the defiance she had shown the members of the court-martial.
“Mullins tells me that you wish to see me,” she said the merest conventionality to break the disconcerting, uneasy silence.
“After what has happened that should not surprise you,” said Tremayne. His agitation was clear to behold, his usual imperturbability all departed. “Why,” he burst out suddenly, “why did you do it?”
She looked at him with the faintest ghost of a smile on her lips, as if she found the question amusing. But before she could frame any answer he was speaking again, quickly and nervously.
“Could you suppose that I should wish to purchase my life at such a price? Could you suppose that your honour was not more precious to me than my life? It was infamous that you should have sacrificed yourself in this manner.”
“Infamous of whom?” she asked him coolly.
The question gave him pause. “I don’t know!” he cried desperately. “Infamous of the circumstances, I suppose.”
She shrugged. “The circumstances were there, and they had to be met. I could think of no other way of meeting them.”
Hastily he answered her out of his anger for her sake: “It should not have been your affair to meet them at all.”
He saw the scarlet flush sweep over her face and leave it deathly white, and instantly he perceived how horribly he had blundered.
“I’m sorry to have been interfering,” she answered stiffly, “but, after all, it is not a matter that need trouble you.” And on the words she turned to depart again. “Good-day, Captain Tremayne.”
“Ah, wait!” He flung himself between her and the door. “We must understand each other, Miss Armytage.”
“I think we do, Captain Tremayne,” she answered, fire dancing in her eyes. And she added: “You are detaining me.”
“Intentionally.” He was calm again; and he was masterful for the first time in all his dealings with her. “We are very far from any understanding. Indeed, we are overhead in a misunderstanding already. You misconstrue my words. I am very angry with you. I do not think that in all my life I have ever been so angry with anybody. But you are not to mistake the source of my anger. I am angry with you for the great wrong you have done yourself.”
“That should not be your affair,” she answered him, thus flinging back the offending phrase.
“But it is. I make it mine,” he insisted.
“Then I do not give you the right. Please let me pass.” She looked him steadily in the face, and her voice was calm to coldness. Only the heave of her bosom betrayed the agitation under which she was labouring.
“Whether you give me the right or not, I intend to take it,” he insisted.
“You are very rude,” she reproved him.
He laughed. “Even at the risk of being rude, then. I must make myself clear to you. I would suffer anything sooner than leave you under any misapprehension of the grounds upon which I should have preferred to face a firing party rather than have been rescued at the sacrifice of your good name.”
“I hope,” she said, with faint but cutting irony, “you do not intend to offer me the reparation of marriage.”
It took his breath away for a moment. It was a solution that in his confused and irate state of mind he had never even paused to consider. Yet now that it was put to him in this scornfully reproachful manner he perceived not only that it was the only possible course, but also that on that very account it might be considered by her impossible.
Her testiness was suddenly plain to him. She feared that he was come to her with an offer of marriage out of a sense of duty, as an amende, to correct the false position into which, for his sake, she had placed herself. And he himself by his blundering phrase had given colour to that hideous fear of hers.
He considered a moment whilst he stood there meeting her defiant glance. Never had she been more desirable in his eyes; and hopeless as his love for her had always seemed, never had it been in such danger of hopelessness as at this present moment, unless he proceeded here with the utmost care. And so Ned Tremayne became subtle for the first time in his honest, straightforward, soldierly life. “No,” he answered boldly, “I do not intend it.”
“I am glad that you spare me that,” she answered him, yet her pallor seemed to deepen under his glance.
“And that,” he continued, “is the source of all my anger, against you, against myself, and against circumstances. If I had deemed myself remotely worthy of you,” he continued, “I should have asked you weeks ago to be my wife. Oh, wait, and hear me out. I have more than once been upon the point of doing so — the last time was that night on the balcony at Count Redondo’s. I would have spoken then; I would have taken my courage in my hands, confessed my unworthiness and my love. But I was restrained because, although I might confess, there was nothing I could ask. I am a poor man, Sylvia, you are the daughter of a wealthy one; men speak of you as an heiress. To ask you to marry me—” He broke off. “You realise that I could not; that I should have been deemed a fortune-hunter, not only by the world, which matters nothing, but perhaps by yourself, who matter everything. I — I—” he faltered, fumbling for words to express thoughts of an overwhelming intricacy. “It was not perhaps that so much as the thought that, if my suit should come to prosper, men would say you had thrown yourself away on a fortune-hunter. To myself I should have accounted the reproach well earned, but it seemed to me that it must contain something slighting to you, and to shield you from all slights must be the first concern of my deep worship for you. That,” he ended fiercely, “is why I am so angry, so desperate at the slight you have put upon yourself for my sake — for me, who would have sacrificed life and honour and everything I hold of any account, to keep you up there, enthroned not only in my own eyes, but in the eyes of every man.”
He paused, and looked at her and she at him. She was still very white, and one of her long, slender hands was pressed to her bosom as if to contain and repress tumult. But her eyes were smiling, and yet it was a smile he could not read; it was compassionate, wistful, and yet tinged, it seemed to him, with mockery.
“I suppose,” he said, “it would be expected of me in the circumstances to seek words in which to thank you for what you have done. But I have no such words. I am not grateful. How could I be grateful? You have destroyed the thing that I most valued in this world.”
“What have I destroyed?” she asked him.
“Your own good name; the respect that was your due from all men.”
“Yet if I retain your own?”
“What is that worth?” he asked almost resentfully.
“Perhaps more than all the rest.” She took a step forward and set her hand upon his arm. There was no mistaking now her smile. It was all tenderness, and her eyes were shining. “Ned, there is only one thing to be done.”
He looked down at her who was only a little less tall than himself, and the colour faded from his own face now.
“You haven’t understood me after all,” he said. “I was afraid you would not. I have no clear gift of words, and if I had, I am trying to say something that would overtax any gift.”
“On the contrary, Ned, I understand you perfectly. I don’t think I have ever understood you until now. Certainly never until now could I be sure of what I hoped.”
“Of what you hoped?” His voice sank as if in awe. “What?” he asked.
She looked away, and her persisting, yet ever-changing smile g
rew slightly arch.
“You do not then intend to ask me to marry you?” she said.
“How could I?” It was an explosion almost of anger. “You yourself suggested that it would be an insult; and so it would. It is to take advantage of the position into which your foolish generosity has betrayed you. Oh!” he clenched his fists and shook them a moment at his sides.
“Very well,” she said. “In that case I must ask you to marry me.”
“You?” He was thunderstruck.
“What alternative do you leave me? You say that I have destroyed my good name. You must provide me with a new one. At all costs I must become an honest woman. Isn’t that the phrase?”
“Don’t!” he cried, and pain quivered in his voice. “Don’t jest upon it.”
“My dear,” she said, and now she held out both hands to him, “why trouble yourself with things of no account, when the only thing that matters to us is within our grasp? We love each other, and—”
Her glance fell away, her lip trembled, and her smile at last took flight. He caught her hands, holding them in a grip that hurt her; he bent his head, and his eyes sought her own, but sought in vain.
“Have you considered—” he was beginning, when she interrupted him. Her face flushed upward, surrendering to that questing glance of his, and its expression was now between tears and laughter.
“You will be for ever considering, Ned. You consider too much, where the issues are plain and simple. For the last time — will you marry me?”
The subtlety he had employed had been greater than he knew, and it had achieved something beyond his utmost hopes.
He murmured incoherently and took her to his arms. I really do not see that he could have done anything else. It was a plain and simple issue, and she herself had protested that the issue was plain and simple.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 332
