“If,” said M. de Vilmorin, “the deed was infamous, its infamy is not modified by the rank, however exalted, of the person responsible. Rather is it aggravated.”
“Ah!” said M. le Marquis, and drew a gold snuffbox from his pocket. “You say, ‘if the deed was infamous,’ monsieur. Am I to understand that you are no longer as convinced as you appeared to be of its infamy?”
M. de Vilmorin’s fine face wore a look of perplexity. He did not understand the drift of this.
“It occurs to me, M. le Marquis, in view of your readiness to assume responsibility, that you must believe justification for the deed which is not apparent to myself.”
“That is better. That is distinctly better.” The Marquis took snuff delicately, dusting the fragments from the fine lace at his throat. “You realize that with an imperfect understanding of these matters, not being yourself a landowner, you may have rushed to unjustifiable conclusions. That is indeed the case. May it be a warning to you, monsieur. When I tell you that for months past I have been annoyed by similar depredations, you will perhaps understand that it had become necessary to employ a deterrent sufficiently strong to put an end to them. Now that the risk is known, I do not think there will be any more prowling in my coverts. And there is more in it than that, M. de Vilmorin. It is not the poaching that annoys me so much as the contempt for my absolute and inviolable rights. There is, monsieur, as you cannot fail to have observed, an evil spirit of insubordination in the air, and there is one only way in which to meet it. To tolerate it, in however slight a degree, to show leniency, however leniently disposed, would entail having recourse to still harsher measures to-morrow. You understand me, I am sure, and you will also, I am sure, appreciate the condescension of what amounts to an explanation from me where I cannot admit that any explanations were due. If anything in what I have said is still obscure to you, I refer you to the game laws, which your lawyer friend there will expound for you at need.”
With that the gentleman swung round again to face the fire. It appeared to convey the intimation that the interview was at an end. And yet this was not by any means the intimation that it conveyed to the watchful, puzzled, vaguely uneasy Andre-Louis. It was, thought he, a very curious, a very suspicious oration. It affected to explain, with a politeness of terms and a calculated insolence of tone; whilst in fact it could only serve to stimulate and goad a man of M. de Vilmorin’s opinions. And that is precisely what it did. He rose.
“Are there in the world no laws but game laws?” he demanded, angrily. “Have you never by any chance heard of the laws of humanity?”
The Marquis sighed wearily. “What have I to do with the laws of humanity?” he wondered.
M. de Vilmorin looked at him a moment in speechless amazement.
“Nothing, M. le Marquis. That is — alas! — too obvious. I hope you will remember it in the hour when you may wish to appeal to those laws which you now deride.”
M. de La Tour d’Azyr threw back his head sharply, his high-bred face imperious.
“Now what precisely shall that mean? It is not the first time to-day that you have made use of dark sayings that I could almost believe to veil the presumption of a threat.”
“Not a threat, M. le Marquis — a warning. A warning that such deeds as these against God’s creatures... Oh, you may sneer, monsieur, but they are God’s creatures, even as you or I — neither more nor less, deeply though the reflection may wound your pride, In His eyes...”
“Of your charity, spare me a sermon, M. l’abbe!”
“You mock, monsieur. You laugh. Will you laugh, I wonder, when God presents His reckoning to you for the blood and plunder with which your hands are full?”
“Monsieur!” The word, sharp as the crack of a whip, was from M. de Chabrillane, who bounded to his feet. But instantly the Marquis repressed him.
“Sit down, Chevalier. You are interrupting M. l’abbe, and I should like to hear him further. He interests me profoundly.”
In the background Andre-Louis, too, had risen, brought to his feet by alarm, by the evil that he saw written on the handsome face of M. de La Tour d’Azyr. He approached, and touched his friend upon the arm.
“Better be going, Philippe,” said he.
But M. de Vilmorin, caught in the relentless grip of passions long repressed, was being hurried by them recklessly along.
“Oh, monsieur,” said he, “consider what you are and what you will be. Consider how you and your kind live by abuses, and consider the harvest that abuses must ultimately bring.”
“Revolutionist!” said M. le Marquis, contemptuously. “You have the effrontery to stand before my face and offer me this stinking cant of your modern so-called intellectuals!”
“Is it cant, monsieur? Do you think — do you believe in your soul — that it is cant? Is it cant that the feudal grip is on all things that live, crushing them like grapes in the press, to its own profit? Does it not exercise its rights upon the waters of the river, the fire that bakes the poor man’s bread of grass and barley, on the wind that turns the mill? The peasant cannot take a step upon the road, cross a crazy bridge over a river, buy an ell of cloth in the village market, without meeting feudal rapacity, without being taxed in feudal dues. Is not that enough, M. le Marquis? Must you also demand his wretched life in payment for the least infringement of your sacred privileges, careless of what widows or orphans you dedicate to woe? Will naught content you but that your shadow must lie like a curse upon the land? And do you think in your pride that France, this Job among the nations, will suffer it forever?”
He paused as if for a reply. But none came. The Marquis considered him, strangely silent, a half smile of disdain at the corners of his lips, an ominous hardness in his eyes.
Again Andre-Louis tugged at his friend’s sleeve.
“Philippe.”
Philippe shook him off, and plunged on, fanatically.
“Do you see nothing of the gathering clouds that herald the coming of the storm? You imagine, perhaps, that these States General summoned by M. Necker, and promised for next year, are to do nothing but devise fresh means of extortion to liquidate the bankruptcy of the State? You delude yourselves, as you shall find. The Third Estate, which you despise, will prove itself the preponderating force, and it will find a way to make an end of this canker of privilege that is devouring the vitals of this unfortunate country.”
M. le Marquis shifted in his chair, and spoke at last.
“You have, monsieur,” said he, “a very dangerous gift of eloquence. And it is of yourself rather than of your subject. For after all, what do you offer me? A rechauffe of the dishes served to out-at-elbow enthusiasts in the provincial literary chambers, compounded of the effusions of your Voltaires and Jean-Jacques and such dirty-fingered scribblers. You have not among all your philosophers one with the wit to understand that we are an order consecrated by antiquity, that for our rights and privileges we have behind us the authority of centuries.”
“Humanity, monsieur,” Philippe replied, “is more ancient than nobility. Human rights are contemporary with man.”
The Marquis laughed and shrugged.
“That is the answer I might have expected. It has the right note of cant that distinguishes the philosophers.”
And then M. de Chabrillane spoke.
“You go a long way round,” he criticized his cousin, on a note of impatience.
“But I am getting there,” he was answered. “I desired to make quite certain first.”
“Faith, you should have no doubt by now.”
“I have none.” The Marquis rose, and turned again to M. de Vilmorin, who had understood nothing of that brief exchange. “M. l’abbe,” said he once more, “you have a very dangerous gift of eloquence. I can conceive of men being swayed by it. Had you been born a gentleman, you would not so easily have acquired these false views that you express.”
M. de Vilmorin stared blankly, uncomprehending.
“Had I been born a gentleman, do you say?�
� quoth he, in a slow, bewildered voice. “But I was born a gentleman. My race is as old, my blood as good as yours, monsieur.”
From M. le Marquis there was a slight play of eyebrows, a vague, indulgent smile. His dark, liquid eyes looked squarely into the face of M. de Vilmorin.
“You have been deceived in that, I fear.”
“Deceived?”
“Your sentiments betray the indiscretion of which madame your mother must have been guilty.”
The brutally affronting words were sped beyond recall, and the lips that had uttered them, coldly, as if they had been the merest commonplace, remained calm and faintly sneering.
A dead silence followed. Andre-Louis’ wits were numbed. He stood aghast, all thought suspended in him, what time M. de Vilmorin’s eyes continued fixed upon M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s, as if searching there for a meaning that eluded him. Quite suddenly he understood the vile affront. The blood leapt to his face, fire blazed in his gentle eyes. A convulsive quiver shook him. Then, with an inarticulate cry, he leaned forward, and with his open hand struck M. le Marquis full and hard upon his sneering face.
In a flash M. de Chabrillane was on his feet, between the two men.
Too late Andre-Louis had seen the trap. La Tour d’Azyr’s words were but as a move in a game of chess, calculated to exasperate his opponent into some such counter-move as this — a counter-move that left him entirely at the other’s mercy.
M. le Marquis looked on, very white save where M. de Vilmorin’s finger-prints began slowly to colour his face; but he said nothing more. Instead, it was M. de Chabrillane who now did the talking, taking up his preconcerted part in this vile game.
“You realize, monsieur, what you have done,” said he, coldly, to Philippe. “And you realize, of course, what must inevitably follow.”
M. de Vilmorin had realized nothing. The poor young man had acted upon impulse, upon the instinct of decency and honour, never counting the consequences. But he realized them now at the sinister invitation of M. de Chabrillane, and if he desired to avoid these consequences, it was out of respect for his priestly vocation, which strictly forbade such adjustments of disputes as M. de Chabrillane was clearly thrusting upon him.
He drew back. “Let one affront wipe out the other,” said he, in a dull voice. “The balance is still in M. le Marquis’s favour. Let that content him.”
“Impossible.” The Chevalier’s lips came together tightly. Thereafter he was suavity itself, but very firm. “A blow has been struck, monsieur. I think I am correct in saying that such a thing has never happened before to M. le Marquis in all his life. If you felt yourself affronted, you had but to ask the satisfaction due from one gentleman to another. Your action would seem to confirm the assumption that you found so offensive. But it does not on that account render you immune from the consequences.”
It was, you see, M. de Chabrillane’s part to heap coals upon this fire, to make quite sure that their victim should not escape them.
“I desire no immunity,” flashed back the young seminarist, stung by this fresh goad. After all, he was nobly born, and the traditions of his class were strong upon him — stronger far than the seminarist schooling in humility. He owed it to himself, to his honour, to be killed rather than avoid the consequences of the thing he had done.
“But he does not wear a sword, messieurs!” cried Andre Louis, aghast.
“That is easily amended. He may have the loan of mine.”
“I mean, messieurs,” Andre-Louis insisted, between fear for his friend and indignation, “that it is not his habit to wear a sword, that he has never worn one, that he is untutored in its uses. He is a seminarist — a postulant for holy orders, already half a priest, and so forbidden from such an engagement as you propose.”
“All that he should have remembered before he struck a blow,” said M. de Chabrillane, politely.
“The blow was deliberately provoked,” raged Andre-Louis. Then he recovered himself, though the other’s haughty stare had no part in that recovery. “O my God, I talk in vain! How is one to argue against a purpose formed! Come away, Philippe. Don’t you see the trap...”
M. de Vilmorin cut him short, and flung him off. “Be quiet, Andre. M. le Marquis is entirely in the right.”
“M. le Marquis is in the right?” Andre-Louis let his arms fall helplessly. This man he loved above all other living men was caught in the snare of the world’s insanity. He was baring his breast to the knife for the sake of a vague, distorted sense of the honour due to himself. It was not that he did not see the trap. It was that his honour compelled him to disdain consideration of it. To Andre-Louis in that moment he seemed a singularly tragic figure. Noble, perhaps, but very pitiful.
CHAPTER IV. THE HERITAGE
It was M. de Vilmorin’s desire that the matter should be settled out of hand. In this he was at once objective and subjective. A prey to emotions sadly at conflict with his priestly vocation, he was above all in haste to have done, so that he might resume a frame of mind more proper to it. Also he feared himself a little; by which I mean that his honour feared his nature. The circumstances of his education, and the goal that for some years now he had kept in view, had robbed him of much of that spirited brutality that is the birthright of the male. He had grown timid and gentle as a woman. Aware of it, he feared that once the heat of his passion was spent he might betray a dishonouring weakness, in the ordeal.
M. le Marquis, on his side, was no less eager for an immediate settlement; and since they had M. de Chabrillane to act for his cousin, and Andre-Louis to serve as witness for M. de Vilmorin, there was nothing to delay them.
And so, within a few minutes, all arrangements were concluded, and you behold that sinisterly intentioned little group of four assembled in the afternoon sunshine on the bowling-green behind the inn. They were entirely private, screened more or less from the windows of the house by a ramage of trees, which, if leafless now, was at least dense enough to provide an effective lattice.
There were no formalities over measurements of blades or selection of ground. M. le Marquis removed his sword-belt and scabbard, but declined — not considering it worth while for the sake of so negligible an opponent — to divest himself either of his shoes or his coat. Tall, lithe, and athletic, he stood to face the no less tall, but very delicate and frail, M. de Vilmorin. The latter also disdained to make any of the usual preparations. Since he recognized that it could avail him nothing to strip, he came on guard fully dressed, two hectic spots above the cheek-bones burning on his otherwise grey face.
M. de Chabrillane, leaning upon a cane — for he had relinquished his sword to M. de Vilmorin — looked on with quiet interest. Facing him on the other side of the combatants stood Andre-Louis, the palest of the four, staring from fevered eyes, twisting and untwisting clammy hands.
His every instinct was to fling himself between the antagonists, to protest against and frustrate this meeting. That sane impulse was curbed, however, by the consciousness of its futility. To calm him, he clung to the conviction that the issue could not really be very serious. If the obligations of Philippe’s honour compelled him to cross swords with the man he had struck, M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s birth compelled him no less to do no serious hurt to the unfledged lad he had so grievously provoked. M. le Marquis, after all, was a man of honour. He could intend no more than to administer a lesson; sharp, perhaps, but one by which his opponent must live to profit. Andre-Louis clung obstinately to that for comfort.
Steel beat on steel, and the men engaged. The Marquis presented to his opponent the narrow edge of his upright body, his knees slightly flexed and converted into living springs, whilst M. de Vilmorin stood squarely, a full target, his knees wooden. Honour and the spirit of fair play alike cried out against such a match.
The encounter was very short, of course. In youth, Philippe had received the tutoring in sword-play that was given to every boy born into his station of life. And so he knew at least the rudiments of what was now expected of him.
But what could rudiments avail him here? Three disengages completed the exchanges, and then without any haste the Marquis slid his right foot along the moist turf, his long, graceful body extending itself in a lunge that went under M. de Vilmorin’s clumsy guard, and with the utmost deliberation he drove his blade through the young man’s vitals.
Andre-Louis sprang forward just in time to catch his friend’s body under the armpits as it sank. Then, his own legs bending beneath the weight of it, he went down with his burden until he was kneeling on the damp turf. Philippe’s limp head lay against Andre-Louis’ left shoulder; Philippe’s relaxed arms trailed at his sides; the blood welled and bubbled from the ghastly wound to saturate the poor lad’s garments.
With white face and twitching lips, Andre-Louis looked up at M. de La Tour d’Azyr, who stood surveying his work with a countenance of grave but remorseless interest.
“You have killed him!” cried Andre-Louis.
“Of course.”
The Marquis ran a lace handkerchief along his blade to wipe it. As he let the dainty fabric fall, he explained himself. “He had, as I told him, a too dangerous gift of eloquence.”
And he turned away, leaving completest understanding with Andre-Louis. Still supporting the limp, draining body, the young man called to him.
“Come back, you cowardly murderer, and make yourself quite safe by killing me too!”
The Marquis half turned, his face dark with anger. Then M. de Chabrillane set a restraining hand upon his arm. Although a party throughout to the deed, the Chevalier was a little appalled now that it was done. He had not the high stomach of M. de La Tour d’Azyr, and he was a good deal younger.
“Come away,” he said. “The lad is raving. They were friends.”
“You heard what he said?” quoth the Marquis.
“Nor can he, or you, or any man deny it,” flung back Andre-Louis. “Yourself, monsieur, you made confession when you gave me now the reason why you killed him. You did it because you feared him.”
“If that were true — what, then?” asked the great gentleman.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 339
