Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Thereupon up jumped Columbine.

  “And I’ll come with you, Scaramouche!” cried she.

  It acted like a signal. Had the thing been concerted it couldn’t have fallen out more uniformly. Binet, in fact, was persuaded of a conspiracy. For in the wake of Columbine went Leandre, in the wake of Leandre, Polichinelle and then all the rest together, until Binet found himself sitting alone at the head of an empty table in an empty room — a badly shaken man whose rage could afford him no support against the dread by which he was suddenly invaded.

  He sat down to think things out, and he was still at that melancholy occupation when perhaps a half-hour later his daughter entered the room, returned at last from her excursion.

  She looked pale, even a little scared — in reality excessively self-conscious now that the ordeal of facing all the company awaited her.

  Seeing no one but her father in the room, she checked on the threshold.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked, in a voice rendered natural by effort.

  M. Binet reared his great head and turned upon her eyes that were blood-injected. He scowled, blew out his thick lips and made harsh noises in his throat. Yet he took stock of her, so graceful and comely and looking so completely the lady of fashion in her long fur-trimmed travelling coat of bottle green, her muff and her broad hat adorned by a sparkling Rhinestone buckle above her adorably coiffed brown hair. No need to fear the future whilst he owned such a daughter, let Scaramouche play what tricks he would.

  He expressed, however, none of these comforting reflections.

  “So you’re back at last, little fool,” he growled in greeting. “I was beginning to ask myself if we should perform this evening. It wouldn’t greatly have surprised me if you had not returned in time. Indeed, since you have chosen to play the fine hand you held in your own way and scorning my advice, nothing can surprise me.”

  She crossed the room to the table, and leaning against it, looked down upon him almost disdainfully.

  “I have nothing to regret,” she said.

  “So every fool says at first. Nor would you admit it if you had. You are like that. You go your own way in spite of advice from older heads. Death of my life, girl, what do you know of men?”

  “I am not complaining,” she reminded him.

  “No, but you may be presently, when you discover that you would have done better to have been guided by your old father. So long as your Marquis languished for you, there was nothing you could not have done with the fool. So long as you let him have no more than your fingertips to kiss... ah, name of a name! that was the time to build your future. If you live to be a thousand you’ll never have such a chance again, and you’ve squandered it, for what?”

  Mademoiselle sat down.— “You’re sordid,” she said, with disgust.

  “Sordid, am I?” His thick lips curled again. “I have had enough of the dregs of life, and so I should have thought have you. You held a hand on which to have won a fortune if you had played it as I bade you. Well, you’ve played it, and where’s the fortune? We can whistle for that as a sailor whistles for wind. And, by Heaven, we’ll need to whistle presently if the weather in the troupe continues as it’s set in. That scoundrel Scaramouche has been at his ape’s tricks with them. They’ve suddenly turned moral. They won’t sit at table with me any more.” He was spluttering between anger and sardonic mirth. “It was your friend Scaramouche set them the example of that. He threatened my life actually. Threatened my life! Called me... Oh, but what does that matter? What matters is that the next thing to happen to us will be that the Binet Troupe will discover it can manage without M. Binet and his daughter. This scoundrelly bastard I’ve befriended has little by little robbed me of everything. It’s in his power to-day to rob me of my troupe, and the knave’s ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of his power.

  “Let him,” said mademoiselle contemptuously.

  “Let him?” He was aghast. “And what’s to become of us?”

  “In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer,” said she. “I shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the Feydau. There’s Mlle. Montansier’s theatre in the Palais Royal; there’s the Ambigu Comique; there’s the Comedie Francaise; there’s even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own.”

  His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.

  “Has he promised that? Has he promised?”

  She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.

  “He did not refuse me when I asked it,” she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.

  “Bah!” He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up. There was disgust on his face. “He did not refuse!” he mocked her; and then with passion: “Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything that you asked — anything that lay within his means, and they are inexhaustible. You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities — God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”

  Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Chateau de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father’s gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all. She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked interference of that villain Scaramouche.

  She had this much justification that possibly, without the warning from M. de Sautron, the Marquis would have found in the events of that evening at the Theatre Feydau a sufficient reason for ending an entanglement that was fraught with too much unpleasant excitement, whilst the breaking-up of the Binet Troupe was most certainly the result of Andre-Louis’ work. But it was not a result that he intended or even foresaw.

  So much was this the case that in the interval after the second act, he sought the dressing-room shared by Polichinelle and Rhodomont. Polichinelle was in the act of changing.

  “I shouldn’t trouble to change,” he said. “The piece isn’t likely to go beyond my opening scene of the next act with Leandre.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.” He put a paper on Polichinelle’s table amid the grease-paints. “Cast your eye over that. It’s a sort of last will and testament in favour of the troupe. I was a lawyer once; the document is in order. I relinquish to all of you the share produced by my partnership in the company.”

  “But you don’t mean that you are leaving us?” cried Polichinelle in alarm, whilst Rhodomont’s sudden stare asked the same question.

  Scaramouche’s shrug was eloquent. Polichinelle ran on gloomily: “Of course it was to have been foreseen. But why should you be the one to go? It is you who have made us; and it is you who are the real head and brains of the troupe; it is you who have raised it into a real theatrical company. If any one must go, let it be Binet — Binet and his infernal daughter. Or if you go, name of a name! we all go with you!”

  “Aye,” added Rhodomont, “we’ve had enough of that fat scoundrel.”

  “I had thought of it, of course,” said Andre-Louis. “It was not vanity, for once; it was trust in your friendship. After to-night we may consider it again, if I survive.”

  “If you survive?” both cried.

  Polichinelle got up. “Now, what madness have you in mind?” he asked.

  “For one thing I think I am indulging Leandre; for another I am pursuing an old quarrel.”

  The three knocks sounded as he spoke.

  “There, I must go. Keep that paper, Polichinelle. After all, it may not be necessary.”

  He was gone. Rhodomont stared at Polichinelle. Polichinelle stared at Rhodomont.

  “What the devil is he thinking of?” quo
th the latter.

  “That is most readily ascertained by going to see,” replied Polichinelle. He completed changing in haste, and despite what Scaramouche had said; and then followed with Rhodomont.

  As they approached the wings a roar of applause met them coming from the audience. It was applause and something else; applause on an unusual note. As it faded away they heard the voice of Scaramouche ringing clear as a bell:

  “And so you see, my dear M. Leandre, that when you speak of the Third Estate, it is necessary to be more explicit. What precisely is the Third Estate?”

  “Nothing,” said Leandre.

  There was a gasp from the audience, audible in the wings, and then swiftly followed Scaramouche’s next question:

  “True. Alas! But what should it be?”

  “Everything,” said Leandre.

  The audience roared its acclamations, the more violent because of the unexpectedness of that reply.

  “True again,” said Scaramouche. “And what is more, that is what it will be; that is what it already is. Do you doubt it?”

  “I hope it,” said the schooled Leandre.

  “You may believe it,” said Scaramouche, and again the acclamations rolled into thunder.

  Polichinelle and Rhodomont exchanged glances: indeed, the former winked, not without mirth.

  “Sacred name!” growled a voice behind them. “Is the scoundrel at his political tricks again?”

  They turned to confront M. Binet. Moving with that noiseless tread of his, he had come up unheard behind them, and there he stood now in his scarlet suit of Pantaloon under a trailing bedgown, his little eyes glaring from either side of his false nose. But their attention was held by the voice of Scaramouche. He had stepped to the front of the stage.

  “He doubts it,” he was telling the audience. “But then this M. Leandre is himself akin to those who worship the worm-eaten idol of Privilege, and so he is a little afraid to believe a truth that is becoming apparent to all the world. Shall I convince him? Shall I tell him how a company of noblemen backed by their servants under arms — six hundred men in all — sought to dictate to the Third Estate of Rennes a few short weeks ago? Must I remind him of the martial front shown on that occasion by the Third Estate, and how they swept the streets clean of that rabble of nobles — cette canaille noble...”

  Applause interrupted him. The phrase had struck home and caught. Those who had writhed under that infamous designation from their betters leapt at this turning of it against the nobles themselves.

  “But let me tell you of their leader — le pins noble de cette canaille, ou bien le plus canaille de ces nobles! You know him — that one. He fears many things, but the voice of truth he fears most. With such as him the eloquent truth eloquently spoken is a thing instantly to be silenced. So he marshalled his peers and their valetailles, and led them out to slaughter these miserable bourgeois who dared to raise a voice. But these same miserable bourgeois did not choose to be slaughtered in the streets of Rennes. It occurred to them that since the nobles decreed that blood should flow, it might as well be the blood of the nobles. They marshalled themselves too — this noble rabble against the rabble of nobles — and they marshalled themselves so well that they drove M. de La Tour d’Azyr and his warlike following from the field with broken heads and shattered delusions. They sought shelter at the hands of the Cordeliers; and the shavelings gave them sanctuary in their convent — those who survived, among whom was their proud leader, M. de La Tour d’Azyr. You have heard of this valiant Marquis, this great lord of life and death?”

  The pit was in an uproar a moment. It quieted again as Scaramouche continued:

  “Oh, it was a fine spectacle to see this mighty hunter scuttling to cover like a hare, going to earth in the Cordelier Convent. Rennes has not seen him since. Rennes would like to see him again. But if he is valorous, he is also discreet. And where do you think he has taken refuge, this great nobleman who wanted to see the streets of Rennes washed in the blood of its citizens, this man who would have butchered old and young of the contemptible canaille to silence the voice of reason and of liberty that presumes to ring through France to-day? Where do you think he hides himself? Why, here in Nantes.”

  Again there was uproar.

  “What do you say? Impossible? Why, my friends, at this moment he is here in this theatre — skulking up there in that box. He is too shy to show himself — oh, a very modest gentleman. But there he is behind the curtains. Will you not show yourself to your friends, M. de La Tour d’Azyr, Monsieur le Marquis who considers eloquence so very dangerous a gift? See, they would like a word with you; they do not believe me when I tell them that you are here.”

  Now, whatever he may have been, and whatever the views held on the subject by Andre-Louis, M. de La Tour d’Azyr was certainly not a coward. To say that he was hiding in Nantes was not true. He came and went there openly and unabashed. It happened, however, that the Nantais were ignorant until this moment of his presence among them. But then he would have disdained to have informed them of it just as he would have disdained to have concealed it from them.

  Challenged thus, however, and despite the ominous manner in which the bourgeois element in the audience had responded to Scaramouche’s appeal to its passions, despite the attempts made by Chabrillane to restrain him, the Marquis swept aside the curtain at the side of the box, and suddenly showed himself, pale but self-contained and scornful as he surveyed first the daring Scaramouche and then those others who at sight of him had given tongue to their hostility.

  Hoots and yells assailed him, fists were shaken at him, canes were brandished menacingly.

  “Assassin! Scoundrel! Coward! Traitor!”

  But he braved the storm, smiling upon them his ineffable contempt. He was waiting for the noise to cease; waiting to address them in his turn. But he waited in vain, as he very soon perceived.

  The contempt he did not trouble to dissemble served but to goad them on.

  In the pit pandemonium was already raging. Blows were being freely exchanged; there were scuffling groups, and here and there swords were being drawn, but fortunately the press was too dense to permit of their being used effectively. Those who had women with them and the timid by nature were making haste to leave a house that looked like becoming a cockpit, where chairs were being smashed to provide weapons, and parts of chandeliers were already being used as missiles.

  One of these hurled by the hand of a gentleman in one of the boxes narrowly missed Scaramouche where he stood, looking down in a sort of grim triumph upon the havoc which his words had wrought. Knowing of what inflammable material the audience was composed, he had deliberately flung down amongst them the lighted torch of discord, to produce this conflagration.

  He saw men falling quickly into groups representative of one side or the other of this great quarrel that already was beginning to agitate the whole of France. Their rallying cries were ringing through the theatre.

  “Down with the canaille!” from some.

  “Down with the privileged!” from others.

  And then above the general din one cry rang out sharply and insistently:

  “To the box! Death to the butcher of Rennes! Death to La Tour d’Azyr who makes war upon the people!”

  There was a rush for one of the doors of the pit that opened upon the staircase leading to the boxes.

  And now, whilst battle and confusion spread with the speed of fire, overflowing from the theatre into the street itself, La Tour d’Azyr’s box, which had become the main object of the attack of the bourgeoisie, had also become the rallying ground for such gentlemen as were present in the theatre and for those who, without being men of birth themselves, were nevertheless attached to the party of the nobles.

  La Tour d’Azyr had quitted the front of the box to meet those who came to join him. And now in the pit one group of infuriated gentlemen, in attempting to reach the stage across the empty orchestra, so that they might deal with the audacious comedian who was responsible f
or this explosion, found themselves opposed and held back by another group composed of men to whose feelings Andre-Louis had given expression.

  Perceiving this, and remembering the chandelier, he turned to Leandre, who had remained beside him.

  “I think it is time to be going,” said he.

  Leandre, looking ghastly under his paint, appalled by the storm which exceeded by far anything that his unimaginative brain could have conjectured, gurgled an inarticulate agreement. But it looked as if already they were too late, for in that moment they were assailed from behind.

  M. Binet had succeeded at last in breaking past Polichinelle and Rhodomont, who in view of his murderous rage had been endeavouring to restrain him. Half a dozen gentlemen, habitues of the green-room, had come round to the stage to disembowel the knave who had created this riot, and it was they who had flung aside those two comedians who hung upon Binet. After him they came now, their swords out; but after them again came Polichinelle, Rhodomont, Harlequin, Pierrot, Pasquariel, and Basque the artist, armed with such implements as they could hastily snatch up, and intent upon saving the man with whom they sympathized in spite of all, and in whom now all their hopes were centred.

  Well ahead rolled Binet, moving faster than any had ever seen him move, and swinging the long cane from which Pantaloon is inseparable.

  “Infamous scoundrel!” he roared. “You have ruined me! But, name of a name, you shall pay!”

  Andre-Louis turned to face him. “You confuse cause with effect,” said he. But he got no farther... Binet’s cane, viciously driven, descended and broke upon his shoulder. Had he not moved swiftly aside as the blow fell it must have taken him across the head, and possibly stunned him. As he moved, he dropped his hand to his pocket, and swift upon the cracking of Binet’s breaking cane came the crack of the pistol with which Andre-Louis replied.

  “You had your warning, you filthy pander!” he cried. And on the word he shot him through the body.

  Binet went down screaming, whilst the fierce Polichinelle, fiercer than ever in that moment of fierce reality, spoke quickly into Andre-Louis’ ear: