Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “You conceive me slaying him for the very lust of slaying, like some beast of the jungle flinging itself upon its natural prey. That has been your error from the first. I did what I did with the very heaviest heart — oh, spare me your sneer! — I do not lie, I have never lied. And I swear to you here and now, by my every hope of Heaven, that what I say is true. I loathed the thing I did. Yet for my own sake and the sake of my order I must do it. Ask yourself whether M. de Vilmorin would have hesitated for a moment if by procuring my death he could have brought the Utopia of his dreams a moment nearer realization.

  “After that. You determined that the sweetest vengeance would be to frustrate my ends by reviving in yourself the voice that I had silenced, by yourself carrying forward the fantastic apostleship of equality that was M. de Vilmorin’s. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion. Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society? Don’t you understand that society must re-order itself presently out of all this?

  “But why say more? I must have said enough to make you understand the only thing that really matters — that I killed M. de Vilmorin as a matter of duty to my order. And the truth — which though it may offend you should also convince you — is that to-night I can look back on the deed with equanimity, without a single regret, apart from what lies between you and me.

  “When, kneeling beside the body of your friend that day at Gavrillac, you insulted and provoked me, had I been the tiger you conceived me I must have killed you too. I am, as you may know, a man of quick passions. Yet I curbed the natural anger you aroused in me, because I could forgive an affront to myself where I could not overlook a calculated attack upon my order.”

  He paused a moment. Andre-Louis stood rigid listening and wondering. So, too, the others. Then M. le Marquis resumed, on a note of less assurance. “In the matter of Mlle. Binet I was unfortunate. I wronged you through inadvertence. I had no knowledge of the relations between you.”

  Andre-Louis interrupted him sharply at last with a question: “Would it have made a difference if you had?”

  “No,” he was answered frankly. “I have the faults of my kind. I cannot pretend that any such scruple as you suggest would have weighed with me. But can you — if you are capable of any detached judgment — blame me very much for that?”

  “All things considered, monsieur, I am rapidly being forced to the conclusion that it is impossible to blame any man for anything in this world; that we are all of us the sport of destiny. Consider, monsieur, this gathering — this family gathering — here to-night, whilst out there... O my God, let us make an end! Let us go our ways and write ‘finis’ to this horrible chapter of our lives.”

  M. le La Tour considered him gravely, sadly, in silence for a moment.

  “Perhaps it is best,” he said, at length, in a small voice. He turned to Mme. de Plougastel. “If a wrong I have to admit in my life, a wrong that I must bitterly regret, it is the wrong that I have done to you, my dear...”

  “Not now, Gervais! Not now!” she faltered, interrupting him.

  “Now — for the first and the last time. I am going. It is not likely that we shall ever meet again — that I shall ever see any of you again — you who should have been the nearest and dearest to me. We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose. In life we pay for the evil that in life we do. That is the lesson that I have learnt to-night. By an act of betrayal I begot unknown to me a son who, whilst as ignorant as myself of our relationship, has come to be the evil genius of my life, to cross and thwart me, and finally to help to pull me down in ruin. It is just — poetically just. My full and resigned acceptance of that fact is the only atonement I can offer you.”

  He stooped and took one of madame’s hands that lay limply in her lap.

  “Good-bye, Therese!” His voice broke. He had reached the end of his iron self-control.

  She rose and clung to him a moment, unashamed before them. The ashes of that dead romance had been deeply stirred this night, and deep down some lingering embers had been found that glowed brightly now before their final extinction. Yet she made no attempt to detain him. She understood that their son had pointed out the only wise, the only possible course, and was thankful that M. de La Tour d’Azyr accepted it.

  “God keep you, Gervais,” she murmured. “You will take the safe-conduct, and... and you will let me know when you are safe?”

  He held her face between his hands an instant; then very gently kissed her and put her from him. Standing erect, and outwardly calm again, he looked across at Andre-Louis who was proffering him a sheet of paper.

  “It is the safe-conduct. Take it, monsieur. It is my first and last gift to you, and certainly the last gift I should ever have thought of making you — the gift of life. In a sense it makes us quits. The irony, sir, is not mine, but Fate’s. Take it, monsieur, and go in peace.”

  M. de La Tour d’Azyr took it. His eyes looked hungrily into the lean face confronting him, so sternly set. He thrust the paper into his bosom, and then abruptly, convulsively, held out his hand. His son’s eyes asked a question.

  “Let there be peace between us, in God’s name,” said the Marquis thickly.

  Pity stirred at last in Andre-Louis. Some of the sternness left his face. He sighed. “Good-bye, monsieur,” he said.

  “You are hard,” his father told him, speaking wistfully. “But perhaps you are in the right so to be. In other circumstances I should have been proud to have owned you as my son. As it is...” He broke off abruptly, and as abruptly added, “Good-bye.”

  He loosed his son’s hand and stepped back. They bowed formally to each other. And then M. de La Tour d’Azyr bowed to Mlle. de Kercadiou in utter silence, a bow that contained something of utter renunciation, of finality.

  That done he turned and walked stiffly out of the room, and so out of all their lives. Months later they were to hear of him in the service of the Emperor of Austria.

  CHAPTER XVI. SUNRISE

  Andre-Louis took the air next morning on the terrace at Meudon. The hour was very early, and the newly risen sun was transmuting into diamonds the dewdrops that still lingered on the lawn. Down in the valley, five miles away, the morning mists were rising over Paris. Yet early as it was that house on the hill was astir already, in a bustle of preparation for the departure that was imminent.

  Andre-Louis had won safely out of Paris last night with his mother and Aline, and to-day they were to set out all of them for Coblenz.

  To Andre-Louis, sauntering there with hands clasped behind him and head hunched between his shoulders — for life had never been richer in material for reflection — came presently Aline through one of the glass doors from the library.

  “You’re early astir,” she greeted him.

  “Faith, yes. I haven’t been to bed. No,” he assured her, in answer to her exclamation. “I spent the night, or what was left of it, sitting at the window thinking.”

  “My poor Andre!”

  “You describe me perfectly. I am very poor — for I know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized. Then...” He threw out his arms, and let them fall again. His face she observed was very drawn and haggard.

  She paced with him along the old granite balustrade over which the geraniums flung their mantle of green and scarlet.

  “Have you decided what you are going to do?” she asked him.

  “I have decided that I have no choice. I, too, must emigrate. I am lucky to be able to do so, lucky to have found no one amid yesterday’s chaos in Paris to whom I could report myself as I foolishly desired, else I might no longer be arm
ed with these.” He drew from his pocket the powerful passport of the Commission of Twelve, enjoining upon all Frenchmen to lend him such assistance as he might require, and warning those who might think of hindering him that they did so at their own peril. He spread it before her. “With this I conduct you all safely to the frontier. Over the frontier M. de Kercadiou and Mme. de Plougastel will have to conduct me; and then we shall be quits.”

  “Quits?” quoth she. “But you will be unable to return!”

  “You conceive, of course, my eagerness to do so. My child, in a day or two there will be enquiries. It will be asked what has become of me. Things will transpire. Then the hunt will start. But by then we shall be well upon our way, well ahead of any possible pursuit. You don’t imagine that I could ever give the government any satisfactory explanation of my absence — assuming that any government remains to which to explain it?”

  “You mean... that you will sacrifice your future, this career upon which you have embarked?” It took her breath away.

  “In the pass to which things have come there is no career for me down there — at least no honest one. And I hope you do not think that I could be dishonest. It is the day of the Dantons, and the Marats, the day of the rabble. The reins of government will be tossed to the populace, or else the populace, drunk with the conceit with which the Dantons and the Marats have filled it, will seize the reins by force. Chaos must follow, and a despotism of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its lowest parts. It cannot endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its best elements it must wither and decay.”

  “I thought you were a republican,” said she.

  “Why, so I am. I am talking like one. I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself — whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole. Two years ago our ideal seemed to have been realized. The monopoly of power had been taken from the class that had held it too long and too unjustly by the hollow right of heredity. It had been distributed as evenly as might be throughout the State, and if men had only paused there, all would have been well. But our impetus carried us too far, the privileged orders goaded us on by their very opposition, and the result is the horror of which yesterday you saw no more than the beginnings. No, no,” he ended. “Careers there may be for venal place-seekers, for opportunists; but none for a man who desires to respect himself. It is time to go. I make no sacrifice in going.”

  “But where will you go? What will you do?”

  “Oh, something. Consider that in four years I have been lawyer, politician, swordsman, and buffoon — especially the latter. There is always a place in the world for Scaramouche. Besides, do you know that unlike Scaramouche I have been oddly provident? I am the owner of a little farm in Saxony. I think that agriculture might suit me. It is a meditative occupation; and when all is said, I am not a man of action. I haven’t the qualities for the part.”

  She looked up into his face, and there was a wistful smile in her deep blue eyes.

  “Is there any part for which you have not the qualities, I wonder?”

  “Do you really? Yet you cannot say that I have made a success of any of those which I have played. I have always ended by running away. I am running away now from a thriving fencing-academy, which is likely to become the property of Le Duc. That comes of having gone into politics, from which I am also running away. It is the one thing in which I really excel. That, too, is an attribute of Scaramouche.”

  “Why will you always be deriding yourself?” she wondered.

  “Because I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You wouldn’t have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I did; especially since discovering my parents.”

  “Don’t, Andre!” she begged him. “You are insincere, you know.”

  “Of course I am. Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it. You have seen it rampant and out of hand in France during the past four years — cant and hypocrisy on the lips of the revolutionaries, cant and hypocrisy on the lips of the upholders of the old regime; a riot of hypocrisy out of which in the end is begotten chaos. And I who criticize it all on this beautiful God-given morning am the rankest and most contemptible hypocrite of all. It was this — the realization of this truth kept me awake all night. For two years I have persecuted by every means in my power... M. de La Tour d’Azyr.”

  He paused before uttering the name, paused as if hesitating how to speak of him.

  “And in those two years I have deceived myself as to the motive that was spurring me. He spoke of me last night as the evil genius of his life, and himself he recognized the justice of this. It may be that he was right, and because of that it is probable that even had he not killed Philippe de Vilmorin, things would still have been the same. Indeed, to-day I know that they must have been. That is why I call myself a hypocrite, a poor, self-duping hypocrite.”

  “But why, Andre?”

  He stood still and looked at her. “Because he sought you, Aline. Because in that alone he must have found me ranged against him, utterly intransigeant. Because of that I must have strained every nerve to bring him down — so as to save you from becoming the prey of your own ambition.

  “I wish to speak of him no more than I must. After this, I trust never to speak of him again. Before the lines of our lives crossed, I knew him for what he was, I knew the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I found him detestable. You heard him allude last night to the unfortunate La Binet. You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode of life, his rearing. To that there is no answer, I suppose. He conforms to type. Enough! But to me, he was the embodiment of evil, just as you have always been the embodiment of good; he was the embodiment of sin, just as you are the embodiment of purity. I had enthroned you so high, Aline, so high, and yet no higher than your place. Could I, then, suffer that you should be dragged down by ambition, could I suffer the evil I detested to mate with the good I loved? What could have come of it but your own damnation, as I told you that day at Gavrillac? Because of that my detestation of him became a personal, active thing. I resolved to save you at all costs from a fate so horrible. Had you been able to tell me that you loved him it would have been different. I should have hoped that in a union sanctified by love you would have raised him to your own pure heights. But that out of considerations of worldly advancement you should lovelessly consent to mate with him... Oh, it was vile and hopeless. And so I fought him — a rat fighting a lion — fought him relentlessly until I saw that love had come to take in your heart the place of ambition. Then I desisted.”

  “Until you saw that love had taken the place of ambition!” Tears had been gathering in her eyes whilst he was speaking. Now amazement eliminated her emotion. “But when did you see that? When?”

  “I — I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time... surely, Aline, that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him in the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?”

  “For him! It was concern for you,” she cried, without thinking what she said.

  But it did not convince him. “For me? When you knew — when all the world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!”

  “Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded me that if you met nothing could save you.”

  He looked at her frowning.

  “Why this, Aline?” he asked her with some sternness. “I can understand that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those sentiments. It is a woman’s way, I suppose.”

  “Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I have told you!”

  “And was it concern for
me,” he asked her, “that laid you swooning when you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes.”

  “Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you as he had said he would. What else could I conclude?”