Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “We don’t know what the physical explanation is,” said he. “That’s all.”

  He replaced his pistol on the mantelpiece, then stooped to poke the fire. “Tell you what, my boy,” he grumbled, “it’s devilish cold in this room.”

  “What do you say to going into the ante-chamber?” I asked him. “We could leave the door open. It’s — it’s cosier in there.”

  His dark eyes mocked me. “You can go if you like, Dennison. I undertook to spend the night here, and here I’ll spend it though the spooks of all the Jacobites that were at Culloden should come to wish me a merry Christmas.”

  His mockery jarred upon me; it increased my fears; it seemed like a challenge to this evil thing to manifest itself. I could stand no more of it. Had the tapping at the window recommenced it would have reassured me, I think. But since it did not, my conviction grew firmer than ever that whatever the thing was that had knocked, it had already gained admission.

  I got up, conscious that my knees were trembling, seeking in vain to steady them. “I am going, anyway,” I grumbled. And without waiting for his answer I went down the room towards the door in the panelling. My eyes sought to avoid the bed; yet I caught a glimpse of the tapestried hangings, and I had a distinct impression that they moved. I checked, almost paralysed by fear, expecting some monstrous thing to leap out upon me as I passed. Then in a panic I dashed forward, wrenched open the door, and sprang into the light, fresh space of the ante-room, followed by Edgeworth’s mocking laugh.

  I dropped into one of the big chairs by the fire, and for a moment felt more at ease. Presently, however, my fancy began to people the dark space of the open door. The impression grew that someone, or something, was watching me thence.

  “Edgeworth!” I called, and my voice was far from steady. “It’s infinitely cosier in here. Do come along, and bring the cards with you.”

  He yawned for answer. “Too sleepy for cards. Besides, I’m all right here. But I wish you’d shut the door. There’s an infernal draught.”

  You will say that I am a coward, and that a man of my temperament has no right to undertake the investigation of supernatural matters. Perhaps so. Anyway, I did not need to be twice invited to shut that door. Had it remained open, I should no more have been able to stay in the ante-chamber than to return to the tapestried room now that I had left it.

  So I closed the door, and returned to my seat by the fire. Soon, as my pulses grew calmer, I began to feel ashamed of myself. And then I heard Edgeworth’s steps approaching the door of communication. The latch clicked, and he stood under the lintel, a wineglass in one hand and a decanter in the other. “Four fingers of brandy is your most urgent need, my boy. Your nerves have mutinied, and you’ve been imagining things.”

  “Did I imagine the taps on the shutters?” I asked him.

  “The devil take the taps on the shutters!” said he. But for all his jauntiness, he spilled some of the brandy in pouring for me.

  I drained the glass gladly enough.

  “Another?” he questioned, raising the decanter again. “It’s the very distilled essence of courage.”

  I refused, and again I begged him to remain with me. But he would not, and he explained his obstinacy.

  “The fact of the matter is, Dennison, that it’s frightened I am, myself. I am quite frank. I am scared — for the first time in my life. So you’ll understand that it’s quite impossible for me not to return to that room. You see, ’tisn’t cowardly to be scared, Dennison, but it’s infernally cowardly to run away when you’re scared; and Jack Edgeworth isn’t going to turn coward — not for all the disembodied Jacobites in the universe.” And with that he swung on his heel, and marched back into the tapestried chamber, slamming the door after him.

  I heard him cross to the fireplace, and I heard the creak of his chair as he settled down. He had made the difference between us pitilessly clear. We were both frightened, but I was the only coward of the two. And a coward I must remain, for his confessing to his fears did not tend to give me courage. Rather it glued me where I was, determined that nothing should take me into the tapestried room again that night. It was a determination I was later to disregard. But for the moment I hugged it to myself.

  Now the genial warmth of the fire, combining with the effect of the brandy I had drunk, induced a pleasant torpor. For a little while I resisted it; but in the end I succumbed to the extent of resting my head on the tall back of my chair. From that moment I remember nothing until I was very wide awake again, startled without yet knowing the reason for it, my pulses throbbing at the gallop, and my ears straining to listen for something that I knew must come.

  I must have slept some hours, for the fire was burning low, and the room had grown chilly.

  Suddenly the thing I instinctively awaited came.

  Through the wall from the tapestried chamber I heard Edgeworth calling my name in a terrified, choking voice. “Dennison! Dennison!”

  I sprang up at the sound, and I felt as if I had been suddenly plunged into cold water. Horror fettered me where I stood.

  And then came the sound of a falling body — just outside the door of communication, just where the murdered lady had fallen. I distinguished a swishing, dragging noise, a groan, and, finally — and most terrific of all — a faint cackle of indescribably malicious laughter.

  For a spell I continued to stand there, staring with wild eyes at the closed door, expecting I knew not what to make its horrible appearance. At last, as the silence continued, I shattered the trammels that paralysed me, and sprang forward. I lifted the latch, and pushed. But the door would not give. There was something against it.

  And on the instant Sir James’s words recurred to me: “Her maid attempted to go to her assistance, but found it impossible to open the door — . She may have been prevented by her mistress’s body, which lay against it.”

  My hand fell from the latch, limp with fear. I backed away from the door, cursing my own and Edgeworth’s folly in tampering with this dreadful matter.

  Then I almost cried out in fresh terror. Something was coming under the door — something black and gleaming, and narrow as the blade of a table-knife. Fascinated and uncomprehending, I watched it. As it advanced it began to take a sinuous course, but when it reached an irregularity in the blocked floor it slowly spread there, and at last I began to understand its nature. It was fluid, and it was not black, but red — deep red. It was blood!

  At once it flashed through my mind that just so must the blood of the murdered woman have crept under the door which her maid could not open on that night eighty years ago, even as I could not open it to-night.

  The murder was being re-enacted by ghostly murderer and ghostly victim, down to the minutest detail. But was the victim a ghostly one?

  My fears for Edgeworth surged up again, and they conquered my horror to the extent of enabling me to take up the lamp and quit the room by the door leading to the corridor. Outside the tapestried room I hesitated for a moment. I rapped on the panels.

  “Edgeworth!” I called. “Edgeworth!”

  There was no answer — no sound. Realising that if I delayed, my courage might desert me again, I seized the handle and flung the door open.

  From the threshold, holding the lamp on high, I beheld the disorder of the room. The table had been overturned and all light extinguished. The cards and the candles were scattered on the floor, and prone near the door in the panelling, his legs against it, lay Edgeworth. His right arm was flung straight out, and his head rested sideways upon it.

  That he was dead the first glimpse of his livid face assured me. Further, there was no movement in the horrid, glistening puddle in which he lay; so that it was quite plain that the blood had ceased to flow from whatever wound had been dealt him.

  All this I noted in the one brief glance I stayed to bestow upon the room. Then, still lacking the courage to enter, I fled shouting down the corridor, towards the servants’ quarters.

  Within five minutes I returne
d accompanied by the butler and one of the footmen, who had been aroused and had promptly responded to my call.

  Thus reinforced, I led the way into that room of horror. They checked a moment at the sight that met them. Then the butler approached the body, whilst I held the lamp on high. He knelt a moment beside Edgeworth. I saw his broad shoulders tremble, and he looked up at me with a grin which at first I imagined to be of sheer horror, but to which was presently added a chuckle.

  First in bewilderment, then in slowly dawning comprehension, I stared at the thing he held up for my inspection. It was a broken Burgundy bottle. The blood upon the floor was blood of grapes.

  An explanation is scarcely needed. Edgeworth, to bolster up his failing courage, had emptied the decanter of brandy. He must have been on the very point of succumbing to it when he took up one of the bottles of Burgundy. It would be at that moment that he stumbled against the table, and the crash of its fall was the sound that had awakened me. In the dark he had called out to me with the last glimmer of consciousness; he had even attempted to reach the door of communication; and then the brandy had felled him — utterly, inertly drunk. In falling he had broken the bottle, and it was almost a miracle that he had not hurt himself upon it.

  He attempted next day to cover up his behaviour by a cock-and-bull story of a supernatural visitor. But the ridicule with which he and I were covered as ghost-investigators was not encouraging. In self-defence I cited the incident of the tapping on the shutter, and even succeeded in impressing them with it. But when the shutters were examined it was discovered that a long strip of iron from one of the hinges had become loose and had been used by the gale as a knocker.

  And yet there are times when, thinking it all over again, I am not satisfied. I remember the uncanny eerieness of the place, and I catch myself wondering once more whether, after all, supernatural causes may not have been finding expression in natural effects.

  THE WEDDING GIFT

  Pearson’s Magazine September 1913.

  Sir George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of England, looked up from the papers before him, and fixed his melancholy eyes upon his visitor, the Lady Mary Ormington.

  “You have done the State a great service, ma’am,” said he, his voice gentle, his utterance slow. “Of that there is no more doubt than that you’ll be setting a price on’t.”

  And his red lips — startling red in so pale a face — were twisted never so faintly in a sneer.

  He was arrayed in his scarlet, ermine-bordered robes, for he was fresh from the court-house of Dorchester, where, pursuing the instructions of his Royal master, and venting a savage humour, sprung, perhaps, from the awful disease that ravaged him, he had horribly dealt out the dread, unsparing justice that was to make his name a by-word of blood-lust.

  Yet you had looked in vain for a trace of the man’s ferocious nature in that pale face, its oval outline sharpened by the heavy periwig that framed it. It was a countenance mild and comely; the eyes were large and liquid, and haunted by a look of suffering.

  “My lord,” said the Lady Mary, wisely. “I have not come to bargain, but to do my duty by my King. Were it otherwise, I would have begun by naming the price of my disclosures.”

  “Instead of ending by it?” he questioned drily.

  She flushed under the humourously scornful glance, and fidgeted an instant with her riding-switch.

  “In no case can there be a question of price,” said she, “though there may be a question of rewarding a service, which your lordship has acknowledged to be great.”

  Sire George’s smile broadened.

  “I have no doubt that you will find His Majesty graciously generous. What is the reward you seek?”

  Her increasing pallor was dissembled by the shadows of her wide, plumed hat; but the strained tones betrayed her anxiety.

  “I seek a small thing — a small thing to His Majesty, though to me a great one — I seek the pardon of a misguided gentleman who has borne arms against His Majesty in the late rising — Stephen Vallancey is his name.”

  Having uttered the name, she watched him breathlessly.

  “Stephen Vallancey!” he croaked, and then fell silent, frowning at the papers on the table.

  Presently, he began to smile, and her fears grew, for the smile’s significance eluded her swimming senses.

  “Stephen Vallancey,” he repeated. “Hum! His arrest is expected by tomorrow. We are informed that he is in hiding in the neighborhood of St. Mary Ottery; and a troop of dragoons set out to find him an hour ago. A very desperate and dangerous man.”

  He looked up to find her leaning for support against the table; her face was grey, her eyes wide with fear. He was moved to a pity that was unusual in him, and to a liking for the foolish young rebel whose life she begged.

  It was her good fortune to have come to him in such an hour as this. The pain by which all day he had been tormented had receded half-an-hour ago, when the Court adjourned, and the reaction brought now a mood of kindliness. Besides, his petitioner was a woman of handsome shape and face, and to the appeal of beauty the libertine Chief Justice was oddly, weakly susceptible.

  Now it fell out that he gave full consideration to the circumstance that Lady Mary Ormington came of a family staunchly loyal to King James, and was staunchly loyal herself, as she had just proved by the service she had done the State in revealing the details of the plot against the life of His Majesty.

  “You ask much,” he said, as if demurring.

  “I have given much,” she answered, and pointed to the papers.

  “True,” he admitted. He put forth a hand, white and slender as a woman’s, and took up a quill. “His Majesty, no doubt, will not find the price exorbitant. I will undertake its payment, but on condition that Mr. Vallancey shall withdraw from England, and remain absent during His Majesty’s lifetime, or at least, during His Majesty’s pleasure.”

  “I pledge his word for it,” she cried in a glad tone.

  He nodded, dipped his quill, and began to write.

  “So much is not necessary. I am setting it for that if Mr. Vallancey is in England seven days from now, he will be hanged if taken. There!” He sealed the document, and thrust it across to her. “Mr. Vallancey is very fortunate in his advocate, and very enviable.”

  She thanked him with a simple and touching earnestness; dropped him a curtsey, and departed hurriedly.

  At the stairs’ foot she found her elderly servant awaiting her.

  “Quick, Nat,” said she, “the horses. We ride at once.”

  Half-an-hour later, in that same room in which he had received her, the Lord Chief Justice, half drunk, was cursing himself for having paid the price too readily; another hour, and, racked by pain, he reviled himself for having paid the price at all.

  Meanwhile, Lady Mary rode briskly amain in the cool of that September evening, attended by her single groom.

  The news Sir George had given her, that the dragoons were ahead, bent upon Vallancey’s capture, increased her haste. Accidents might occur. Vallancey at bay might offer a rash resistance, preferring a soldier’s death to the hangman’s rope that must await him were he taken. Therefore must she outpace the troops, and reach his hiding-place ahead of them.

  She was well mounted, and she knew the country as she knew the palm of her own hand. Often had she ridden to hounds across it, but never quite at such a breakneck pace as she rode in the dusk of that September evening, to the great alarm of her attendant. She left the road, and seemed to him bent upon going to St. Mary Ottery as the crow flies, or as nearly so as might be possible for a woman on horseback.

  Ahead of them the saffron of the sky grew paler; it became faintly violet, then grey. The stars came out, and the night deepened. Still she pounded on relentlessly, uphill, downhill, by meadow and moorland, over wall and hedge, across brooks and through fords. Twice did her horse stumble, unseating her on the second occasion. Yet undaunted, she pursued her headlong way.

  A fearless, high-spirited woman wa
s Lady Mary, as Nat, old groom, was fully aware; and she was as resourceful as she was spirited.

  It was midnight when two reeking, steaming horses pulled up on the very borders of Devonshire, at an inn that stood on the left bank of the Char. It was the last inn in England where you would have expected to find relays. But Lady Mary had provided for everything against the success of interview with Jeffreys, and a pair of stout nags were at once forthcoming, to dash Nat’s hope that it might be her ladyship’s good pleasure to lie the night in that hovel.

  The saddles being transferred, they mounted the fresh horses, went splashing through the ford and on. By daybreak they had left Colyton behind them, and were breasting the slopes above the valley of the Otter. On the heights they paused to breathe their nags.

  The mellow, golden light of the new-risen sun flooded the country at their feet. They beheld St. Mary Ottery still sleeping below them, and beyond it the gleaming river. For miles they could see the road that wound about the foot of the hills, and nowhere was there a sign of troops. In her reckless cross-country gallop she had outpaced them. She looked at the haggard old groom, and laughed, well pleased.

  All fatigue fell from her in that moment of victory. There was no sign of weariness in her fine eyes, her cheeks were delicately flushed, and there was an uprightness in her carriage which made it seem incredible that she should have ridden fifty miles between sunset and sunrise.

  Gently they ambled down the slope and through the township, heading for a homestead by the river, a mile or so beyond St. Mary. Across an old stone bridge, barred by a gate which Nat got down to unlatch, they came straight into the yard of the farm, scattering a cloud of poultry in clucking terror. A dog barked furiously, and then, before Nat raised his whip to knock, the door was opened, and a tall, heavy man came forth into the light to challenge them.

  He was in grey homespun, with rough woollen stockings, and wooden-soled shoes. His face was bronzed and bearded, his hair touched with grey. There was malevolence in his air, a truculence which vanished the moment his keen blue eyes lighted on this handsome woman in her riding-habit of brown velvet.