Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  The poet and his guest, the lawyer, met at breakfast the next morning.

  “Been in long?” inquired Lumley, as Tommy entered the room.

  “Sweetest of youths, most gifted of poets, let me recommmend you a little gentle exercise as an antidote for the ugly matutinal penchant for sarcasm.”

  “And what,” inquired the poet, selecting a kidney, “is your programme for to-day?”

  “In the morning I am doing nothing. In the afternoon I am going to a garden party at the Loddingtons. In the evening I shall be at your disposal if you can tear yourself away from those withered ‘Autumn Leaves’ of yours.”

  “Will the Martingales be at the garden party?”

  Hawksley looked up quickly. Had the poet got wind of his attachment to the divine Helen?

  “I believe they will — I have heard so,” he replied, cautiously.

  “A fatal name, Helen,” murmured the poet, rhapsodically.

  “There was, I believe,” said the lawyer, “a lady of that name in a place called Troy, a little while ago. She gave me no end of trouble, I know, because a gentleman of your profession wrote some verses about her. Rather a flirt, wasn’t she?”

  “I dare say. Most women are, when they are good-looking enough to be flirted with.”

  “You’ve found them so, have you? Hum! Some more coffee?”

  “I’m going with you to the Loddingtons,” said the poet.

  Hawksley grew uneasy.

  “What about the ‘Autumn Leaves’?”

  “They’ll keep.”

  “They’re certainly dry enough.”

  He affected nonchalance, but in reality Hawksley was alarmed. He knew the poet’s susceptible heart, and the tornado-like manner in which it was his habit to sweep all before him when he set himself to play the game of dalliance — which was unconscionably often. The situation was trying enough already, with a duke in the background. With the poet on the spot, it must become positively unbearable.

  So he set himself to dissuade his friend; he assured him that the affair would be an awfully slow one.

  “I like ‘em slow.” said the poet, inscrutably, and he went.

  Helen was there; very beautiful; very vivacious; very fascinating. The poet’s fall was consummated when his eyes alighted on her. He approached, and her reception of him proved to him what a blind fool he had been in the past. The brightening of her eye as it met his was a thing unmistakable. The beautiful Helen was conquered. He would sing of her as Homer never sang of that other ancient Helen.

  The brightness of her mood infected him. It usually did infect such men as were capable of infection. He talked with a glib smartness that amazed himself. The little knot of men about her grew silent at his coming, and gradually melted away until only Hawksley was left to look on with a gloomy countenance, and make monosyllabic and unheeded efforts to obtain a share in the conversation. At last she dispatched him on some useless errand to her mother, and Lumley was alone with her. She asked him had he seen the boxwood alley. He answered her that he had not, and together they wandered toward it, vanishing from the sight of the other guests.

  “You haven’t a flower, Mr. Lumley,” said she, presently.

  “I never wear one.”

  “But if I offer you one, I defy you to refuse it.”

  “Give me the flower, but spare me the defiance. From your hands, dear lady, there is nothing that I could but receive upon my knees.”

  She laughed, and broke a rosebud from a bush in passing. He observed the act, noted that the rose was red, and prepared a speech of dainty metaphor wherewith to receive it.

  “There, sir.” And she held it out to him.

  “Dear lady,” he began, theatrically, bending over her hand as he took the flower. Then the little gasp that broke from her lips made him look up. He met the eyes of the Duke of Starlingford, who was approaching them.

  Lumley straightened himself, wondering what would be the most convenient pose, and determined upon the adoption of persiflage and effrontery. Starlingford raised his hat coldly to the lady.

  “May I ask you, Nell — I mean will you allow me to have a word with this gentleman?” said he.

  “Why, certainly not,” cried Nell, with a coolness that won her the poet’s profoundest admiration. “I am showing Mr. Lumley the grounds, and I am not going to relinquish him.”

  “Which, though they be of small account,” put in the poet, gracefully, “are quite my own feelings in the matter.”

  “Perhaps you, sir, will allow me to say a word to this lady?”

  The poet’s eyes asked Nell a question.

  “If you don’t mind waiting for me, I shall not keep you a moment,” said she, and withdrew.

  “Now look here, Nell,” the duke threatened, “I mean, if you have anything more to say to that fellow, I shall never speak to you again. What I mean to say is, people are talking about you, and I won’t stand it. I came here to speak to you about it, and I hardly expected to — well — I mean—”

  “Oh, yes, you always mean well,” she cried, impatiently, “But isn’t your coming here rather imprudent? Your mother, you know, might hear of it.”

  What the duke said may be charitably described as discourteous.

  “I shan’t speak to you again, Helen,” he wound up, “unless you do as I wish.”

  “I shall be sorry, of course,” she answered coldly, “but you must please yourself.”

  The duke was even more impolite in his utterance than before. Her cheeks grew scarlet.

  “You forget yourself.” she cried. “And you forget that the fact of your having been born a duke does not relieve you from the ordinary obligations of a gentleman.” And with that parting sting she left him to rejoin the poet.

  Now, as it happened, the Duchess of Starlingford did come to hear of her son’s transgression, and he spent an uncomfortable half hour with her next day. This resulted in his leaving England on the morrow by her command and on pain of the cessation of the liberal allowance which she made him.

  Curiously enough, Lumley crossed the channel on the same day, summoned suddenly to Cannes to the deathbed of one of his aunts. He left the lawyer to make his excuses and explain his sudden departure to a host of common friends. But to Helen he wrote, himself, a letter rather longer than the mere communication of his departure demanded, and containing dark hints of happenings when he should return.

  But he returned not so speedily as he expected. His aunt recovered, and expressed the hope that he would stay on — she found him so useful. His cousin Marjory had grown up a remarkably good-looking young woman, he discovered, and so he stayed until the winter had set in.

  Some friends of his aunt’s who had stopped at Cannes on their way to Algiers in December, invited him to join them. The party contained a delightful creature fresh from a Paris convent school, untouched as yet by sophistication. The poet tore himself away from his cousin Marjory, and went.

  He wintered in Algiers, and in England none but his solicitors knew of his whereabouts. In April he proposed to the lady who was to blame for this, and was refused. For two days he was very miserable, then suddenly — similia similibus curantur — he remembered Helen Martingale, and marveled that in the contemplation of a shallow schoolgirl he should have so long forgotten her.

  Three days later he left for England. At Calais the first man he saw on the packet was the Duke of Starlingford. His grace treated him to a glare, and he the duke to a mild irrecognizing glance.

  He put up at a hotel in town; looked in at his club, and permitted a man he knew to carry him off to a reception. There again one of the first men he met was his grace of Starlingford. It occurred to him that the duke must by now be of age, and he wondered whether his grace would enter the lists with him again. He rather hoped he would; he would enjoy the contest.

  The duke looked at him, and speculated upon the uses to which Lumley might have put his absence — ignorant also of the fact that Lumley had been out of England for the past ten mo
nths.

  That very morning Starlingford had come across the year-old letter from Vavasour. “There is an outsider down here, a lawyer chap named Hawksley, who,” etc. The duke had smiled over Vavasour’s mistake in the name. “So like Vavvy,” he said to himself, “he always did mix up these bourgeois names horribly.”

  He looked across at the poet now, and scowled. But the poet was smiling ecstatically. His gaze had just rested upon Helen Martingale’s face. She came toward him, smiling also. The poet was transported by the sweetness of that smile. What a fool he had been to have lingered abroad!

  They shook hands effusively.

  “Wherever have you been hiding all these months?” she cried. And the duke, within earshot, winced and wondered.

  “Hiding from the sun,” murmured the poet.

  “Sh!” she laughed. “Tommy will be jealous if he hears you.”

  Just then Lumley caught sight of Hawksley’s rubicund visage — more rubicund even than when last he had seen it. The man of law grinned a welcome.

  “Nellie has wonderful eyes,” he cried, “she spotted you the moment you entered the room.”

  The poet was mystified. No less so was the duke in the background. Then a lady swept up to them.

  “Ah, my dear Mrs. Hawksley, there you are,” she cried.

  The poet felt a cold perspiration start on his brow, and glanced at Tommy with a smile that was positively sickly.

  “Hawksley,” muttered the duke in the background. “Hawksley!”

  Then realization swept down upon him like a flood.

  “Well, I’m hanged,” said he.

  As Lumley, in a very dejected frame of mind, was leaving the house, some one touched him on the shoulder. It was the Duke of Starlingford.

  “I owe you an apology, Mr. Lumley, for not believing you last year at Stollbridge. I mean that in fact there was a mistake. I was told that a man named Hawksley was — well, I mean — was paying address to Miss Martingale. I somehow mixed up his name with yours, and well — I mean, I’m sorry.”

  “You mixed up his name with mine,” echoed the poet. And his memory calling up his interview with the duke that day, he also realized even as the duke had done a few moments before. And even as the duke had muttered so did he now mutter:

  “Well, I’m hanged,” or words of very similar sound. Which shows that in moments of great emotion a duke and a poet may avail themselves of very similar phrases to express very similar feelings.

  THE DUELLIST’S WIFE

  Ainslee’s, October 1903

  His first book of verses— “Autumn Leaves” — had run into a third edition within six months; the reviewers had been more than kind; the public was reading him, and he was in a fair way to realize the ambitions of his youth.

  Yet Rudolph Lumley was unhappy.

  His thoughts were retrospective. They dwelt upon the different women, a transient affection for each of whom had inspired the verses which had been collected and given to the world under the pathetic title of “Autumn Leaves.”

  Particularly and with much bitterness did they dwell upon the last of these flames to which he had played the moth, and who had married a friend of his.

  He brooded so much and so bitterly over this that in the end he took a determination to again leave the England to which he was but newly returned.

  On a visit of congé he sought out a friend of his who had recently wed.

  “I’ve only come to say ‘good-by,’” he announced in reply to his friend’s cheery greeting.

  “But,” cried Burleigh, “you’ve only been in England three days!”

  “Three days too long,” growled the poet.

  Burleigh — who had seen similar symptoms before — eyed him narrowly and sniffed.

  “On the warpath again, eh? Well, what’s her name?”

  “My dear Herbert,” said the poet loftily, “whatever matrimony may have done for you it has not improved your manners.”

  “It would be vain,” returned the other, “to seek to improve that which the gods have made perfect. But if not a woman — what is it takes you away again so suddenly?”

  “The wish to be rid of the society of women. I have done with them for good.”

  “My dear Roody,” quoth the critical Burleigh, “however fascinating a pursuit may be we can render it stale by abusing it. I quite understand your feelings. As a pastime you found love charming, no doubt. But you wore away its charm by indulging it too freely, too frequently and — may I add? — too indiscriminately. Love is the sugar of life. But what happens to the man who takes sugar with all his viands? I will tell you.”

  “You needn’t trouble; it really doesn’t matter. Besides, it no longer concerns me; I have done with the sex. Women are the most inconstant, the most fickle, the most—”

  “Hang it all,” cried Burleigh, “you forget I’m married.”

  Roody might, and was on the point of offering condolences to his friend. For obvious reasons he restrained himself.

  “I shall probably be in Paris the day after tomorrow,” he said presently, “and I should like to look up old Fournailles. Can you give me his address?”

  “I have his card somewhere,” answered Burleigh, and turning to a little escritoire he began to search for it. “Poor old Fournailles,” he sighed.

  “Oh, he’s poor no longer,” returned the poet. “He has become both rich and famous.”

  “Still,” objected the other, whose sentiments were eminently patrician, and whose cult was the adoration of the useless, “it is a trifle derogatory for a man of his birth to be compelled to open a fencing school and turn what was a pretty accomplishment into a profession.”

  “The profession of a master of fence is a most gentlemanly one.”

  “Quite so, quite so, and it makes a man respected, which is much. Ah, here’s his card.”

  Roody took the card, which bore the name of Jules de Fournailles, the description “Maître d’armes,” and the address “Rue Copernic No. 13.” He glanced at it and slipped it into his case with a sigh.

  “I’ll look him up for the sake of old times, and perhaps a bout or two with the foils may shake me into a more optimistic frame of mind. Exercise is a great antidote to despondency. I’ll give him your love, Herbert.”

  Gloomily Rudolph Lumley paced the deck of the Calais-bound packet. A look of settled melancholy chastened his intellectual — if weak — face, and, combined with its natural pallor, gave him the interesting air of one who has done with the follies of the world and looked deep into the eyes of sorrow.

  That was precisely the air which the poet wished to assume, for in a deck chair, a neglected magazine in her lap, and her eyes fixed pensively upon the glistening water, sat a strikingly pretty woman in black.

  Of course she nowise interested Lumley. Her sex to him was a book wherein he had read but sorrow, and which he had closed for all time. Still he could not but observe that she was a pretty woman, and as for the tenth time he passed before her, his sorrow wrapped about him like a cloak, he caught himself drawing a parallel between the color of her eyes and that of the water they contemplated — a comparison by which the water suffered in a marked degree.

  At Calais he hovered near her with a satellite-like movement, hoping for no reason whatever that her French might prove insufficient and that he might lend her some of his. But in this he was disappointed.

  He heard her tell a porter that she was going to Bâle, and again he suffered — for no reason in the world — a pang of disappointment. He saw her pass out on to the platform with an elderly lady and a maid. He observed the grace of her figure, the stateliness of her carriage, the ruddy wealth of her hair, and again he registered — with a sigh — the fact that she was an enchanting creature.

  Then, having almost an hour to spare, he sauntered into the buffet, and delivered himself up to the material pleasures of gastronomy.

  He emerged once more on to the platform of the Gare Maritime as the end of the Engadine Express was vanis
hing out of the station. It occurred to him that she would be on board the train, and he smiled sadly and cynically without any apparent reason.

  Suddenly, to his amazement, he beheld her on the platform talking excitedly to the Chef de Gare, and her words being wafted to him, he learned that her mother and her maid had gone on the express, which she had unfortunately missed. The station master advised her to wire that she would follow by the ordinary train leaving in half an hour’s time.

  She brushed past Lumley on her way to the telegraph office, and some subtle, delicate perfume that she exhaled bewildered him and completed the rout of his senses. Before she had vanished he had resolved that he, too, would go to Switzerland. What did he — a saddened misanthropist — seek in Paris, that pandemonium of human folly, that altar raised to the elusive god of pleasure?

  No. It was the mountains, the eternal snows, the peace and majesty of nature that Lumley wanted, and in which he might find solace for his lacerated heart. He pretended to forget that the beautiful unknown with the Venetian hair and the statuesque figure was going to Bâle. How could that possibly interest him or affect his movements?

  A quarter of an hour later he boarded the train for Bâle, and quite accidentally he saw her as he passed down the corridor, and entered a smoking compartment next to hers. He was alone, and he spent his time alternately in reading, thinking and going out into the corridor, ostensibly to admire the flat inadmirable landscape, surreptitiously to glance at her. She was sharing her coupé with a harsh-featured woman; a circumstance which though small in itself happens to have afforded the motif of that which followed.

  At Laon the poet alighted to bolt an exceedingly bad dinner. He returned to find his carriage occupied. Metaphorically he rubbed his eyes upon discovering that the tenant was the beautiful unknown. She met his glances calmly, and without embarrassment.

  “I trust, sir,” she said, with great dignity, “that you will pardon my intrusion. But the lady in the next carriage has very pronounced views on ventilation, which unfortunately do not coincide with my own. She insists upon an open window. I could endure it during the day, but it is out of the question in the evening. I knew this to be a smoking carriage, but I also knew that it had only one occupant, and I thought you wouldn’t mind. The fore part of the train is so crowded, and I don’t mind tobacco in the least.”