Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “Sir! Sir!” said a voice.

  He swung round and scowled into the bearded, aquiline face of Colonel Holles. Conceiving here another witness of his shame, his anger, seeking a vent, flamed out.

  “What now, fellow? Do you dare touch me?” he snapped.

  The colonel, never flinching, as another might have done, before that white face and blazing eyes, made answer simply:

  “I touched you once before, I think, and you were not wroth, for it was to serve you that I touched you then.”

  “Ha! And ‘twill be to remind me of it that you touch me now?” came our fine gentleman’s quick, contemptuous answer.

  Holles crimsoned under his tan. His eyes gave back contempt for contempt with something of interest, and without a word he swung on his heel again to depart. But even as he turned, a flash as of red fire smote the gallant’s eyes, so that he gasped in sudden amazement, and in his turn caught the other by the arm, in his turn arrested him with the cry of:

  “Sir! A moment!” They were face to face again. “How came you by that jewel?”

  But out of his deep sense of injury the colonel answered him:

  “It was given me after Worcester by a fatuous fool whose life I thought worth saving.”

  Without resenting the words, the other stared long and searchingly into his face.

  “Ay!” he said slowly. “The man had such a nose, and was of your inches; yet otherwise you hardly look the Cromwellian who befriended me that day. You were shaven, then, and wore your hair of a godly length, as they had it. But you are the man. Besides, it was foretold that we should meet again — ay, and that for a season our lives should run intertwined.”

  “Foretold?” said Holles. “By whom?”

  “By whom? By the stars — they are the only prophets, and speak plainly to him who can read them. Have you ever sought that lore?”

  “I am a soldier, sir,” answered Holles, in a tone that implied his contempt of charlatanry:

  “Why, so am I — or have been — which does not prevent me from being also a reader of the heavens, and a writer of verse, and a courtier, and many other things. The man who is one thing only might as well be nothing. To live, my friend, you must sip at many wells of life.” There was an indefinable charm in his air and manner which was fastening upon our adventurer even as it had fastened upon him fifteen years ago in that brief hour of their only but fateful meeting. He linked his gorgeously sleeved arm through the colonel’s shabby one. “But, sir, we have not met here and thus to part again without more. If you have business, it must wait upon my pleasure.” Over his shoulder he addressed his waiting lackeys sharply in French, then drew the colonel on with him back towards Cheapside. Holles, unresisting, curious, conquered by the charm of the duke’s personality, allowed himself to be borne whither the other would, as a man drifts upon the stream of Destiny.

  “We’ll to Proctor’s at the Mitre in Wood Street, which is the best house of entertainment hereabouts, and you shall tell me of yourself. There was that baggage, Sylvia,” he added, “but she can wait. If I owed you nothing until now, I owe it to you that you can rescue my mind for an hour or so from the tormenting thought of her. You saw how she used me, the little wanton?” He laughed, all anger having left him now. “But I contrived the thing clumsily, as she said, and deserve to be laughed at for my pains. And yet — oh, but a plague on the woman! She shall pay me with interest one of these days for all the trouble she has given me. Well, sir, and what are you now that once were a Commonwealth man?”

  “I am nobody’s man at present,” said the colonel. “I have seen a deal of service since those days, yet they have brought me small prosperity, as you can see.”

  “Faith, yes! I should not call your air a prosperous one.”

  “You may call it a desperate one, and so describe it most exactly.”

  “Is it so bad? Nay, now, but I am grieved. Yet naught but desperation could bring a Commonwealth man to show himself in London these days. What is your name, sir?”

  “Holles — Edward Holles, lately a colonel of horse in the Stadtholder’s service. And yours, sir?”

  The gallant looked at him almost in surprise, surprise that one should live who did not know him.

  “I am George Villiers,” he said.

  “The Duke of Buckingham,” said Holles. “I remember now that I heard you named by the crowd. Besides, I might have guessed it from the pursuit in which I found you.”

  “Pursuit, you say. Oh, excellent word. Pursuit indeed that never overtakes. Yet it shall, Colonel Holles. I swear it shall, no matter what the cost. Meanwhile, sir, you shall tell me how I may serve you. You shall explain to me how Colonel Holles, sometime of the Commonwealth Army, and more lately in the service of the Stadtholder, happens to be endangering his neck in the England of Old Rowley — this king whose memory for injuries is as long as a lawsuit or as a list of his own amorous adventures.”

  Colonel Holles told him. He told him of the ill-fortune that had attended him and to what it had reduced him; told him of the mistakes he had made by following impulses that were never right; told of the office in Bombay that he had missed and not desired until he had lost it, and in a surge of frankness — feeling it impossible to fear anything from one so debonair, and standing, moreover, so deeply in his debt — spoke of how he had decided to join the plot in which Tucker and his fellows were engaged, and how there again Fortune had thwarted him and yet saved him for once.

  All this he told as they took their way up Wood Street, and ended the tale when they were already at table in a private room at the Mitre that his Grace had commanded. And the Duke was airily sympathetic, condoled and jested in a breath, and when finally they parted — the duke being by then in an advanced stage of intoxication — his Grace almost wept as he flung himself upon the colonel’s bosom, calling him his deliverer, and swearing that he went at once to engage himself on his behalf, and that he would know no rest until he had sent the colonel upon the high road to fortune.

  That done, he went off in a coach that had been summoned for him, his French lackeys trotting beside it, whilst Colonel Holles, with his head in the clouds and a greater swagger than ever in his port, to emphasise the shabby condition of his person, rolled down Wood Street into Cheapside, fingering the jewel in his ear.

  It had served its turn at last, in the eleventh hour, and he might sell it now without a pang, to put himself in funds for the next few days, until his Grace of Buckingham should make his fortune for him as he had undertaken. The result of this mental attitude was, of course, that he was villainously swindled, and got but fifteen guineas for a ruby that was worth a hundred. But he cared nothing. What was a handful of guineas more or less to a man who stood upon the very threshold of Fortune’s treasure-house?

  Chapter III.

  Whatever the future’s uncertainty might hold, you see Colonel Holles with fifteen guineas in his pocket to stand between himself and the utter destitution in which we lately found him. Some five of these he owed to Mrs. Bankes at the Paul’s Head, which — the ugly truth must be told — he never paid, leaving her instead in possession of some paltry gear that was hardly worth as many shillings.

  I do not wish to make excuses for him, yet neither do I wish to do him any injustice. It is probable that, but for the arrest of Tucker and Rathbone, he would have returned to his old lodging and settled his score now that he possessed the means. But when he came to consider things, he found that he had no reason whatever to trust Mrs. Bankes. A word from her to the justices, and he would go the way of his late associates. Although they could have nothing against him so far as the plot which had led to his friends’ arrest was concerned, yet when they came to examine him no doubt they would unearth his connection with the regicides, and, as we know, it would have availed him nothing to have cited the Bill of Indemnity.

  Finding himself in this position, I leave you to judge whether he is greatly to be censured for showing himself no more at the Paul’s Head, and for pers
uading himself that Mrs. Bankes would be amply repaid by that worthless gear of his which she could now retain.

  Urged partly by the same considerations, and partly by the love of fine clothes, which is as inevitable as the love of toothsome viands and good wine to one who has roamed the world, the colonel took his way to the second-hand clothiers in Birchin Lane, and spent close upon half his worldly possessions upon a brave suit of maroon velvet and a new hat. Next, to complete the transformation in his appearance, so that none whom he might meet should recognise him for the sometime associate of Rathbone and Tucker, he repaired to a barber’s shop, where his beard and moustachios were removed and his face restored to its smoothness of other days. He came forth looking ten years younger at least.

  If you conceived that he husbanded the balance of his slender possessions, then you do not know his kind at all. Whatever virtues it may practise, economy is not amongst them. Consider, too, that Holles, having passed through a season of enforced Lent, found himself the more sharp-set for the good things of the world, and you will understand that he sought out the choicest ordinaries in the town, and for a week ruffled it with the best and indulged his appetite like a gentleman. In an evil hour he permitted himself to be drawn into gaming — another thing which your adventurer never can withstand — and thanks to his skill, for he was versed in the potentialities of a bale of dice as any rook that lived by them, he won at first, until, meeting his match, he came to be relieved of his last guinea.

  Thus you find him at the end of the week very much as he was on the day of his meeting with the Duke of Buckingham, save that he was the richer by a brave suit of velvet. But since a man may as easily starve in that as in a leather hacketon, he was awakened from his fool’s dream by the pangs of hunger, and despondency overtook him once again. He had expected to hear from the Duke before this, having apprised him of his change of address. The fact that he had heard nothing increased and magnified his despondency. He was in a state of reaction from his hopes, and those who know into what depths of despair such reaction usually plunges a man will not marvel at the letter that he wrote the duke forthwith.

  In it he spoke of himself as a broken, desperate man, ready for any work that should earn him the wherewithal to live until the dawning of better days. He told the duke that his Grace was now his only hope, that he had hesitated between writing this letter and jumping from London Bridge, and that he would most certainly take the latter course should the other now prove fruitless. He remained his Grace’s humble, obedient servant to command in any service, be it never so mean.

  He scraped together some few pence wherewith to hire a messenger, then tightened his belt, and sat down to wait.

  This was at the end of June. The Court had just left for Salisbury, and there was something approaching panic in the City as a consequence of the orders of the Lord Mayor concerning the plague. In the week that was passed it had broken forth here and there, springing perhaps from those four cases Tucker had reported, so that Sir John Lawrence and the aldermen had been constrained to appoint examiners and searchers, and to take measures for isolating infected houses — measures so rigorous that they dispelled at last the fond illusion that there was immunity within the City walls, and made men realise the peril in which they stood.

  A wholesale flight followed, and a sort of paralysis settled upon London life and the carrying forward of its business by the rapidly thinning population. In the suburbs it was reported that the plague was raging fiercely, and that men were dying like flies at the approach of winter.

  Preachers of doom multiplied, and were no longer laughed to scorn or pelted with offal. They were listened to in awe, and so reduced in ribaldry were the London ‘prentices that they even suffered a madman to run naked through the streets with a cresset of live coals upon his head, screaming “Woe!”

  But Holles, obsessed by his own misfortunes, gave little heed to the general dismay, and his Grace of Buckingham, obsessed by a misfortune of his own, was quite as negligent of what was happening, may even have conceived himself immune by reason of his station, for so far the plague had used a proper discrimination and confined itself to those of the poorest classes, and in particular to the women and children of these. Be that as it may, the duke had not accompanied the Court in its flight, nor did he hesitate to go abroad as before, with the result that two nights after Holles had written to him he stepped from a chair at the door of the Bird in Hand, in Paternoster Row, where the colonel was now lodged.

  “Colonel Holles,” he said, when they stood face to face above in the adventurer’s room, “your despair comes opportunely to my own. We are desperate both, though in different ways, and each can mend the other’s case. Indeed, I think destiny has made us for each other.”

  And he sat down.

  “If your Grace was made for me, I am ready enough to show myself made for your Grace,” said Holles.

  “I wonder now,” murmured the duke, and scanned the other’s seared face. “Gad’s life,” he said, “though I should no longer recognise you for the man I met some days ago, yet I recognise you for the man I met at Worcester. I commend the prudence of the change. But to the business of your letter. You say that you are ready for any service?”

  The duke watched him; and Holles noted the straining look, noted the deep shadows under his Grace’s eyes, the pallor and hardness that seemed to have crept into that lovely, dissipated face.

  “I said so. Yes, I say so again.”

  The duke seemed relieved. He drew forth a handkerchief and dabbed his lips. A faint smell of camphor and vinegar reached the colonel. It seemed that though his Grace went forth where the plague stalked yet he took the prescribed precautions.

  “I know not how much of squeamishness, of what men call honesty, your travels may have left you.”

  “None that your Grace need consider,” said Holles, on a note of self-derision.

  Yet his Grace seemed to hesitate.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “I warn you that the business I am come to propose is fraught with danger.”

  “We are old friends — danger and I.”

  “Grave danger,” the duke insisted.

  “Good! Presumably the reward will be proportionate.”

  “It shall be as great as my somewhat reduced exchequer will permit.”

  “Then let us to it, in the name of Heaven.”

  “Ah, no, not in the name of Heaven, my friend. In the devil’s name, if you will, or in the name of George Villiers, which is much the same.” He paused again. “Let me warn you that you may find the task distasteful.”

  “If I do, I shall tell you so.”

  “Just so,” said the duke. “That is why I warn you. For should you tell me so, you will please tell me without roaring, without the airs of a Bobadil or a Pistol or any other of your fire-eating, down-at-heel fraternity. You have but to say ‘No’ to it, and spare me the stormings of outraged virtue.”

  “There’s no virtue left in me to outrage,” Holles assured him.

  “You are to remember that I am here at your own invitation to offer you any service. No doubt in your time you have played many parts, Colonel Holles?”

  “Ay — a many,” said Holles.

  “Have you ever played Sir Pandarus of Troy?” the duke inquired; and his narrowing eyes watched the other’s face keenly for some sign.

  But the colonel was indifferently acquainted with the classics.

  “I have never heard of him. What part may that be?”

  The duke took another way to his ends.

  “Have you ever heard of Sylvia Farquahrson?” he asked.

  “A baggage of a play actress at the Duke’s Theatre? I heard of her on the day I met your Grace. I saw her, and heard her, too, and admired her liveliness. What has she to do with me?”

  “Something, I think, or else the stars are wrong; and the stars cannot lie. It was foretold that we should meet again, you and I, that we should be concerned in a fateful matter with one other. Tha
t other is the lovely Sylvia. You behold in me a man distraught, racked, consumed by my feelings for that woman.” He came to his feet, and his pleasant voice was momentarily thickened by the stress of his emotions. “Yet she has spurned and scorned me, and made a mock of me until I can endure no more. Yourself, you say, you heard her; ay, and you admired her liveliness, her scorpion’s sting of mockery. If it were virtue that prompted her, I should go my ways, bending to her will. But I know it for mere wantonness, for caprice, for woman’s infernal subtlety and zest to torture a man whom she sees perishing and wasting for love of her!”

  He clenched his hands one in the other, and his face was livid with the deep emotion that possessed him — that curious and fearful unconscious merging of baffled passion into hatred.

  “I could tear the jade limb from limb with these two hands, and take joy in it; or, with the same joy, could I give my body to the rack for her sweet sake! To such a state has she reduced me.”

  He sat down again and took his blond head in his jewelled hands. Holles looked at him with a glance in which scorn and amusement were blending with surprise.

  “Is your Grace come to me for advice?” he wondered. “If so, you have come for the one thing I cannot give. I am but indifferently schooled in the ways of the frail sex.”

  “For advice, you fool!” blazed the duke. “I am come to you for help. I am come to offer you employment.”

  A faint colour stirred in Holles’s cheeks, but his voice came cold and level.

  “Your Grace has hardly said enough.”

  “I mean to make an end of the prudish airs with which this wanton jade repels me!”

  And he adapted a line of Suckling’s:

  “Since of herself she will not love, Myself shall make her, The devil take her!”

  “I scarce see how I can serve, your Grace,” said Holles. “Will you not be plain with me?”

  “Plain?” echoed Buckingham. “Why, man, I want her carried off for me!”

  Holles conned him in silence a moment, his face blank, so that the duke watched it in vain for some sign of how he might be taking the proposal. At last he smiled somewhat scornfully.