Bardelys the Magnificent, Rafael Sabatini [best free e book reader .txt] 📗

saint descending into, hell; or, rather, to make my

metaphor more apt, would warrant a sinner’s intrusion into heaven.”

 

I spoke solemnly, yet not too solemnly; the least slur of a sardonic

humour was in my tones.

 

She moved her head upon the white column of her neck, and with the

gesture one of her brown curls became disordered. I could fancy

the upward tilt of her delicate nose, the scornful curve of her lip

as she answered shortly “Then say it quickly, monsieur.”

 

And, being thus bidden, I said quickly “I love you, Roxalanne.”

 

Her heel beat the shimmering parquet of the floor; she half turned

towards me, her cheek flushed, her lip tremulous with anger.

 

“Will you say what you have to say, monsieur?” she demanded in a

concentrated voice, “and having said it, will you go?”

 

“Mademoiselle, I have already said it,” I answered, with a wistful

smile.

 

“Oh!” she gasped. Then suddenly facing round upon me, a world of

anger in her blue eyes - eyes that I had known dreamy, but which

were now very wide awake. “Was it to offer me this last insult you

forced your presence upon me? Was it to mock me with those words,

me - a woman, with no man about me to punish you? Shame, sir! Yet

it is no more than I might look for in you.”

 

“Mademoiselle, you do me grievous wrong—” I began.

 

“I do you no wrong,” she answered hotly, then stopped, unwilling

haply to be drawn into contention with me. “Enfin, since you have

said what you came to say will you go?” And she pointed to the door.

 

“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle—” I began in a voice of earnest

intercession.

 

“Go!” she interrupted angrily, and for a second the violence of her

voice and gesture almost reminded me of the Vicomtesse. “I will

hear no more from you.”

 

“Mademoiselle, you shall,” I answered no whit less firmly.

 

“I will not listen to you. Talk if you will. You shall have the

walls for audience.” And she moved towards the door, but I barred

her passage. I was courteous to the last degree; I bowed low

before her as I put myself in her way.

 

“It is all that was wanting - that you should offer me violence!”

she exclaimed.

 

“God forbid!” said I.

 

“Then let me pass.”

 

“Aye, when you have heard me.”

 

“I do not wish to hear you. Nothing that you may say can matter to

me. Oh, monsieur, if you have any instincts of gentility, if you

have any pretension to be accounted anything but a mauvais sujet, I

beg of you to respect my grief. You witnessed, yourself, the arrest

of my father. This is no season for such as scene as you are

creating.”

 

“Pardon! It is in such a season as this that you need the comfort

and support that the man you love alone can give you.”

 

“The man I love?” she echoed, and from flushed that they had been,

her cheeks went very pale. Her eyes fell for an instant, then -

they were raised again, and their blue depths were offered me. “I

think, sir,” she said, through her teeth, “that your insolence

transcends all belief.”

 

“Can you deny it?” I cried. “Can you deny that you love me? If

you can - why, then, you lied to me three nights ago at Toulouse!”

 

That smote her hard - so hard that she forgot her assurance that she

would not listen to me - her promise to herself that she would stoop

to no contention with me.

 

“If, in a momentary weakness, in my nescience of you as you truly

are, I did make some such admission, I did entertain such feelings

for you, things have come to my knowledge since then, monsieur, that

have revealed you to me as another man; I have learnt something that

has utterly withered such love as I then confessed. Now, monsieur,

are you satisfied, and will you let me pass?” She said the last

words with a return of her imperiousness, already angry at having

been drawn so far.

 

“I am satisfied, mademoiselle,” I answered brutally, “that you did

not speak the truth three nights ago. You never loved me. It was

pity that deluded you, shame that urged you - shame at the Delilah

part you had played and at your betrayal of me. Now, mademoiselle,

you may pass,” said I.

 

And I stood aside, assured that as she was a woman she would not

pass me now. Nor did she. She recoiled a step instead. Her lip

quivered. Then she recovered quickly. Her mother might have told

her that she was a fool for engaging herself in such a duel with me

- me, the veteran of a hundred amorous combats. Yet though I doubt

not it was her first assault-at-arms of this description, she was

more than a match for me, as her next words proved.

 

“Monsieur, I thank you for enlightening me. I cannot, indeed, have

spoken the truth three nights ago. You are right, I do not doubt it

now, and you lift from me a load of shame.”

 

Dieu! It was like a thrust in the high lines, and its hurtful

violence staggered me. I was finished, it seemed. The victory was

hers, and she but a child with no practice of Cupid’s art of fence!

 

“Now, monsieur,” she added, “now that you are satisfied that you

did wrong to say I loved you, now that we have disposed of that

question - adieu!”

 

“A moment yet!” I cried. “We have disposed of that, but there was

another point, an earlier one, which for the moment we have

disregarded. We have - you have disproved the love I was so

presumptuous as to believe you fostered for me. We have yet to

reckon with the love I bear you, mademoiselle, and of that we shall

not be able to dispose so readily.”

 

With a gesture of weariness or of impatience, she turned aside.

“What is it you want? What do you seek to gain by thus provoking

me? To win your wager?” Her voice was cold. Who to have looked

upon that childlike face, upon those meek, pondering eyes, could

have believed her capable of so much cruelty?

 

“There can no longer be any question of my wager; I have lost and

paid it,” said I.

 

She looked up suddenly. Her brows met in a frown of bewilderment.

Clearly this interested her. Again was she drawn.

 

“How?” she asked. “You have lost and paid it?”

 

“Even so. That odious, cursed, infamous wager, was the something

which I hinted at so often as standing between you and me. The

confession that so often I was on the point of making - that so

often you urged me to make - concerned that wager. Would to God,

Roxalanne, that I had told you!” I cried, and it seemed to me that

the sincerity ringing in my voice drove some of the harshness from

her countenance, some of the coldness from her glance.

 

“Unfortunately,” I pursued, “it always seemed to me either not yet

time, or already too late. Yet so soon as I regained my liberty,

my first thought was of that. While the wager existed I might not

ask you to become my wife, lest I should seem to be carrying out

the original intention which embarked me upon the business of

wooing you, and brought me here to Languedoc. And so my first step

was to seek out Chatellerault and deliver him my note of hand for

my Picardy possessions, the bulk - by far the greater bulk - of all

my fortune. My second step was to repair to you at the Hotel de

l’Epee.

 

“At last I could approach you with clean hands; I could confess what

I had done; and since it seemed to me that I had made the utmost

atonement, I was confident of success. Alas! I came too late. In

the porch of the auberge I met you as you came forth. From my

talkative intendant you had learnt already the story of that bargain

into which Bardelys had entered. You had learnt who I was, and you

thought that you had learnt why I wooed you. Accordingly you could

but despise me.”

 

She had sunk into a chair. Her hands were folded in a listless

manner in her lap, and her eyes were lowered, her cheeks pale. But

the swift heave of her bosom told me that my words were not without

effect.” Do you know nothing of the bargain that I made with

Chatellerault?” she asked in a voice that held, I thought, some

trace of misery.

 

“Chatellerault was a cheat!” I cried. “No man of honour in France

would have accounted himself under obligation to pay that wager. I

paid it, not because I thought the payment due, but that by its

payment I might offer you a culminating proof of my sincerity.”

 

“Be that as it may,” said she, “I passed him my word to - to marry

him, if he set you at liberty.”

 

“The promise does not hold, for when you made it I was at liberty

already. Besides, Chatellerault is dead by now - or very near it.”

 

“Dead?” she echoed, looking up.

 

“Yes, dead. We fought—” The ghost of a smile, of sudden, of

scornful understanding, passed like a ray of light across her face.

“Pardieu!” I cried, “you do me a wrong there. It was not by my

hands that he fell. It was not by me that the duel was instigated.”

 

And with that I gave her the whole details of the affair, including

the information that Chatellerault had been no party to my release,

and that for his attempted judicial murder of me the King would have

dealt very hardly with him had he not saved the King the trouble by

throwing himself upon his sword:

 

There was a silence when I had done. Roxalanne sat on, and seemed

to ponder. To let all that I had said sink in and advocate my cause,

as to me was very clear it must, I turned aside and moved to one of

the windows.

 

“Why did you not tell me before?” she asked suddenly. “Why - oh,

why - did you not confess to me the whole infamous affair as soon as

you came to love me, as you say you did?”

 

“As I say I did?” I repeated after her. “Do you doubt it? Can you

doubt it in the face of what I have done?”

 

“Oh, I don’t know what to believe!” she cried, a sob in her voice.

“You have deceived me so far, so often. Why did you not tell me

that night on the river? Or later, when I pressed you in this very

house? Or again, the other night in the prison of Toulouse?”

 

“You ask me why. Can you not answer the question for yourself?

Can you not conceive the fear that was in me that you should shrink

away from me in loathing? The fear that if you cared a little, I

might for all time stifle such affection as you bore me? The fear

that I must ruin your trust in me? Oh, mademoiselle, can you not

see how my only hope lay in first owning defeat to Chatellerault,

in first paying the wager?”

 

“How could you have lent yourself to such a bargain?” was her next

question.

 

“How, indeed?” I asked in my turn. “From your mother you have

heard something of the reputation that attaches to