Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution, Rafael Sabatini [bookstand for reading txt] 📗

her own eyes and theirs enshrined by marriage with him as a great lady, this disclosure crushed and humiliated her. Her prince in disguise was merely the outcast bastard of a country gentleman! She would be the laughing-stock of every member of her father’s troupe, of all those who had so lately envied her this romantic good fortune.

“You should have told me this before,” she said, in a dull voice that she strove to render steady.

“Perhaps I should. But does it really matter?”

“Matter?” She suppressed her fury to ask another question. “You say that this M. de Kercadiou is popularly believed to be your father. What precisely do you mean?”

“Just that. It is a belief that I do not share. It is a matter of instinct, perhaps, with me. Moreover, once I asked M. de Kercadiou point-blank, and I received from him a denial. It is not, perhaps, a denial to which one would attach too much importance in all the circumstances. Yet I have never known M. de Kercadiou for other than a man of strictest honour, and I should hesitate to disbelieve him—particularly when his statement leaps with my own instincts. He assured me that he did not know who my father was.”

“And your mother, was she equally ignorant?” She was sneering, but he did not remark it. Her back was to the light.

“He would not disclose her name to me. He confessed her to be a dear friend of his.”

She startled him by laughing, and her laugh was not pleasant.

“A very dear friend, you may be sure, you simpleton. What name do you bear?”

He restrained his own rising indignation to answer her question calmly: “Moreau. It was given me, so I am told, from the Brittany village in which I was born. But I have no claim to it. In fact I have no name, unless it be Scaramouche, to which I have earned a title. So that you see, my dear,” he ended with a smile, “I have practised no deception whatever.”

“No, no. I see that now.” She laughed without mirth, then drew a deep breath and rose. “I am very tired,” she said.

He was on his feet in an instant, all solicitude. But she waved him wearily back.

“I think I will rest until it is time to go to the theatre.” She moved towards the door, dragging her feet a little. He sprang to open it, and she passed out without looking at him.

Her so brief romantic dream was ended. The glorious world of fancy which in the last hour she had built with such elaborate detail, over which it should be her exalted destiny to rule, lay shattered about her feet, its debris so many stumbling-blocks that prevented her from winning back to her erstwhile content in Scaramouche as he really was.

Andre-Louis sat in the window embrasure, smoking and looking idly out across the river. He was intrigued and meditative. He had shocked her. The fact was clear; not so the reason. That he should confess himself nameless should not particularly injure him in the eyes of a girl reared amid the surroundings that had been Climene’s. And yet that his confession had so injured him was fully apparent.

There, still at his brooding, the returning Columbine discovered him a half-hour later.

“All alone, my prince!” was her laughing greeting, which suddenly threw light upon his mental darkness. Climene had been disappointed of hopes that the wild imagination of these players had suddenly erected upon the incident of his meeting with Aline. Poor child! He smiled whimsically at Columbine.

“I am likely to be so for some little time,” said he, “until it becomes a commonplace that I am not, after all, a prince.

“Not a prince? Oh, but a duke, then—at least a marquis.”

“Not even a chevalier, unless it be of the order of fortune. I am just Scaramouche. My castles are all in Spain.”

Disappointment clouded the lively, good-natured face.

“And I had imagined you...”

“I know,” he interrupted. “That is the mischief.” He might have gauged the extent of that mischief by Climene’s conduct that evening towards the gentlemen of fashion who clustered now in the green-room between the acts to pay their homage to the incomparable amoureuse. Hitherto she had received them with a circumspection compelling respect. To-night she was recklessly gay, impudent, almost wanton.

He spoke of it gently to her as they walked home together, counselling more prudence in the future.

“We are not married yet,” she told him, tartly. “Wait until then before you criticize my conduct.”

“I trust that there will be no occasion then,” said he.

“You trust? Ah, yes. You are very trusting.”

“Climene, I have offended you. I am sorry.”

“It is nothing,” said she. “You are what you are.” Still was he not concerned. He perceived the source of her ill-humour; understood, whilst deploring it; and, because he understood, forgave. He perceived also that her ill-humour was shared by her father, and by this he was frankly amused. Towards M. Binet a tolerant contempt was the only feeling that complete acquaintance could beget. As for the rest of the company, they were disposed to be very kindly towards Scaramouche. It was almost as if in reality he had fallen from the high estate to which their own imaginations had raised him; or possibly it was because they saw the effect which that fall from his temporary and fictitious elevation had produced upon Climene.

Leandre alone made himself an exception. His habitual melancholy seemed to be dispelled at last, and his eyes gleamed now with malicious satisfaction when they rested upon Scaramouche, whom occasionally he continued to address with sly mockery as “mon prince.”

On the morrow Andre-Louis saw but little of Climene. This was not in itself extraordinary, for he was very hard at work again, with preparations now for “Figaro-Scaramouche” which was to be played on Saturday. Also, in addition to his manifold theatrical occupations, he now devoted an hour every morning to the study of fencing in an academy of arms. This was done not only to repair an omission in his education, but also, and chiefly, to give him added grace and poise upon the stage. He found his mind that morning distracted by thoughts of both Climene and Aline. And oddly enough it was Aline who provided the deeper perturbation. Climene’s attitude he regarded as a passing phase which need not seriously engage him. But the thought of Aline’s conduct towards him kept rankling, and still more deeply rankled the thought of her possible betrothal to M. de La Tour d’Azyr.

This it was that brought forcibly to his mind the self-imposed but by now half-forgotten mission that he had made his own. He had boasted that he would make the voice which M. de La Tour d’Azyr had sought to silence ring through the length and breadth of the land. And what had he done of all this that he had boasted? He had incited the mob of Rennes and the mob of