Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini [inspirational books txt] 📗

me of everything. It’s in his power today to rob me of my troupe, and the knave’s ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of his power.”

“Let him,” said mademoiselle contemptuously.

“Let him?” He was aghast. “And what’s to become of us?”

“In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer,” said she. “I shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the Feydau. There’s Mlle. Montansier’s theatre in the Palais Royal; there’s the Ambigu Comique; there’s the Comédie Française; there’s even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own.”

His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.

“Has he promised that? Has he promised?”

She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.

“He did not refuse me when I asked it,” she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.

“Bah!” He withdrew his hand, and heaved himself up. There was disgust on his face. “He did not refuse!” he mocked her; and then with passion: “Had you acted as I advised you, he would have consented to anything that you asked, and what is more he would have provided anything that you asked⁠—anything that lay within his means, and they are inexhaustible. You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities⁠—God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”

Had she known of the interview taking place at that moment at the Château de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father’s gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all. She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked interference of that villain Scaramouche.

She had this much justification that possibly, without the warning from M. de Sautron, the Marquis would have found in the events of that evening at the Théâtre Feydau a sufficient reason for ending an entanglement that was fraught with too much unpleasant excitement, whilst the breaking-up of the Binet Troupe was most certainly the result of André-Louis’ work. But it was not a result that he intended or even foresaw.

So much was this the case that in the interval after the second act, he sought the dressing-room shared by Polichinelle and Rhodomont. Polichinelle was in the act of changing.

“I shouldn’t trouble to change,” he said. “The piece isn’t likely to go beyond my opening scene of the next act with Leandre.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.” He put a paper on Polichinelle’s table amid the grease-paints. “Cast your eye over that. It’s a sort of last will and testament in favour of the troupe. I was a lawyer once; the document is in order. I relinquish to all of you the share produced by my partnership in the company.”

“But you don’t mean that you are leaving us?” cried Polichinelle in alarm, whilst Rhodomont’s sudden stare asked the same question.

Scaramouche’s shrug was eloquent. Polichinelle ran on gloomily: “Of course it was to have been foreseen. But why should you be the one to go? It is you who have made us; and it is you who are the real head and brains of the troupe; it is you who have raised it into a real theatrical company. If anyone must go, let it be Binet⁠—Binet and his infernal daughter. Or if you go, name of a name! we all go with you!”

“Aye,” added Rhodomont, “we’ve had enough of that fat scoundrel.”

“I had thought of it, of course,” said André-Louis. “It was not vanity, for once; it was trust in your friendship. After tonight we may consider it again, if I survive.”

“If you survive?” both cried.

Polichinelle got up. “Now, what madness have you in mind?” he asked.

“For one thing I think I am indulging Leandre; for another I am pursuing an old quarrel.”

The three knocks sounded as he spoke.

“There, I must go. Keep that paper, Polichinelle. After all, it may not be necessary.”

He was gone. Rhodomont stared at Polichinelle. Polichinelle stared at Rhodomont.

“What the devil is he thinking of?” quoth the latter.

“That is most readily ascertained by going to see,” replied Polichinelle. He completed changing in haste, and despite what Scaramouche had said; and then followed with Rhodomont.

As they approached the wings a roar of applause met them coming from the audience. It was applause and something else; applause on an unusual note. As it faded away they heard the voice of Scaramouche ringing clear as a bell:

“And so you see, my dear M. Leandre, that when you speak of the Third Estate, it is necessary to be more explicit. What precisely is the Third Estate?”

“Nothing,” said Leandre.

There was a gasp from the audience, audible in the wings, and then swiftly followed Scaramouche’s next question:

“True. Alas! But what should it be?”

“Everything,” said Leandre.

The audience roared its acclamations, the more violent because of the unexpectedness of that reply.

“True again,” said Scaramouche. “And what is more, that is what it will be; that is what it already is. Do you doubt it?”

“I hope it,” said the schooled Leandre.

“You may believe it,” said Scaramouche, and again the acclamations rolled into thunder.

Polichinelle and Rhodomont exchanged glances: indeed, the former winked, not without mirth.

“Sacred name!” growled a voice behind them. “Is the scoundrel at his political tricks again?”

They turned to confront M. Binet. Moving with that noiseless tread of his, he had come up unheard behind them, and there he stood now in his scarlet suit of Pantaloon under a trailing bedgown, his little eyes glaring from either side of his false nose. But their attention was held by the voice of Scaramouche. He had stepped to the front of the stage.

“He doubts it,” he was telling the audience. “But then this M. Leandre