Scaramouche (35 page)

"It would be easy to remove him," said the intriguer quietly.

He disclosed the means. Let the Regent announce his departure for Toulon, which, after all, could no longer be delayed. He would go by way of Turin and Leghorn. There was an urgent message to be sent to the Prince de Conde in Belgium, and meanwhile, Monsieur de Langeac, their usual messenger, would already have been despatched elsewhere. The only other person whom the Regent could spare from attendance to bear those letters to Conde was Monsieur de Kercadiou. His niece could hardly accompany him on such a mission. She would remain in Hamm. The presence there of Kercadiou's cousin, Madame de Plougastel, would make this easy.

The Regent sat considering, his chin upon his breast. His face had lost some of its high colour. Temptation, so fiendishly presented, had him by the throat.

"And afterwards?" he asked.

The Comte d'Entragues permitted himself a cynical little laugh.

"Preventive measures may have been employed against your highness in the past. I do not know. But has your highness ever been troubled afterwards?"

And so it came to pass that in the afternoon, Langéac, barely rested from his journey, was riding out of Hamm again, this time charged with the arrangement of relays along the road by which his highness was to travel in the course of the next few days. It was only after his departure that the urgent need of a courier for the Prince de Conde was discovered, and Monsieur de Kercadiou invited, in default of any other, to undertake the task. It was not for the Lord of Gavrillac to shirk a duty, whatever it might be, in the service of his Prince. His instructions were that upon the performance of his errand he was to return to Hamm, and there await the further orders of the Regent.

If Aline was anxious on her uncle's behalf, she displayed no sign of it. Anxieties on her own she had none. She would await his return in Hamm. Meanwhile, the only care she manifested was concerned with the details of his equipment for the journey.

Not only in the chalet, but among the few émigrés elsewhere in the village there was now relief and satisfaction. At last Monsieur was to bestir himself to action and hasten to Toulon.

The only person whom the events at all disgruntled was the Comte de Plougastel. Younger than the Lord of Gavrillac by ten years, of great physical vigour and endurance, accustomed moreover to come and go as an ambassador of the Princes, he took it as a personal reflection upon his ability in these matters that Monsieur de Kercadiou should have been preferred to him for that mission to the camp of the Prince de Conde. He complained of it to d'Entragues.

"To be frank, I find it very odd. I am curious to know in what I have deserved Monsieur's displeasure."

"His displeasure. My dear Plougastel! It is the very contrary. His highness esteems you so highly that he desires you near his person in this crisis."

Plougastel's face lightened. "I am, then, to accompany him to Toulon?"

"That is hardly possible, however desirable to his highness. You will understand that Monsieur's attendance on that journey must be reduced to the bare minimum."

"But then?" Plougastel was frowning again. "Monsieur d'Entragues, it seems to me that you contradict yourself. Monsieur does not send me on a mission of a kind in which I am experienced. He sends in my place a man who is barely equal to the fatigue of the journey. Especially in this December weather. He does this because he desires me near his person. Yet in two days' time, when he departs for Toulon, I am to be left behind."

D'Entragues was smooth with him. "Things often appear contradictory without being so at heart. His highness has his own ends to serve. I can tell you no more. If you are not satisfied, you must ask Monsieur himself."

Plougastel departed more aggrieved than he had come, and went to plague his countess with his ill-humoured conjectures.

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE INTERRUPTION

Aline sat in the room above stairs which for nearly a year now she and her uncle had occupied at the Bear Inn. Never in her life had she felt more alone than on this evening of that day on which Monsieur de Kercadiou had set out on his long ride to Conde in Belgium. The loneliness of it seemed to renew the sense of bereavement which had been with her in those black weeks just after she had received the news of the death of André-Louis. She was weary at heart and despondent. Life seemed a dreary emptiness.

She had supped alone, very sparingly and mechanically. The table had been cleared, and the candles snuffed. In a kindly sympathetic apprehension of her loneliness, the landlord had come in person to perform this little service and solicitously to inquire if there was anything still lacking for her comfort.

She sat sadly dreaming, a book of Horace in her lap, a translation of the Odes. It was not a volume she would have chosen for her own entertainment. Yet it had been her constant companion in these last five months. It had been a favourite with André-Louis; and she read what he had so often read, merely so that she might turn her mind into channels in which his own had flowed. Thus she sought the fond delusion of a spiritual communion.

But to-night the words she had read remained meaningless. Loneliness weighed too heavily upon her. To dispel it, at last, towards ten o'clock, came the Regent.

He entered quietly and unheralded. He had been a frequent visitor in this unconventional manner, coming upon her at all hours of the day in the last three months.

Softly he closed the door, and from the threshold stood observing her. He had removed his round hat; but he was still heavily cloaked, and his shoulders were lightly powdered with snow.

From the street below at that moment rose the hoarse voice of the night watchmen calling the hour of ten. Rising slowly to receive him, that call prompted the form of her greeting.

"It is late for your highness to be abroad."

A smile softened the stare of the prominent eyes. "Late or early, my dear Aline, I exist to serve you." He loosened his cloak, slipped it from his shoulders, and moved forward to fling it across a chair. Then the heavy, paunchy figure marched upon her with its lilting strut. He came to a halt very close to her upon the hearth, and mechanically spread one of his podgy white hands to the blaze; for the solicitudinous landlord had lately made up the fire.

He considered her in silence. He seemed tongue-tied, and an odd nervousness, an indefinable apprehension began to creep upon her.

"It is late," she said again. "I was about to retire. I am none so well to-night, and very weary."

"Ay, you are pale. My poor child You will be lonely, too. It was this decided me to seek you, despite the hour. I feel myself to blame." He sighed. "But, child, necessity knows no laws. I had to send to Conde and there was none left at hand but your uncle whom I could employ."

"My uncle, monseigneur, was very willing. We are dutiful. Your highness has no ground for self-reproach."

"Not unless you have reproaches for me."

"I, monseigneur? If I have a reproach for you it is for having given yourself concern on my behalf. You should not have troubled to seek me so late. And it is snowing. You should not have come."

"Not come? Knowing you lonely here?" Very gently, yet with an odd ardour he complained. "How far you still are from understanding me, Aline." He took her hands. "You are cold. And how pale!" He lowered his eyes from her face to continue his survey of her. She wore a taffeta gown of apple green cut low in the bodice as the mode had prescribed when it was made. "I vow your cheeks put your breast to shame for whiteness."

For this, it seemed, he could have found no better medicine than his words. A flush overspread her pallid face, and gently she sought to disengage her hands. But he maintained his grip.

"Why, child, will you be afraid of me? This is unkind. And I have been so patient. So patient that I scarcely know myself."

"Patient?" There was a kindling in her eyes, a frown between them. All timidity left her, to be replaced by dignity.

"Monseigneur, it grows late. I am here alone. I am sensible of your interest. But you do me too much honour."

"Not half the honour I desire to do you. Aline, why will you be cruel? Why will you be indifferent to my suffering? Does this soft white bosom hold a heart of stone? Or is it that you do not trust me? They have told you that I am fickle. They malign me, Aline. Or else, if I have been fickle, it is yours to cure me of that. I could be constant to you, child. Constant as the stars."

He loosed one of her hands, to set his ponderous arm about her shoulders. He sought to draw her to him, but found in her an unsuspected strength which the soft, flabby fellow could not subdue.

"Monseigneur, this is not worthy." She wrenched herself free, and stood straight and tense before him, her head high. He watched the play of the candlelight in her hair of gold, the ebb and flow of 'colour in her delicate cheeks, the curve of her lovely throat, and became exasperated by her unreasonableness. Was he not a prince of the blood? Who, after all, was she? The daughter of a rustic Breton nobleman, the child of a house of no account; yet she fronted him with the airs of a duchess. Worse. For there was no duchess in France, he was convinced, would have offered such cold reserves to his wooing. Of all the princes of the blood he stood nearest to the throne and was likely to be king one day. Did she overlook this in her silly prudishness? Was she insensible to the honour which he did her, to the honours which might be hers?

But he gave utterance to none of these unanswerable arguments. There was a cold rustic virtue here that was not to be melted by them. In his anger his passion was in danger of transmutation. Indeed, it stood delicately poised upon the borderline. He was moved almost to a desire to hurt her. Obeying it, he might have taken a short way with the little fool; but he loathed all violent action. He was too overburdened with flesh and too scant of breath; and from the manner in which she had disengaged herself from his grasp he actually doubted if his strength would prove a match for hers.

He must have recourse to subtlety. He had always more faith in his wits than in his sinews.

"Not worthy?" he echoed. He looked at her sadly, his big liquid eyes full of a pathetic pleading. "So be it, child. You shall school me in worth. For if there is one thing in this world of which I would be worthy, you are that thing. I set worthiness of that above worthiness of the throne itself." Thus he reminded her how near the throne he stood. But it seemed to have no weight with the little fool.

She continued wrapped in a dignity which made her seem of ice.

"Monseigneur, I am alone here," she was beginning and there she checked to look at him more keenly, the throb of a sudden thought perceptible in her quickening glance.

She reviewed in a flash the past months in which he had imposed his companionship upon her; remembered the esteem in which she had held it, the flattery which she had accounted it. She recalled occasional attempts of his to overstep the boundaries of a platonic friendship, but how quickly on each occasion he had retreated the moment she had shown it to be unwelcome. Reviewing all those lapses now in the aggregate, she blamed herself for having lacked the wit to perceive whither he was ultimately aiming. In her blindness and in her very listlessness, it seemed to her now that she had encouraged him by continuing a companionship in which such lapses had been repeated. Not a doubt but he had classed her with those who, like the woman in the song, vowing that she would ne'er consent, consented. Perhaps he had thought her restrained by the lack of proper opportunity. And now he had created it.

"Was it for this," she asked him, "that you sent my uncle on a mission to the Prince de Conde? To leave me here defenceless?"

"Defenceless? What a word, Aline! What defence do you need other than that of your will? Would any dare do violence to it? Not I, at least."

"You reassure me, monseigneur." Was she ironical, he wondered. And then, with an inclination of her dainty head, she added: "I beg, monseigneur, that you will leave me."

But he remained squarely planted on his stout legs, and with his head a little on one side surveyed her, archly smiling. "I am not used to be dismissed," he reminded her.

She put a hand to her brow in a gesture of weariness. "Your highness will forgive me. But etiquette here..."

"You are right, and I am wrong. What need to regard etiquette between us, my dear?"

"I understood that you insisted upon the rights of your rank."

"With you? As if I should! Have I ever done so? Have I ever been the Prince to you?"

"You have always been the Prince to me, monseigneur."

"Then it has not been by my insistence. To you I have never desired to be more than just a man; the man for whom you might come to care, Aline; the man whose devotion might melt you into perceiving some worth in him. Does it offend you, child, to hear me say I love you? Does it offend you that I offer you my worship, as I offer you my destiny, my very life?"

He was the suppliant now. The fat voice was softly modulated. There was something akin to a tear in it. And he went on without giving her time to answer him.

"You have aroused in me feelings that seem to have changed my nature. I have no thought but of you, no care but to be near you, no fear but the fear of losing you. Is all this nothing to you? Nothing it may be. But offend you it cannot. If you are indeed a woman, and God knows you are that, Aline, it must move you to compassion for me. I suffer. Can you be insensible? Will you see a man so tortured that he must end by being false to himself, false to his mission, false to his very duty because you have made him mad?"

"This is wild talk, monseigneur!" she cried out, and then abruptly presented him with the question: "What does your highness want of me?"

"What I want?" he faltered. Plague take the girl. Could a man be more explicit? Did she think to checkmate him by asking him to express the inexpressible? "What I want!" He opened wide his arms. "Aline!"

But here was no eagerness to respond to the invitation and fling herself upon that portly, royal bosom. She continued to regard him with a quizzically bitter little smile.

"If you will not say it, monseigneur, why, then, I will. Thus we shall be clear. You are asking me to become your mistress, I think."

If she thought to abash him by thus reducing to its precise terms the relationship he sought, she was profoundly at fault. His great liquid eyes opened a little wider in astonishment.

"What else can I offer you, my dear? I am already married. And if I were not, there would still be my rank. Though I swear to you that it should count for little with me if it were an obstacle in my way to you. I would barter all for you, and count myself the gainer. I swear I should."

"That is easily sworn, monseigneur."

Gloom descended upon him. "You do not believe me. You do not believe even the evidence of your own senses. Why am I here? Why do I tarry in Hamm at such a time as this? For many weeks now it has daily been dinned into my ears that my place is in Toulon with those who are making a stand there for throne and altar. Three days ago there arrived here a gentleman sent to me by the royalist committee in Paris, who permitted himself to point out to me my duty, to demand in the name of the nobility of France that I should render myself at once to Toulon and place myself at the head of the forces there. The terms of the demand were presumptuous. And yet I was robbed of even the satisfaction of resenting them, because in my heart I knew that they were justified. I know that I have been false to my duty, to myself, to my house, and to the brave defenders of Toulon. And why have I been false? Because my love for you has put trammels upon me which will not permit me to move. I am chained here, chained to the spot that holds you, Aline. My house may be destroyed, my chances of succeeding to the throne may perish, my honour may go hang before I will be false to my love for you. Does that tell you nothing? Does it afford you no proof of my sincerity? Does it give you no glimpse into the depth of it? Can you still, when you consider this, suppose that I am offering you some trivial and transient passion?"

That she was deeply moved, deeply shaken, he perceived at once. The mantle of dignity in which she had so coldly wrapped herself was permitted to slip from her shoulders. She was pale, and her eyes no longer met his ardent glance with their earlier defiant fearlessness. Although her words still sought to fence him off, they lacked their former bold uncompromising tone.

"But that is all over now. You have conquered this unworthy weakness, monseigneur. You start for Toulon on the day after to-morrow."

"Do I? Do I, indeed? Who will guarantee that? Not I, by my soul."

"What do you mean?" She was looking at him in alarm, leaning forward towards him. He was instantly aware of it; instantly aware that what he had alarmed was her sense of what was due, her concern for those men of her own aristocratic class who had raised the royal standard at Toulon and who were depending upon his presence amongst them. He was quick to perceive how her loyalties were aroused, how intolerable to her must be the thought that those gentlemen should look for him in vain.