Bardelys the Magnificent - Rafael Sabatini (affordable ebook reader .txt) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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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
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