The Red Mask - Rafael Sabatini (rm book recommendations .txt) 📗

doubt not”—oh, the irony of his words! “you are, I doubt not, surprised to see me here. But I heard of this and it was my intention to foil your purpose and to punish you, false noble that you are. Methinks, Monsieur, that you have wrought sufficient evil in your life without culminating it by so dastardly a deed as this. That you should have stooped to stab a poor defenceless valet, whom you considered below the dignity of your sword, this—fallen as you are—I had scarcely expected from one whose veins are fed by the blood of the St. Augéres. And to think,” he continued in accents of withering scorn, “that you should attempt to throw upon your deed the glamour of patriotism! What harm has this poor wretch done France? Speak up! Have you naught to say?”

But rage, despair, and shame had choked the Count’s utterance, and were fighting a mighty battle in his soul. So violent, that as the Cardinal paused to wait for his reply, his lips twitched convulsively for a moment, then, staggering forward he fell prone upon the ground, in a swoon.

“Call the guard, Monsieur de Cavaignac,” said Mazarin to me. “That man has committed his last crime. A week in a dungeon of the Bastille and the companionship of a holy father, may fit him for a better life beyond the scaffold.”

“You see,” said his Eminence, an hour later, as we stood alone in his study. “if I had allowed the world to know for whom St. Augére’s blow was intended, the world would have sympathised, as it always does, with a luckless conspirator; would, mayhap, have loved me less. Again, there are always fanatics ready to copy such acts as these, and had they known that what has ended in the death of an obscure valet was an attempt against the life of Mazarin—I am afraid that some murderer’s knife would have cut short my existence before the appointed time.”

“As it is,” he went on, with a wave of the hand, “St. Augére meets the doom of a cowardly traitor; he dies, regretted by none, for a deed of surpassing loathsomeness. As for André, his death has been too easy.”

“How comes it, Monseigneur,” I asked, “that he gave no warning to his confederate, made no attempt to defend himself.”

“Can you not guess?” he said, smiling, “When I had forced the confession of his treason from him I bound his arms to his side and pressed a gag into his mouth, which I removed together with his mask.”

“But the mask?” I cried.

Again he smiled.

“How dull you are; I changed it whilst you were seeing to the coach.”

“Why did you conceal the fact from me, Monseigneur?” I cried. “Did you mistrust me?”

“No, no, not that,” he said, “I thought it wiser; you might have betrayed my identity by a show of respect. But go, leave me, Cavaignac, it grows late.”

I made my bow, and, as I retired, I heard him muttering to himself the words of St. Augére: “Thus perish all traitors to the welfare of France.” And with a chuckle he added: “How little he guessed the truth of what he said.”

This story appears in The Life and Work of Rafael Sabatini web site http://www.rafaelsabatini.com/ .