“Mademoiselle will see you, monsieur,” said Anatole at last.
Twice already had he carried unavailingly my request that Roxalanne
should accord me an interview ere I departed. On this the third occasion
I had bidden him say that I would not stir from Lavedan until she had
done me the honour of hearing me. Seemingly that threat had prevailed
where entreaties had been scorned.
I followed Anatole from the half-light of the hall in which I had been
pacing into the salon overlooking the terraces and the river, where
Roxalanne awaited me. She was standing at the farther end of the room by
one of the long windows, which was open, for, although we were already
in the first week of October, the air of Languedoc was as warm and balmy
as that of Paris or Picardy is in summer.
I advanced to the centre of the chamber, and there I paused and waited
until it should please her to acknowledge my presence and turn to face
me. I was no fledgling. I had seen much, I had learnt much and been in
many places, and my bearing was wont to convey it. Never in my life
had I been gauche, for which I thank my parents, and if years ago--long
years ago--a certain timidity had marked my first introductions to the
Louvre and the Luxembourg, that timidity was something from which I had
long since parted company. And yet it seemed to me, as I stood in that
pretty, sunlit room awaiting the pleasure of that child, scarce out of
her teens, that some of the awkwardness I had escaped in earlier years,
some of the timidity of long ago, came to me then. I shifted the weight
of my body from one leg to the other; I fingered the table by which I
stood; I pulled at the hat I held; my colour came and went; I looked
at her furtively from under bent brows, and I thanked God that her back
being towards me she might not see the clown I must have seemed.
At length, unable longer to brook that discomposing silence--
“Mademoiselle!” I called softly. The sound of my own voice seemed to
invigorate me, to strip me of my awkwardness and self-consciousness. It
broke the spell that for a moment had been over me, and brought me back
to myself--to the vain, self-confident, flamboyant Bardelys that perhaps
you have pictured from my writings.
“I hope, monsieur,” she answered, without turning, “that what you
may have to say may justify in some measure your very importunate
insistence.”
On my life, this was not encouraging. But now that I was master of
myself, I was not again so easily to be disconcerted. My eyes rested
upon her as she stood almost framed in the opening of that long window.
How straight and supple she was, yet how dainty and slight withal! She
was far from being a tall woman, but her clean length of limb, her very
slightness, and the high-bred poise of her shapely head, conveyed an
illusion of height unless you stood beside her. The illusion did not
sway me then. I saw only a child; but a child with a great spirit, with
a great soul that seemed to accentuate her physical helplessness. That
helplessness, which I felt rather than saw, wove into the warp of my
love. She was in grief just then--in grief at the arrest of her father,
and at the dark fate that threatened him; in grief at the unworthiness
of a lover. Of the two which might be the more bitter it was not mine to
judge, but I burned to gather her to me, to comfort and cherish her, to
make her one with me, and thus, whilst giving her something of my man's
height and strength, cull from her something of that pure, noble spirit,
and thus sanctify my own.
I had a moment's weakness when she spoke. I was within an ace of
advancing and casting myself upon my knees like any Lenten penitent, to
sue forgiveness. But I set the inclination down betimes. Such expedients
would not avail me here.
“What I have to say, mademoiselle,” I answered after a pause, “would
justify a saint descending into, hell; or, rather, to make my 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 Bardelys. I was a man of
careless ways, satiated with all the splendours life could give me,
nauseated by all its luxuries. Was it wonderful that I allowed myself
to be lured into this affair? It promised some excitement, a certain
novelty, difficulties in a path that I had--alas!--ever found all
too smooth--for Chatellerault had made your reputed coldness the chief
bolster of his opinion that I should not win.
“Again, I was not given to over-nice scruples. I make no secret of my
infirmities, but do not blame me too much. If you could see the fine
demoiselles we have in Paris, if you could listen to their tenets and
take a deep look into their lives, you would not marvel at me. I had
never known any but these. On the night of my coming to Lavedan, your
sweetness, your pure innocence, your almost childish virtue, dazed me by
their novelty. From that first moment I became your slave. Then I was in
your garden day by day. And here, in this old Languedoc garden with you
and your roses, during the languorous days of my convalescence, is it
wonderful that some of the purity, some of the sweetness that was of
you and of your roses, should have crept into my heart and cleansed it
a little? Ah, mademoiselle!” I cried--and, coming close to her, I would
have bent my knee in intercession but that she restrained me.
“Monsieur,” she interrupted, “we harass ourselves in vain. This can have
but one ending.”
Her tones were cold, but the coldness I knew was forced--else had she
not said “we harass ourselves.” Instead of quelling my ardour, it gave
it fuel.
“True, mademoiselle,” I cried, almost exultantly. “It can end but one
way!”
She caught my meaning, and her frown deepened. I went too fast, it
seemed.
“It had better end now, monsieur. There is too much between us. You
wagered to win me to wife.” She shuddered. “I could never forget it.”
“Mademoiselle,” I denied stoutly, “I did not.”
“How?” She caught her breath. “You did not?”
“No,” I pursued boldly. “I did not wager to win you. I wagered to win
a certain Mademoiselle de Lavedan, who was unknown to me--but not you,
not you.”
She smiled, with never so slight a touch of scorn.
“Your distinctions are very fine--too fine for me, monsieur.”
“I implore you to be reasonable. Think reasonably.”
“Am I not reasonable? Do I not think? But there is so much to think
of!” she sighed. “You carried your deception so far. You came here, for
instance, as Monsieur de Lesperon. Why that duplicity?”
“Again, mademoiselle, I did not,” said I.
She glanced at me with pathetic disdain.
“Indeed, indeed, monsieur, you deny things very bravely.”
“Did I tell you that my name was Lesperon? Did I present myself to
monsieur your father as Lesperon?”
“Surely--yes.”
“Surely no; a thousand times no. I was the victim of circumstances in
that, and if I turned them to my own account after they had been
forced upon me, shall I be blamed and accounted a cheat? Whilst I was
unconscious, your father, seeking for a clue to my identity, made an
inspection of my clothes.
“In the pocket of my doublet they found some papers addressed to Rene de
Lesperon--some love letters, a communication from the Duc d'Orleans,
and a woman's portrait. From all of this it was assumed that I was
that Lesperon. Upon my return to consciousness your father greeted me
effusively, whereat I wondered; he passed on to discuss--nay, to tell me
of--the state of the province and of his own connection with the rebels,
until I lay gasping at his egregious temerity. Then, when he greeted
me as Monsieur de Lesperon, I had the explanation of it, but too late.
Could I deny the identity then? Could I tell him that I was Bardelys,
the favourite of the King himself? What would have occurred? I ask you,
mademoiselle. Would I not have been accounted a spy, and would they not
have made short work of me here at your chateau?”
“No, no; they would have done no murder.”
“Perhaps not, but I could not be sure just then. Most men situated as
your father was would have despatched me. Ah, mademoiselle, have you not
proofs enough? Do you not believe me now?”
“Yes, monsieur,” she answered simply, “I believe you.”
“Will you not believe, then, in the sincerity of my love?”
She made no rely. Her face was averted, but from her silence I took
heart. I drew close to her. I set my hand upon the tall back of her
chair, and, leaning towards her, I spoke with passionate heat as must
have melted, I thought, any woman who had not a loathing for me.
“Mademoiselle; I am a poor man now,” I ended. “I am no longer that
magnificent gentleman whose wealth and splendour were a byword. Yet am I
no needy adventurer. I have a little property at Beaugency--a very spot
for happiness, mademoiselle. Paris shall know me no more. At Beaugency
I shall live at peace, in seclusion, and, so that you come with me, in
such joy as in all my life I have done nothing to deserve. I have no
longer an army of retainers. A couple of men and a maid or two shall
constitute our household. Yet I shall account my wealth well lost if for
love's sake you'll share with me the peace of my obscurity. I am poor,
mademoiselle yet no poorer even now than that Gascon gentleman, Rene de
Lesperon, for whom you held me, and on whom you bestowed the priceless
treasure of your heart.”
“Oh, might it have pleased God that you had remained that poor Gascon
gentleman!” she cried.
“In what am I different, Roxalanne?”
“In that he had laid no wager,” she answered, rising suddenly.
My hopes were withering. She was not angry. She was pale, and her gentle
face was troubled--dear God! how sorely troubled! To me it almost seemed
that I had lost.
She flashed me a glance of her blue eyes, and I thought that tears
impended.
“Roxalanne!” I supplicated.
But she recovered the control that for a moment she had appeared upon
the verge of losing. She put forth her hand.
“Adieu, monsieur!” said she.
I glanced from her hand to her face. Her attitude began to anger me, for
I saw that she was not only resisting me, but resisting herself. In her
heart the insidious canker of doubt persisted. She knew--or should have
known--that it no longer should have any place there, yet obstinately
she refrained from plucking it out. There was that wager. But for that
same obstinacy she must have realized the reason of my arguments, the
irrefutable logic of my payment. She denied me, and in denying me she
denied herself, for that she had loved me she had herself told me, and
that she could love me again I was assured, if she would but see the
thing in the light of reason and of justice.
“Roxalanne, I did not come to Lavedan to say 'Good-bye' to you. I seek
from you a welcome, not a dismissal.”
“Yet my dismissal is all that I can give. Will you not take my hand? May
we not part in friendly spirit?”
“No, we may not; for we do not part at all.”
It was as the steel of my determination striking upon the flint of hers.
She looked up to my face for an instant; she raised her eyebrows in
deprecation; she sighed, shrugged one shoulder, and, turning on her
heel, moved towards the door.
“Anatole shall bring you refreshment ere you go,” she said in a very
polite and formal voice.
Then I played my last card. Was it for nothing that I had flung away
my wealth? If she would not give herself, by God, I would compel her
to sell herself. And I took no shame in doing it, for by doing it I was
saving her and saving myself from a life of unhappiness.
“Roxalanne!” I cried. The imperiousness of my voice arrested and
compelled her perhaps against her very will.
“Monsieur?” said she, as demurely as you please.
“Do you know what you are doing?”.
“But yes--perfectly.”
“Pardieu, you do not. I will tell you. You are sending your father to
the scaffold.”
She turned livid, her step faltered, and she leant against the frame of
the doorway for support. Then she stared at me, wide-eyed in horror.
“That is not true,” she pleaded, yet without conviction. “He is not
in danger of his life. They can prove nothing against him. Monsieur de
Saint-Eustache could find no evidence here--nothing.”
“Yet there is Monsieur de Saint-Eustache's word; there is the fact--the
significant fact--that your father did not take up arms for the King,
to afford the Chevalier's accusation some measure of corroboration. At
Toulouse in these times they are not particular. Remember how it had
fared with me but for the King's timely arrival.”
That smote home. The last shred of her strength fell from her. A great
sob shook her, then covering her face with her hands “Mother in heaven,
have pity on me!” she cried. “Oh, it cannot be, it cannot be!”
Her distress touched me sorely. I would have consoled her, I would have
bidden her have no fear, assuring her that I would save her father.
But for my own ends, I curbed the mood. I would use this as a cudgel to
shatter her obstinacy, and I prayed that God might forgive me if I did
aught that a gentleman should account unworthy. My need was urgent, my
love all-engrossing; winning her meant winning life and happiness, and
already I had sacrificed so much. Her cry rang still in my ears, “It
cannot be, it cannot be!”
I trampled my nascent tenderness underfoot, and in its room I set a
harshness that I did not feel--a harshness of defiance and menace.
“It can be, it will be, and, as God lives, it shall be, if you persist
in your unreasonable attitude.”
“Monsieur, have mercy!”
“Yes, when you shall be pleased to show me the way to it by having mercy
upon me. If I have sinned, I have atoned. But that is a closed question
now; to reopen it were futile. Take heed of this, Roxalanne: there is
one thing--one only in all France can save your father.”
“That is, monsieur?” she inquired breathlessly.
“My word against that of Saint-Eustache. My indication to His Majesty
that your father's treason is not to be accepted on the accusation of
Saint-Eustache. My information to the King of what I know touching this
gentleman.”
“You will go, monsieur?” she implored me. “Oh, you will save him! Mon
Dieu, to think of the time that we have wasted here, you and I, whilst
he is being carried to the scaffold! Oh, I did not dream it was so
perilous with him! I was desolated by his arrest; I thought of some
months' imprisonment, perhaps. But that he should die--! Monsieur de
Bardelys, you will save him! Say that you will do this for me!”
She was on her knees to me now, her arms clasping my boots, her eyes
raised in entreaty--God, what entreaty!--to my own.
“Rise, mademoiselle, I beseech you,” I said, with a quiet I was far from
feeling. “There is no need for this. Let us be calm. The danger to your
father is not so imminent. We may have some days yet--three or four,
perhaps.”
I lifted her gently and led her to a chair. I was hard put to it not to
hold her supported in my arms. But I might not cull that advantage from
her distress. A singular niceness, you will say, perhaps, as in your
scorn you laugh at me. Perhaps you are right to laugh--yet are you not
altogether right.
“You will go to Toulouse, monsieur?” she begged.
I took a turn in the room, then halting before her “Yes,” I answered, “I
will go.”
The gratitude that leapt to her eyes smote me hard, for my sentence was
unfinished.
“I will go,” I continued quickly, “when you shall have promised to
become my wife.”
The joy passed from her face. She glanced at me a moment as if without
understanding.
“I came to Lavedan to win you, Roxalanne, and from Lavedan I shall not
stir until I have accomplished my design,” I said very quietly. “You
will therefore see that it rests with you how soon I may set out.”
She fell to weeping softly, but answered nothing. At last I turned from
her and moved towards the door.
“Where are you going?” she cried.
“To take the air, mademoiselle. If upon deliberation you can bring
yourself to marry me, send me word by Anatole or one of the others, and
I shall set out at once for Toulouse.”
“Stop!” she cried. Obediently I stopped, my hand already upon the
doorknob. “You are cruel, monsieur!” she complained.
“I love you,” said I, by way of explaining it. “To be cruel seems to be
the way of love. You have been cruel to me.”
“Would you--would you take what is not freely given?”
“I have the hope that when you see that you must give, you will give
freely.”
“If--if I make you this promise--”
“Yes?” I was growing white with eagerness.
“You will fulfil your part of the bargain?”
“It is a habit of mine, mademoiselle--as witnesses the case of
Chatellerault.” She shivered at the mention of his name. It reminded her
of precisely such another bargain that three nights ago she had made.
Precisely, did I say? Well, not quite precisely.
“I--I promise to marry you, then,” said she in a choking voice,
“whenever you choose, after my father shall have been set at liberty.”
I bowed. “I shall start at once,” said I.
And perhaps out of shame, perhaps out of--who shall say what
sentiments?--I turned without another word and left her.