The Essential Rafael Sabatini Collection. Rafael Sabatini
towards the inner room, whence proceeded the click-click of blades, the quick moving of feet, and the voice of the instructor, Le Duc.
"Well, well, that is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now. Let us dine this evening at the Caf de Foy. Kersain will be of the party."
"A moment!" Andre-Louis' voice arrested him on the threshold. "Is Mlle. de Kercadiou with her uncle?"
"How the devil should I know? Go and find out."
He was gone, and Andre-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought. Then he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de Villeniort, the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet, illustrating with a small-sword the advantages to be derived from its adoption.
Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action. Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.
Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed--by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing freely--Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.
The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte d'Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d'Artois--the royal tennis-player--had been amongst the very first to emigrate. Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen's intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier--and there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children. Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany--where the nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France--had come to occupy in his brother's absence the courtier's handsome villa at Meudon.
That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants--for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind. Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he slept a great deal, and but for Aline, who made no attempt to conceal her delight at this proximity to Paris and the heart of things, it is possible that he would have beat a retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed--to the ceaseless and but half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M. Etienne had left--as his maitre d'hotel here at Meudon.
Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost had he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting him to the salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who would--in the words of Benoit--be ravished to see M. Andre again.
"Monseigneur! Monseigneur!" he cried in a quavering voice, entering a pace or two in advance of the visitor. "It is M. Andre... M. Andre, your godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here... and so fine that you would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is he not beautiful?"
And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight that he believed he was conveying to his master.
Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted to the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its festooned ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals. The door by which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the garden, were of an enormous height--almost, indeed, the full height of the room itself. It was a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture, in which it nowise differed from what was customary in the dwellings of people of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis' that if these people could only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better case.
The Seigneur--furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his surroundings--had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on the part of Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since their coming to Meudon.
"What is it? Eh?" His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the visitor. "Andre!" said he, between surprise and sternness; and the colour deepened in his great pink face.
Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned at Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent hostility on the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent old fellow discreetly effaced himself.
"What do you want here?" growled M. de Kercadiou.
"No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my godfather," said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.
"You have contrived without kissing it for two years."
"Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune."
The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.
"Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether you were alive or dead?"
"At first it was dangerous--dangerous to my life--to disclose my whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and my pride forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must take of it, to appeal to you for help. Later..."
"Destitute?" The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip trembled. Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he surveyed this very changed and elegant godson of his, noted the quiet richness of his apparel, the paste buckles and red heels to his shoes, the sword hilted in mother-o'-pearl and silver, and the carefully dressed hair that he had always seen hanging in wisps about his face. "At least you do not look destitute now," he sneered.
"I am not. I have prospered since. In that, monsieur, I differ from the ordinary prodigal, who returns only when he needs assistance. I return solely because I love you, monsieur--to tell you so. I have come at the very first moment after hearing of your presence here." He advanced. "Monsieur my godfather!" he said, and held out his hand.
But M. de Kercadiou remained unbending, wrapped in his cold dignity and resentment.