The Rafael Sabatini Megapack. Rafael Sabatini
should be here at any moment.”
The stilted ass! Had he learnt that speech by heart in advance, or was he by nature a pedantic idiot who expressed himself in this set and formal manner? How came so sweet a blossom to waste her perfumes on such a prig? And what a ridiculous name the creature owned!
Thus Andre-Louis to himself from his observatory. Meanwhile, she was speaking.
“That is what my heart desires, Leandre, but I am beset by fears lest your stratagem should be too late. I am to marry this horrible Marquis of Sbrufadelli this very day. He arrives by noon. He comes to sign the contract—to make me the Marchioness of Sbrufadelli. Oh!” It was a cry of pain from that tender young heart. “The very name burns my lips. If it were mine I could never utter it—never! The man is so detestable. Save me, Leandre. Save me! You are my only hope.”
Andre-Louis was conscious of a pang of disappointment. She failed to soar to the heights he had expected of her. She was evidently infected by the stilted manner of her ridiculous lover. There was an atrocious lack of sincerity about her words. They touched his mind, but left his heart unmoved. Perhaps this was because of his antipathy to M. Leandre and to the issue involved.
So her father was marrying her to a marquis! That implied birth on her side. And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.
“It shall never be!” M. Leandre was storming passionately. “Never! I swear it!” And he shook his puny fist at the blue vault of heaven—Ajax defying Jupiter. “Ah, but here comes our subtle friend…” (Andre-Louis did not catch the name, M. Leandre having at that moment turned to face the gap in the hedge.) “He will bring us news, I know.”
Andre-Louis looked also in the direction of the gap. Through it emerged a lean, slight man in a rusty cloak and a three-cornered hat worn well down over his nose so as to shade his face. And when presently he doffed this hat and made a sweeping bow to the young lovers, Andre-Louis confessed to himself that had he been cursed with such a hangdog countenance he would have worn his hat in precisely such a manner, so as to conceal as much of it as possible. If M. Leandre appeared to be wearing, in part at least, the cast-offs of nobleman, the newcomer appeared to be wearing the cast-offs of M. Leandre. Yet despite his vile clothes and viler face, with its three days’ growth of beard, the fellow carried himself with a certain air; he positively strutted as he advanced, and he made a leg in a manner that was courtly and practised.
“Monsieur,” said he, with the air of a conspirator, “the time for action has arrived, and so has the Marquis… That is why.”
The young lovers sprang apart in consternation; Climene with clasped hands, parted lips, and a bosom that raced distractingly under its white fichu-menteur; M. Leandre agape, the very picture of foolishness and dismay.
Meanwhile the newcomer rattled on. “I was at the inn an hour ago when he descended there, and I studied him attentively whilst he was at breakfast. Having done so, not a single doubt remains me of our success. As for what he looks like, I could entertain you at length upon the fashion in which nature has designed his gross fatuity. But that is no matter. We are concerned with what he is, with the wit of him. And I tell you confidently that I find him so dull and stupid that you may be confident he will tumble headlong into each and all of the traps I have so cunningly prepared for him.”
“Tell me, tell me! Speak!” Climene implored him, holding out her hands in a supplication no man of sensibility could have resisted. And then on the instant she caught her breath on a faint scream. “My father!” she exclaimed, turning distractedly from one to the other of those two. “He is coming! We are lost!”
“You must fly, Climene!” said M. Leandre.
“Too late!” she sobbed. “Too late! He is here.”
“Calm, mademoiselle, calm!” the subtle friend was urging her. “Keep calm and trust to me. I promise you that all shall be well.”
“Oh!” cried M. Leandre, limply. “Say what you will, my friend, this is ruin—the end of all our hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from this. Never!”
Through the gap strode now an enormous man with an inflamed moon face and a great nose, decently dressed after the fashion of a solid bourgeois. There was no mistaking his anger, but the expression that it found was an amazement to Andre-Louis.
“Leandre, you’re an imbecile! Too much phlegm, too much phlegm! Your words wouldn’t convince a ploughboy! Have you considered what they mean at all? Thus,” he cried, and casting his round hat from him in a broad gesture, he took his stand at M. Leandre’s side, and repeated the very words that Leandre had lately uttered, what time the three observed him coolly and attentively.
“Oh, say what you will, my friend, this is ruin—the end of all our hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from this. Never!”
A frenzy of despair vibrated in his accents. He swung again to face M. Leandre. “Thus,” he bade him contemptuously. “Let the passion of your hopelessness express itself in your voice. Consider that you are not asking Scaramouche here whether he has put a patch in your breeches. You are a despairing lover expressing…”
He checked abruptly, startled. Andre-Louis, suddenly realizing what was afoot, and how duped he had been, had loosed his laughter. The sound of it pealing and booming uncannily under the great roof that so immediately confined him was startling to those below.
The fat man was the first to recover, and he announced it after his own fashion in one of the ready sarcasms in which he habitually dealt.
“Hark!” he cried, “the very gods laugh at you, Leandre.” Then he addressed the roof of the barn and its invisible tenant. “Hi! You there!”
Andre-Louis revealed himself by a further protrusion of his tousled head.
“Good-morning,” said he, pleasantly. Rising now on his knees, his horizon was suddenly extended to include the broad common beyond the hedge. He beheld there an enormous and very battered travelling chaise, a cart piled up with timbers partly visible under the sheet of oiled canvas that covered them, and a sort of house on wheels equipped with a tin chimney, from which the smoke was slowly curling. Three heavy Flemish horses and a couple of donkeys—all of them hobbled—were contentedly cropping the grass in the neighbourhood of these vehicles. These, had he perceived them sooner, must have given him the clue to the queer scene that had been played under his eyes. Beyond the hedge other figures were moving. Three at that moment came crowding into the gap—a saucy-faced girl with a tip-tilted nose, whom he supposed to be Columbine, the soubrette; a lean, active youngster, who must be the lackey Harlequin; and another rather loutish youth who might be a zany or an apothecary.
All this he took in at a comprehensive glance that consumed no more time than it had taken him to say good-morning. To that good-morning Pantaloon replied in a bellow:
“What the devil are you doing up there?”
“Precisely the same thing that you are doing down there,” was the answer. “I am trespassing.”
“Eh?” said Pantaloon, and looked at his companions, some of the assurance beaten out of his big red face. Although the thing was one that they did habitually, to hear it called by its proper name was disconcerting.
“Whose land is this?” he asked, with diminishing assurance.
Andre-Louis answered, whilst drawing on his stockings. “I believe it to be the property of the Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr.”
“That’s a high-sounding name. Is the gentleman severe?”
“The gentleman,” said Andre-Louis, “is the devil; or rather, I should prefer to say upon reflection, that the devil is a gentleman by comparison.
“And yet,” interposed the villainous-looking fellow who played Scaramouche, “by your own confessing you don’t hesitate, yourself, to trespass upon his property.”