Bardelys the Magnificent (25 page)

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 a 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 Hôtel de l'Épée.

"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 Lavédan, 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.