Authors: Rafael Sabatini
"I'faith, then, your eyes deceived you. It was an accident, I say—and who should know better than I?" He was smiling in that whimsical enigmatic way of his. Smiling still he sank back into
Gascoigne's arms.
"You are talking too much," said the Major.
"What odds? I am not like to talk much longer."
The door opened to admit a gentleman in black, wearing a grizzle wig and carrying a gold-headed cane. Men moved aside to allow him to approach Mr. Caryll. The latter, not noticing him, had met
at last the gaze of Hortensia's eyes. He continued to smile, but his smile was now changed to wistfulness under that pitiful regard of hers.
"It is better so," he was saying. "Better so!"
His glance was upon her, and she understood what none other there suspected—that those words were for her alone.
He closed his eyes and swooned again, as the doctor stooped to remove the temporary bandages from his wound.
Hortensia, a sob beating in her throat, turned and fled to her own room.
CHAPTER XII
SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
MR. CARYLL was almost happy.
He reclined on a long chair, supported by pillows cunningly set for him by the deft hands of Leduc, and took his ease and indulged his day-dreams in Lord Ostermore's garden. He sat within the
cool, fragrant shade of a privet arbor, interlaced with flowering lilac and laburnum, and he looked out upon the long sweep of emerald lawn and the little patch of ornamental water where the
water-lilies gaped their ivory chalices to the morning sun.
He looked thinner, paler and more frail than was his habit, which is not wonderful, considering that he had been four weeks abed while his wound was mending. He was dressed, again by the hands
of the incomparable Leduc, in a déshabille of some artistry. A dark-blue dressing-gown of flowered satin fell open at the waist, disclosing sky-blue breeches and pearl-colored
stockings, elegant shoes of Spanish leather with red heels and diamond buckles. His chestnut hair had been dressed with as great care as though he were attending a levee, and Leduc had insisted
upon placing a small round patch under his left eye, that it might—said Leduc—impart vivacity to a countenance that looked over-wan from his long confinement.
He reclined there, and, as I have said, was almost happy.
The creature of sunshine that was himself at heart, had broken through the heavy clouds that had been obscuring him. An oppressive burden was lifted from his mind and conscience. That
sword-thrust through the back a month ago had been guided, he opined, by the hand of a befriending Providence; for although he had, as you see, survived it, it had nonetheless solved for him that
hateful problem he could never have solved for himself, that problem whose solution—no matter which alternative he had adopted—must have brought him untold misery afterwards.
As it was, during the weeks that he had lain helpless, his life attached to him by but the merest thread, the chance of betraying Lord Ostermore was gone, nor—the circumstances being such
as they were—could Sir Richard Everard blame him that he had let it pass.
Thus he knew peace; knew it as only those know it who have sustained unrest and can appreciate relief from it.
Nature had made him a voluptuary, and reclining there in an ease which the languor born of his long illness rendered the more delicious, inhaling the tepid summer air that came to him laden with
a most sweet attar from the flowering rose-garden, he realized that with all its cares life may be sweet to live in youth and in the month of June.
He sighed, and smiled pensively at the water-lilies; nor was his happiness entirely and solely the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two
mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his tedium by reading to him, but remaining to talk instead.
The most perfect friendliness had prevailed between them; a
camaraderie
which Mr. Caryll had been careful not to dispel by any return to such speeches as those which had originally
offended but which seemed now mercifully forgotten.
He was awaiting her, and his expectancy heightened for him the glory of the morning, increased the meed of happiness that was his. But there was more besides. Leduc, who stood slightly behind
him, fussily busy about a little table on which were books and cordials, flowers and comfits, a pipe and a tobacco-jar, had just informed him for the first time that during the more dangerous
period of his illness Mistress Winthrop had watched by his bedside for many hours together upon many occasions, and once—on the day after he had been wounded, and while his fever was at its
height—Leduc, entering suddenly and quietly, had surprised her in tears.
All this was most sweet news to Mr. Caryll. He found that between himself and his half-brother there lay an even deeper debt that he had at first supposed, and already acknowledged. In the
delicious contemplation of Hortensia in tears beside him stricken all but to the point of death, he forgot entirely his erstwhile scruples that being nameless he had no name to offer her. In
imagination he conjured up the scene. It made, he found, a very pretty picture. He would smoke upon it.
"Leduc, if you were to fill me a pipe of Spanish—"
"Monsieur has smoked one pipe already," Leduc reminded him.
"You are inconsequent, Leduc. It is a sign of advancing age. Repress it. The pipe!" And he flicked impatient fingers.
"Monsieur is forgetting that the doctor——"
"The devil take the doctor," said Mr. Caryll with finality.
"Parfaitement!"
answered the smooth Leduc. "Over the bridge we laugh at the saint. Now that we are cured, the devil take the doctor by all means."
A ripple of laughter came to applaud Leduc's excursion into irony. The arbor had another, narrower entrance, on the left. Hortensia had approached this, all unheard on the soft turf, and stood
there now, a heavenly apparition in white flimsy garments, head slightly a-tilt, eyes mocking, lips laughing, a heavy curl of her dark hair falling caressingly into the hollow where white neck
sprang from whiter shoulder.
"You make too rapid a recovery, sir," said she.
"It comes of learning how well I have been nursed," he answered, making shift to rise, and he laughed inwardly to see the red flush of confusion spread over the milk-white skin, the reproachful
shaft her eyes let loose upon Leduc.
She came forward swiftly to check his rising; but he was already on his feet, proud of his return to strength, vain to display it. "Nay," she reproved him. "If you are so headstrong, I shall
leave you."
"If you do, ma'am. I vow here, as I am, I hope, a gentleman, that I shall go home today, and on foot."
"You would kill yourself," she told him.
"I might kill myself for less, and yet be justified."
She looked her despair of him. "What must I do to make you reasonable?"
"Set me the example by being reasonable yourself, and let there be no more of this wild talk of leaving me the very moment you are come. Leduc, a chair for Mistress Winthrop!" he commanded, as
though chairs abounded in a garden nook. But Leduc, the diplomat, had effaced himself.
She laughed at his grand air, and, herself, drew forward the stool that had been Leduc's, and sat down. Satisfied, Mr. Caryll made her a bow, and seated himself sideways on his long chair, so
that he faced her. She begged that he would dispose himself more comfortably; but he scorned the very notion.
"Unaided I walked here from the house," he informed her with a boastful air. "I had need to begin to feel my feet again. You are pampering me here, and to pamper an invalid is bad; it keeps him
an invalid. Now I am an invalid no longer."
"But the doctor——" she began.
"The doctor, ma'am, is disposed of already," he assured her. "Very definitely disposed of. Ask Leduc. He will tell you."
"Not a doubt of that," she answered. "Leduc talks too much."
"You have a spite against him for the information he gave me on the score of how and by whom I was nursed. So have I. Because he did not tell me before, and because when he told me he would not
tell me enough. He has no eyes, this Leduc. He is a dolt, who only sees the half of what happens, and only remembers the half of what he has seen."
"I am sure of it," said she.
He looked surprised an instant. Then he laughed. "I am glad that we agree."
"But you have yet to learn the cause. Had this Leduc used his eyes or his ears to better purpose, he had been able to tell you something of the extent to which I am in your debt."
"Ah?" said he, mystified. Then: "The news will be nonetheless welcome from your lips, ma'am," said he. "Is it that you are interested in the ravings of delirium, and welcomed the opportunity
of observing them at first hand? I hope I raved engagingly, if so be that I did rave. Would it, perchance, be of a lady that I talked in my fevered wanderings?—of a lady pale as a lenten
rose, with soft brown eyes, and lips that——"
"Your guesses are all wild," she checked him. "My debt is of a more real kind. It concerns my—my reputation."
"Fan me, ye winds!" he ejaculated.
"Those fine ladies and gentlemen of the town had made my name a by-word," she explained in a low tense voice, her eyelids lowered. "My foolishness in running off with my Lord
Rotherby—that I might at all cost escape the tyranny of my Lady Ostermore"—(Mr. Caryll's eyelids flickered suddenly at that explanation)—"had made me a butt and a jest and an
object for slander. You remember, yourself, sir, the sneers and oglings, the starings and simperings in the park that day when you made your first attempt to champion my cause, inducing the Lady
Mary Deller to come and speak to me."
"Nay, nay—think of these things no more. Gnats will sting; 'tis in their nature. I admit 'tis very vexing at the time; but it soon wears off if the flesh they have stung be healthy. So
think no more on't."
"But you do not know what follows. Her ladyship insisted that I should drive with her a week after your hurt, when the doctor first proclaimed you out of danger, and while the town was still all
agog with the affair. No doubt her ladyship thought to put a fresh and greater humiliation upon me; you would not be present to blunt the edge of the insult of those creatures' glances. She carried
me to Vauxhall, where a fuller scope might be given to the pursuit of my shame and mortification. Instead, what think you happened?"
"Her ladyship, I trust, was disappointed."
"The word is too poor to describe her condition. She broke a fan, beat her black boy and dismissed a footman, that she might vent some of the spleen it moved in her. Never was such respect,
never such homage shown to any woman as was shown to me that evening. We were all but mobbed by the very people who had earlier slighted me.
"'Twas all so mysterious that I must seek the explanation of it. And I had it, at length, from his Grace of Wharton, who was at my side for most of the time we walked in the gardens. I asked him
frankly to what was this change owing. And he told me, sir."
She looked at him as though no more need be said. But his brows were knit. "He told you, ma'am?" he questioned. "He told you what?"
"What you had done at White's. How to all present and to my Lord Rotherby's own face you had related the true story of what befell at Maidstone—how I had gone thither, an innocent, foolish
maid, to be married to a villain, whom, like the silly child I was, I thought I loved; how that villain, taking advantage of my innocence and ignorance, intended to hoodwink me with a
mock-marriage.
"That was the story that was on every lip; it had gone round the town like fire; and it says much for the town that what between that and the foul business of the duel, my Lord Rotherby was
receiving on every hand the condemnation he deserves, while for me there was once more—and with heavy interest for the lapse from it—the respect which my indiscretion had forfeited, and
which would have continued to be denied me but for your noble championing of my cause.
"That, sir, is the extent to which I am in your debt. Do you think it small? It is so great that I have no words in which to attempt to express my thanks."
Mr. Caryll looked at her a moment with eyes that were very bright. Then he broke into a soft laugh that had a note of slyness.
"In my time," said he, "I have seen many attempts to change an inconvenient topic. Some have been artful; others artless; others utterly clumsy. But this, I think, is the clumsiest of them all.
Mistress Winthrop, 'tis not worthy in you."
She looked puzzled, intrigued by his mood.
"Mistress Winthrop," he resumed, with an entire change of voice. "To speak of this trifle is but a subterfuge of yours to prevent me from expressing my deep gratitude for your care of me."
"Indeed, no——" she began.
"Indeed, yes," said he. "How can this compare with what you have done for me? For I have learnt how greatly it is to you, yourself, that I owe my recovery—the saving of my life."
"Ah, but that is not true. It——"
"Let me think so, whether it be true or not," he implored her, eyes between tenderness and whimsicality intent upon her face. "Let me believe it, for the belief has brought me
happiness—the greatest happiness, I think, that I have ever known. I can know but one greater, and that——"
He broke off suddenly, and she observed that the hand he had stretched out trembled a moment ere it was abruptly lowered again. It was as a man who had reached forth to grasp something that he
craves, and checked his desire upon a sudden thought.
She felt oddly stirred, despite herself, and oddly constrained. It may have been to disguise this that she half turned to the table, saying: "You were about to smoke when I came." And she took
up his pipe and tobacco-jar to offer them.
"Ah, but since you've come, I would not dream," said he.
She looked at him. The complete change of topic permitted it. "If I desired you so to do?" she inquired, and added: "I love the fragrance of it."