Authors: Rafael Sabatini
"Nay, nay, father! Speak not of forgiveness."
"I have sore need of it."
"Ah, but not from me; not from me! What is there I should forgive? There is a debt between us I had hoped to repay some day when you were grown truly old. I had looked to tend you in your old
age, to be the comfort of it, and the support that you were to my infancy."
"It had been sweet, Justin," sighed Sir Richard, smiling upon his adopted son, and putting forth an unsteady hand to stroke the white, drawn face. "It had been sweet. It is sweet to hear that
you so proposed."
A shudder convulsed him. He sank back coughing, and there was froth and blood on his lips. Reverently Justin wiped them, and signed for the cordial to Bentley, who stood, numbed, in the
background.
"It is the end," said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of
this snug bed, and you and Bentley here—just two good friends."
Bentley, losing all self-control at this mention of himself, sank weeping to his knees. Sir Richard put out a hand, and touched his head.
"You will serve Mr. Caryll, Bentley. You'll find him a good master if you are as good a servant to him as you have been to me."
Then suddenly he made the quick movement of one who bethinks himself of something. He waved Bentley away.
"There is a case in the drawer yonder," he said, when the servant was beyond earshot. "It contains papers that concern you—certificates of your birth and of your mother's death. I brought
them with me as proofs of your identity, against the time when the hour of vengeance upon Ostermore should strike. They will serve no purpose now. Burn them. They are best destroyed."
Mr. Caryll nodded understanding, and on Sir Richard's part there followed another fight for breath, another attack of coughing, during which Bentley instinctively approached again.
When the paroxysm was past, Sir Richard turned once more to Justin, who was holding him in his arms, upright, to ease his breathing. "Be good to Bentley," he murmured, his voice very faint and
exhausted now. "You are my heir, Justin. All that I have——I set all in order ere I left Paris. It—it is growing dark. You have not snuffed the candles, Bentley. They are burning very
low."
Suddenly he started forward, held as he was in Justin's arms. He half-raised his arms, holding out his hands toward the foot of the bed. His eyes dilated; the expression of his livid face grew
first surprised, then joyous—beatific. "Antoinette!" he cried in a loud voice. "Antoi——"
And thus, abruptly, but in great happiness, he passed.
CHAPTER XVII
AMID THE GRAVES
WHAT time Sir Richard had been dying in the inner room, Mr. Green and two of his acolytes had improved the occasion by making a thorough search in Sir Richard's writing-table
and a thorough investigation of every scrap of paper found there. From which you will understand how much Mr. Green was a gentleman who set business above every other consideration.
The man who had shot Sir Richard had been ordered by Mr. Green to take himself off, and had been urged to go down on his knees, for once in a way, and pray Heaven that his rashness might not
bring him to the gallows as he so richly deserved.
His fourth myrmidon Mr. Green had dispatched with a note to my Lord Rotherby, and it was entirely upon the answer he should receive that it must depend whether he proceeded or not, forthwith, to
the apprehension of Mr. Caryll. Meanwhile the search went on amain, and was extended presently to the very bedroom where the dead Sir Richard lay. Every nook and cranny was ransacked; the very
mattress under the dead man was removed, and investigated, and even Mr. Caryll and Bentley had to submit to being searched. But it all proved fruitless. Not a line of treasonable matter was to be
found anywhere. To the certificates upon Mr. Caryll the searcher made the mistake of paying but little heed in view of their nature.
But if there were no proofs of plots and treasonable dealings, there was, at least, abundant proof of Sir Richard's identity, and Mr. Green appropriated these against any awkward inquiries
touching the manner in which the baronet had met his death.
Of such inquiries, however, there were none. It was formally sworn to Lord Carteret by Green and his men that the secretary's messenger, Jerry—the fellow owned no surname—had shot
Sir Richard in self-defence, when Sir Richard had produced firearms upon being arrested on a charge of high treason, for which they held the secretary's own warrant.
At first Lord Carteret considered it a thousand pities that they should not have contrived matters better so as to take Sir Richard alive; but upon reflection he was careful not to exaggerate to
himself the loss occasioned by his death, for Sir Richard, after all, was a notoriously stubborn man, not in the least likely to have made any avowals worth having. So that his trial, whilst
probably resulting sterile of such results as the government could desire, would have given publicity to the matter of a plot that was hatching; and such publicity at a time of so much unrest was
the last thing the government desired. Where Jacobitism was concerned, Lord Carteret had the wise discretion to proceed with the extremest caution. Publicity might serve to fan the smouldering
embers into a blaze, whereas it was his cunning aim quietly to stifle them as he came upon them.
So, upon the whole, he was by no means sure but that Jerry had done the state the best possible service in disposing thus summarily of that notorious Jacobite agent, Sir Richard Everard. And his
lordship saw to it that there was no inquiry and that nothing further was heard of the matter.
As for Lord Rotherby, had the affair transpired twenty-four hours earlier, he would certainly have returned Mr. Green a message to effect the arrest of Mr. Caryll upon suspicion. But as it
chanced, he had that very afternoon received a visit from his mother, who came in great excitement to inform him that she had forced from Lord Ostermore an acknowledgment that he was plotting with
Mr. Caryll to go over to King James.
So, before they could move further against Mr. Caryll, it behooved them to ascertain precisely to what extent Lord Ostermore might not be incriminated, as otherwise the arrest of Caryll might
lead to exposures that would ruin the earl more thoroughly than could any South Sea bubble revelations. Thus her ladyship to her son. He turned upon her.
"Why, madam," said he, "these be the very arguments I used t'other day when we talked of this; and all you answered me then was to call me a dull-witted clod, for not seeing how the thing might
be done without involving my lord."
"Tcha!" snapped her ladyship, beating her knuckles impatiently with her fan. "A dull-witted clod did I call you? 'Twas flattery—sheer flattery; for I think ye're something worse. Fool, can
ye not see the difference that lies betwixt your disclosing a plot to the secretary of state, and causing this Caryll to disclose it—as might happen if he were seized? First discover the
plot—find out in what it may consist, and then go to Lord Carteret to make your terms."
He looked at her, out of temper by her rebuke. "I may be as dull as your ladyship says—but I do not see in what the position now is different from what it was."
"It isn't different—but we thought it was different," she explained impatiently. "We assumed that your father would not have betrayed himself, counting upon his characteristic caution. But
it seems we are mistook. He has betrayed himself to Caryll. And before we can move in this matter, we must have proofs of a plot to lay before the secretary of state."
Lord Rotherby understood, and accounted himself between Scylla and Charybdis, and when that evening Green's messenger found him, he gnashed his teeth in rage at having to allow this chance to
pass, at being forced to temporize until he should be less parlously situated. He returned Mr. Green an urgent message to take no steps concerning Mr. Caryll until they should have concerted
together.
Mr. Green was relieved. Mr. Caryll arrested might stir up matters against the slayer of Sir Richard, and this was a business which Mr. Green had prevision enough to see his master, Lord
Carteret, would prefer should not be stirred up. He had a notion, for the rest, that if Mr. Caryll were left to go his ways, he would not be likely to give trouble touching that same matter. And he
was right in this. Before his overwhelming sense of loss, Mr. Caryll had few thoughts to bestow upon the manner in which that loss had been sustained. Moreover, if he had a quarrel with any one on
that account, it was with the government whose representative had issued the warrant for Sir Richard's arrest, and no more with the wretched tipstaff who had fired the pistol than with the pistol
itself. Both alike were but instruments, of slightly different degrees of insensibility.
For twenty-four hours Mr. Caryll's grief was overwhelming in its poignancy. His sense of solitude was awful. Gone was the only living man who had stood to him for kith and kin. He was left alone
in the world; utterly alone. That was the selfishness of his sorrow—the consideration of Sir Richard's death as it concerned himself.
Presently an alloy of consolation was supplied by the reflection of Sir Richard's own case—as Sir Richard himself had stated it upon his deathbed. His life had not been happy; it had been
poisoned by a monomania, which, like a worm in the bud, had consumed the sweetness of his existence. Sir Richard was at rest. And since he had been discovered, that shot was, indeed, the most
merciful end that could have been measured out to him. The alternative might have been the gibbet and the gaping crowd, and a moral torture to precede the end. Better—a thousand times
better—as it was.
So much did all this weigh with him that when on the following Monday he accompanied the body to its grave, he found his erstwhile passionate grief succeeded by an odd thankfulness that things
were as they were, although it must be confessed that a pang of returning anguish smote him when he heard the earth clattering down upon the wooden box that held all that remained of the man who
had been father, mother, brother and all else to him.
He turned away at last, and was leaving the graveyard, when some one touched him on the arm. It was a timid touch. He turned sharply, and found himself looking into the sweet face of Hortensia
Winthrop, wondering how came she there. She wore a long, dark cloak and hood, but her veil was turned back. A chair was waiting not fifty paces from them along the churchyard wall.
"I came but to tell you how much I feel for you in this great loss," she said.
He looked at her in amazement. "How did you know?" he asked her.
"I guessed," said she. "I heard that you were with him at the end, and I caught stray words from her ladyship of what had passed. Lord Rotherby had the information from the tipstaff who went to
arrest Sir Richard Everard. I guessed he was your—your foster-father, as you called him; and I came to tell you how deeply I sorrow for you in your sorrow."
He caught her hands in his and bore them to his lips, reckless of who might see the act. "Ah, this is sweet and kind in you," said he.
She drew him back into the churchyard again. Along the wall there was an avenue of limes—a cool and pleasant walk wherein idlers lounged on Sundays in summer after service. Thither she
drew him. He went almost mechanically. Her sympathy stirred his sorrow again, as sympathy so often does.
"I have buried my heart yonder, I think," said he, with a wave of his hand towards that spot amid the graves where the men were toiling with their shovels. "He was the only living being that
loved me."
"Ah, surely not," said she, sorrow rather than reproach in her gentle voice.
"Indeed, yes. Mine is a selfish grief. It is for myself that I sorrow, for myself and my own loneliness. It is thus with all of us. When we argue that we weep the dead, it would be more true to
say that we bewail the living. For him—it is better as it is. No doubt it is better so for most men, when all is said, and we do wrong to weep their passing."
"Do not talk so," she said. "It hurts."
"Ay—it is the way of truth to hurt, which is why, hating pain, we shun truth so often." He sighed. "But, oh, it was good in you to seek me, to bring me word with your own lips of your
sweet sympathy. If aught could lighten the gloom of my sorrow, surely it is that."
They stepped along in silence until they came to the end of the avenue, and turned. It was no idle silence: the silence of two beings who have naught to say. It was a grave, portentous silence,
occasioned by the unutterable much in the mind of one, and by the other's apprehension of it. At last she spoke, to ask him what he meant to do.
"I shall return to France," he said. "It had perhaps been better had I never crossed to England."
"I cannot think so," she said, simply, frankly and with no touch of a coquetry that had been harshly at discord with time and place.
He shot her a swift, sidelong glance; then stopped, and turned. "I am glad on't," said he. "'Twill make my going the easier."
"I mean not that," she cried, and held out her hands to him. "I meant not what you think—you know, you know what 'twas I meant. You know—you must—what impulse brought me to you
in this hour, when I knew you must need comfort. And in return how cruel, were you not—to tell me that yonder lay buried the only living being that—that loved you?"
His fingers were clenched upon her arm. "Don't—don't!" he implored hoarsely, a strange fire in his eyes, a hectic flush on either cheek. "Don't! Or I'll forget what I am, and take
advantage of this midsummer folly that is upon you."
"Is it no more than folly, Justin?" she asked him, brown eyes looking up into gray-green.
"Ay, something more—stark madness. All great emotions are. It will pass, and you will be thankful that I was man enough—strong enough—to allow it the chance of passing."
She hung her head, shaking it sorrowfully. Then very softly: "Is it no more than the matter of—of that, that stands between us?" she inquired.