Bardelys the Magnificent
R >>
Rafael Sabatini >> Bardelys the Magnificent
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT
Being on Account of the Strange Wooing pursued by
the Sieur Marcel de Saint-Pol; Marquis of Bardelys,
and of the things that in the course of it befell him
in Languedoc, in the year of the Rebellion
BY RAFAEL SABATINI
CONTENTS
I. THE WAGER
II. THE KING'S WISHES
III. RENT: DE LESPERON
IV. A MAID IN THE MOONLIGHT
V. THE VICOMTE DE LAVEDAN
VI. IN CONVALESCENCE
VII. THE HOSTILITY OF SAINT-EUSTACHE
VIII. THE PORTRAIT
IX. A NIGHT ALARM
X. THE RISEN DEAD
XI. THE KING'S COMMISSIONER
XII. THE TRIBUNAL OF TOULOUSE
XIII. THE ELEVENTH HOUR
XIV. EAVESDROPPING
XV. MONSIEUR DE CHATELLERAULT IS ANGRY
XVI. SWORDS
XVII. THE BABBLING OF GANYMEDE
XVIII. SAINT-EUSTACHE IS OBSTINATE
XIX. THE FLINT AND THE STEEL
XX. THE "BRAVI" AT BLAGNAC
XXI. LOUIS THE JUST
XXII. WE UNSADDLE
BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT
CHAPTER I
THE WAGER
Speak of the Devil," whispered La Fosse in my ear, and, moved by the
words and by the significance of his glance, I turned in my chair.
The door had opened, and under the lintel stood the thick-set figure
of the Comte de Chatellerault. Before him a lacquey in my
escutcheoned livery of red-and-gold was receiving, with back
obsequiously bent, his hat and cloak.
A sudden hush fell upon the assembly where a moment ago this very
man had been the subject of our talk, and silenced were the wits
that but an instant since had been making free with his name and
turning the Languedoc courtship - from which he was newly returned
with the shame of defeat - into a subject for heartless mockery and
jest. Surprise was in the air for we had heard that Chatellerault
was crushed by his ill-fortune in the lists of Cupid, and we had not
looked to see him joining so soon a board at which - or so at least
I boasted - mirth presided.
And so for a little space the Count stood pausing on my threshold,
whilst we craned our necks to contemplate him as though he had been
an object for inquisitive inspection. Then a smothered laugh from
the brainless La Fosse seemed to break the spell. I frowned. It
was a climax of discourtesy whose impression I must at all costs
efface.
I leapt to my feet, with a suddenness that sent my chair gliding a
full half-yard along the glimmering parquet of the floor, and in two
strides I had reached the Count and put forth my hand to bid him
welcome. He took it with a leisureliness that argued sorrow. He
advanced into the full blaze of the candlelight, and fetched a dismal
sigh from the depths of his portly bulk.
"You are surprised to see me, Monsieur le Marquis," said he, and his
tone seemed to convey an apology for his coming - for his very
existence almost.
Now Nature had made my Lord of Chatellerault as proud and arrogant
as Lucifer - some resemblance to which illustrious personage his
downtrodden retainers were said to detect in the lineaments of his
swarthy face. Environment had added to that store of insolence
wherewith Nature had equipped him, and the King's favour - in which
he was my rival - had gone yet further to mould the peacock
attributes of his vain soul. So that this wondrous humble tone of
his gave me pause; for to me it seemed that not even a courtship
gone awry could account for it in such a man.
"I had not thought to find so many here," said he. And his next
words contained the cause of his dejected air. "The King, Monsieur
de Bardelys, has refused to see me; and when the sun is gone, we
lesser bodies of the courtly firmament must needs turn for light
and comfort to the moon." And he made me a sweeping bow.
"Meaning that I rule the night?" quoth I, and laughed. "The figure
is more playful than exact, for whilst the moon is cold and
cheerless, me you shall find ever warm and cordial. I could have
wished, Monsieur de Chatellerault, that your gracing my board were
due to a circumstance less untoward than His Majesty's displeasure."
"It is not for nothing that they call you the Magnificent," he
answered, with a fresh bow, insensible to the sting in the tail of
my honeyed words.
I laughed, and, setting compliments to rest with that, I led him to
the table.
"Ganymede, a place here for Monsieur le Comte. Gilles, Antoine,
see to Monsieur de Chatellerault. Basile, wine for Monsieur le
Comte. Bestir there!"
In a moment he was become the centre of a very turmoil of attention.
My lacqueys flitted about him buzzing and insistent as bees about
a rose. Would Monsieur taste of this capon a la casserole, or of
this truffled peacock? Would a slice of this juicy ham a l'anglaise
tempt Monsieur le Comte, or would he give himself the pain of
trying this turkey aux olives? Here was a salad whose secret
Monsieur le Marquis's cook had learnt in Italy, and here a
vol-au-vent that was invented by Quelon himself.
Basile urged his wines upon him, accompanied by a page who bore a
silver tray laden with beakers and Wagons. Would Monsieur le Comte
take white Armagnac or red Anjou? This was a Burgundy of which
Monsieur le Marquis thought highly, and this a delicate Lombardy
wine that His Majesty had oft commended. Or perhaps Monsieur de
Chatellerault would prefer to taste the last vintage of Bardelys?
And so they plagued him and bewildered him until his choice was
made; and even then a couple of them held themselves in readiness
behind his chair to forestall his slightest want. Indeed, had he
been the very King himself, no greater honour could we have shown
him at the Hotel de Bardelys.
But the restraint that his coming had brought with it hung still
upon the company, for Chatellerault was little loved, and his
presence there was much as that of the skull at an Egyptian banquet.
For of all these fair-weather friends that sat about my table -
amongst whom there were few that had not felt his power -- I feared
there might be scarcely one would have the grace to dissemble his
contempt of the fallen favourite. That he was fallen, as much his
words as what already we had known, had told us.
Yet in my house I would strive that he should have no foretaste of
that coldness that to-morrow all Paris would be showing him, and
to this end I played the host with all the graciousness that role
may bear, and overwhelmed him with my cordiality, whilst to thaw
all iciness from the bearing of my other guests, I set the wines to
flow more freely still. My dignity would permit no less of me,
else would it have seemed that I rejoiced in a rival's downfall and
took satisfaction from the circumstance that his disfavour with the
King was like to result in my own further exaltation.
My efforts were not wasted. Slowly the mellowing influence of the
grape pronounced itself. To this influence I added that of such
wit as Heaven has graced me with, and by a word here and another
there I set myself to lash their mood back into the joviality out
of which his coming had for the moment driven it.
And so, presently, Good-Humour spread her mantle over us anew, and
quip and jest and laughter decked our speech, until the noise of
our merry-making drifting out through the open windows must have
been borne upon the breeze of that August night down the rue
Saint-Dominique, across the rue de I'Enfer, to the very ears perhaps
of those within the Luxembourg, telling them that Bardelys and his
friends kept another of those revels which were become a byword in
Paris, and had contributed not a little to the sobriquet of
"Magnificent" which men gave me.
But, later, as the toasts grew wild and were pledged less for the
sake of the toasted than for that of the wine itself, wits grew
more barbed and less restrained by caution; recklessness hung a
moment, like a bird of prey, above us, then swooped abruptly down
in the words of that fool La Fosse.
"Messieurs," he lisped, with that fatuousness he affected, and with
his eye fixed coldly upon Chatellerault, "I have a toast for you."
He rose carefully to his feet - he had arrived at that condition in
which to move with care is of the first importance. He shifted his
eye from the Count to his glass, which stood half empty. He signed
to a lacquey to fill it. "To the brim, gentlemen," he commanded.
Then, in the silence that ensued, he attempted to stand with one
foot on the ground and one on his chair; but encountering
difficulties of balance, he remained upright - safer if less
picturesque.
"Messieurs, I give you the most peerless, the most beautiful, the
most difficult and cold lady in all France. I drink to those her
thousand graces, of which Fame has told us, and to that greatest
and most vexing charm of all - her cold indifference to man. I
pledge you, too, the swain whose good fortune it maybe to play
Endymion to this Diana.
"It will need," pursued La Fosse, who dealt much in mythology and
classic lore - "it will need an Adonis in beauty, a Mars in valour,
an Apollo in song, and a very Eros in love to accomplish it. And I
fear me," he hiccoughed, "that it will go unaccomplished, since the
one man in all France on whom we has based our hopes has failed.
Gentlemen, to your feet! I give you the matchless Roxalanne de
Lavedan!"
Such amusement as I felt was tempered by apprehension. I shot a
swift glance at Chatellerault to mark how he took this pleasantry
and this pledging of the lady whom the King had sent him to woo, but
whom he had failed to win. He had risen with the others at La
Fosse's bidding, either unsuspicious or else deeming suspicion too
flimsy a thing by which to steer conduct. Yet at the mention of her
name a scowl darkened his ponderous countenance. He set down his
glass with such sudden force that its slender stem was snapped and
a red stream of wine streaked the white tablecloth and spread around
a silver flowerbowl. The sight of that stain recalled him to himself
and to the manners he had allowed himself for a moment to forget.
"Bardelys, a thousand apologies for my clumsiness," he muttered.
"Spilt wine," I laughed, "is a good omen."
And for once I accepted that belief, since but for the shedding of
that wine and its sudden effect upon him, it is likely we had
witnessed a shedding of blood. Thus, was the ill-timed pleasantry
of my feather-brained La Fosse tided over in comparative safety.
But the topic being raised was not so easily abandoned. Mademoiselle
de Lavedan grew to be openly discussed, and even the Count's
courtship of her came to be hinted at, at first vaguely, then
pointedly, with a lack of delicacy for which I can but blame the
wine with which these gentlemen had made a salad of their senses.
In growing alarm I watched the Count. But he showed no further sign
of irritation. He sat and listened as though no jot concerned.
There were moments when he even smiled at some lively sally, and at
last he went so far as to join in that merry combat of wits, and
defend himself from their attacks, which were made with a good-humour
that but thinly veiled the dislike he was held in and the
satisfaction that was culled from his late discomfiture.
For a while I hung back and took no share in the banter that was
toward. But in the end - lured perhaps by the spirit in which I
have shown that Chatellerault accepted it, and lulled by the wine
which in common with my guests I may have abused - I came to utter
words but for which this story never had been written.
"Chatellerault," I laughed, "abandon these defensive subterfuges;
confess that you are but uttering excuses, and acknowledge that you
have conducted this affair with a clumsiness unpardonable in one
equipped with your advantages of courtly rearing."
A flush overspread his face, the first sign of anger since he had
spilled his wine.
"Your successes, Bardelys, render you vain, and of vanity is
presumption born," he replied contemptuously.
"See!" I cried, appealing to the company. "Observe how he seeks to
evade replying! Nay, but you shall confess your clumsiness."
"A clumsiness," murmured La Fosse drowsily, "as signal as that
which attended Pan's wooing of the Queen of Lydia."
"I have no clumsiness to confess," he answered hotly, raising his
voice. "It is a fine thing to sit here in Paris, among the languid,
dull, and nerveless beauties of the Court, whose favours are easily
won because they look on dalliance as the best pastime offered
them, and are eager for such opportunities of it as you fleering
coxcombs will afford them. But this Mademoiselle de Lavedan is
of a vastly different mettle. She is a woman; not a doll. She is
flesh and blood; not sawdust, powder, and vermilion. She has a
heart and a will; not a spirit corrupted by vanity and licence."
La Fosse burst into a laugh.
"Hark! O, hark!" he cried, "to the apostle of the chaste!"
"Saint Gris!" exclaimed another. "This good Chatellerault has
lost both heart and head to her."
Chatellerault glanced at the speaker with an eye in which anger
smouldered.
"You have said it," I agreed. "He has fallen her victim, and so
his vanity translates her into a compound of perfections. Does
such a woman as you have described exist, Comte? Bah! In a
lover's mind, perhaps, or in the pages of some crack-brained
poet's fancies; but nowhere else in this dull world of ours."
He made a gesture of impatience.
"You have been clumsy, Chatellerault," I insisted.
"You have lacked address. The woman does not live that is not to
be won by any man who sets his mind to do it, if only he be of her
station and have the means to maintain her in it or raise her to
a better. A woman's love, sir, is a tree whose root is vanity.
Your attentions flatter her, and predispose her to capitulate.
Then, if you but wisely choose your time to deliver the attack, and
do so with the necessary adroitness -- nor is overmuch demanded -
the battle is won with ease, and she surrenders. Believe me,
Chatellerault, I am a younger man than you by full five years, yet
in experience I am a generation older, and I talk of what I know."
He sneered heavily. "If to have begun your career of dalliance at
the age of eighteen with an amour that resulted in a scandal be
your title to experience, I agree," said he. "But for the rest,
Bardelys, for all your fine talk of conquering women, believe me
when I tell you that in all your life you have never met a woman
for I deny the claim of these Court creatures to that title. If
you would know a woman, go to Lavedan, Monsieur le Marquis. If you
would have your army of amorous wiles suffer a defeat at last, go
employ it against the citadel of Roxalanne de Lavedan's heart. If
you would be humbled in your pride, betake yourself to Lavedan."
"A challenge!" roared a dozen voices. "A challenge, Bardelys!"
"Mais voyons," I deprecated, with a laugh, "would you have me
journey into Languedoc and play at wooing this embodiment of all
the marvels of womanhood for the sake of making good my argument?
Of your charity, gentlemen, insist no further."
"The never-failing excuse of the boaster," sneered Chatellerault,
"when desired to make good his boast."
"Monsieur conceives that I have made a boast?" quoth I, keeping
my temper.
"Your words suggested one - else I do not know the meaning of words.
They suggested that where I have failed you could succeed, if you
had a mind to try. I have challenged you, Bardelys. I challenge
you again. Go about this wooing as you will; dazzle the lady with
your wealth and your magnificence, with your servants, your horses,
your equipages; and all the splendours you can command; yet I make
bold to say that not a year of your scented attentions and most
insidious wiles will bear you fruit. Are you sufficiently
challenged?"
"But this is rank frenzy!" I protested. "Why should I undertake
this thing?"
"To prove me wrong," he taunted me. "To prove me clumsy. Come,
Bardelys, what of your spirit?"
"I confess I would do much to afford you the proof you ask. But to
take a wife! Pardi! That is much indeed!"
"Bah!" he sneered. "You do well to draw back You are wise to
avoid discomfiture. This lady is not for you. When she is won,
it will be by some bold and gallant gentleman, and by no mincing
squire of dames, no courtly coxcomb, no fop of the Luxembourg, be
his experiences of dalliance never so vast."
"Po' Cap de Dieu!" growled Cazalet, who was a Gascon captain in
the Guards, and who swore strange, southern oaths. "Up, Bardelys!
Afoot! Prove your boldness and your gallantry, or lie forever
shamed; a squire of dames, a courtly coxcomb, a fop of the
Luxembourg! Mordemondiou! I have given a man a bellyful of steel
for the half of those titles!"
"I heeded him little, and as little the other noisy babblers, who
now on their feet - those that could stand - were spurring me
excitedly to accept the challenge, until from being one of the
baiters it seemed that of a sudden the tables were turned and I
was become the baited. I sat in thought, revolving the business
in my mind, and frankly liking it but little. Doubts of the issue,
were I to undertake it, I had none.
My views of the other sex were neither more nor less than my words
to the Count had been calculated to convey. It may be - I know now
that it was that the women I had known fitted Chatellerault's
description, and were not over-difficult to win. Hence, such
successes as I had had with them in such comedies of love as I had
been engaged upon had given me a false impression. But such at
least was not my opinion that night. I was satisfied that
Chatellerault talked wildly, and that no such woman lived as he
depicted. Cynical and soured you may account me. Such I know I
was accounted in Paris; a man satiated with all that wealth and
youth and the King's favour could give him; stripped of illusions,
of faith and of zest, the very magnificence - so envied - of my
existence affording me more disgust than satisfaction. Since
already I had gauged its shallows.
Is it strange, therefore, that in this challenge flung at me with
such insistence, a business that at first I disliked grew presently
to beckon me with its novelty and its, promise of new sensations?
"Is your spirit dead, Monsieur de Bardelys?" Chatellerault was
gibing, when my silence had endured some moments. "Is the cock that
lately crowed so lustily now dumb? Look you, Monsieur le Marquis,
you are accounted here a reckless gamester. Will a wager induce
you to this undertaking?"
I leapt to my feet at that. His derision cut me like a whip. If
what I did was the act of a braggart, yet it almost seems I could
do no less to bolster up my former boasting - or what into boasting
they had translated.
"You'll lay a wager, will you, Chatellerault?" I cried, giving him
back defiance for defiance. A breathless silence fell. "Then have
it so. Listen, gentlemen, that you may be witnesses. I do here
pledge my castle of Bardelys, and my estates in Picardy, with every
stick and stone and blade of grass that stands upon them, that I
shall woo and win Roxalanne de Lavedan to be the Marquise of
Bardelys. Does the stake satisfy you, Monsieur le Comte? You may
set all you have against it," I added coarsely, "and yet, I swear,
the odds will be heavily in your favour."
I remember it was Mironsac who first found his tongue, and sought
even at that late hour to set restraint upon us and to bring
judgment to our aid.
"Messieurs, messieurs!" he besought us. "In Heaven's name, bethink
you what you do. Bardelys, your wager is a madness. Monsieur de
Chatellerault, you'll not accept it. You'll - "
"Be silent," I rebuked him, with some asperity. "What has Monsieur
de Chatellerault to say?"
He was staring at the tablecloth and the stain of the wine that he
had spilled when first Mademoiselle de Lavedan's name was mentioned.
His head had been bent so that his long black hair had tumbled
forward and partly veiled his face. At my question he suddenly
looked up. The ghost of a smile hung on his sensuous lips, for all
that excitement had paled his countenance beyond its habit.
"Monsieur le Marquis." said he rising, "I take your wager, and I
pledge my lands in Normandy against yours of Bardelys. Should you
lose, they will no longer call you the Magnificent; should I lose
- I shall be a beggar. It is a momentous wager, Bardelys, and
spells ruin for one of us."
"A madness!" groaned Mironsac.
"Mordioux!" swore Cazalet. Whilst La Fosse, who had been the
original cause of all this trouble, vented his excitement in a
gibber of imbecile laughter.
"How long do you give me, Chatellerault?" I asked, as quietly as
I might.
"What time shall you require?"
"I should prefer that you name the limit," I answered.
He pondered a moment. Then "Will three months suffice you?" he
asked.
"If it is not done in three months, I will pay," said I.
And then Chatellerault did what after all was, I suppose, the only
thing that a gentleman might do under the circumstances. He rose
to his feet, and, bidding the company charge their glasses, he gave
them a parting toast.
"Messieurs, drink with me to Monsieur le Marquis de Bardelys's safe
journey into Languedoc, and to the prospering of his undertaking."
In answer, a great shout went up from throats that suspense had
lately held in leash. Men leapt on to their chairs, and, holding
their glasses on high, they acclaimed me as thunderously as though
I had been the hero of some noble exploit, instead of the main
figure in a somewhat questionable wager.
"Bardelys!" was the shout with which the house reechoed. "Bardelys!
Bardelys the Magnificent! Vive Bardelys!"
CHAPTER II
THE KING'S WISHES
It was daybreak ere the last of them had left me, for a dozen or so
had lingered to play lansquenet after the others had departed. With
those that remained my wager had soon faded into insignificance, as
their minds became engrossed in the fluctuations of their own
fortunes.
I did not play myself; I was not in the mood, and for one night, at
least, of sufficient weight already I thought the game upon which I
was launched.
I was out on the balcony as the first lines of dawn were scoring the
east, and in a moody, thoughtful condition I had riveted my eyes
upon the palace of the Luxembourg, which loomed a black pile against
the lightening sky,, when Mironsac came out to join me. A gentle,
lovable lad was Mironsac, not twenty years of age, and with the face
and manners of a woman. That he was attached to me I knew.
`Monsieur le Marquis," said he softly, "I am desolated at this wager
into which they have forced you."
"Forced me?" I echoed. "No, no; they did not force me. And yet,"
I reflected, with a sigh, "perhaps they did."
"I have been thinking, monsieur, that if the King were to hear of
it the evil might be mended."
"But the King must not hear of it, Armand," I answered quickly.
"Even if he did, matters would be no better - much worse, possibly."
"But, monsieur, this thing done in the heat of wine - "
"Is none the less done, Armand," I concluded. "And I for one do
not wish it undone."
"But have you no thought for the lady?" he cried.
I laughed at him. "Were I still eighteen, boy, the thought might
trouble me. Had I my illusions, I might imagine that my wife must
be some woman of whom I should be enamoured. As it is, I have grown
to the age of twenty-eight unwed. Marriage becomes desirable. I
must think of an heir to all the wealth of Bardelys. And so I go
to Languedoc. If the lady be but half the saint that fool
Chatellerault has painted her, so much the better for my children;
if not, so much the worse. There is the dawn, Mironsac, and it is
time we were abed. Let us drive these plaguy gamesters home."
When the last of them had staggered down my steps, and I had bidden
a drowsy lacquey extinguish the candles, I called Ganymede to light
me to bed and aid me to undress. His true name was Rodenard; but
my friend La Fosse, of mythological fancy, had named him Ganymede,
after the cup-bearer of the gods, and the name had clung to him.
He was a man of some forty years of age, born into my father's
service, and since become my intendant, factotum, majordomo, and
generalissimo of my regiment of servants and my establishments both
in Paris and at Bardelys.
We had been to the wars together ere I had cut my wisdom teeth, and
thus had he come to love me. There was nothing this invaluable
servant could not do. At baiting or shoeing a horse, at healing a
wound, at roasting a capon, or at mending a doublet, he was alike
a master, besides possessing a score of other accomplishments that
do not now occur to me, which in his campaigning he had acquired.
Of late the easy life in Paris had made him incline to corpulency,
and his face was of a pale, unhealthy fullness.
To-night, as he assisted me to undress, it wore an expression of
supreme woe.
"Monseigneur is going into Languedoc?" he inquired sorrowfully.
He always called me his "seigneur," as did the other of my servants
born at Bardelys.
"Knave, you have been listening," said I.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17