Rafael Sabatini - The Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

For a second his emotion had been out of hand, and he revealed to Leandre in the mordant tone of those last words something of the fires that burned under his icy exterior. The young man caught him by the hand.

“I knew you were acting,” said he. “You feel — you feel as I do.”

“Behold us, fellows in viciousness. I have betrayed myself, it seems. Well, and what now? Do you want to see this pretty Marquis torn limb from limb? I might afford you the spectacle.”

“What?” Leandre stared, wondering was this another of Scaramouche’s cynicisms.

“It isn’t really difficult provided I have aid. I require only a little. Will you lend it me?”

“Anything you ask,” Leandre exploded. “My life if you require it.”

Andre–Louis took his arm again. “Let us walk,” he said. “I will instruct you.”

When they came back the company was already at dinner. Mademoiselle had not yet returned. Sullenness presided at the table. Columbine and Madame wore anxious expressions. The fact was that relations between Binet and his troupe were daily growing more strained.

Andre–Louis and Leandre went each to his accustomed place. Binet’s little eyes followed them with a malicious gleam, his thick lips pouted into a crooked smile.

“You two are grown very friendly of a sudden,” he mocked.

“You are a man of discernment, Binet,” said Scaramouche, the cold loathing of his voice itself an insult. “Perhaps you discern the reason?”

“It is readily discerned.”

“Regale the company with it!” he begged; and waited. “What? You hesitate? Is it possible that there are limits to your shamelessness?”

Binet reared his great head. “Do you want to quarrel with me, Scaramouche?” Thunder was rumbling in his deep voice.

“Quarrel? You want to laugh. A man doesn’t quarrel with creatures like you. We all know the place held in the public esteem by complacent husbands. But, in God’s name, what place is there at all for complacent fathers?”

Binet heaved himself up, a great towering mass of manhood. Violently he shook off the restraining hand of Pierrot who sat on his left.

“A thousand devils!” he roared; “if you take that tone with me, I’ll break every bone in your filthy body.”

“If you were to lay a finger on me, Binet, you would give me the only provocation I still need to kill you.” Andre–Louis was as calm as ever, and therefore the more menacing. Alarm stirred the company. He protruded from his pocket the butt of a pistol — newly purchased. “I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I’ll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble — a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can’t suffer to sit at table with you. It turns my stomach.”

He pushed away his platter and got up. “I’ll go and eat at the ordinary below stairs.”

Thereupon up jumped Columbine.

“And I’ll come with you, Scaramouche!” cried she.

It acted like a signal. Had the thing been concerted it couldn’t have fallen out more uniformly. Binet, in fact, was persuaded of a conspiracy. For in the wake of Columbine went Leandre, in the wake of Leandre, Polichinelle and then all the rest together, until Binet found himself sitting alone at the head of an empty table in an empty room — a badly shaken man whose rage could afford him no support against the dread by which he was suddenly invaded.

He sat down to think things out, and he was still at that melancholy occupation when perhaps a half-hour later his daughter entered the room, returned at last from her excursion.

She looked pale, even a little scared — in reality excessively self-conscious now that the ordeal of facing all the company awaited her.

Seeing no one but her father in the room, she checked on the threshold.

“Where is everybody?” she asked, in a voice rendered natural by effort.

M. Binet reared his great head and turned upon her eyes that were blood-injected. He scowled, blew out his thick lips and made harsh noises in his throat. Yet he took stock of her, so graceful and comely and looking so completely the lady of fashion in her long fur-trimmed travelling coat of bottle green, her muff and her broad hat adorned by a sparkling Rhinestone buckle above her adorably coiffed brown hair. No need to fear the future whilst he owned such a daughter, let Scaramouche play what tricks he would.

He expressed, however, none of these comforting reflections.

“So you’re back at last, little fool,” he growled in greeting. “I was beginning to ask myself if we should perform this evening. It wouldn’t greatly have surprised me if you had not returned in time. Indeed, since you have chosen to play the fine hand you held in your own way and scorning my advice, nothing can surprise me.”

She crossed the room to the table, and leaning against it, looked down upon him almost disdainfully.

“I have nothing to regret,” she said.

“So every fool says at first. Nor would you admit it if you had. You are like that. You go your own way in spite of advice from older heads. Death of my life, girl, what do you know of men?”

“I am not complaining,” she reminded him.

“No, but you may be presently, when you discover that you would have done better to have been guided by your old father. So long as your Marquis languished for you, there was nothing you could not have done with the fool. So long as you let him have no more than your fingertips to kiss . . . ah, name of a name! that was the time to build your future. If you live to be a thousand you’ll never have such a chance again, and you’ve squandered it, for what?”

Mademoiselle sat down. —“You’re sordid,” she said, with disgust.

“Sordid, am I?” His thick lips curled again. “I have had enough of the dregs of life, and so I should have thought have you. You held a hand on which to have won a fortune if you had played it as I bade you. Well, you’ve played it, and where’s the fortune? We can whistle for that as a sailor whistles for wind. And, by Heaven, we’ll need to whistle presently if the weather in the troupe continues as it’s set in. That scoundrel Scaramouche has been at his ape’s tricks with them. They’ve suddenly turned moral. They won’t sit at table with me any more.” He was spluttering between anger and sardonic mirth. “It was your friend Scaramouche set them the example of that. He threatened my life actually. Threatened my life! Called me . . . Oh, but what does that matter? What matters is that the next thing to happen to us will be that the Binet Troupe will discover it can manage without M. Binet and his daughter. This scoundrelly bastard I’ve befriended has little by little robbed me of everything. It’s in his power to-day to rob me of my troupe, and the knave’s ungrateful enough and vile enough to make use of his power.

“Let him,” said mademoiselle contemptuously.

“Let him?” He was aghast. “And what’s to become of us?”

“In no case will the Binet Troupe interest me much longer,” said she. “I shall be going to Paris soon. There are better theatres there than the Feydau. There’s Mlle. Montansier’s theatre in the Palais Royal; there’s the Ambigu Comique; there’s the Comedie Francaise; there’s even a possibility I may have a theatre of my own.”

His eyes grew big for once. He stretched out a fat hand, and placed it on one of hers. She noticed that it trembled.

“Has he promised that? Has he promised?”

She looked at him with her head on one side, eyes sly and a queer little smile on her perfect lips.

“He did not refuse me when I asked it,” she answered, with conviction that all was as she desired it.