Rafael Sabatini - The Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

He said no more than that. He waited for her to resume. At a loss, she sat in silence awhile, a pucker on her white brow, her fingers nervously drumming on the table. At last she flung herself headlong against the impassive, polished front that he presented.

“I have come, monsieur, to beg you to put off this meeting.”

She saw the faint raising of his dark eyebrows, the faintly regretful smile that scarcely did more than tinge his fine lips, and she hurried on. “What honour can await you in such an engagement, monsieur?”

It was a shrewd thrust at the pride of race that she accounted his paramount sentiment, that had as often lured him into error as it had urged him into good.

“I do not seek honour in it, mademoiselle, but — I must say it — justice. The engagement, as I have explained, is not of my seeking. It has been thrust upon me, and in honour I cannot draw back.”

“Why, what dishonour would there be in sparing him? Surely, monsieur, none would call your courage in question? None could misapprehend your motives.”

“You are mistaken, mademoiselle. My motives would most certainly be misapprehended. You forget that this young man has acquired in the past week a certain reputation that might well make a man hesitate to meet him.”

She brushed that aside almost contemptuously, conceiving it the merest quibble.

“Some men, yes. But not you, M. le Marquis.”

Her confidence in him on every count was most sweetly flattering. But there was a bitterness behind the sweet.

“Even I, mademoiselle, let me assure you. And there is more than that. This quarrel which M. Moreau has forced upon me is no new thing. It is merely the culmination of a long-drawn persecution . . . ”

“Which you invited,” she cut in. “Be just, monsieur.”

“I hope that it is not in my nature to be otherwise, mademoiselle.”

“Consider, then, that you killed his friend.”

“I find in that nothing with which to reproach myself. My justification lay in the circumstances — the subsequent events in this distracted country surely confirm it.”

“And . . . ” She faltered a little, and looked away from him for the first time. “And that you . . . that you . . . And what of Mademoiselle Binet, whom he was to have married?”

He stared at her for a moment in sheer surprise. “Was to have married?” he repeated incredulously, dismayed almost.

“You did not know that?”

“But how do you?”

“Did I not tell you that we are as brother and sister almost? I have his confidence. He told me, before . . . before you made it impossible.”

He looked away, chin in hand, his glance thoughtful, disturbed, almost wistful.

“There is,” he said slowly, musingly, “a singular fatality at work between that man and me, bringing us ever each by turns athwart the other’s path . . . ”

He sighed; then swung to face her again, speaking more briskly: “Mademoiselle, until this moment I had no knowledge — no suspicion of this thing. But . . . ” He broke off, considered, and then shrugged. “If I wronged him, I did so unconsciously. It would be unjust to blame me, surely. In all our actions it must be the intention alone that counts.”

“But does it make no difference?”

“None that I can discern, mademoiselle. It gives me no justification to withdraw from that to which I am irrevocably committed. No justification, indeed, could ever be greater than my concern for the pain it must occasion my good friend, your uncle, and perhaps yourself, mademoiselle.”

She rose suddenly, squarely confronting him, desperate now, driven to play the only card upon which she thought she might count.

“Monsieur,” she said, “you did me the honour to-day to speak in certain terms; to . . . to allude to certain hopes with which you honour me.”

He looked at her almost in fear. In silence, not daring to speak, he waited for her to continue.

“I . . . I . . . Will you please to understand, monsieur, that if you persist in this matter, if . . . unless you can break this engagement of yours to-morrow morning in the Bois, you are not to presume to mention this subject to me again, or, indeed, ever again to approach me.”

To put the matter in this negative way was as far as she could possibly go. It was for him to make the positive proposal to which she had thus thrown wide the door.

“Mademoiselle, you cannot mean . . . ”

“I do, monsieur . . . irrevocably, please to understand.” He looked at her with eyes of misery, his handsome, manly face as pale as she had ever seen it. The hand he had been holding out in protest began to shake. He lowered it to his side again, lest she should perceive its tremor. Thus a brief second, while the battle was fought within him, the bitter engagement between his desires and what he conceived to be the demands of his honour, never perceiving how far his honour was buttressed by implacable vindictiveness. Retreat, he conceived, was impossible without shame; and shame was to him an agony unthinkable. She asked too much. She could not understand what she was asking, else she would never be so unreasonable, so unjust. But also he saw that it would be futile to attempt to make her understand.

It was the end. Though he kill Andre–Louis Moreau in the morning as he fiercely hoped he would, yet the victory even in death must lie with Andre–Louis Moreau.

He bowed profoundly, grave and sorrowful of face as he was grave and sorrowful of heart.

“Mademoiselle, my homage,” he murmured, and turned to go.

“But you have not answered me!” she called after him in terror.

He checked on the threshold, and turned; and there from the cool gloom of the hall she saw him a black, graceful silhouette against the brilliant sunshine beyond — a memory of him that was to cling as something sinister and menacing in the dread hours that were to follow.

“What would you, mademoiselle? I but spared myself and you the pain of a refusal.”

He was gone leaving her crushed and raging. She sank down again into the great red chair, and sat there crumpled, her elbows on the table, her face in her hands — a face that was on fire with shame and passion. She had offered herself, and she had been refused! The inconceivable had befallen her. The humiliation of it seemed to her something that could never be effaced.

Startled, appalled, she stepped back, her hand pressed to her tortured breast.

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M. de Kercadiou wrote a letter.

“Godson,” he began, without any softening adjective, “I have learnt with pain and indignation that you have dishonoured yourself again by breaking the pledge you gave me to abstain from politics. With still greater pain and indignation do I learn that your name has become in a few short days a byword, that you have discarded the weapon of false, insidious arguments against my class — the class to which you owe everything — for the sword of the assassin. It has come to my knowledge that you have an assignation to-morrow with my good friend M. de La Tour d’Azyr. A gentleman of his station is under certain obligations imposed upon him by his birth, which do not permit him to draw back from an engagement. But you labour under no such disadvantages. For a man of your class to refuse an engagement of honour, or to neglect it when made, entails no sacrifice. Your peers will probably be of the opinion that you display a commendable prudence. Therefore I beg you, indeed, did I think that I still exercise over you any such authority as the favours you have received from me should entitle me to exercise, I would command you, to allow this matter to go no farther, and to refrain from rendering yourself to your assignation to-morrow morning. Having no such authority, as your past conduct now makes clear, having no reason to hope that a proper sentiment of gratitude to me will induce to give heed to this my most earnest request, I am compelled to add that should you survive to-morrow’s encounter, I can in no circumstances ever again permit myself to be conscious of your existence. If any spark survives of the affection that once you expressed for me, or if you set any value upon the affection, which, in spite of all that you have done to forfeit it, is the chief prompter of this letter, you will not refuse to do as I am asking.”