Читать книгу The Comancheros - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 4

A bayou mist filled the oak grove, so that in the uncertain early light objects even relatively close seemed distorted or mysterious. That, perhaps, was what gave Paul Regret the momentary feeling of unreality, as if the whole thing had never happened.

With a feeling of weariness and distaste, if not of actual remorse, he looked at the youth whom he had just shot, stretched on the wet grass twelve paces away, his young face, with eyes half closed, a glimmering paleness; the ruffled front of his white shirt already staining with blood. Then at least a dozen were kneeling about the fallen figure, Regret’s seconds as well as his, the witnesses, even Perigord, who as referee had given the signal for fire. It took only a few moments for the surgeon to make his examination, and they rose as if by concert.

In their faces Regret saw anger, accusation. One muttered, “Assassin!” Another, “Butcher!”

At that selfsame moment they all heard the rapid tattoo of a galloping horse, and through the cottony lather of fog a rider burst.

Paul Regret, seasoned gambler, was not a man easily dismayed, yet his heart sank, somewhat, as he recognized Judge Beaubien.

For all his sixty years the judge was still a horseman; and he sat his saddle like a furious gray-haired centaur as he wheeled his tall hunter into the grove.

They heard his shout, “My son?”

It was half question, half exclamation. Then he saw the prostrate form, half supported by one of the seconds, and threw himself from the saddle to the ground. For a moment he bent over the young face, then stood erect.

“Too late! I am too late!” he groaned.

Regret remained where he had placed himself at first, a slender and not inelegant figure, feet together, coatless, the pistol hanging heavy in his hand and the sharp tang of powder smoke still prickling his nostrils. He was twenty-nine, with a face lean and dark, and a narrow black mustache of which he was a little vain. And he had a reputation for being lucky, but at this moment it appeared to him that he was the unluckiest man in all New Orleans.

Toward him Judge Beaubien turned, a portly but vigorous figure, dressed richly as usual. Regret had always respected, even admired him, but now the older man’s face was bitter with fury.

“Paul Regret!” he cried, in a voice almost choked. “Paul Regret, my son’s death is on your head!”

He said it with solemn portent, as if he were pronouncing the death sentence in his own courtroom, where he ruled, as everyone knew, like an autocrat, virtually a king.

Regret inclined his head slightly. The judge’s feeling, the feeling of all those angry persons about him, was after all understandable. It was, he reflected, one of those inevitable moments in life when a man is not popular with anyone, however little he may be to blame for it.

The youth lying there, with his cambric ruffles dabbled with his blood, was Emile Adrien de Rieux Beaubien. And Regret thought of Eloise Grailhe, the fair and fickle.

Women, he sometimes believed, were at the bottom of almost all the trouble in the world. It was the misfortune of Emile Beaubien that he loved Eloise Grailhe, or thought he did, which came to much the same thing. She was chanteuse légère in the French Opera, where her voice and beauty had won her remarkable popularity. She had her legions of suitors, her baskets of flowers, her jewels, her banquets, her universal adulation. To be sure she was an actress: and of all the adorers who pursued her, none had any thought of marriage, save perhaps one. And she smiled upon all of them: but with no particular favor on any, save perhaps one. The man who would have married her was young Emile; the man she may have favored was Paul Regret.

Some whisper of this favor must have reached Emile’s ears. He did not mention her name in the quarrel, but chose to act as if he did not know how to lose at lansquenet, cursing, and flinging down the cards, and finally casting the word “Cheat” in Regret’s teeth.

An epithet most unjust. Though Regret had for years made his living by gambling, he had his own code of honor, and took a pride in honest dealing. Still, he had no wish to fight Emile. That unlicked cub, hardly twenty, pampered, perfumed, and pomaded, had connections too important, and the disparity between them was too evident when it came to a meeting with arms. Regret would have passed over the incident, save for the fact that the youth cast his insult openly, in the presence of a full dozen gentlemen in the Salle St. Philippe.

In New Orleans, in that year of 1843, two fatal things could happen to a man in Paul Regret’s position. One was to become a laughingstock. The other was to accept an insult openly, without proper retaliation. A gambler had to keep his pistols in practice.

For the matter of that, Regret’s skill with weapons was not unknown. A marksman, particularly with the pistol, must be born with a certain flair, an instinct too delicate to be described, without which any amount of practice achieves little more than mediocrity. Regret was fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to possess that flair, and had perfected it. Habitués of the gallery at the Salle St. Philippe unanimously testified to his shooting, which some of them described as almost uncanny.

Had Emile been less drunk, or less blinded by his jealousy, he might have held his words. He was a fool: but that did not alter the fact that he was a sprig of one of the great families of New Orleans. His mother was a De Rieux, with the blood of the Bourbons in her veins: but that was not even important beside the fact that he was the only son of Judge Beaubien, the most powerful man in Louisiana, a political autocrat who made and unmade governors at his whim, who dictated the policies of the state, and whose decisions in his court nobody dared to challenge. Vengeance was very certain to be directed at the man who had shot Emile Beaubien.

Paul Regret did not reply to Judge Beaubien. He saw no reason to justify himself. He might have urged that this duel was not of his seeking; that he was the aggrieved party; that Emile had been given the choice of place and weapons. These arguments would have had little effect, however, on a man like Judge Beaubien, grief-stricken as he was, and almost mad with pain and fury.

Besides, Regret’s reputation was too well known to all those present. They would remember Colonel Rust, Adam Littleton, the river gambler, and Honoré Brisseul, all of whose deaths under these very dueling oaks were charged to him. And that was saying nothing of other affairs which ended without fatalities, although each of his antagonists carried from the field the mark of Paul Regret.

He shrugged. Public opinion always was against a gambler, he thought wearily. From the second who now stiffly brought up his coat, he took the garment and put it on. Then he mounted his horse, lifted his hat to the assemblage, and rode away into the mist.