Читать книгу The Comancheros - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 6

Regret tethered his horse before his lodgings, which were above a tavern near the French Market, and gloomily mounted the stairs to his rooms. A calendar on the wall told him the date:

May 6, 1843

It was a date he never forgot.

Frowning, he began to gather his effects, putting them into the two trunks and the portmanteau with which he intended to travel. An uncongenial task. But hardly had he begun it, when he heard a step on the stair; and by the quick stab of high heels, the step of a woman.

A knock, now, at the door. With some annoyance he opened it, for a woman, just at this time, was the last creature he wished to see.

But his annoyance changed to something else. In the hall he found Eloise Grailhe.

She stood regarding him with her graceful head balanced a little on one side, and a question in her magnificent gray eyes. Once more he was struck by the richness of her dark hair, the brightness of her lips, and the odd, almost gypsy quality in her. A pretty girl, he had always said. Damned pretty. Too damned pretty.

“Eloise!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? Isn’t the French Opera troupe in rehearsal?”

“It’s much too early for rehearsal,” she replied, giving him both her hands, and carrying him, as it were, into his room with her, whereat she closed the door behind her.

This boldness he rather disliked. It is one thing to meet a charming young woman clandestinely, with sufficient safeguards, and so make love to her: it is quite another to have her come bolting into your rooms in broad day and in full view of the whole street. His reputation perhaps was not such that it would suffer, but he still had some feeling for discretion. As for Eloise, this might well set going a scandal that would ruin her.

Yet it is flattering to any man to have a pretty and talented young woman so aflame with ardor for him that she is blind to every risk, and there is a consideration which a gentleman owes to the ladies always. To be less than gallant would be disgraceful, especially in view of the sacrifice she seemed bent on making. So he summoned his best smile and raised to his lips the fingers of this girl who, he believed, was engaged in the act of throwing herself at his head.

“Whatever your reason for coming at this hour,” he said, “you bring heaven with you.” Retaining her hand, and with the smile of a confident lover, he drew her toward him, expecting that she would come to his arms. Instead, she wrenched herself away.

“You fool!” she cried.

The epithet, as well as her sharp voice in uttering it, and the displeasure on her pretty face, set him back.

“Fool?” he echoed, rather stupidly.

“Yes, fool! You’ve been described to me as a charming scoundrel, Paul—but never has anyone told me you were a fool!”

“Mademoiselle, I fail to follow,” he said stiffly.

After all, women do not ordinarily rush to a man’s rooms to call him a fool. Particularly to the rooms of a man like Paul Regret.

“Then attend!” she said rapidly. “I’m not here for gallantries or caresses—I’m here to warn you!”

“As to what?”

“Judge Beaubien.”

“Oh, that.” His voice was careless. “I know of it. Unfortunately I had to meet his son at the Oaks of Allard this morning. See—I’m packing already.” He indicated the two trunks and the portmanteau.

“Pack?” she cried. “You’ve no time to pack!”

“Why? A man must take some clothes when he travels——”

“Not a man in your case!”

“My dear, you make too much of the situation——”

“Believe me, Paul, I didn’t come here without good reason!” She sounded as if she were straining to keep her patience. “I have my own problems——”

“What problems, little Eloise?” He was half amused. Women’s problems usually had to do with what gown to wear, or the kind of perfume to use, or some other triviality.

“Personal problems!” she said. “Family problems——”

She broke off, and he stared at her. Always there had been a certain mystery about this girl’s antecedents, although she was accepted as of good blood. Still, he had thought her alone in the world. If she had a family, he had never heard of it. She intrigued him, and he had it on his tongue to question her further, but she interrupted him.

“They’re on their way up here now!” she said.

It jarred the smile off his face. “Who?”

“The authorities—to arrest you!”

“How do you know this?” A very different complexion to matters now.

“Judge Beaubien’s offices are across the street from the Opera. He arrived foaming, to draw up a warrant and summon the sheriff. It was all over the street, he shouted so! I came as fast as a carriage would bring me——”

She stopped. Both of them distinctly heard the clatter of ironshod hoofs on the cobbles below. A voice in the street said, “He’s here. That’s his horse.”

It was Regret’s horse that was tethered in front. He glanced from the window. Judge Beaubien had made his rendezvous quickly, and with him were the sheriff and two or three deputies.

“Oh ... what will you do now?” The girl’s voice sank suddenly to a whisper.

“I’m more concerned for you,” he said. “What if—they find you here in my rooms?”

“It doesn’t matter!” She was almost tearful. “I only want you to go—please——”

To Regret it was evident that this beautiful girl was in love with him. An attractive situation ... If events just now were not so crowded ...

“I can’t leave you——” he began, indecisively.

She turned on him a face so impatient, so angry, that he stepped back from it.

“You idiot! Can’t you understand that I’m doing this for myself—not for you? Do you realize what the notoriety of your trial and execution, with my name drawn into it, would do to me? Being found in your rooms I can survive—but that, never!”

The change in her so bewildered him that he uttered a stumbling, blundering remark. “But I—I thought—you loved me——”

It left him wide open to withering feminine scorn. “Love you? The sickening conceit of men! Because I’ve flirted with you once in a while—you’ve built on that? I merely amused myself! This is too ridiculous—it’s infuriating, if it weren’t so laughable!”

On the mantel lay his riding whip, which he had placed there when he came up to the room. She snatched it, and turned on him with a face so tense he thought she would strike him.

That was not, however, what made him move with such alacrity. It was the thunder of the sheriff’s fist on the door.

To give him due credit, Regret could think and act quickly. His front windows looked down on the street: those on the side opened on an enclosed courtyard, and were framed by a huge bougainvillaea vine, a mass of magenta flowers which grew on the tavern wall. Light as any canebrake panther, he was out of the side window, hanging against the wall, supported precariously by this growth. Even as he trusted himself to the knotted vine, he heard the door within fly open, and the conversation that followed came clearly to him as he clung just outside the window.

“Where is Regret?” It was Judge Beaubien’s voice.

“He’s gone—he fled,” Eloise said.

“You’re Mademoiselle Grailhe, aren’t you? I recognize you from the Opera stage. What are you doing here?”

“I came to do what a woman could do—for vengeance!”

“How, mademoiselle?”

“He—that man Regret—shot down my—the man I loved——” A sob in her voice. “Emile and I——” She hesitated. “Oh, your honor——”

“You—and my son?” the judge marveled.

“Y-yes——”

“In that case”—his voice grew stern—“explain your presence here!”

“A woman can’t call a man out and shoot him,” said Eloise clearly. The sob had left her tones, and her voice grew stronger as with the fury of hatred. Regret, listening, silently applauded such consummate acting. “But a woman can take a whip to a man—like the cur he is!” she went on.

Now Regret understood why she had seized his whip from the mantel. He heard her lash a chair with it, slap it against her dress. Quick-witted—very quick-witted—that touch.

“You horsewhipped Paul Regret?” asked a new voice, the sheriff’s.

“Like a dog!” she said. “And like a dog he ran!”

A moment of surprised silence, then a roar of laughter burst out of the room. Regret heard exclamations.

“Paul Regret whipped!”

“Driven from his own lodgings by a girl!”

“Oh, this is rare! Wait till they hear it at Victor’s!”

“Or the Café Rouge! Or the Salle St. Philippe!”

The laughter grew. On his vine outside, Regret winced, he cringed. Women, even actresses, he said to himself, sometimes have their moments of sublimity—but Eloise was overdoing matters. She loved him, in spite of her words, he told himself. But he could almost have wished that she had given him up to the sheriff, rather than using this method of saving him.

Then a new thought came. Was he so very sure after all that the girl did love him? Perhaps she had spoken the truth as to her anxiety to get him out of New Orleans, when he thought she was only sacrificing herself for him.

Suddenly many things seemed clear which had not been clear before. Regret had never considered marriage with Eloise. He did not regard himself as the marrying type. His was the usual viewpoint of the reckless and pleasure-loving young men of his coterie toward pretty women in general, and actresses in particular. A boudoir affair—another little conquest—a charming interlude of love-making—these were all he contemplated.

Now it appeared she had seen through him. With all his callowness and stupidity, Emile Beaubien at least offered her honest marriage. Regret could hardly blame the girl for choosing that security. Yet it came to him as a shock.

He had been so sure of her adoration. And now he discovered how numbing to a man’s vanity it is to find that a woman has been toying with him, while her real affections belong to another. It was, for him, a rather new experience, and not a pleasant one. He was furious with Eloise, at her faithlessness and selfishness, and at his own folly.

Meantime the laughter continued to come through the window with the cruelty of the cry of a wolf pack. In an hour it would be all over New Orleans that Paul Regret had been trounced like a schoolboy, forced to flee the anger of a girl. Endless mirth would resound in every café, every gaming room: and he, his brow already reddening with humiliation as he clung like a monkey to the vine, could not even deny it.

As has been said, one of the fatal things that could happen to a man in his position was to become a laughingstock. Thanks to Eloise Grailhe, he knew that he was through forever in New Orleans.

“Mademoiselle,” he heard the judge say as the laughter within the room quieted somewhat, “I’m sorry it had to be left to a lady to retaliate on the scoundrel. But you’ll have a fuller revenge, I give you my solemn word. You’ll see him on the gallows!” Then he said, in a different voice, “Now, may I have the honor of escorting you back whence you came?”

“With all my gratitude,” she said prettily.

The sheriff interjected, “Mademoiselle evidently interrupted Regret in the act of packing. See his clothes all strewn around——”

“True enough,” agreed the judge. “He may return. Post men here to intercept him if he does.”

For Regret, that was sufficient. Silently he climbed down the bougainvillaea into the empty courtyard, and thence quickly lost himself among the crowded buildings of the market quarter.