Читать книгу The Romantic Prince - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 12

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Count Anthony’s first glimpse of her burnt into his brain a picture which was to abide there all his days, and which no later impression of her could overlay or dim. Whenever hereafter he should think of her, the mental image his memory evoked was always this.

She stood in the doorway of her father’s handsome house to welcome these guests, apprised of their coming by the clatter of halting hooves in the street beyond.

Until her appearance there, Count Anthony had been taking stock of his surroundings: the brick-tiled courtyard about which this red house of goodly proportions formed a quadrangle, the red house itself with its steep roof and unusually ample windows, the shrubs symmetrically shaped and placed at regular intervals in tubs along three sides of that court; the borders of white and yellow tulips; the quails in their osier cage upon the wall, and the tame grey stork, advancing solemnly as a chamberlain or seneschal to meet them.

Then she appeared, and he saw nothing else.

She stood a shade above the middle height, her slender body cased in a gown of blue, high-waisted in the courtly mode, the bodice laced across a white silken undergarment which rose in a broadening wedge from waist to neck. Her head was bare, the plain white wimple flung back upon her shoulders, and the last red rays of the setting sun lighted a golden aureole about the coils of her hair and touched as with an inward effulgence the delicately tinted, delicately featured face.

To Count Anthony it seemed that he looked upon a picture of the Assumption from some cunning Italian hand, and afterwards he was to smile—though very gently—when he remembered how in prey to that momentary but overmastering illusion, before the holy beauty of that face, he had almost fallen on his knees. Instead, however, he continued mechanically to advance, conscious that her eyes were as steadily upon him as his were steadily upon her—eyes of clearest blue, from which a soul looked out that must be frank and pure and fearless.

He experienced in that moment an inexplicable exaltation. If some verses which he wrote afterwards, and which La Marche has preserved, are to be accepted as truly mirroring his sensations, he was overcome by a sense that this was not a meeting, but a reunion; that his eyes had looked into those eyes before; that somewhere at some dim time he and this girl as yet unnamed to him had been indissolubly united, consecrated each to the other and made one in rapture and in anguish. It was like a memory, dim and elusive as a whiff of perfume borne on the breeze, assailing his conscious senses and in a flash escaping them again before he could identify its source. He was to think of it often hereafter, but never to recapture the experience, pursue it though he might.

And he knew her name, he thought; knew that he knew it. Up through unfathomable depths of memory he felt it rising; but, before it reached the surface of his consciousness, it was shattered by another name spoken aloud in Danvelt’s big voice.

‘Johanna!’

A shiver of annoyance ran through him. That was not the name his soul had been about to yield—a name that stood, he knew, for purity, for constancy, for courage, for loyalty, because so intimately associated in her person with those things.

And yet it seemed she answered to this name by which his companion hailed her.

‘Why, Philip! You are soon returned!’ First this expression of surprise, and then a question laden with womanly tenderness. ‘But what has happened to you?’

The young burgher laughed off that inquiry as to how he came by bruised nose and swollen mouth and blackened eye, mightily at ease with her, proprietarily almost.

‘I’ve had my adventures, by my faith, and might never have returned but for this good friend Master Egmont here.’

Thus he presented his companion, promoted now to the dignity of his good friend, with a certain hearty patronage which at another time must have made Count Anthony wince. At present, however, seeing nothing but this gentle lady, conscious of no presence but her own, he bowed very low and reverently over the slim white hand she frankly extended to him.

Master Danvelt completed the presentation. ‘This is the daughter of Mynheer Claessens. And here is Mynheer Claessens himself.’

‘To greet our Philip returning from the wars,’ came the jovial voice of the jovial burgher who rolled forward to his daughter’s side. A big man this, of a proper portliness, rubicund and kindly of countenance, shrewd and humorous of eye.

He embraced Danvelt as he might have embraced a son, and gave Master Egmont a generous and hearty welcome in words that were presently to be abundantly confirmed in deeds.

Mynheer Claessens kept a good house and a good table; he had a nice taste in wine, of which there was great trade in Walcheren; and he was well attended by devoted servants. Under no better auspices could Count Anthony have sought initiation to the domestic side of burgher life in Zealand.

At supper that night over the succulent ham of a boar from the Ardennes and a brace of ducks from Master Claessens’s own decoy, washed down by a mellow Gascony vintage, Count Anthony, whose experiences in the past half-year had not all been pleasant, assured himself that one might live a great deal worse than this and have no ground for complaint.

The talk, of course, was all of Philip Danvelt’s travels and adventures, and he supplied most of it himself, readily responding to the spur of an occasional question. It would have wearied Count Anthony into somnolence but for the amusement he found in the note introduced into the narrative by the jactancy inherent in Danvelt. The young burgher made an Odyssey of his journey to Ghent, and presented the tale in such a manner that he was ever the heroic figure in it; and this without departing as outrageously from the truth as he might have done but for the restraining presence of Count Anthony. When finally he came to the part played by the Count at the Gravensteen, the facts constrained him to fall, however reluctantly, into a minor rôle. And the Count, for all his normal calm and detachment, began to grow uncomfortable under the wondering glances of his host and his host’s daughter. This wonder turned to stupefaction, at least on the part of Claessens, when the magnitude of the fine was disclosed.

The merchant swore deep in his throat, and asked the question: ‘What will your father say to that?’

‘What, indeed?’ wondered Danvelt with sudden gravity and such a change of countenance that Claessens laughed in good-humoured malice.

‘I’ld give a deal to be present when you tell him.’

‘So would not I,’ grumbled Danvelt. ‘Nor shall I; for I mean to tell him of it by letter to-morrow, and await his answer here before I start for home. Before then, too, I hope to pay my debt.’

Claessens was moved to still deeper mirth at the expense of his friend and rival in prosperity, the elder Danvelt. He sobered presently when his mind veered to speculate upon the amazing fact that a stranger of obvious distinction should have come forward as surety for so vast a sum. This, Claessens expressed.

‘What, sir,’ he asked, ‘was your inducement?’

Count Anthony laughed. ‘I have been asked the question three times already, and I shall be asked it perhaps three hundred before I die.’

‘And the answer is?’ Mynheer Claessens insisted.

We know the half-scorn in which twice already Count Anthony had supplied that answer, contemptuous of folk who could not understand the performance of a humane action for its own sake. But it was not the answer that he now supplied. Instead, holding by its stem his silver goblet, his eyes upon the purple mirror of its contents, he replied dreamily:

‘Who shall say? Perhaps the future holds the answer to that question.’

They stared at him, and let the subject drop. But that one of them probed his cryptic utterance at least in thought he had cause to suspect next morning.

He had risen betimes from the great bed in the chamber of honour which had been placed at his disposal, and he had gone forth into the stiff formal garden, set like a terrace upon the dunes. Walking there he had found Mistress Johanna, all in grey this morning, from which demure colour she appeared to gather an increased demureness. Her golden head was cased in a wimple kept in place by a hoop of dark blue velvet, plain and severe across the brow. Thus she fronted the breeze—for the morning was fresh with a tang of salt in the air—when Count Anthony came upon her there among the tulips of which already she had half-filled a little basket slung upon her arm.

‘You are early astir, mistress,’ was his comment when she had given him good-morning and made courteous inquiry touching his repose.

If she stood a little in awe of him, of that indefinable quality, blending radiance and dignity, which he wrapped about him like a cloak and by which he seemed apart and different from any man she had ever known, she betrayed no hint of it in her bearing. Frankly she met the gaze of his dark eyes, and with a composure apparently equal to his own.

‘It is our custom here in Walcheren. We are industrious folk. As industrious as we are peaceful.’

‘I should be as pained, madam, to restrain your industry’—and he waved a hand towards the tulips upon which he had found it exercised—‘as to trouble your peace.’

She smiled as she answered him: ‘You would not be suffered to do either.’

‘Oh, I believe you. You would know how to defend your own.’

‘Defend it? Who should trouble to assail it?’

‘Why, some reckless wanderer such as I, perhaps.’

‘Are you so very reckless?’ she mocked him, but without challenge, and suddenly became grave. ‘Oh, to be sure you are. Yet hardly to the detriment of others from the instance we have seen.’

‘Can you be sure that there was no detriment to any in what I did?’

‘In what you did? You saved Philip’s life. To whose detriment could that be?’

‘Who shall say? Perhaps to Master Philip’s. We do not know what the life I saved may hold. Perhaps to that of the wife he is to wed or of the children she is to bear him. Only the future can answer you. Always is it only the future that can supply the answer to the present.’

‘That,’ she said slowly, ‘is how you replied when father asked you what had induced you to go to the rescue of a stranger. What did you mean?’

‘No more than I said. A month hence, a year hence, I may know why I did it, or I may die without knowing it. But some day, someone will know, and some day someone will either bless or curse me for the deed.’

‘Curse you? For a deed so kindly, so disinterested as to be almost noble? Why?’

‘That will be according to its consequences, for which the responsibility will be laid on me. I made myself in this the instrument of Destiny. Ah, mistress, it is a grave thing to take a life—a graver than men realize who do it lightly. It may be even more grave to save a life.’

She shook her head a little and looked out over the dunes to the sparkling sea.

‘The more you explain, the less I understand,’ she complained and laughed. She was a creature of ready laughter, as of infinite tenderness, inclining to love all things, to see only good, since herself she knew nothing else.

So the Count read her as he watched and paused before replying.

‘That is because I have no gift of prophecy.’

‘Sir, sir,’ she cried in gentle impatience, ‘you will speak of the future when I question you on the past. I ask you only why—upon what prompting—you did what you did.’

This time he supplied what she required. ‘He was in sore plight when I beheld him. That moved my pity. I considered that his plight might yet be worse, and this so increased my pity that to allay it I went and snatched him from the cord.’

‘In short, you obeyed the impulse of a pitiful and noble nature, which is what you are reluctant to confess.’

He made a gesture of denial. ‘Ah! You think it answers you. But you are deceived. It supplies no more than half the reason. The other half lies in the womb of Destiny. I know that I was moved to pity. But not why I was so moved.’

‘But I have told you why already. Because your nature is noble.’

‘Then tell me why with this noble nature of mine I chanced to be so opportunely at hand. Why did I ride into Ghent at that precise hour when they were brawling in the street by which I came, and so rode into the life of Master Danvelt? Was it, perhaps ...’ He broke off. Then, lowering his voice to such a tone of reverence as to rob his words of all offence, he resumed, ‘Was it perhaps so that I might ride into yours?’

‘Into mine?’ Frightened eyes looked into his, then quickly out to sea again. She caught her breath, and, observing the delicate profile of her half-averted face, he saw that it turned deathly white.

He was suddenly aware that he had laid violent, bruising hands upon this pure, tender soul. Conscience smote him and amazement at himself, at the crude daring of his speech, worthy of some glib court gallant skilled in the paltry arts of dalliance. Yet he knew that the spirit prompting it had been of no such trivial kind; that he had spoken on an impulse from the depths of his being, from some prevision of the future, as instinctive as had been yestereve that uncanny glimpse into some remote and unsuspected past.

He sought to amend, to modify the impression he might have made.

‘Am I not here,’ he asked, ‘as a consequence of my act?’ He used a Moslem phrase, odd in her ears and incomprehensible. ‘It was written that I should save Danvelt.’

‘Written? Written? How? Where was it written?’

‘On the scroll of Destiny. What else is written we shall find as it unrolls. We are only at the beginning of that scroll.’

He was relieved to hear her laugh: a silvery laugh, so like the Lady Catharine’s, and yet so different. It assured him that she had recovered from the perturbation he had caused.

‘You are a master of vagueness, sir,’ she protested. ‘Once I essayed to read a book that was written as you talk. I understood not a word of it.’

‘I’ll swear the fault lay in the author as it now lies in me.’

‘You swear, then, what you do not believe. The only virtue of that is its courtesy.’

And then came Mynheer Claessens to join them, and bid them in to table, where Danvelt—his contusions changed from blue to yellow—waited with the impatience of the healthy trencherman.

He announced whilst they broke their fast that he had written to his father and would presently be gratified for Mynheer Claessens’s opinion on his letter. This moved a caustic humour in the merchant.

‘Whatever my opinion, there can be no doubt of your father’s, Philip. And it is his that will be interesting.’

Philip grunted, his mouth being too full of salted herring for a clearer expression of his disgust at his host’s deplorable mirth. Thus encouraged, Claessens continued:

‘He’ll clip your wings, my lad. He’ll curb your thirst for travel by steering you firmly into the harbour of wedlock.’

‘With all my heart!’ cried Danvelt, his mouth being free at last. ‘If he’ll do that I’ll count the thousand ducats well spent.’ He laughed noisily, and ogled Mistress Johanna so bold and meaningly that Count Anthony asked himself was a furtherance of their union what Destiny had required of him?

‘You spendthrift,’ Claessens admonished him. ‘Waste finds no favour in Johanna’s eyes. She’ll need to school you in thrift.’

The lad assumed an air of gallantry. ‘She may school me in anything she pleases and just so soon as it is her pleasure to begin.’

Johanna offered no comment. She sat with eyes upon her plate, her countenance so set that nothing was to be read in it unless one looked closer than Count Anthony dared to look just then.

From what he had heard, he drew the conclusion that here a match was already settled. These children of two wealthy burghers were already destined to each other, no doubt with the object of amassing greater wealth by a combination of golden forces. That was the vain purpose of all burgher lives. He was conscious of a little chill at his heart, and suddenly was marvelling at himself. He was a Prince of the House of Guelders, after all, and heir to its throne. Was it possible that, almost without suspecting it, he should have been conceiving hopes where a burgher’s daughter was concerned? If it chilled him to discover her fittingly betrothed to one of her own class, the sooner he departed the better for himself and others.

And so he spoke of his voyage to England, and desired to know when Mynheer Claessens could afford him passage.