Читать книгу The Romantic Prince - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 14

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‘What do you seek in England, Master Egmont?’ she had asked him suddenly, and at her question his fingers, which had softly been stroking the lute-strings into sound, fell still.

That was on the afternoon of the following day, a day of wind and rain which kept them within doors. After dining, they had come to this bower of hers above the garden, from whose windows you looked out upon dunes and ramparts and more dunes, and then the sea, now grey and sullen and obscured in misty rain.

It was a pleasant chamber, hung with brightly coloured Flemish tapestries depicting sacred subjects. Here Michael, the celestial knight, with flaming sword, hurled Lucifer and his legions down in ruin. There Gabriel, bearing a lily-wand, descended on a cloud to make the Annunciation, and yonder Raphael stood rending the fish under the wondering gaze of young Tobias. In these archangelic surroundings Count Anthony had found a lute, a pretty thing of mulberry and ebony and ivory, with which he had retired to the ample window-seat.

His music reminded Mynheer Claessens that matters of importance demanded his presence in the counting-house, and sent the over-dined Danvelt into a profound slumber. Remained him for only audience Mistress Johanna, who came to occupy the other angle of the window-seat, and, herself but an indifferent performer, to admire his skill, which indeed was considerable, and to encourage him to continue in its exercise. From strumming little airs of Brabant and Picardy and his native Guelders, he was moved, perhaps by the sympathetic quality of his audience, to essay a little song which he had made. He did scarcely more than speak his lines to a rippling accompaniment of lute-strings.

He ceased, and in thoughtful silence they both sat awhile. The only sounds were the gentle patter of the rain outside and the stertorous breathing of the slumbering Danvelt. The young burgher sprawled uncouthly in his chair, with stumpy, ill-shaped hands locked tight across a paunch too heavy already for so young a man.

The maiden moved and sighed. Deep in her soul something had been quickened by that song, a new conception of life, its evanescence and its glory. Like one entranced, she sat until Count Anthony, perhaps to break the spell that was surcharging him, began softly to play a trivial, tripping dance measure. Then came her question: ‘What do you seek in England?’

At the sound of her voice his playing ceased. He rose and went to set down the lute on a side-table beside the bowl of white tulips disposed there by Johanna. Returning thence to the window, he stood looking out.

‘If this weather holds,’ he said casually, ‘it will end by making me a burden on your hospitality.’

‘Why do you go to England?’ she asked him again, and thrilled him now by the direct form of the question.

‘To follow in the footsteps of Lalaing.’

‘Who was he?’ she asked.

‘You never heard of Jacques de Lalaing? He was a knight, a very perfect, gentle knight of Duke Philip’s court, whose lovely brief life I have had the vainglory to take as a pattern for my own.’

He went on to tell her of Lalaing, of his prowess, his nobility, and his purity of heart. In the telling he spoke intimately of courts and their inhabitants, of a world which to her was almost fabulous, peopled by beings other indeed than herself and those among whom her days were spent.

‘Like Lalaing,’ he concluded,’ I go to England to make my endeavour, though not quite the endeavour that was his.’

‘Are you a knight, then?’ she asked him on a note of awe.

Almost he evaded her question.

‘Something of a knight, I hope, God helping me. But more troubadour than knight, and perhaps more fool than either. For who shall say what is wisdom?’

‘Do you hope to discover that in England?’

He laughed. ‘Faith, no.’

‘Why, then, do you go there?’

‘To seek reality, to break away from shams that threaten to enmesh me.’

‘What is reality?’ she asked him.

‘A fruit upon the tree of truth.’

‘And is that tree so difficult to discover?’

He looked down at her. ‘You speak as if you knew its whereabouts.’

‘I think I do. I was brought up in the shade of it. I have lived by the mercy of God in its shelter.’

He looked at her so long and intently and in such wistfulness that at last her glance fell in sheer embarrassment.

‘Could you lead me to it?’ he wondered, but so dreamily that it sounded as if he were thinking aloud and asking the question of himself.

It reached the waking senses of Danvelt, who croaked half-coherently, still slumber-laden: ‘Lead you to what?’

The question brought Count Anthony to himself in two senses, and the whole truth lay in his startled ejaculation: ‘God forgive me, Master Danvelt! I had forgotten your existence.’

‘Forgotten it?’ spluttered the burgher, and heaved himself up laughing. ‘Continue to forget it and you’ll save me a thousand ducats.’

Count Anthony, considering him as he rolled towards them with his swaggering gait, opined in his soul that a million ducats would not be too much to pay for such a privilege. It was a startling thought so self-revelatory that at his prayers that night the Count besought an abatement of the stormy weather to render possible his immediate going. Heaven, however, was deaf to the intercession. The weather grew worse, and for a week the gales persisted in the narrow seas and kept him waiting in that perilous haven. More than once he spoke of setting a term to what amounted to an abuse of hospitality and seeking quarters at the inn. But Mynheer Claessens sturdily opposed him. No hospitality of his, he asserted, could ever be abused by one who had served his young friend Danvelt so nobly, which again but served to remind the Count of the closer kinship with Danvelt which was commonly desired.

Of this desire Claessens was driven in those days to speak to his daughter by an event that fell upon them like a bolt from the blue.

The young burgher’s letter to his father had been despatched, and Claessens waited to enjoy the laugh which the sequel should afford. But the sequel when it came may have provoked the laughter of the ironic gods; it provoked not Claessens’s.

The elder Danvelt read that ill-scrawled missive from his son, of whose endowments he had never held a high opinion. When he had read, he stood a moment without breathing, his face convulsed. Then his lips began to utter a horrible imprecation that was never finished. He crashed full length upon the floor of his counting-house in a fit of apoplexy, and expired that same evening. Like his son, he was too short in the neck for such shocks as this.

When the news reached Philip Danvelt in Flushing, it sent him off in appalled and contrite haste to Middelburg to perform the last duties by a father whose days he bitterly blamed his own conduct for having shortened.

The event pointed to consequences which Mynheer Claessens mentioned on the morrow to his daughter. He spoke gently, a note of regret in his voice.

‘Now that Philip is master of his fortune, I shall be losing you soon, Johanna.’

The roses faded slowly from her cheeks. ‘You mean that ...’ She paused. ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly.

‘You don’t know?’ He smiled a little wistfully. ‘But I know; and Philip knows.’

‘I don’t think I want to leave you, father.’

‘You are aware of my need of you, and that is sweet. You were always sweet, Johanna. No man was ever more truly blessed in his child.’ He stroked the golden head very tenderly. ‘Your mother in heaven will be proud of you, my dear, as I am.’ He sighed. ‘I shall miss you when you go. But I should be a selfish ingrate to detain you, when your own interest and happiness beckon you away.’

There fell a long silence at the end of which she looked up, and he saw that her eyes were full of trouble. ‘May I speak frankly, father?’

‘I should not know you if you spoke otherwise.’

‘I am not sure that my happiness lies with Philip.’

‘Not sure?’ Claessens was startled. ‘But you are promised to him.’

‘I was no party to the promise, father.’

‘Nor was Philip. But he’s fond of you. Old Danvelt and I knew what was good for both of you. Your fortunes united will make you very rich.’

‘Is wealth the only consideration?’

‘The chief consideration, as you’ll come to discover. And, for the rest, Philip’s a good fellow, good-natured, kindly. He’ll make you a good husband, never doubt it.’

‘Not if I do not love him, father.’

‘Love! Love comes with habit, child. Take my word for it.’

She shook her head. ‘I must judge for myself in this; judge as my heart bids me.’

Claessens was troubled, and went as near impatience as it lay in his kindly, phlegmatic nature. ‘But what ails Philip?’

‘Heaven forbid that I should have a fault to find with him.’

‘Why, then, all’s well. A solid lad. Not perhaps of the grace and airs of such men as Master Egmont, but of a worth that seldom goes with such outward virtues.’

‘Master Egmont’s virtues are not outward only,’ she said, and flushed at her tongue’s too-ready betrayal of her mind.

He frowned as he looked at her. ‘God save us! This stranger isn’t the cause of your looking coldly upon Philip? It isn’t that ... ?’

She made haste to interrupt him. ‘No, no. It is only that I like and respect Master Egmont. Therefore I will assume nothing unflattering to him. That is all.’

‘It seems a deal, child, considering that we know nothing of this man.’

‘Oh, something, I think. We know that he is chivalrous and pitiful, and we know that he commands an abundance of this wealth of which you make a virtue. So much is shown by the act that linked him to Philip. We know also that he is courtly, gracious and accomplished. So much our senses tell us.’

‘You defend him warmly, child; more warmly than you need, I think. In a few days, when this weather eases, he’ll go his ways, and we are not likely ever to see him again.’

She did not answer him in words, but had he looked close he would have discovered more pain in her eyes than he had ever seen there.

He said no more to Johanna just then on the subject of Philip. A wise man this Claessens, in more than the ways of trade. But that evening after supper, sitting alone with his guest, he returned to the subject of his daughter’s coming marriage, informing the Count that from childhood she had been promised to Danvelt. And Count Anthony perceived quite clearly the merchant’s object in this confidence.

Claessens knew of his guest no more than was to be read in his actions and externals. From these he judged him a man of courts, of noble blood, of a different clay from himself, and he had a strong and well-justified prejudice against unions where such disparity existed. In addition to this, knowledge of the world warned him that, whilst such men as his guest do not marry women of the burgher class, they rarely hesitate to become their lovers, even when they were men of scrupulous honour. He judged this Master Egmont to be something even more. There was a fundamental pitifulness in his nature which would withhold him from doing anything to another’s hurt, and there was a lofty dignity which would keep him aloof from banal gallantries. Claessens knew also that his daughter’s virtue was a rock. So that between the two he discerned no cause for anxiety; and yet he prayed as fervently as Count Anthony for the fine weather that should permit his guest’s departure.

These prayers were answered at last on the morrow. The leaden pall of the heavens broke, the sun shone clear and warm, and the wind died down.

Claessens was able to inform his guest that the sloop which had been waiting to leave port would sail on the next day. Count Anthony thanked Heaven, and was downcast. Thereafter he wandered in the garden with Johanna, a sad garden, damp and battered by the storm.

‘You will be glad,’ she said, ‘to win release at last.’

If the question was in itself a probing one, it was robbed of any such quality by being delivered without suspicion of archness or challenge.

‘Release?’ echoed Count Anthony. ‘I am a boor, indeed, if I have conveyed any sense of impatience at the sojourn here imposed upon me.’

‘Ah! But there is your quest.’

‘I am not sure that it has not ended already; that I have not found here the only reality worthy a man’s seeking.’

She was conscious of quickened heartbeats. Instinctively, in maidenly self-defence, she affected to misunderstand where there was no room for misunderstanding.

‘Reality is of many kinds. Here we show you but the somnolent, peaceful sort.’

‘Peaceful; not somnolent. Could any show me a better?’

‘It depends, sir, upon what you seek; upon the inclinations of your nature.’

‘The inclinations of my nature?’ There was a rising inflexion in his voice. Then he fetched a sigh. ‘Who dares to follow the inclinations of his nature?’

Very gently, as if she read his mind, she answered him. ‘All those, I think, who have the courage and the wisdom.’

It startled him to be brought thus face to face with a truth so simple, plain, and obvious. He looked at her where she stood beside him, her golden head on a line with his shoulder, her eyes averted, the colour ebbing and flowing in her cheeks. For an instant he was assailed by a fierce desire to take that lovely head in his hands, and to inhale from it the essences of her being as one inhales the perfume of a flower. No other man of his station would be so nice in his handling of this burgher’s daughter. Thus a voice within him whispered insidiously, and at once he knew it for the voice of the Devil, grown overbold with him in this moment of his very human weakness. Who harboured a thought defiling to the purity and candour of this maid did but defile himself. If this emotion which she aroused in him was love—the greatest, perhaps the only, reality of life—then let him count the world well lost for it. Let him offer himself here as lover and as husband, and if she took him let him renounce the world to which he belonged and the throne that ultimately awaited him, and adopt for his own the humbler world of which she was a part. What was it she had said? To follow the inclinations of one’s nature was for those who had the courage and the wisdom.

When, at last, having applied the test, he broke the silence, it was to say:

‘I am a coward and a fool, Johanna.’

She trembled to hear him speak her name. On his lips it bore a sound she had never before heard in it, acquired a beauty unsuspected hitherto.

‘In what?’ she asked him.

‘In that I lack both courage and wisdom according to your just conception.’

She knew what he meant, knew that the strength to whose lack he alluded was the strength to climb certain barriers between them, barriers of blood which already she had sensed. If a cold shadow fell across her soul, if a daring, half-formed hope withered in her maiden heart, her brave spirit allowed no sign of it to show upon the surface.

Next day he sailed for England, and her world was empty: empty because of the going of a man of whose existence ten days ago she had not been conscious. For comfort she clung to the hope that he would come again, a hope begotten of his last words.

‘I leave my horses, by your father’s favour. My Schimmel is a gentle palfrey that would bear a child in safety. Use him freely until I come again, and, if I do not come again, retain him for your own as an earnest of the gratitude I bear you.’

‘Gratitude?’ she echoed, who desired almost anything but that of him. ‘For what are you grateful?’

‘To you, for more than I could tell,’ he said. ‘To God, for having known you, Johanna.’

Whilst she stood stricken dumb by that, his lips touched her hand for the first and last time, in all reverence, and he was gone.

She found herself suddenly in tears, and, eluding her father before he should discover it, went to seek consolation in prayer.

Thereafter she took to riding daily as she had never ridden before. Mounted on the big white horse, with her father’s servant Jan following on the bay which had belonged to Count Anthony’s groom, she made long excursions into the surrounding country, and talked at long length to Schimmel of his master.

A fortnight later, Philip Danvelt returned from Middelburg, and he was not quite the same man who had last gone thither. His accession to a fortune far greater than he had suspected had wrought a change in him. The roll of his gait was increased; on his short neck he carried his head still farther back, so that his nose seemed more aggressive even than heretofore; he was more ponderous of speech and of manner. Although in black, he was dressed with a richness beyond a merchant’s station, and he wore his finery none too well. His round hat with the peaked brim carried now a feather brooched into the side of it by a jewel of price, and a jewel of price gleamed upon one of his stumpy fingers. He would have suffered sorely for all this in Mynheer Claessens’s esteem had not the kindly man supposed that this fine plumage was assumed for the fascination of Johanna.

He craved news of Egmont, speaking of him boldly as his dear friend, and he desired to know if Claessens had supplied him at parting with any portion of the moneys due.

‘He asked for none,’ said Claessens. ‘He never spoke of it. And when at parting I broached the subject on your behalf, he waved it aside as of no importance.’

‘Ay, ay! That’s like him,’ said Master Philip. ‘He treats money as if it were just mud.’

‘That is how he thinks of it,’ said Johanna.

‘He must be either fabulously wealthy or fabulously mad,’ said Claessens.

‘A little of both,’ Master Philip assured them with his loud, fatuous laugh, suddenly checked by Johanna.

‘Do you thank God for it, Philip.’

Her championing the absent pleased Master Danvelt none too well. For all that he was made dull by smug complacency, he caught in her voice a note that was hostile to himself. It stirred an uneasiness in him. To allay it, he opened the subject of marriage that night to Claessens.

‘It’s my belief,’ he announced ponderously, ‘that a man should settle early.’

‘Ay, ay,’ said Claessens drily. ‘You’ll have had enough of travel.’

Philip did not consider the interruption amusing.

‘I need a wife, and I’ve a fine house up there in Middelburg awaiting a mistress. If you’re willing, then, good Master Claessens ...’ He spread his hands, deeming it unnecessary to complete the sentence.

Good Master Claessens felt that he was being used with patronage, and was between amusement and resentment.

‘It’s not my willingness you must ascertain; but Johanna’s,’ was his answer, calculated to give pause to the young man. It had, however, no such effect.

Philip laughed shortly, a very self-assured master of his fate.

‘Oh, that!’ Airily he dismissed the possibility of Johanna’s having any but one opinion in the matter. ‘I’ll speak to Johanna in the morning.’

The affair thus comfortably dismissed, he passed to other things: the state of trade in Middelburg; the fortune inherited from his father; the opportunities for increasing it which his father had neglected; and the gerency of it which he intended. So that when at last, full of beer and self-sufficiency, Master Philip retired to bed, it occurred to Claessens that perhaps Johanna was right in her lack of eagerness for these nuptials planned so long ago.

In the morning when Philip came late to breakfast, Johanna was away, scouring the country on Count Anthony’s big white palfrey. It astounded Philip that she should do it, and still more that her father should permit it. He said so, and enlarged upon his views of a woman’s functions in life. This sort of thing might be well enough for idle wantons of the court, but was hardly seemly in a sober burgher woman.

Receiving but indifferent sympathy from the father, Master Danvelt addressed the daughter in the matter later in the day. She listened meekly, struggling generously against the conviction that he was stupid, pompous, and uncouth, and never so ridiculous as when he regarded his own opinions as unalterable laws.

‘But what harm do I do, Philip?’

He was impatient that she should require the obvious to be constantly explained.

‘No great harm, perhaps. But it’s unbecoming in a maid of your station.’

She considered that Master Egmont had not deemed it unbecoming, else he would not have left her the palfrey; and in matters of taste she must account him a sounder arbiter than Master Philip. At last she said slowly: ‘That is a question for my father, Philip.’

‘And for your husband,’ he snapped.

‘When I have one, perhaps.’

‘For your future husband, meanwhile.’

‘How can I say what my future husband will approve?’

‘I am telling you.’

‘But you can speak only for yourself, Philip.’

‘I am speaking for myself. Am I not to marry you?’

‘This is very condescending, Philip.’

Missing the irony, he was a little mollified.

‘I admonish you for your own good—out of my affection for you.’

‘I am grateful. But am I worthy?’

He considered this, and evaded a reply that might go to her head. He liked a woman to be humble.

‘My affairs in Middelburg, now that my father has gone and all the burden is on my shoulders, make it difficult for me to come and go. We must cut short our courtship, Johanna. We might be married, I think, before the end of the month.’

She went white. She sat with hands folded in her lap, her downcast eyes considering them.

‘It is impossible, Philip,’ she quietly answered him.

‘How soon, then?’ he demanded, and never was lover more peremptory.

She drew a deep breath before replying. ‘Philip, my dear, it should be easy for you to find in Middelburg a wife better suited to you than I am.’

This made him impatient. Humility in women is well enough. This, however, was pushing things too far.

‘But I love you, Johanna!’ he exclaimed in protest.

‘I was wondering if you did. I hoped that you did not.’

‘You hoped that I did not? When you are to marry me!’

She rose now and confronted him frankly, calm save for a gleam of distress in those clear eyes. ‘Philip, dear, I have a friendship for you; even affection. But it is not the kind of affection that should exist between husband and wife if they are to be happy.’

‘Why? What do you know of such things?’ He was aghast.

‘Knowledge has come to me,’ she said wistfully.

‘Whence?’ he demanded.

She paused a moment before replying. ‘From myself, of course. Whence else should such knowledge come?’

He laughed through his perturbation. ‘But all that will follow. It always does. Trust me, Johanna. I understand these things: life and the rest. I love you, Johanna,’ he said again, and now at last became a lover in earnest and began humbly and with some warmth to woo that which unopposed he would phlegmatically have appropriated.

It moved her, distressed her, shook her resolve a little, but did not suffice to beat it down. When she had made this clear, he collapsed in dismayed amazement. ‘Then all that our parents planned is to come to naught!’

Gently she stroked his yellow head, as he sat hunched in his chair. ‘I am sorry, Philip.’

So pitiful was her nature and so touched was she by his manifest distress that, out of charity, to allay it, had he pressed the matter then, she might have yielded. As it was, she found it in her heart to wish that Master Egmont had never crossed her path to reveal her to herself.

The dejected Philip bore his lament to her father. Gravely Claessens heard him, and thought in his heart that what had happened was very good for Philip’s soul and might yet shape him into such a man as Johanna should ultimately be content to marry.

‘You’ve ruffled her, my lad. That’s all,’ Claessens comforted him. ‘You are too downright and blunt. Women need to be coaxed.’ Philip snorted impatiently. ‘Oh! A good woman’s worth coaxing. Take my word for it. I am twice your age. And a maid will often say no to a man at first, and be glad enough to say yes in the end. Johanna is not a girl to be constrained, nor am I the man to constrain her. But I’ll advise her—cautiously. I desire to see you joined, and she’ll have you in the end. But give her time, and play the lover; pay court to her. Could you be romantic, Philip?’

‘What’s that?’ said Philip.

‘I don’t know. But Johanna might school you.’

His dejection mitigated by such hope as he could gather from what her father had said, Philip went back to Middelburg, whence came gifts for Johanna, to herald his return a fortnight later. He stayed two days, was discreet, and beyond a tender attentiveness made no advance in the wooing upon which he was now determined.