Читать книгу The Romantic Prince - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 6

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The antics of the players on the dais at the end of the long hall so fully engaged the attention of the courtly audience that the arrival of the Duke and his cousin went unperceived. It went unperceived also by the Lady Catharine, for all that her attention was nowise bestowed upon the mummers. She occupied a chair by one of the pillars on the right of the hall almost immediately below the staircase by which our gentlemen had been descending, and where, since Count Anthony had perceived her, they now stood arrested midway in their descent, observing.

She was of a fair and exquisite loveliness such as might well have served for a poet’s incarnation of his ideal. Tendrils of her golden hair, in violation of fashion’s law, escaped about her brow from the dark band at the base of the small pointed hennin with which she was coifed. A more daring violation of that same law was the extent of the décolletage of the close-fitting bodice of her gown of green and gold brocade, with its excessive revelation of the ivory perfections of her neck and breasts. Her sleeve, very tight in the arm, grew suddenly to such a fullness at the wrist that a foot and more of it hung below the fine jewelled hand which moved playfully, caressingly, as she spoke or listened, upon the black velvet sleeve of her companion. This was a tall, loose-limbed, youthful fellow, arrogant of bearing, swarthy, black-browed, and handsome in a sinister, unpleasant way. Leaning upon the back of her chair, his cropped head of black hair was bowed as he talked until it almost touched her own; and when she looked up into his face, as she did ever and anon with wanton arts of coyness, their eyes were scarcely a foot apart.

The Duke, for all his usually imperturbable boldness, glanced with misgiving at his tall companion; nor were his misgivings lessened by the thin, baffling smile that was compressing Count Anthony’s lips. He had intended that Count Anthony should observe for himself; but he had hardly expected that there would be quite so much to observe. The moment, he now considered, had been execrably ill-chosen.

Nor were these two upon the stairs the only observers. The dallying pair below were dividing with the players the attention of those more immediately about them. In their neighbourhood the Duchess of Orléans, Count Anthony’s kinswoman, sat frowning, as ever and anon she looked sideways at the Lady Catharine; and beside the Duchess, frowning also, and manifestly ill-at-ease, stood the elegant, courtly Saint-Pol, at present in Brussels on a mission from King Louis. Raising his eyes, Saint-Pol perceived those two observing figures on the stairs, one tall and scarlet, the other short and black. He cleared his throat to attract attention and sound the alarm, and scowled warningly upon the pair. But they were deaf and blind to all but each other. The lady’s delicate fingers continued their caressing, almost wanton movement upon her companion’s arm, whilst Armagnac, bending closer, and greatly daring, shifted his brown hand from the back of her chair and let it rest lightly upon her shoulder at a point where the audacious cut of her bodice left it bare.

Count Anthony resumed his descent of the stairs quite heedless of the Duke’s restraining hand.

‘Leave this to me,’ his highness was muttering, regretting now that he had not taken matters into his own hands from the outset. ‘Leave me to deal with Armagnac. He shall go home to-morrow, by Saint George!’ And he repeated still more insistently: ‘Leave him to me.’

Count Anthony, turning his head to regard him, still with that close-lipped smile upon his fair white face, puzzled him by his answer:

‘Why, what is he to me, that I should dispute him with you? Madam Catharine is not yet my wife, for which on my knees I shall render thanks to Our Lady presently.’ And he went on.

The comedy on the dais reached its end as the comedy in the hall below took its beginnings. The players had given good entertainment, and, on the closing lines of the epilogue spoken by their leader, applause had greeted them. Flowers, comfits, and money fell in a shower about them from their grateful audience, and then the noisy acclamations sank into the din of talk as the groups in the hall broke up, to re-form elsewhere and break again, and the movement became general.

The summer daylight was fading. Came servants with tapers, ushered by a chamberlain, to light the flambeaux and girandoles, and draw the great curtains, each a masterpiece of Flemish art, vividly illustrating scenes from the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Men’s thoughts began to turn to supper, but none supposed that it was of supper that the Count of Armagnac whispered just then in the Lady Catharine’s ear, invisible under the band of her headdress. Of whatever it may have been, it provoked the lady’s laughter, which rose above the general hum like a peal of little silver bells. At least, that is how yesterday Count Anthony would have described it. This evening he discovered no music in it. He found the sound detestable, the frivolous tinkle of a trivial, hollow mind.

Looking up and around at that moment, she beheld him, quietly smiling, at her side, and, beyond him, her brother-in-law, a thundercloud upon his ducal brow. Her laughter snapped in the grip of a sudden and instinctive fear; a fear rather of Count Anthony’s vague smile than of the Duke’s obvious displeasure.

The Count inclined his bare golden head; he bent a little towards her from his graceful, red-swathed height.

‘Of your charity, madam, share with us the pleasantries of my Lord of Armagnac. Let us laugh with you, madam.’

M. de Saint-Pol, the Duchess of Orléans, Madame de Blaumont with the Duke’s ten-year-old daughter, little Mary of Burgundy, and young d’Épinal were the more immediate witnesses of the scene, and their eyes, if we except the child’s, were anxious.

Followed a long and awkward pause, at the end of which the Lady Catharine withdrew at last her fingers from Armagnac’s arm, and he, straightening himself stiffly, shifted his hand from her shoulder to the back of her chair. Whereupon Count Anthony cried out in a mockery of courteous chagrin:

‘But we discompose you. We intrude. We place a restraint upon you. We disturb fond attitudes. This must not be. Charles, why did you bring me? We are not wanted here.’

The unready Duke made a noise in his throat. His scowl deepened. An exponent ever of the direct attack, he understood nothing of his cousin’s enveloping movement. And meanwhile, as he found no words, his cousin prattled on quite pleasantly:

‘Madam Catharine is reluctant, then, to repeat the pleasantry which moved her laughter. The pleasantry being my Lord of Armagnac’s we can understand her reluctance. His pleasantries are seldom nice.’

Her ladyship’s lovely face, clear-cut in profile as a cameo, was going red and white by turns; her bosom rose and fell in its revealing corsage; her eyes were lowered in panic. And then at last, seeing her tongue-tied who usually was never short of pertness, the Lord of Armagnac, spurred by the glances of ever-increasing witnesses, swaggered to her rescue, to save her countenance and his own.

‘Do you talk at me, Lord Count?’ he challenged.

‘At you?’ Count Anthony’s tone suggested a faint wonder. His dark eyes grew dreamy as they surveyed the Frenchman. ‘I spoke of you, perforce. It was unavoidable.’

Armagnac ignored the subtle innuendo. ‘You will be wise, my lord, to avoid it in the future.’

‘Not wise. That is not the word at all. Fastidious. You are not a pleasant topic, sir.’

There was a movement among the spectators, an audible drawing of breath, and some one laughed outright. It was young d’Épinal, maliciously glad, through the torment of his soul, to see another—and one who had the right to do it—baiting the bully Armagnac. That laugh stirred the fuming Duke into instant action. Almost he shouldered his cousin aside, to take the stage and plant himself squarely before the foolish pair. By his very presence he checked the Count of Armagnac’s retort.

‘By Saint George, there’s been talk enough. Are we playing in a comedy, Anthony?’

‘Is tragedy your preference, Charles?’

The Duke disregarded him. He stormed upon that lovely fool, his sister-in-law, who in all her life had never looked lovelier or more foolish.

‘You have leave to go, Catharine.’ The dismissal was harsh, almost contemptuous. ‘Away with you! To your room, madam.’

She rose abruptly, like a puppet whose strings he had rudely jerked.

Finding the Duchess of Orléans at his elbow, he impressed her into service.

‘Take the little fool hence, Mary. Go with her.’

He seized the Lady Catharine’s arm in his powerful grip, swung her round and flung her into the arms of the Duchess.

‘Oh, cruelty!’ cried Count Anthony. The Duke stared at him, his countenance almost purple. ‘To part them,’ the Count explained, and waved a hand from the Lord of Armagnac to the Lady Catharine, who was retreating now in tears. ‘They were made for each other, expressly created for mutual joy. Do you not agree with me, M. d’Épinal?’

The young courtier glared at him, understanding nothing of this icy mockery where knighthood, as it seemed to his ingenuous mind, called for fiery indignation.

‘If it had been my honour to have been betrothed to that peerless lady, I ... I ...’ He faltered, at a loss.

‘Well, sir? Well? What would you have done? Instruct me. You perceive my need.’

‘I would not laugh.’

‘Ah, no! With the breath leaping in flames from your nostrils, like the dragon yonder in the tapestry, you’ld hurl your gauntlet down at the intruder. Indeed, I think I’ve heard that is your knightly way, even when your engagement does not go the length of a betrothal. You are in the romantic tradition, you suppose.’ Count Anthony shook his head in deprecation. ‘There is neither romance nor reason in it, unless stags at rutting time are reasonable and romantic.’

D’Épinal stiffened. It grew clear to him that metaphorically Count Anthony was slapping his face for his own adventure with M. d’Auxonne on the Lady Catharine’s behalf. And slapping it in such a way that open resentment must render him intolerably foolish. There was a force of truth in what Count Anthony said which stripped of all glamour and laid brutally naked the deed in which the young knight had taken a vainglorious pride.

He stood abashed, without answer, and the Count, with a smile and a nod, turned aside to bend over little Mary of Burgundy whom he found beside him. He talked and laughed with her now as if he had no thought for any in the world but this child who loved him.

Meanwhile the furious Duke had gone off, dragging with him almost forcibly, by the arm, the scarcely less furious Armagnac. He designed to get him beyond the reach of Count Anthony’s mordant tongue before irreparable damage should be wrought.

If Charles of Burgundy was no diplomatist, yet a certain rough diplomacy he used on this occasion.

‘My lord,’ he said, ‘it will be better for all concerned, and for the preservation of the peace and amity so vital to us all, that you do not postpone your intended departure from Brussels.’

‘Postpone?’ quoth Armagnac, who had no thought of going.

‘You have prepared, I understand, to leave to-morrow.’

The Frenchman paused at the Burgundian’s side. He stared long at his host, cold and haughtily. Then at last, he laughed.

‘You give me leave?’ he said. ‘It is a little ... abrupt.’

The Duke spread his hands, his face grave. ‘In your interests and my own and those of others.’

‘And that insolent cousin of yours from Guelders? Does he remain on the field?’

‘Here is no field, my lord.’ The Duke curbed with difficulty his rising anger. ‘Nor have I perceived any insolence. There has been,’ he added, warming as he proceeded, ‘lack of discretion, which my cousin of Guelders is entitled to resent, and which I shall resent with him if carried further.’

Each stared into the eyes of the other, and the glances of both were hard. Armagnac was the first to bow, as perforce he must when reason prevailed.

Yet, when a few years later war flamed forth again between France and Burgundy, and Count John of Armagnac was found to have sold his sword to King Louis, the cause of this may well have been supplied on that July evening in Brussels.

‘Your wishes are my laws, Monseigneur, in this as in all matters.’

The Duke turned away to seek his cousin. But the Count had already departed. Eventually the Duke found him alone in his closet, leaning from the open casement and looking out into the turquoise sky of eventide and the mists that were rising above the great ducal park by which the vision to the north was limited.

It was while dreaming here that Count Anthony of Guelders had reached the clear conclusion that the world—his world, at least—was no place for a gentleman.

The Duke came to fling a vigorous arm about his neck.

‘All is most happily concluded,’ he announced.

‘I perceive the conclusion. Not the happiness.’ His tone was wistful and a little weary. It sowed distrust in the ducal mind. Then Count Anthony swung half-round from his contemplation of the eventide. ‘What are we, Charles?’ he asked. ‘Are we real, you and I? Do we live and breathe and act of our own independent wills; or are we but the creatures of a dream—the dream of some vast consciousness other than our own—in which we move, dimly aware of the parts we are set to play, but only in a measure as we play them?’

‘God save us!’ the Duke ejaculated, accounting himself confronted by stark lunacy.

Count Anthony flung an arm outwards, towards the black mass of the park, the mists, and the sky above in which the stars were palely dawning. ‘All that is real! It exists and is at peace. But we, Charles—you and I and Armagnac and the Lady Catharine and this court of yours in which all is greed and lechery—we are not real, for if we were and were masters of our wills we would shape things otherwise. Could Montlhéry have been, and all that went to it, before and after? Could Dinant have been, and the horrors that were wrought there in the name of knighthood? Could any of this be if we were real?’

‘Does it profit you to ask if that which is could be?’

‘Ah, but is it? Is it?’

‘It is. You may take my word for it.’

‘Your word, Charles? Your word against my consciousness? You are deceived. Or else it is the life of courts that’s false, unreal, rendered so by all the ceremonial in which we trammel it and which creeps into the soul of each composing it; by the illusions of power which are its breath; by the traditions of birth and blood which are the empty bubbles in which it is reflected. Yes, that may be it. We are all actors in this world of courts, Charles; players of parts allotted to us at birth according to the names we bear. Natural we never are. Hence our unreality. And because we are not natural in ourselves, when Nature expresses herself through us despite our panoplies and mummeries, she comes forth travestied and grotesque, stressing our unreality.’

The Duke breathed windily. ‘It may all be as you say. But I’ll hope it isn’t.’

‘While you are hoping, I will ascertain, Charles.’

‘Let me know the result when you reach it,’ the Duke mocked him. ‘You read too much and you think too much. You are suffering from indigestion up here.’ And he tapped his forehead. Abruptly he changed the subject. ‘Armagnac returns to France to-morrow.’

‘A pity,’ said the Count.

‘A pity? What the devil ails you to-night?’

‘As I said below, he and your sister-in-law are excellently suited. In your place I’ld have played Providence to force a match between them.’

‘God give me patience! Is there no sense in you at all?’

‘Indeed, I hope so. Consider: A wife might make of Armagnac a man at least outwardly fit for decent company by rescuing him from the infamy of his incestuous life. Whilst such a husband as Armagnac would curb any wanton disposition in a woman. Thus these two who separately remain worthless might united become worthy. Is there no sense in that?’

The Duke recoiled before him. ‘Is there sense,’ he thundered, ‘in speaking in such terms of the lady you are to marry?’

‘Marry?’ Count Anthony laughed a little. He shook his golden head. ‘That dream at least is over and dispelled. And it leaves no pain, mirabile dictu. But I understand. I was in love with love. The Lady Catharine herself was naught; no more than the armature upon which I modelled the ideal mistress of my dreams. But the armature proving rotten has crumpled within my little edifice, and the form I worshipped being lost I perceive only the clay of which it was fashioned.’ He sighed. ‘It is but another illusion lost. The last perhaps.’

The Duke was roused to fury. ‘Do you live in a romance, Anthony; or in the world?’

‘Do I live at all?’ quoth the exasperating Anthony.

‘You’ld best rouse yourself to realize it. God’s death, man, you talk of love like ... like ... an Arcadian shepherd. You are a prince; heir to a throne. And whilst princes may love as they please and where they please and when they please, they marry for the welfare of the state.’ He swung away from his cousin, across the room and back in long, ponderous strides, talking the while. ‘Myself, I was twice married without ever my consent being asked. I was six years of age when I married Catharine of France, to cement the alliance between Charles the Seventh and my father, and I was a widower at thirteen. Yet, though I was twenty when I entered second nuptials, do you suppose I consulted my tastes or personal inclinations on the subject of the bride?’

‘Your indifference to women is a byword, Charles.’

The Duke imprecated inarticulately in his impatience. ‘What has that to do with it? None could say it of my father, who has left me to provide for some twenty of his bastards. Yet he married as I have married, and as I shall marry again presently: as the State of Burgundy requires.’

‘I give thanks to God that I am not Duke of Burgundy.’

‘So does Burgundy,’ snapped the Duke. ‘But you’ll be Duke of Guelders one day.’

‘Not even that if I may not marry as I choose. I have ideals, Charles.’

‘You have insanity.’

‘The ideals of one man are the insanities of another.’

Upon this the Duke disdained to argue. He struck directly at the heart of the matter.

‘Armagnac is going. Catharine shall hear two words from me on the score of prudence which she’ll remember.’

‘A prudent conduct to dissemble a wanton heart! Fine linen over a festering sore! Catharine is in soul a wanton, and I desire no wanton for my wife.’

‘A wanton!’

‘You saw how they played with each other, and that in public. You saw his hand, his foul, lascivious paw, on her bare shoulder. Do you not guess the prurient itch in those vile fingers, soiling her very soul with their touch? And you saw him whisper. Did you mark his eyes when he whispered?’

‘Why, here is jealousy—jealousy that will magnify a woman’s hair into a rope! Bah!’

But Count Anthony went on relentlessly. ‘Am I to marry that, and have perhaps other men hereafter making free with one who, in her wantonness and vanity and greed of admiration, does not know where to place the barriers of reserve? And this to consolidate the alliance between Burgundy and Guelders. Our alliance, Charles, is firm enough without that. So think of it no more.’

‘Think of it no more!’ The Duke was flung from rage to rage. ‘You are publicly betrothed.’

‘Let the lady announce that she has changed her mind. Let there be reasons of state why each of us should wed elsewhere.’

The veins of the Duke’s brow stood out congested. For a moment he looked as if he would strike his cousin. Then he mastered himself.

‘No more of this,’ he said coldly, peremptorily, the overlord admonishing his vassal. ‘You are angry with her at the moment, and incapable of calm judgment. We’ll talk of it again to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow!’ said Count Anthony in the dreamy accents of one who questions Fate. ‘To-morrow?’

‘I commend you to consider well your position between this and then.’

On that threat, for it amounted to no less, the Duke was gone. Count Anthony raised his voice to call after him: ‘Good-night, Charles!’

But the slamming of the door was his only answer.

Alone, Count Anthony turned to the night again, and questioned the darkling heavens upon reality. It must exist somewhere behind this shadowy phantasmagoria of a court, which obscured it precisely as the mists below obscured the park. Let him seek this reality, and, if found, be lost in it.

He summoned from the anteroom his page, a sleek, well-grown lad of sixteen of the noble Guelders family of Valburg, who was already ripe for promotion to the rank of esquire. He gave him certain orders concerned with the lad’s return to Guelders on the morrow, which plunged him into dismay. Then he sent for the master of his household, his intendant, his chamberlain, his secretary, his two esquires, and finally the captain of his guard; and the summer night was far gone before the last of his business with them was transacted.

From his casement he watched the early dawn breaking over the park and giving form to its dark mass; and he pursued his dream of that world of reality, the promised land towards which he was to set his feet.