Gallantry: Dizain des Fetes Galantes by James Branch Cabell (large screen ebook reader TXT) 📕

Captain Dungelt. I am sorry, because I like you, even though you are fat."

"You bid me leave you?" said John Bulmer. He was comfortably seated upon the turf.

"For your own good," said she, "I advise you to." And she closed the wicket.

"The acceptance of advice," said John Bulmer, "is luckily optional. I shall therefore go down into the village, purchase a lute, have supper, and I shall be here at sunrise to greet you with an aubade, according to the ancient custom of Poictesme."

The wicket remained closed.

VI

"I will go to Marly, inform Gaston of the entire matter, and then my wife is mine. I have tricked her neatly.

"I will do nothing of the sort. Gaston, can give me the woman's body only.
I shall accordingly buy me a lute."

VII

Achille Cazaio on the Taunenfels did not sleep that night….

The two essays [Footnote: The twenty-first chapter of Du Maillot's Hommes Illustres; and the fifth of d'Avranches's Ancêtres de la Révolution. Löwe has an excellent digest of this data.] dealing with the man have scarcely touched his capabilities. His exploits in and about Paris and his Gascon doings, while important enough in the outcome, are but the gesticulations of a puppet: the historian's real concern is with the hands that manoeuvered above Cazaio; and whether or no Achille Cazaio organized the riots in Toulouse and Guienne and Béarn is a question with which, at this late day, there can be little profitable commerce.

One recommends this Cazaio rather to the spinners of romance: with his morality—a trifle buccaneerish on occasion—once discreetly palliated, history affords few heroes more instantly taking to the fancy….One casts a hankering eye toward this Cazaio's rumored parentage, his hopeless and life-long adoration of Claire de Puysange, his dealings with d'Argenson and King Louis le Bien-Aimé, the obscure and mischievous imbroglios in Spain, and finally his aggrandizement and his flame-lit death, as du Maillot, say, records these happenings: and one finds therein the outline of an impelling hero, and laments that our traffic must be with a stolid and less livelily tinted Bulmer. And with a sigh one passes on toward the labor prearranged….

To-night Cazaio's desires were astir, and consciousness of his own power was tempting him. He had never troubled Poictesme much: the Taunenfels were accessible on that side, and so long as he confined his depredations to the frontier, the Duc de Puysange merely shrugged and rendered his annual tribute; it was not a great sum, and the Duke preferred to pay it rather than forsake his international squabbles to quash a purely parochial nuisance like a bandit, who was, too, a kinsman….

Meanwhile Cazaio had grown stronger than de Puysange knew. It was a time of disaffection: the more violent here and there were beginning to assert that before hanging a superfluous peasant or two de Puysange ought to bore himself with inquiries concerning the abstract justice of the action. For everywhere the irrational lower classes were grumbling about the very miseries and maltreatments that had efficiently disposed of their fathers for centuries: they seemed not to respect tradition: already they were posting placards in the Paris boulevards,—"Shave the King for a monk, hang the Pompadour, and break Machault on the wheel,"—and already a boy of twelve, one Joseph Guillotin, was running about the streets of Saintes yonder. So the commoners flocked to Cazaio in the Taunenfels until, little by little, he had gathered an army about him.

And at Bellegarde, de Soyecourt had only a handful of men, Cazaio meditated to-night. And the woman was there,—the woman whose eyes were blue and incurious, whose face was always scornful.

In history they liken Achille Cazaio to Simon de Montfort, and the Gracchi, and other graspers at fruit as yet unripe; or, if the perfervid word of d'Avranches be accepted, you may regard him as "le Saint-Jean de la Révolution glorieuse." But I think you may with more wisdom regard him as a man of strong passions, any one of which, for the time being, possessed him utterly.

Now he struck his palm upon the table.

"I have never seen a woman one-half so beautiful, Dom Michel. I am more than ever in love with her."

"In that event," the Friar considered, "it is, of course, unfortunate she should have a brand-new husband. Husbands are often thought much of when they are a novelty."

"You bungled matters, you fat, mouse-hearted rascal. You could quite easily have killed him."

The Dominican spread out his hands, and afterward reached for the bottle. "Milanese armor!" said Dom Michel Frégose. [Footnote: The same ecclesiastic who more lately dubbed himself, with Maréchal de Richelieu's encouragement, l'Abbé de Trans, and was discreditably involved in the forgeries of Madame de St. Vincent.]

"Yet I am master of Poictesme," Cazaio thundered, "I have ten men to de
Soyecourt's one. Am I, then, lightly to be thwarted?"

"Undoubtedly you could take Bellegarde—and the woman along with the castle,—if you decided they were worth the price of a little killing. I think they are not worth it, I strongly advise you to have up a wench from the village, to put out the light, and exercise your imagination."

Cazaio shook his head. "No, Dom Michel, you churchmen live too lewdly to understand the tyranny of love."

"—Besides, there is that trifling matter of your understanding with de
Puysange,—and, besides, de Puysange will be here in two days."

Cazaio snapped his fingers. "He will arrive after the fair." Cazaio uncorked the ink-bottle with an august gesture.

"Write!" said Achille Cazaio.

VIII

As John Bulmer leisurely ascended from the village the birds were waking. Whether day were at hand or no was a matter of twittering debate overhead, but in the west the stars were paling one by one, like candles puffed out by the pretentious little wind that was bustling about the turquoise cupola of heaven; and eastward Bellegarde showed stark, as though scissored from a painting, against a sky of gray-and-rose. Here was a world of faint ambiguity. Here was the exquisite tension of dawn, curiously a-chime with John Bulmer's mood, for just now he found the universe too beautiful to put any actual faith in its existence. He had strayed into Faëry somehow—into Atlantis, or Avalon, or "a wood near Athens,"—into a land of opalescence and vapor and delicate color, that would vanish, bubble-like, at the discreet tap of Pawsey fetching in his shaving-water; meantime John Bulmer's memory snatched at each loveliness, jealously, as a pug snatches bits of sugar.

Beneath her window he paused and shifted his lute before him. Then he began to sing, exultant in the unreality of everything and of himself in particular.

Sang John Bulmer,

    "Speed forth, my song, the sun's ambassador,
  Lest in the east night prove the conqueror,
  The day be slain, and darkness triumph,—for
  The sun is single, but her eyes are twain.

    "And now the sunlight and the night contest
  A doubtful battle, and day bides at best
  Doubtful, until she waken. 'Tis attest
  The sun is single.

                  "But her eyes are twain,—
  And should the light of all the world delay,
  And darkness prove victorious? Is it day
  Now that the sun alone is risen?

                                 "Nay,
  The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,—
  Twain firmaments that mock with heavenlier hue
  The heavens' less lordly and less gracious blue,
  And lit with sunlier sunlight through and through,

    "The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,
  And of fair things this side of Paradise
  Fairest, of goodly things most goodly,"

He paused here and smote a resonant and louder chord. His voice ascended in dulcet supplication.

                                      "Rise,
  And succor the benighted world that cries,
  The sun is single, but her eyes are twain!"

"Eh—? So it is you, is it?" Claire was peeping disdainfully from the window. Her throat was bare, and her dusky hair was a shade dishevelled, and in her meditative eyes he caught the flicker of her tardiest dream just as it vanished.

"It is I," John Bulmer confessed—"come to awaken you according to the ancient custom of Poictesme."

"I would much rather have had my sleep out," said she, resentfully. "In perfect frankness, I find you and your ancient customs a nuisance."

"You lack romance, my wife."

"Oh—?" She was a person of many cryptic exclamations, this bride of his.
Presently she said: "Indeed, Monsieur Bulmer, I entreat you to leave
Poictesme. I have informed Louis of everything, and he is rather furious."

John Bulmer said, "Do you comprehend why I have not already played the emigrant?"

After a little pause, she answered, "Yes."

"And for the same reason I can never leave you so long as this gross body is at my disposal. You are about to tell me that if I remain here I shall probably be hanged on account of what happened yesterday. There are grounds for my considering this outcome unlikely, but if I knew it to be inevitable—if I had but one hour's start of Jack Ketch,—I swear to you I would not budge."

"I am heartily sorry," she replied, "since if I had known you really cared for me—so much—I would never have married you. Oh, it is impossible!" the girl laughed, with a trace of worriment. "You had not laid eyes on me until a week ago yesterday!"

"My dear," John Bulmer answered, "I am perhaps inadequately acquainted with the etiquette of such matters, but I make bold to question if love is exclusively regulated by clock-ticks. Observe!" he said, with a sort of fury: "there is a mocking demon in me who twists my tongue into a jest even when I am most serious. I love you: and I dare not tell you so without a grin. Then when you laugh at me I, too, can laugh, and the whole transaction can be regarded as a parody. Oh, I am indeed a coward!"

"You are nothing of the sort! You proved that yesterday."

"Yesterday I shot an unsuspecting man, and afterward fenced with another—in a shirt of Milanese armor! Yes, I was astoundingly heroic yesterday, for the simple reason that all the while I knew myself to be as safe as though I were snug at home snoring under an eider-down quilt. Yet, to do me justice, I am a shade less afraid of physical danger than of ridicule."

She gave him a womanly answer. "You are not ridiculous, and to wear armor was very sensible of you."

"To the contrary, I am extremely ridiculous. For observe: I am an elderly man, quite old enough to be your father; I am fat—No, that is kind of you, but I am not of pleasing portliness, I am just unpardonably fat; and, I believe, I am not possessed of any fatal beauty of feature such as would by ordinary impel young women to pursue me with unsolicited affection: and being all this, I presume to love you. To me, at least, that appears ridiculous."

"Ah, do not laugh!" she said. "Do not laugh, Monsieur Bulmer!"

But John Bulmer persisted in that curious laughter. "Because," he presently stated, "the whole affair is so very diverting."

"Believe me," Claire began, "I am sorry that you care—so much. I—do not understand. I am sorry,—I am not sorry," the girl said, in a new tone, and you saw her transfigured; "I am glad! Do you comprehend?—I am glad!" And then she swiftly closed the window.

John Bulmer observed. "I am perhaps subject to hallucinations, for otherwise the fact had been previously noted by geographers that heaven is immediately adjacent to Poictesme."

IX

Presently the old flippancy came back to him, since an ancient custom is not lightly broken; and John Bulmer smiled sleepily and shook his head. "Here am I on my honeymoon, with my wife locked up in the château, and with me locked out of it. My position savors too much of George Dandin's to be quite acceptable. Let us set about rectifying matters."

He came to the great gate of the castle and found two sentries there. He thought this odd, but they recognized him as de Soyecourt's guest, and after a whispered consultation admitted him. In the courtyard a lackey took charge of Monsieur Bulmer, and he was conducted into the presence of the Marquis de Soyecourt. "What the devil!" thought John Bulmer, "is Bellegarde in a state of siege?"

The little Marquis sat beside the Duchesse de Puysange, to the rear of a long table with a crimson cover. Their attitudes smacked vaguely of the judicial, and before them stood, guarded by four attendants, a ragged and dissolute looking fellow whom the Marquis was languidly considering.

"My dear man," de Soyecourt was saying as John Bulmer came into the room "when you brought this extraordinary epistle to