Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (best color ebook reader txt) 📕

The Countess looked up and saw him as he was driven past. Her face lighted; almost it seemed to him she was about to greet him or to call him, wherefore, to avoid a difficulty, arising out of the presence there of his late antagonist, he anticipated her by bowing frigidly⁠—for his mood was frigid, the more frigid by virtue of what he saw⁠—and then resumed his seat with eyes that looked deliberately ahead.

Could anything more completely have confirmed him in his conviction that it was on M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s account that Aline had come to plead with him that morning? For what his eyes had seen, of course, was a lady overcome with emotion at the sight of blood of her dear friend, and that same dear friend restoring her with assurances that his hurt was very far from mortal. Later, much later, he was to blame his own perverse stupidity. Almost is he too severe in his self-condemnation. For how else could he have interpreted the scene he beheld, his preconceptions being what they were?

That which he had already been suspecting, he now accounted proven to him. Aline had been wanting in candour on the subject of her feelings towards M. de La Tour d’Azyr. It was, he supposed, a woman’s way to be secretive in such matters, and he must not blame her. Nor could he blame her in his heart for having succumbed to the singular charm of such a man as the Marquis⁠—for not even his hostility could blind him to M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s attractions. That she had succumbed was betrayed, he thought, by the weakness that had overtaken her upon seeing him wounded.

“My God!” he cried aloud. “What must she have suffered, then, if I had killed him as I intended!”

If only she had used candour with him, she could so easily have won his consent to the thing she asked. If only she had told him what now he saw, that she loved M. de La Tour d’Azyr, instead of leaving him to assume her only regard for the Marquis to be based on unworthy worldly ambition, he would at once have yielded.

He fetched a sigh, and breathed a prayer for forgiveness to the shade of Vilmorin.

“It is perhaps as well that my lunge went wide,” he said.

“What do you mean?” wondered Le Chapelier.

“That in this business I must relinquish all hope of recommencing.”

M. de La Tour d’Azyr was seen no more in the Manège⁠—or indeed in Paris at all⁠—throughout all the months that the National Assembly remained in session to complete its work of providing France with a Constitution. After all, though the wound to his body had been comparatively slight, the wound to such a pride as his had been all but mortal.

The rumour ran that he had emigrated. But that was only half the truth. The whole of it was that he had joined that group of noble travellers who came and went between the Tuileries and the headquarters of the émigrés at Coblentz. He became, in short, a member of the royalist secret service that in the end was to bring down the monarchy in ruins.

That time, however, was not yet. For the present the royalists continued to find the innovators more or less droll; they continued to laugh at them, and, laughing, edited their merry sheet, The Acts of the Apostles, in the Palais Royal.

One visit M. de La Tour d’Azyr had paid to Meudon. He was well received by M. de Kercadiou, who, after all, had no quarrel with him. But Mademoiselle kept her chamber, firm in her expressed resolve never again to receive him. It nowise modified her resolve that André-Louis should not have been harmed in the encounter. At a certain price, implied, she had offered herself to M. le Marquis, and he had refused to buy. The abiding humiliation of that thought alone precluded the possibility of her ever consenting to see M. le Marquis again.

That unalterable resolve of hers was delicately conveyed to him by M. de Kercadiou. Understanding the enormity of his offence from her point of view, he took his leave in hopelessness, and returned no more.

As for André-Louis, without reason to hope that M. de Kercadiou would depart from his written word, he submitted without attempting to combat a decision which he assumed to be irrevocable. His godfather’s house saw him no more. But twice in the course of that winter he saw M. de Kercadiou and Aline; once in the Galéri de Bois in the Palais Royal, when bows were distantly exchanged between them, and on another occasion in a box at the Théâtre Français, when they did not see him at all. Aline he saw on yet a third occasion, and again in a box at the theatre⁠—this time with Madame de Plougastel. That was early in the following Spring, and again Aline did not see him.

Meanwhile he went about his duties in the Assembly with what zest he could, and also attended to the direction of his fencing academy, which continued to prosper exceedingly, having received an enormous impetus from his performances in the Bois during that memorable September week. Subsisting now almost entirely on the eighteen francs a day of his salary as a deputy, his already considerable savings began to mount up. These he was prudently investing in Germany. He sold such shares as he had acquired in the Compagnie des Eaux and his bonds of the Caisse d’Escompte, and disposed of the proceeds through a German banker in the Rue Dauphine. He purchased during those two years some considerable property in the neighbourhood of Dresden. He would have preferred his native country. But the tenure of land in France appeared to him, and rightly, to be insecure. Today one group of Frenchmen had dispossessed another; tomorrow another group might dispossess those who had come forward to purchase the last dispossessions.

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