The Rafael Sabatini Megapack. Rafael SabatiniЧитать онлайн книгу.
to mate with the good I loved? What could have come of it but your own damnation, as I told you that day at Gavrillac? Because of that my detestation of him became a personal, active thing. I resolved to save you at all costs from a fate so horrible. Had you been able to tell me that you loved him it would have been different. I should have hoped that in a union sanctified by love you would have raised him to your own pure heights. But that out of considerations of worldly advancement you should lovelessly consent to mate with him… Oh, it was vile and hopeless. And so I fought him—a rat fighting a lion—fought him relentlessly until I saw that love had come to take in your heart the place of ambition. Then I desisted.”
“Until you saw that love had taken the place of ambition!” Tears had been gathering in her eyes whilst he was speaking. Now amazement eliminated her emotion. “But when did you see that? When?”
“I—I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time…surely, Aline, that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him in the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?”
“For him! It was concern for you,” she cried, without thinking what she said.
But it did not convince him. “For me? When you knew—when all the world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!”
“Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded me that if you met nothing could save you.”
He looked at her frowning.
“Why this, Aline?” he asked her with some sternness. “I can understand that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those sentiments. It is a woman’s way, I suppose.”
“Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I have told you!”
“And was it concern for me,” he asked her, “that laid you swooning when you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes.”
“Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you as he had said he would. What else could I conclude?”
He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back, a hand to his brow. “And that was why you fainted?” he asked incredulously.
She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
He held out both hands to her.
“Aline! Aline!” His voice broke on the name. “It was I…”
“O blind Andre, it was always you—always! Never, never did I think of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when…when that theatre girl came into your life, and then…” She broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away. “I thought of following ambition, since there was nothing left to follow.”
He shook himself. “I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad,” he said.
“Blind, Andre; just blind,” she assured him.
“Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen.”
“And yet,” she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of old, “I have never found you lack presumption.”
M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window, beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if each saw Paradise in the other’s face.
*
THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENT (First Series)
First Series
PREFACE
In approaching “The Historical Nights’ Entertainment” I set myself the task of reconstructing, in the fullest possible detail and with all the colour available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous events. I would select for my purpose those which were in themselves bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst relating each of these events in the form of a story, I would compel that story scrupulously to follow the actual, recorded facts without owing anything to fiction, and I would draw upon my imagination, if at all, merely as one might employ colour to fill in the outlines which history leaves grey, taking care that my colour should be as true to nature as possible. For dialogue I would depend upon such scraps of actual speech as were chronicled in each case, amplifying it by translating into terms of speech the paraphrases of contemporary chroniclers.
Such was the task I set myself. I am aware that it has been attempted once or twice already, beginning, perhaps, with the “Crimes Celebres” of Alexandre Dumas. I am not aware that the attempt has ever succeeded. This is not to say that I claim success in the essays that follow. How nearly I may have approached success—judged by the standard I had set myself—how far I may have fallen short, my readers will discern. I am conscious, however, of having in the main dutifully resisted the temptation to take the easier road, to break away from restricting fact for the sake of achieving a more intriguing narrative. In one instance, however, I have quite deliberately failed, and in some others I have permitted myself certain speculations to resolve mysteries of which no explanation has been discovered. Of these it is necessary that I should make a full confession.
My deliberate failure is “The Night of Nuptials.” I discovered an allusion to the case of Charles the Bold and Sapphira Danvelt in Macaulay’s “History of England”—quoted from an old number of the “Spectator”—whilst I was working upon the case of Lady Alice Lisle. There a similar episode is mentioned as being related of Colonel Kirke, but discredited because known for a story that has a trick of springing up to attach itself to unscrupulous captains. I set out to track it to its source, and having found its first appearance to be in connection with Charles the Bold’s German captain Rhynsault, I attempted to reconstruct the event as it might have happened, setting it at least in surroundings of solid fact.
My most flagrant speculation occurs in “The Night of Hate.” But in defence of it I can honestly say that it is at least no more flagrant than the speculations on this subject that have become enshrined in history as facts. In other words, I claim for my reconstruction of the circumstances attending the mysterious death of Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandia, that it no more lacks historical authority than do any other of the explanatory narratives adopted by history to assign the guilt to Gandia’s brother, Cesare Borgia.
In the “Cambridge Modern History” our most authoritative writers on this epoch have definitely pronounced that there is no evidence acceptable to historians to support the view current for four centuries that Cesare Borgia was the murderer.
Elsewhere I have dealt with this at length. Here let it suffice to say that it was not until nine months after the deed that the name of Cesare Borgia was first associated with it; that public opinion had in the mean time assigned the guilt to a half-dozen others in succession; that no motive for the crime is discoverable in the case of Cesare; that the motives advanced will not bear examination, and that they bear on the face of them the stamp of having been put forward hastily to support an accusation unscrupulously political in purpose; that the first men accused by the popular voice were the Cardinal Vice-Chancellor Ascanio Sforza and his nephew Giovanni Sforza, Tyrant of Pesaro; and, finally, that in Matarazzo’s “Chronicles of Perugia” there is a fairly detailed account of how the murder was perpetrated by the latter.
Matarazzo, I confess, is worthy of no more credit than any other of the contemporary reporters of common gossip. But at least he is worthy of no less. And it is undeniable that in Sforza’s case a strong motive for the murder was not lacking.
My narrative in “The Night of Hate” is admittedly a purely theoretical account of the crime. But it is closely based upon all the known facts of incidence and of character; and if there is nothing in the surviving records that will absolutely support it, neither is there anything that can absolutely refute it.
In “The Night of Masquerade”