Scaramouche

the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I found him detestable. You heard him allude last night to the unfortunate La Binet. You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode of life, his rearing. To that there is no answer, I suppose. He conforms to type. Enough! But to me, he was the embodiment of evil, just as you have always been the embodiment of good; he was the embodiment of sin, just as you are the embodiment of purity. I had enthroned you so high, Aline, so high, and yet no higher than your place. Could I, then, suffer that you should be dragged down by ambition, could I suffer the evil I detested 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, André? 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 André, 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, André; 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.

Colophon

Scaramouche
was published in 1921 by
Rafael Sabatini.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1999 by
An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
Soldier Playing the Theorbo,
a painting completed in 1865 by
Ernest Meissonier.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
June 14, 2017, 9:49 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/rafael-sabatini/scaramouche.

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