The Snare. Rafael Sabatini

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СКАЧАТЬ are very late,” Lady O’Moy greeted him petulantly. Since she spent her life in keeping other people waiting, it naturally fretted her to discover unpunctuality in others.

      Her portrait, by Raeburn, which now adorns the National Gallery, had been painted in the previous year. You will have seen it, or at least you will have seen one of its numerous replicas, and you will have remarked its singular, delicate, rose-petal loveliness—the gleaming golden head, the flawless outline of face and feature, the immaculate skin, the dark blue eyes with their look of innocence awakening.

      Thus was she now in her artfully simple gown of flowered muslin with its white fichu folded across her neck that was but a shade less white; thus was she, just as Raeburn had painted her, saving, of course, that her expression, matching her words, was petulant.

      “I was detained by the arrival of a mail-bag from Vizeu,” Sir Terence excused himself, as he took the chair which Mullins, the elderly, pontifical butler, drew out for him. “Ned is attending to it, and will be kept for a few moments yet.”

      Lady O’Moy’s expression quickened. “Are there no letters for me?”

      “None, my dear, I believe.”

      “No word from Dick?” Again there was that note of ever ready petulance. “It is too provoking. He should know that he must make me anxious by his silence. Dick is so thoughtless—so careless of other people’s feelings. I shall write to him severely.”

      The adjutant paused in the act of unfolding his napkin. The prepared explanation trembled on his lips; but its falsehood, repellent to him, was not uttered.

      “I should certainly do so, my dear,” was all he said, and addressed himself to his breakfast.

      “What news from headquarters?” Miss Armytage asked him. “Are things going well?”

      “Much better now that Principal Souza’s influence is at an end. Cotton reports that the destruction of the mills in the Mondego valley is being carried out systematically.”

      Miss Armytage’s dark, thoughtful eyes became wistful.

      “Do you know, Terence,” she said, “that I am not without some sympathy for the Portuguese resistance to Lord Wellington’s decrees. They must bear so terribly hard upon the people. To be compelled with their own hands to destroy their homes and lay waste the lands upon which they have laboured—what could be more cruel?”

      “War can never be anything but cruel,” he answered gravely. “God help the people over whose lands it sweeps. Devastation is often the least of the horrors marching in its train.”

      “Why must war be?” she asked him, in intelligent rebellion against that most monstrous and infamous of all human madnesses.

      O’Moy proceeded to do his best to explain the unexplainable, and since, himself a professional soldier, he could not take the sane view of his sane young questioner, hot argument ensued between them, to the infinite weariness of Lady O’Moy, who out of self-protection gave herself to the study of the latest fashion plates from London and the consideration of a gown for the ball which the Count of Redondo was giving in the following week.

      It was thus in all things, for these cousins represented the two poles of womanhood. Miss Armytage without any of Lady O’Moy’s insistent and excessive femininity, was nevertheless feminine to the core. But hers was the Diana type of womanliness. She was tall and of a clean-limbed, supple grace, now emphasised by the riding-habit which she was wearing—for she had been in the saddle during the hour which Lady O’Moy had consecrated to the rites of toilet and devotions done before her mirror. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, vivacity and intelligence lent her countenance an attraction very different from the allurement of her cousin’s delicate loveliness. And because her countenance was a true mirror of her mind, she argued shrewdly now, so shrewdly that she drove O’Moy to entrench himself behind generalisations.

      “My dear Sylvia, war is most merciful where it is most merciless,” he assured her with the Irish gift for paradox. “At home in the Government itself there are plenty who argue as you argue, and who are wondering when we shall embark for England. That is because they are intellectuals, and war is a thing beyond the understanding of intellectuals. It is not intellect but brute instinct and brute force that will help humanity in such a crisis as the present. Therefore, let me tell you, my child, that a government of intellectual men is the worst possible government for a nation engaged in a war.”

      This was far from satisfying Miss Armytage. Lord Wellington himself was an intellectual, she objected. Nobody could deny it. There was the work he had done as Irish Secretary, and there was the calculating genius he had displayed at Vimeiro, at Oporto, at Talavera.

      And then, observing her husband to be in distress, Lady O’Moy put down her fashion plate and brought up her heavy artillery to relieve him.

      “Sylvia, dear,” she interpolated, “I wonder that you will for ever be arguing about things you don’t understand.”

      Miss Armytage laughed good-humouredly. She was not easily put out of countenance. “What woman doesn’t?” she asked.

      “I don’t, and I am a woman, surely.”

      “Ah, but an exceptional woman,” her cousin rallied her affectionately, tapping the shapely white arm that protruded from a foam of lace. And Lady O’Moy, to whom words never had any but a literal meaning, set herself to purr precisely as one would have expected. Complacently she discoursed upon the perfection of her own endowments, appealing ever and anon to her husband for confirmation, and O’Moy, who loved her with all the passionate reverence which Nature working inscrutably to her ends so often inspires in just such strong, essentially masculine men for just such fragile and excessively feminine women, afforded this confirmation with all the enthusiasm of sincere conviction.

      Thus until Mullins broke in upon them with the announcement of a visit from Count Samoval, an announcement more welcome to Lady O’Moy than to either of her companions.

      The Portuguese nobleman was introduced. He had attained to a degree of familiarity in the adjutant’s household that permitted of his being received without ceremony there at that breakfast-table spread in the open. He was a slender, handsome, swarthy man of thirty, scrupulously dressed, as graceful and elegant in his movements as a fencing master, which indeed he might have been; for his skill with the foils was a matter of pride to himself and notoriety to all the world. Nor was it by any means the only skill he might have boasted, for Jeronymo de Samoval was in many things, a very subtle, supple gentleman. His friendship with the O’Moys, now some three months old, had been considerably strengthened of late by the fact that he had unexpectedly become one of the most hostile critics of the Council of Regency as lately constituted, and one of the most ardent supporters of the Wellingtonian policy.

      He bowed with supremest grace to the ladies, ventured to kiss the fair, smooth hand of his hostess, undeterred by the frosty stare of O’Moy’s blue eyes whose approval of all men was in inverse proportion to their approval of his wife—and finally proffered her the armful of early roses that he brought.

      “These poor roses of Portugal to their sister from England,” said his softly caressing tenor voice.

      “Ye’re a poet,” said O’Moy tartly.

      “Having found Castalia here,” said, the Count, “shall I not drink its limpid waters?”

      “Not, СКАЧАТЬ