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In Kings' Byways

by Stanley John Weyman · English · Gutenberg #22334 · 490,516 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: In Kings' Byways

Author: Stanley John Weyman


        
Release date: August 16, 2007 [eBook #22334]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN KINGS' BYWAYS ***




Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, Janet Blenkinship
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net









IN KINGS' BYWAYS

BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN
AUTHOR OF
"A GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE," "THE CASTLE INN," "COUNT HANNIBAL," ETC.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
1902

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN

_All rights reserved._


       *       *       *       *       *


BY STANLEY J. WEYMAN

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[Illustration: A DAUGHTER OF THE GIRONDE

_Page 326_]




CONTENTS


PART I

                                                           PAGE

FLORE,                                                        1

CRILLON'S STAKE,                                             51

FOR THE CAUSE,                                               86

THE KING'S STRATAGEM,                                       131

THE HOUSE ON THE WALL,                                      152

HUNT THE OWLER,                                             177

THE TWO PAGES,                                              194


PART II

THE DIARY OF A STATESMAN

    EPISODE OF THE FOWL IN THE POT,                         213

    EPISODE OF THE BOXWOOD FIRE,                            238

    EPISODE OF THE SNOWBALL,                                266


PART III

KING TERROR

    A DAUGHTER OF THE GIRONDE,                              295

    IN THE NAME OF THE LAW,                                 329




PART I




IN KINGS' BYWAYS




FLORE

(1643)


It was about a month after my marriage--and third clerk to the most
noble the Bishop of Beauvais, and even admitted on occasions to write in
his presence and prepare his minutes, who should marry if I might
not?--it was about a month after my marriage, I say, that the
thunderbolt, to which I have referred, fell and shattered my fortunes. I
rose one morning--they were firing guns for the victory of Rocroy, I
remember, so that it must have been eight weeks or more after the death
of the late king, and the glorious rising of the Sun of France--and who
as happy as I? A summer morning, Monsieur, and bright, and I had all I
wished. The river as it sparkled and rippled against the piers of the
Pont Neuf far below, the wet roofs that twinkled under our garret
window, were not more brilliant than my lord the Bishop's fortunes: and
as is the squirrel so is the tail. Of a certainty, I was happy that
morning. I thought of the little hut under the pine wood at Gabas in
Bearn, where I was born, and of my father cobbling by the unglazed
window, his nightcap on his bald head, and his face plaistered where the
sherd had slipped; and I puffed out my cheeks to think that I had
climbed so high. High? How high might not a man climb, who had married
the daughter of the Queen's under-porter, and had sometimes the ear of
my lord, the Queen's minister--my lord of Beauvais in whom all men saw
the coming master of France! my lord whose stately presence beamed on a
world still chilled by the dead hand of Richelieu!

But that morning, that very morning, I was to learn that who climbs may
fall. I went below at the usual hour; at the usual hour Monseigneur
left, attended, for the Council; presently all the house was in an
uproar. My lord had returned, and called for Prosper. I fancied even
then that I caught something ominous in the sound of my name as it
passed from lip to lip; and nervously I made all haste to the chamber.
But fast as I went I did not go fast enough; one thrust me on this side,
another on that. The steward cursed me as he handed me on to the
head-clerk, who stormed at me; while the secretary waited for me at the
door, and, seizing me by the neck, ran me into the room. "In, rascal,
in!" he growled in my ear, "and I hope your skin may pay for it!"

Naturally by this time I was quaking: and Monseigneur's looks finished
me. He stood in the middle of the chamber, his plump handsome face pale
and sullen. And as he scowled at me, "Yes!" he said curtly, "that is the
fellow. What does he say?"

"Speak!" the head-clerk cried, seizing me by the ear and twisting it
until I fell on my knees. "Imbecile! But it is likely enough he did it
on purpose."

"Ay, and was bribed!" said the secretary.

"He should be hung up," the steward cried, truculently, "before he does
further mischief! And if my lord will give the word----"

"Silence!" the Bishop said, with a dark glance at me. "What does he
plead?"

The head-clerk twisted my ear until I screamed. "Ingrate!" he cried. "Do
you hear his Grace speak to you? Answer him aloud!"

"My lord," I cried piteously, "I do not know of what I am accused. And
besides, I have done nothing! Nothing!"

"Nothing!" half a dozen echoed. "Nothing!" the head-clerk added
brutally. "Nothing, and you add a cipher to the census of Paris!
Nothing, and your lying pen led my lord to state the population to be
five millions instead of five hundred thousand! Nothing, and you sent
his Grace's Highness to the Council to be corrected by low clerks and
people, and made a laughing-stock for the Cardinal, and----"

"Silence!" said the Bishop, fiercely. "Enough! Take him away, and----"

"Hang him!" cried the steward.

"No, fool, but have him to the courtyard, and let the grooms flog him
through the gates. And have a care you," he continued, addressing me,
"that I do not see your face again or it will be worse for you!"

I flung myself down and would have appealed against the sentence, but
the Bishop, who had suffered at the Council and whose ears still burned,
was pitiless. Before I could utter three words a dozen officious hands
plucked me up and thrust me to the door. Outside worse things awaited
me. A shower of kicks and cuffs and blows fell upon me; vainly
struggling and shrieking, and seeking still to gain his lordship's ear,
I was hustled along the passage to the courtyard, and there dragged amid
jeers and laughter to the fountain, and brutally flung in. When I
scrambled out, they thrust me back again and again: until, almost dead
with cold and rage, I was at last permitted to escape, only to be hunted
round the yard with stirrup-leathers that cut like knives, and drew a
scream at every stroke. I doubled like a hare; more than once I knocked
half a dozen down; but I was fast growing exhausted, when some one more
prudent or less cruel than his fellows, opened the gates before me, and
I darted into the street.

I was sobbing with rage and pain, dripping, ragged, and barefoot; for
some saving rogue had prudently drawn off my shoes in the scuffle. It
was a wonder that I was not fallen upon and chased through the streets.
Fortunately in the street opposite my lord's gates opened the mouth of a
little alley. I plunged into it, and in the first dark corner dropped
exhausted and lay sobbing and weeping on a heap of refuse. I who had
risen so happily a few hours before! I who had climbed so high! I who
had a wife new-married in my garret at home!

I do not know how long I lay there, now cursing the jealousy of the
clerks, who would have flayed me to save themselves, and now the cruelty
of the grooms who thought it fine sport to whip a scholar. But the first
tempest of passion had spent itself, when a woman--not the first whom my
plight had attracted, but the others had merely shrugged their shoulders
and passed on--paused before me. "What a white skin!" she cried, making
great eyes at me; and they had cut my clothes so that I was half bare to
her. And then, "You are not a street-prowler. How come you here, my lad,
in that guise?"

I was silent, and pretended to be sullen, being ashamed to meet her
gaze.

She stood a moment staring at me curiously. Then, "Better go home," she
said, shaking her head sedately, "or those who have robbed you may end
by worse. I doubt not this is what comes of raking and night-work. Go
home, my lad," she repeated, and went on her way.

Home! The word raised new thoughts, new hopes, new passions. I scrambled
to my feet. I had a home--the Bishop might deprive me of it: but I had
also a wife, from whom God only could separate me. I felt a sudden fire
run through me at the thought of her, and of all I had suffered since I
left her arms: and with new boldness I turned, and sore and aching as I
was, I stumbled back to the place of my shame.

The steward and two or three of his underlings were standing in the
gateway, and saw me approach; and began to jeer. The high grey front of
Monseigneur's hotel, three sides of a square, towered up behind them;
the steward in the opening sprawled his feet apart and set his hands to
his stout sides, and jeered at me. "Ha! ha! Here is the lame leper from
the Cour des Miracles!" he cried. "Have a care or he will give you the
itch!"

"Good sir, the swill-tub is open," cried another, mocking me. "Help
yourself!"

A third spat at me and bade me begone for a pig. The passers--there were
always a knot of gazers opposite my lord of Beauvais' palace in those
days, when we had the Queen's ear and bade fair to succeed
Richelieu--stayed to stare.

"I want my goods," I said, trembling.

"Your goods!" the steward answered, swelling out his brawny chest, and
smiling at me over it. "_Your_ goods, indeed! Begone, and be thankful
you have escaped so well."

"Give me my things--from my room," I said stubbornly; and I tried to
enter. "They are my own!"

He moved sideways so as to block the passage. "Your goods? They are
Monseigneur's," he said.

"My wife, then!"

He winked, the great beast. "Your wife?" he said. "Well, true; she is
not Monseigneur's. But she will do for me." And with a coarse laugh he
winked again at the crowd.

At that the pent-up rage which I had so long stemmed broke out. He stood
a head taller than I, and a foot wider; but with a scream I sprang at
his throat, and by the very surprise of the attack and his unwieldiness,
I got him down and beat his face with my fists. His fellows, as soon as
they recovered from their astonishment, tore me off, showing me no
mercy. But by that time I had so marked him that the blood poured down
his fat cheeks. He scrambled to his feet, panting and furious, his oaths
tripping over one another.

"To the Chatelet with him!" he cried, spitting out a tooth and staring
at me through the mud on his face. "He shall swing for this! He tried to
break in. I call you to witness he tried to break in!"

"Ay, to the Chatelet! To the Chatelet!" cried the crowd, siding with the
stronger party. He was my lord of Beauvais' steward; I was a
gutter-snipe and dangerous. A dozen hands held me tightly; yet not so
tightly, but that, a coach passing at that moment and driving us all to
the wall, I managed by a jerk--I was desperate by this time, and savage
as a wild-cat--to snatch myself loose. In a second I was speeding down
the Rue Bons Enfants with the hue and cry behind me.

I have said, I was desperate. In an hour the world was changed for me.
In an hour I had broken with every tradition of safe and modest and
clerkly life; and from a sleek scribe was become a ragged outlaw flying
through the streets. I saw the gallows, I felt the lash sink like molten
lead into the quivering back, still bleeding from the stirrup-leathers:
I forgot all but the danger. I lived only in my feet, and with them made
superhuman efforts. Fortunately the light was failing, and in the dusk I
distanced the pack by a dozen yards. I passed the corner of the Palais
Royal so swiftly that the Queen's Guards, though they ran out at the
alarm, were too late to intercept me. Thence I turned instinctively to
the left, and with the cry of pursuit in my ears strained towards the
old bridge, intending to cross to the Cite, where I knew all the lanes
and byways. But the bridge was alarmed, the Chatelet seemed to yawn for
me--they were just lighting the brazier in front of the gloomy pile--and
doubling back, while the air roared with shouts of warning and cries of
"Stop thief! Stop thief!"--I evaded my pursuers, and sped up the narrow
Rue Troussevache, with the hue and cry hard on my heels.

I had no plan now, no aim; only terror added wings to my feet. The end
of that street gained I darted blindly down another, and yet another;
with straining chest, and legs that began to fail, and always in my ears
the yells that rose round me as fresh pursuers joined in the chase.
Still I kept ahead, I was even gaining; with night thickening, I might
hope to escape, if I could baffle those who from time to time--but in a
half-hearted way, not knowing if I were armed--made an attempt to stop
me or trip me up.

Suddenly turning a corner--I had gained a quiet part where blind walls
lined an alley--I discovered a man running before me. At the same
instant the posse in pursuit quickened their pace in a last effort; I,
in answer, put forth my last strength, and in a dozen paces I came up
with the man. He turned to me, our eyes met as we ran abreast; desperate
myself, I read equal terror in his look, and before I could think what
it might mean, he bent himself sideways as he ran, and with a singular
movement flung a parcel he carried into my arms. Then wheeling abruptly
he plunged into a side-lane on his left.

It was done in a moment. Instinctively I caught the burden: but the
impetus with which he had passed it to me, sent me reeling to the
right, and the lane being narrow, I fell against the wall before I could
steady myself. As luck would have it, that which should have destroyed
me, was my salvation; I struck the wall where a door broke it, the door,
lightly latched, flew open under the impact, I fell inwards. I alighted,
in darkness, on my hands and knees, heard the stifled yelp of a dog, and
in a second, though I could see nothing, I was up and had the door
closed behind me.

Then I listened. Panting and breathless, I heard the hunt go raving
through the lane, and the noise die in the distance; until only the
beating of my heart broke the close silence of the darkness in which I
stood. When this had lasted a minute or two, I began to peer and wonder
where I was; and remembering the dog I had heard, I moved stealthily to
find the latch, and escape. As I did so, the bundle, to which through
all I had clung--instinctively, for I had not thought of it--moved in my
arms.

I almost dropped it; then I held it from me with a swift movement of
repulsion. It stirred again, it was warm. In a moment the truth flashed
upon me. It was a child!

Burning hot as I had been before, the sweat rose on me at the thought.
For I saw again the man's face of terror, and I guessed that he had
stolen the child, and I feared the worst. He had mistaken the rabble
hooting at my heels for the avengers of blood, and had been only too
thankful to rid himself of the damning fact, and escape.

And now I had it, and had as much, or more, to fear. For an instant the
impulse to lay the parcel down, and glide out, and so be clear of it,
was strong upon me. And that I think is what the ordinary clerk, being
no hero, nor bred like a soldier to risk his life, would have done. But
for one thing, I was desperate. I knew not, after this, whither to go or
where to save myself. For another thing my clerk's wits were already
busy, showing me how with luck I might use the occasion and avoid the
risk; how with luck I might discover the parents and without suffering
for the theft, restore the child. Beyond that I saw an opening vista of
pardon, employment and reward.

Suddenly, the dog whined again, close to me; and that decided me. I had
found the latch by this time, and warily I drew the door open. In a
moment I was in the lane, looking up and down. I saw nothing to alarm
me; darkness had completely fallen, no one was moving, the neighbourhood
seemed to be of the quietest. I made up my mind to take the bold course:
to return at all hazards to the Rue St. Honore, seek my father-in-law at
the gates of the Palais Royal--where he had the night turn--and throw
the child and myself on his protection.

Without doubt it was the wisest course I could adopt. In those days the
streets of Paris, even in the district of the Louvre and Palais Royal,
were ill-lighted; a network of lanes and dark courts encroached on the
most fashionable parts, and favoured secret access to them, and I
foresaw no great difficulty, short of the moment when I must appear in
the lighted lodge and exhibit my rags. But my evil star was still above
the horizon. I had scarcely reached the end of the lane; I was still
hesitating there, uncertain which way to turn for the shortest course,
when a babel of voices broke on my ear, lights swept round a distant
corner, and I found myself threatened by a new danger. I did not wait to
consider. These people, with their torches and weapons, might have
naught to do with me. But my nerves were shaken, the streets of Paris
were full of terrors, every corner had a gallows for me--and I turned
and, fleeing back the way I had come, I made a hurried effort to find
the house which had sheltered me before. Failing, in one or two trials,
and seeing that the lights were steadily coming on that way, and that in
a moment I must be discovered, I sprang across the way, and dived into
the side-lane by which the child-stealer had vanished.

I had not taken ten steps before some object, unseen in the darkness,
tripped me up, and I fell headlong on the stones. In the fall my burden
rolled from my arms; instantly it was snatched up by a dark figure,
which rose as by magic beside me, and was gone into the gloom almost as
quickly. I got up gasping and limping, and flung a curse after the man;
but the lights already shone on the mouth of the lane in which I stood,
and I had no time to lose if I would not be detected. I set off running
down the passage, turned to the left at the end, and along a second
lane, thence passed into another and a wider road; nor did I stop until
I had left all signs and sounds of pursuit far behind me.

The place in which I came to a stand at last--too weak to run any
farther--was a piece of waste land, in the northern suburbs of the city.
High up on the left I could discern a light or two, piercing the gloom
of the sky; and I knew they shone from the wind-mills of Montmartre. In
every other direction lay darkness; desolation swept by the night wind;
silence broken only by the dismal howling of far-off watch-dogs. I might
have been ten miles from Paris: even as I was a thousand miles from the
man who had risen so happily that morning.

For very misery I sobbed aloud. I did not know exactly where I was; nor
had I known, had I the strength to return. Excitement had carried me
far, but suddenly I felt the weakness of exhaustion, and sick and aching
I craved only a hole in which to lie down and die. Fortunately at this
moment I met the wind, and caught the scent of new-mown hay: stumbling
forward a few steps with such strength as remained, I made out a low
building looming through the night. I staggered to it; I discovered that
it was a shed; and entering with my hands extended, I felt the hay under
my feet. With a sob of thankfulness I took two steps forward and sank
down; but instead of the soft couch I expected, I fell on the angular
body of a man, who with a savage curse rose and flung me off.

This at another time would have scared me to death; but I was so far
gone in wretchedness that I felt no fear and little surprise. I rolled
away without a word, and curling myself up at a distance of a few feet
from my fellow-lodger, fell in a minute fast asleep.

When I awoke, daylight, though the sun was not up, was beginning to
creep into the shed. I turned, every bone in my body ached: the weals of
the stirrup-leathers smarted and burned. I remembered yesterday's
doings, and groaned. Presently the hay beside me rustled, and over the
shoulder of the mass against which I lay I made out the face of a man,
peering curiously at me. I had not yet broken with every habit of
suspicion, nor could in a moment recollect that I had nothing but rags
to lose; and I gazed back spellbound. In silence which neither broke by
so much as a movement we waited gazing into one another's eyes; while
the light in the low-roofed hovel grew and grew, and minute by minute
brought out more clearly the other's features.

At length I knew him, and almost at the same moment he recognized me;
uttering an oath of rage, he rose up as if to spring at my throat. But
either because I did not recoil--being too deep-set in the hay to
move--or for some other reason, he only shook his claw-like fingers at
me, and held off. "Where is it, you dog?" he cried, finding his voice
with an effort. "Speak, or I will have your throat slit. Speak; do you
hear? What have you done with it?"

He was the man who had passed the child to me! I watched him heedfully,
and after a moment's hesitation I told him that it had been taken from
me, and I told him when and where.

"And you don't know the man who took it?" he screamed.

"Not from Adam," I said. "It was dark."

In his disappointment and rage, at receiving the answer, I thought again
that he would fall upon me: but he only choked and swore, and then stood
scowling, the picture of despair. Until, some new thought pricking him,
he threw up his arms and cried out afresh. "_Oh, mon dieu_, what a fool
I was!" he moaned. "What a craven I was! I had a fortune in my hands,
and, fool that I was, I threw it away!"

I thought bitterly of my own case--I was not much afraid of him now, for
I began to think that I understood him. "So had I, yesterday morning,"
I said, "a fortune. You are in no worse case than others."

"Yesterday morning!" he exclaimed. "No, last night. Then, if you like,
you had. But yesterday morning? Fortune and you, scarecrow? Go hang
yourself."

He looked gloomily at me for a moment with his arms crossed on his
chest, and his face darkly set. Then "Who are you?" he asked.

I told him. When he learned that the rabble that had alarmed him, had in
fact been pursuing me--so that his fright had been groundless--he broke
into fresh execrations: and these so violent that I began to feel a sort
of contempt for him, and even plucked up spirit to tell him that look as
disdainfully as he might at me, he seemed to be in no better case.

He looked at me askance at that. "Ay, as it turns out," he said grimly.
"In worse case, if you please. But see the difference, idiot. You are a
poor fool beaten from pillar to post; at all men's mercy, and naught to
get by it; while I played for a great stake. I have lost, it is true! I
have lost!" he continued, his voice rising almost to a yell, "and we are
both in the gutter. But if I had won--if I had won, man----"

He did not finish the sentence but flung himself down on his face in the
hay, and bit and tore it in his passion. A moment I viewed him with
contempt, and thought him a poor creature for a villain. Then the skirt
of his coat, curling over as he grovelled and writhed, disclosed
something that turned my thoughts into another channel. Crushed under
his leather girdle was a little cape, or a garment of that kind, of
velvet so lustrous that it shone in the dark place where I saw it, as
the eyes shine in a toad. Nor it only: before he rolled over and hid it
again, I espied embroidered on one corner of the velvet a stiff gold
crown!

It was with difficulty that I repressed a cry. Cold, damp, aching, I
felt the heat run through me like wine. A crown! A little purple cape!
And taken beyond doubt from the infant he had stolen last night! Then
last night--last night I had carried the King! I had carried the King of
France in my arms.

I no longer found it hard to understand the man's terror of yesterday;
or his grief and despair of this morning. He had indeed played for a
great stake; he had risked torture and the wheel; death in its most
horrible form. And that for which he had risked so much he had
lost!--lost!

I looked at him with new eyes, and a sort of wonder: and had scarcely
time to compose my face, when, the paroxysm of his fury spent, he rose,
and looking at me askance, to see how I took his actions, he asked me
sullenly whither I was going.

"To Monseigneur's," I said cunningly: had I answered, "To the Palais
Royal," he would have suspected me.

"To the Bishop's?"

"Where else?"

"To be beaten again?" he sneered.

I said nothing to that, but asked him whither he was going.

"God knows," he said. "God knows!"

But when I went out, he accompanied me; and we slunk silently, like the
pair of night-birds we were, through lanes and alleys until we were
fairly in town again. By that time the sun was up and the market people
were beginning to enter the city. Here and there eyes took curious note
of my disorder: and thinking of the company I was in, I trembled, and
wondered that the alarm was not abroad and the bells proclaiming us from
every tower. I was more than content, therefore, when my companion at
the back of the Temple halted before a small door in a blind wall. Over
against it stood another small door in the opposite wall.

"Do you stay here?" I said.

He swore churlishly. "What is that to you?" he said, looking up and
down. "Go your way, idiot."

I was glad to affect a like ill-humour, shrugged my shoulders, and
lounged on without looking back. But my brain was on fire. The King! The
four-year-old King! What was I to do? To whom to go with my knowledge?
And then--even then, while I paused hesitating, I heard steps running
behind me, and I turned to find him at my elbow. His face was pale, but
his eyes burned with eagerness, and his whole demeanour was changed.

"Stay!" he cried panting; and then seizing me peremptorily by the breast
of my shirt, "the man who tripped you up, fellow--you did not see him?"

"It was dark," I answered curtly. "I told you I did not know him from
Adam."

"But had he--" he gasped, "you heard him run away--was he lame?"

I could not repress an exclamation. "_Par dieu!_" I said. "Yes, I had
forgotten that. I think he was. I remember I heard his foot go
cluck--clack, cluck--clack as he ran."

His face became burning red, and he staggered. If ever man was near
dying from blood in his head, it was that man at that moment! But after
a while he drew a long breath, and got the better of it, nodded to me,
and turned away. I marked, however--for I stood a moment, watching--that
he did not go back to the door at which I had left him: but after
looking round once and espying me standing, he took a lane on the right
and disappeared.

But I knew or thought that I knew all now; and the moment he was out of
sight, I set off towards the Palais Royal like a hound let loose,
heeding neither those against whom I bumped in the straiter ways, nor
the danger I ran of recognition, nor the miserable aspect I wore in my
rags. I forgot all, save my news, even my own wretchedness; and never
halted or stayed to take breath until I crept panting into the doorway
of the lodge at the Palais, and met my father-in-law's look of disgust
and astonishment.

He was just off the night turn, and met me on the threshold. I saw
beyond him the grinning faces of the under-porters. But I had that to
tell which still upheld me. I threw up my hands.

"I know where they are!" I cried breathlessly. "I can take you to them!"

He gazed at me, dumb for the moment with surprise and rage; and
doubtless a less reputable son-in-law than I appeared, it would have
been hard to find in all Paris. Then his passion found vent. "Pig!" he
cried. "Jackal! Gutter-bird! Begone! I have heard about you! Begone! or
I will have you flayed!"

"But I know where they are! I know where they have him!" I protested.

His face underwent a startling change. He stepped forward with a
nimbleness wonderful in one of his bulk, and he caught me by the collar.
"What," he said, "have you seen the dog?"

"The dog?" I cried. "No, but I have seen the King! I have held him in my
arms! I know where he is."

He released me suddenly, and fell back a pace, looking at me so oddly
that I paused. "Say it again," he said slowly. "You have held the----"

"The King! The King!" I cried impatiently. "In these arms. Last night! I
know where they have him, or at least--where the robbers are."

His double chin fell, and his fat face lost colour. "Poor devil!" he
said, staring at me like one fascinated. "They have took his senses from
him."

"But--" I cried, advancing, "are you not going to do anything?"

He waved me off, and retreating a step, crossed himself. "Jacques!" he
said, speaking to one of the porters, but without taking his eyes off
me, "move him off! Move him off; do you hear, man? He is not safe!"

"But I tell you," I cried fiercely, "they have stolen the King! They
have stolen his Majesty, and I--have held him in my arms. And I
know----"

"There, there, be calm," he answered. "Be calm, my lad. They have stolen
the Queen's dog, that is true. But have it your own way if you like,
only go. Go from here, and quickly, or it will be the worse for you; for
here comes Monseigneur the Bishop to wait on her Majesty, and if he sees
you, you will suffer worse things. There, make way, make way!" he
continued, turning from me to the staring crowd that had assembled.
"Way, for Monseigneur the Bishop of Beauvais! Make way!"

As he spoke, the Bishop in his great coach turned heavily out of the
Rue St. Honore, and the crowd attending him eddied about the Palace
entrance. I was hustled and swept out of the way, and fortunately
escaping notice, found myself a few minutes later crouching in a lane
that runs beside the church of St. Jacques. I was wolfing a crust of
bread, which one of the men with whom I had often talked in the lodge
had thrust into my hand. I ate it with tears: in all Paris, that day,
was no more miserable outcast. What had become of my little wife I knew
not; and I dared not show myself at the Bishop's to ask. My
father-in-law, I feared, was hardened against me, and at the best
thought me mad. I had no longer home or friend, and--this at the moment
cut most sharply--the gorgeous hopes in which I had indulged a few
moments before were as last year's snow! The King was not lost!

I crouched and shivered. In St. Antoine's, at the mouth of the lane, a
man was beating a drum preparatory to publishing a notice; and
presently his voice caught my attention in the middle of my
lamentations. I listened, at first idly, then with my mind.
"Oyez! Oyez!" he cried. "Whereas some evil person, having no fear
of God or of the law before his eyes, has impudently, feloniously,
and treasonably stolen from the Palais Royal, a spaniel, the property
of the Queen-Regent's most excellent Majesty, this is to say, that any
one--rumble--rumble--rumble"--here a passing coach drowned some
sentences--after which I caught--"five hundred crowns, the same to be
paid by Monseigneur the Bishop of Beauvais, President of the Council!"

"And glad to pay it," snarled a voice, quite close to me. I started and
looked up. Two men were talking at a grated window above my head. I
could not see their faces.

"Yet it is a high price for a dog," the other sneered.

"But low for a queen. Yet it will buy her. And this is Richelieu's
France!"

"Was!" the other said pithily. "Well, you know the proverb, my friend.
'A living dog is better than a dead lion.'"

"Ay," his companion rejoined, "but I have a fancy that _that_ dog's name
is spelt neither with an F for Flore--which was the whelp's name, was it
not?--nor a B for Beauvais; nor a C for Conde; but with an M----"

"For Mazarin!" the other answered sharply. "Yes, if he find the dog. But
Beauvais is in possession."

"Rocroy, a hit that counted for Conde shook him; you may be sure of
that."

"Still he is in possession."

"So is my shoe in possession of my foot," was the keen reply. "And
see--I take it off. Beauvais is tottering, I tell you; tottering. It
wants but a shove, and he falls."

I heard no more, for they moved from the window into the room; but they
left me a different man. It was not so much the hope of reward as the
desire for vengeance that urged me; my clerk's wits returned once more,
and in the very desperation of my affairs gave me the courage I
sometimes lacked. I recognized that I had not to do with a King, but a
dog; but that none the less that way lay revenge. And I rose up and
slunk again into the main street and passed through the crowd and up the
Rue St. Martin and by St. Merri, a dirty, ragged, barefoot rascal from
whom people drew their skirts; yes, all that, and the light of the sun
on it--all that, and yet vengeance itself in the body--the hand that
should yet drag my cruel master's _fauteuil_ from under him.

Once I halted, weighing the risks and whether I should take my knowledge
direct to the Cardinal and let him make what use he pleased of it. But I
knew nothing definite, and hardening my heart to do the work myself, I
went on, until I found again the alley between the blind walls where I
had left the dog-stealer. It was noon. The alley was empty, the
neighbouring lane at the back of the Filles Dieu towards St. Martin's
was empty. I looked this way and that and slowly went down to the door
at which the man had halted in his despair; but to which, as soon as he
knew that the game was not lost, he had been heedful not to return while
I watched him.

There, seeing all so quiet, with the green of a tree showing here and
there above the dead wall, I began to blench and wonder how I was to
take the next step. And for half an hour, I dare say, I sneaked to and
fro, now in sight of the door and now with my back to it; afraid to
advance, and ashamed to retreat. At length I came once more through the
alley, and, seeing how quiet and respectable it lay, with the upper part
of a house visible at intervals above the wall, I took heart of grace
and tried the door.

It was so firmly closed, that I despaired; and after looking to assure
myself that the attempt had not been observed, I was going to move away,
when I espied the edge of a key projecting from under the door. Still
all was quiet. A stealthy glance round, and I had out the key. To draw
back now was to write myself craven all my life; and with a shaking hand
I thrust the wards into the lock, turned them, and in another moment
stood on the other side of the door in a neat garden, speckled with
sunshine and shade, and where all lay silent.

I remained a full minute, flattened against the door, staring fearfully
at the high-fronted mansion that beyond the garden looked down on me
with twelve great eyes. But all remained quiet, and observing that the
windows were shuttered, I took courage to move, and slid under a tree
and breathed again.

Still I looked and listened, fearfully, for the silence seemed to watch
me; and the greenness and orderliness of the place frightened me. But
nothing happened, and everything I saw went to prove that the house was
empty. I grew bolder then, and sneaking from bush to bush, reached the
door and with a backward glance between courage and desperation tried
it.

It was locked, but I hardly noticed that; for, as my hand left the
latch, from some remote part of the house came the long-drawn whine of a
dog!

I stood, listening and turning hot and cold in the sunshine; and dared
not touch the latch again lest others should hear the noise. Instead, I
stole out of the doorway, and crept round the house and round the house
again, hunting for a back entrance. I found none; but at last, goaded by
the reflection that fortune would never again be so nearly within my
grasp, I marked a window on the first floor, and at the side of the
house; by which it seemed to me that I might enter. A mulberry-tree
stood by it, and it lacked bars; and other trees veiled the spot. To be
brief, in two minutes I had my knee on the sill, and, sweating with
terror--for I knew that if I were taken I should hang for a thief--I
forced in the casement, and dropped on the floor.

There I waited a while, listening. I was in a bare room, the door of
which stood ajar. Somewhere in the bowels of the house the dog whined
again--and again; otherwise all was still--deadly still. But I had
risked too much to stand now; and in the end, emboldened by the silence,
I crept out and stole along a passage, seeking the way to the lower
floor.

The passage was dark, and every board on which I stepped shrieked the
alarm. But I felt my way to the landing at the head of the stairs, and I
was about to descend, when some impulse, I know not what--perhaps a
shrinking from the dark parts below, to which I was about to trust
myself--moved me to open one of the shutters and peer out.

I did so, cautiously, and but a little--a few inches. I found myself
looking, not into the garden through which I had passed, but into the
one over the way, beyond the alley, and there on a scene so strange and
yet so apropos to my thoughts, that I paused, gaping.

On a plat of grass four men were standing, two and two; between them,
with nose upraised and scenting this way and that, moved a beautiful
curly-haired spaniel, in colour black and tan. The eyes of all four men
were riveted to the dog; which, as I looked, walked sedately first to
the one pair, and then, as if dissatisfied, to the other pair; and then
again stood midway and sniffed the air. The men were speaking, but I
could not catch even their voices, and I was reduced to drawing what
inferences I could from their appearance.

Of the two further from me, one was my rascally bed-fellow; the other
was a crooked villain, almost in rags, with a leg shorter than its
comrade, yet a face bold and even handsome. Of the nearer pair, who had
their backs to me, the shorter, dressed in black, wore the ordinary
aspect of a clerk, or confidential attendant; but when my eyes travelled
to his companion, they paused. He, it was plain to me, was the chief of
the party, for he alone stood covered; and though I could not see his
face nor more of his figure than that he was tall, portly, and of very
handsome presence, it chanced that as I looked he raised his hand to his
chin, and I caught on his thumb, which was white as a woman's, the
sparkle of a superb jewel.

That dazzled me, and the presence of the dog puzzled me; and I continued
to watch, forgetting myself. Presently the man again raised his hand,
and this time it seemed to me that an order was given, for the lame man
started into action, and moved briskly across the sward towards the wall
which bordered the garden on my side--and consequently towards the house
in which I stood. Before he had moved far my companion of the night
interposed; apparently he would have done the errand himself. But at a
word he stood sulkily and let the other proceed; who when he had all but
disappeared--on so little a thing my fortunes turned--below the level of
the intervening walls, looked up and caught sight of me at the window.

Apparently he gave the alarm; for in an instant the eyes of all four
were on me. I hung a moment in sheer surprise, too much taken aback to
retreat; then, as the lame man and his comrade sprang to the door in the
wall--with the evident intention of seizing me--I flung the shutter
close, and, cursing my curiosity, I fled down the stairs.

I had done better had I gone to the window by which I had entered, for
all below was dark; and at the foot of the staircase, I stood, unable,
in my panic, to remember the position of the door. A key grating in the
lock informed me of this, but too late. On the instant the door opened,
a flood of light entered, a cry warned me that I was detected. I turned
to reascend, but stumbled before I had mounted six steps, and as I tried
to rise, felt a weight fall on my back, and the clutch of long fingers
close about my throat. I screamed, as I felt the fingers close in a
grip, deadly, cold, and merciless--then in sheer terror I swooned.

When I recovered my senses, I found myself propped in a chair, and for a
time sat wondering, with an aching head, where I was. In front of me a
great door stood open, admitting a draught of summer air, and a flood of
sunshine that fell even to my feet. Through the doorway I looked on
grass and trees, and heard sparrows twitter, and the chirp of crickets;
and I found all so peaceful that my mind went no further, and it was
only after some minutes that I recognized with a sharp return of terror,
that turned me sick, that I was still in the hall of the empty house.
That brought back other things, and with a shudder I carried my hand to
my throat and tried to rise. A hand put me back, and a dry voice said in
my ear, "Be easy, Monsieur Prosper, be easy. You are quite safe. But I
am afraid that in our haste we have put you to some inconvenience."

I looked with a wry face at the speaker, and recognized him for one of
those I had seen in the garden. He had the air of a secretary or--as he
stood rubbing his smooth chin and looking down at me with a saturnine
smile--of a physician. I read in his eyes something cold and not too
human, yet it went no further. His manner was suave, and his voice, when
he spoke again, as well calculated to reassure as his words were to
surprise me.

"You are better now?" he said. "Yes, then I have to congratulate you on
a strange chance. Few men, Monsieur Prosper, few men, believe me, were
ever so lucky. You were lately I think in the service of Monseigneur the
Bishop of Beauvais, President of her Majesty's Council?"

I fancied that a faint note of irony lurked in his words--particularly
as he recited my late master's titles. I kept silence.

"And yesterday were dismissed," he continued easily, disregarding my
astonishment. "Well, to-day you shall be reinstated--and rewarded. Your
business here, I believe, was to recover her Majesty's dog, and earn the
reward?"

I remembered that the wretch whose fingermarks were still on my throat
might be within hearing, and I tried to utter a denial.

He waved it aside politely. "Just so," he said. "But I know your mind,
better than you do yourself. Well, the dog is in that closet; and on two
conditions it is at your service."

Amazed before, I stared at him now, in a stupor of astonishment.

"You are surprised?" he said. "Yet the case is of the simplest. We stole
the dog, and now have our reasons for restoring it; but we cannot do so
without incurring suspicion. You, on the other hand, who are known to
the Bishop, and did not steal it, may safely restore it. I need not say
that we divide the reward; that is one of the two conditions."

"And the other?" I stammered.

"That you refresh your memory as to the past," he answered lightly. "If
I have the tale rightly, you saw a man convey a dog to this house, an
empty house in the Montmartre Faubourg. You watched, and saw the man
leave, and followed him; he took the alarm, fled, and dropped in his
flight the dog's coat. I think I see it there. On that you hurried with
the coat to Monseigneur, and gave him the address of the house, and----"

"And the dog!" I exclaimed.

"No. Let Monseigneur come and find the dog for himself," he answered,
smiling. "In the closet."

I felt the blood tingle through all my limbs. "But if he comes, and does
not find it?" I cried.

The stranger shrugged his shoulders. "He will find it," he said coolly.
And slightly raising his voice, he called "Flore! Flore!" For answer a
dog whined behind a door, and scratched the panels, and whined again.

The stranger nodded, and his eyes sparkled as if he were pleased.
"There," he said, "you have it. It is there and will be there. And I
think that is all. Only keep two things in mind, my friend. For the
first, a person will claim our share of the reward at the proper time:
for the second, I would be careful not to tell Monseigneur the President
of the Council"--again that faint note of irony--"the true story, lest a
worse thing happen!" And the stranger, with a very ugly smile, touched
his throat.

"I will not!" I said, shuddering. "But----?"

"But what?"

"But I may not," I said faintly--I hated the Bishop--"I may not get
speech of Monseigneur. May I not then take the news to the Palais Royal
and--and let the Queen know directly? Or go with it to the Cardinal?"

"No, you may not!" he said, with a look and in a tone that sent a shiver
down my back. "The Cardinal? What has the Cardinal to do with it?
Understand! You must do precisely that and that only which I have told
you, and add not a jot nor a tittle to it!"

"I will do it," I muttered in haste. My spite against the Bishop was a
small thing beside my neck. And there was the reward!

"Good! Then--then, I think that is all," he answered, seeing in my face,
I think, that I was minded to be obedient. "And I may say farewell.
Until we meet again, adieu, Monsieur Prosper! Adieu, and remember!" And
setting on his hat with a polite gesture, he turned his back to me, went
out into the sunlight, passed to the left, and vanished. I heard the
garden door close with a crash, and then, silence--silence, broken only
by the faint whine of the dog, as it moved in its prison.

Was I alone? I waited awhile before I dared to move; and even when I
found courage to rise, I stood listening with a beating heart, expecting
a footfall on the stairs or that something--I knew not what--would rush
on me from the closed doors of this mysterious house. But the silence
endured. The sparrows outside twittered, the cricket renewed its chirp,
and at length, drawing courage from the sunlight, I moved forward and
lifted the dog's coat from the floor. I examined it: it was the one I
had seen in the possession of the man in the shed. Five minutes later I
was in the streets on my way to the Bishop's hotel, the parcel of velvet
tucked under my girdle.

I have since thought that I did not fully appreciate at the moment the
marvel that had happened to me. But by this time in truth I was nearly
light-headed. I went my way as a man moves in a dream, and even when I
found myself at the door of the hotel, whence I had been so cruelly
ejected, I felt none of those qualms which must have shaken me had I
been sensible. I did not even question how I should reach Monseigneur,
or get the news to him: which proves that we often delude ourselves with
vain fears, and climb obstacles where none exist. For, as it happened,
he was descending from his coach when I entered the yard, and though he
raised his gold-headed staff at sight of me, and in a fury bade the
servants put me out, I had the passion if not the wit to wave the velvet
coat in his face, and cry my errand before them all.

Heaven knows at that there was such a sudden pause and about-face as
must have made even the stolen dog laugh had it been there. Monseigneur
in high excitement bade them bring me in to him as soon as he was
shifted, the secretary whispered in my ear that he had a cloak that
would replace the one I had lost, a valet told me that my wife was gone
to her father's, a serving-man brought me food, and nudged me to
remember him, while others ran and fetched me shoes and a cap; and
all--all from the head-clerk, who was most insistent, downwards, would
know where the dog was, and how I came to know what I did.

But I had even then the sense to keep my secret, and would tell my story
only to the Bishop. He had me in, and heard it. In ten minutes he was in
his coach on his way to the Montmartre Faubourg, taking me with him.

His presence and the food they had given me while I waited had sobered
me somewhat; and I trembled as we went lest the man who had spared me on
terms so strange had some disappointment yet in store for me, lest the
closet be found empty. But a whine, that grew into a long and melancholy
howl, greeted us on the threshold of the room whither I led them; and
the closet door being forced, in a trice the dog was out and amongst us.

Monseigneur clapped his hands and swore freely. "_Dieu benisse!_" he
cried. "It is the dog, sure enough! Here, Flore! Flore!" And as the dog
jumped on us and licked his hand, he turned to me. "Lucky for you,
rascal!" he cried, in great good humour. "There shall be fifty crowns in
your pocket, and your desk again!"

I gasped. "But the reward, Monseigneur?" I stammered. "The five hundred
crowns?"

He bent his black eyebrows. "Reward? Reward, villain?" he thundered. "Do
I hear aright? Is it not enough that I spare you the gallows you richly
earned but yesterday by assaulting my servant? Reward? For what do I pay
you wages, do you think, except to do my work? Are you not my servant?
Go and hang yourself! Or rather," he continued grimly, "stir at your
peril. Look to him, Bonnivet, he is a rogue in grain; and bring him with
me to the Queen's ante-chamber, Her Majesty may desire to ask him
questions, and if he answer them well and handsomely, good! He shall
have the fifty crowns I promised him. If not--I shall know how to deal
with him."

At that, and the mean treachery of his conduct, I fell into my old rage
again, and even his servants looked oddly at him, until a sharp word
recalled them to their duty; on which they hustled me off with little
ceremony, and the less for that which they had before showed me. While
the Bishop, carrying the dog in his arms, mounted his coach and went by
the Rue St. Martin and the Lombards, they hurried me by short cuts and
byways to the Palais Royal, which we reached as his running footman came
in sight. The approach to the gate was blocked by a great crowd of
people, and for a moment I was fond enough to imagine that they had to
do with our affair--and I shrank back. But the steward, with a thrust of
his knee against my hip, which showed me that he had not forgotten my
assault upon him, urged me forward, and from what passed round me as we
pushed through the press, I gathered that a score of captured colours
had arrived from Flanders within the hour, and were about to be
presented to the Queen.

The courtyard confirmed this, for in the open part of it, and much
pressed upon by the curious who thronged the arcades, we found a troop
of horse, plumed and dusty and travel-stained, fresh from the Flanders
road. The officers who bore the trophies we overtook on the stairs near
the door of the ante-chamber. Burning with resentment as I was, and
strung to the last pitch of excitement, I none the less remember that I
thought it an odd time to push in with a dog; but Monseigneur the Bishop
did not seem to see this. Whether he took a certain pleasure in
belittling the war-party, to whom he was opposed in his politics, or
merely knew his ground well, he went on, thrusting the _militaires_
aside with little ceremony; and as every one was as quick to give place
to him, as he was to advance, in a moment we were in the ante-chamber.

I had never been admitted before, and from the doorway, where I paused
in Bonnivet's keeping, I viewed the scene with an interest that for the
first time overcame my sense of injustice. The long room hummed with
talk; a crowd of churchmen and pages, with a sprinkling of the lesser
nobility, many lawyers and some soldiers, filled it from end to end. In
one corner were a group of tradesmen bearing plate for the Queen's
inspection: in another stood a knot of suitors with petitions; while
everywhere men, whose eager faces and expectant eyes were their best
petitions, watched the farther door with quivering lips, or sighed when
it opened, and emitted merely a councillor or a marquis. Several times a
masked lady flitted through the crowd, with a bow here and the honour of
her taper fingers there. The windows were open, the summer air entered;
and the murmur of the throng without, mingling with the stir of talk
within, seemed to add to the light and colour of the room.

My lord of Beauvais, with his chaplain and his pages at his shoulder,
was making in his stately way towards the farther door, when he met M.
de Chateauneuf, and paused to speak. When he escaped from him a dozen
clients, whose obsequious bows rendered evasion impossible, still
delayed him. And I had grown cold, and hot again, and he was but halfway
on his progress up the crowded room, when the inner door opened, half a
dozen voices cried "The Queen! The Queen!" and an usher with a silver
wand passed down the room and ranked the company on either side--not
without some struggling, and once a fierce oath, and twice a smothered
outcry.

Of the bevy of ladies in attendance, only half a dozen entered; for a
few paces within the doorway the Queen-Mother stood still to receive my
patron, who had advanced to meet her. It seemed to me that she was not
best pleased to see him at that moment; her voice rang somewhat loud and
peevish as she said, "What, my lord! Is it you? I came to receive the
trophies from Rocroy, and did not expect to see you at this hour."

"I bring my own excuse, Madam," he answered, smiling and unabashed.
"Have I your Majesty's leave to present it?" he continued, with a smirk
and a low bow.

"I came to receive the colours," she retorted, still frowning. It seemed
to me that he presumed a trifle on his favour; and either knew his
ground particularly well, or was more obtuse than a clever man should
have been.

For he did not blench. "I bring your Majesty something as much to your
liking as the colours!" he replied.

Then I think she caught his meaning, for her proud Hapsburg face cleared
wonderfully, and she clapped her hands together with a gesture of
pleasure almost childish. "What!" she exclaimed. "Have you
found--Flore?"

"Yes, Madam," he said, smiling gallantly. He turned. "Bonnivet!" he
said.

But Bonnivet had watched his moment. Before the name fell clear of his
master's lips, he was beside him, and with bent knee laid the dog
tenderly at her Majesty's feet. She uttered a cry of joy and stooped to
caress it, her fair ringlets falling and hiding her face and her plump
white shoulders. On that I did not see exactly what happened; for her
ladies flocked round her, and all that reached me, where I stood by the
door, took the form of excited cries of "Flore! Flore!" "Oh, the
darling!" and the like. A few old men who stood nearest the wall and
farthest from the Queen raised their eyebrows, and the officers standing
with the colours by the door, wore fallen faces and glum looks; but
nine-tenths of the crowd seemed to be carried away by the Queen's
delight, and congratulated one another as warmly as if ten Rocroys had
been won.

At that moment, while I hung in suspense, expecting each moment to be
called forward, I heard a little stir at my elbow. Turning--I had
advanced some way into the room--I found myself with others pushed aside
to give place to a person of consequence who was entering; and I heard
several voices whisper, "Mazarin!" As I looked, he came in, and pausing
to speak to the foremost of the officers, gave me the opportunity--which
I had never enjoyed before--of viewing him near at hand. He bore a
certain likeness, to my lord of Beauvais, being tall and of a handsome
and portly figure. But it was such a likeness when I looked a second
time, as a jewelled lanthorn, lit within, bears to its vacant fellow.
And then in a moment it flashed upon me--though now he wore his
Cardinal's robes and then had been very simply dressed--that it was he
whose back I had seen, and whose dazzling thumb-ring had blinded me in
the garden near the Filles Dieu.

The thought had scarcely grown to a conviction before he passed by me,
apologizing almost humbly to those whom he displaced, and courteously to
all; and this, and perhaps also the fact that the mass of those present
belonged to my patron's party--who in the streets had the nick-name of
"The Importants"--so that they were not quick to make room for him,
rendered his progress so slow that, my name being called and everybody
hustling me forward, I came face to face with the Queen almost at the
moment that he did. And so I saw--though for a while I was too much
excited to understand--what passed.

Her Majesty, it seemed to me, did not look unkindly upon him. On the
contrary. But my lord of Beauvais was so full of his success, and so
uplifted by the presence of his many friends, that he had a mind to make
the most of his triumph and even to flaunt it in his rival's face. "Ha,
the Cardinal!" he cried; and before the Queen could speak, "I hope,"
with a bow and a simper, "that your Eminence has been as zealous in her
Majesty's service as I have been."

"As zealous, assuredly," the Cardinal replied meekly. "For my zeal I can
answer. But as effective? Alas, it is not given to all to vie with your
Lordship in affairs."

This answer--though I detected no smack of irony in the tone--did not
seem to please the Queen. "The Bishop has done me a great service. He
has recovered my dog," she said tartly.

"He is a happy man, and the happy must look to be envied," the Cardinal
answered glibly. "Your Majesty's dog----"

"Your Eminence never liked Flore!" the Queen exclaimed with feeling. And
she tossed her head, as I have seen quite common women do it in the
street.

"You do me a very great wrong, Madam!" the Cardinal answered, with the
look of a man much hurt. "If the dog were here--but it is not, I think."

"Your Eminence is for once at a loss!" the Bishop said, with a sneer;
and at a word from him one of the ladies came forward, nursing the dog
in her arms.

The Cardinal looked. "Umph," he said. He looked again, frowning.

I did not know then that, whether the Queen liked him or disliked him,
she ever took heed of his looks; and I started when she cried
pettishly----

"Well, sir, what now? What is it?"

The Cardinal pursed up his lips.

My lord the Bishop could bear it no longer.

"He will say presently," he cried, snorting with indignation, "that it
is not the dog! It is that his Eminence would say," with a sneer, "if he
dared!"

His Eminence shrugged his shoulders very slightly, and turned the palms
of his hands outwards. "Oh," he said, "if her Majesty is satisfied I
am."

"_M'dieu!_" the Queen cried, with a spirt of anger--"what do you mean?"
But she turned to the lady who held the dog, and took it from her. "It
_is_ the dog!" she said, her colour high. "Do you think that I do not
know my own dog?" she continued. And she set the dog on its feet. She
called it "Flore! Flore!" It turned to her and wagged its tail eagerly,
and jumped upon her skirts, and licked her hand.

"Poor Flore!" said the Cardinal. "Flore!" It went to him.

"Certainly its name is Flore," he said: yet he continued to scan it with
a puzzled eye. "It is the dog, I suppose. But it used to die at the word
of command, I think?"

"What it did, it will do!" Monseigneur de Beauvais cried scornfully.
"But I see that your Eminence was right in one thing you said."

The Cardinal bowed.

"That I should be envied!" the Bishop retorted, with a sneer. And he
glanced round the circle. There was a slight though general titter; a
great lady at the Queen's elbow laughed out.

"Flore," said the Queen, "die! Die, good dog. Do you hear, _m'dieu!_
die!"

But the dog only gazed into her Majesty's face with a spaniel's soft
affectionate eyes, and wagged its tail; and though she cried to it again
and again, and angrily, it made no attempt to obey. On that a deep-drawn
breath ran round the circle; one looked at another; and there were
raised eyebrows. A score of heads were thrust forward, and some who had
seemed merry enough the moment before looked grave as mutes now.

"It used to bark for France and growl for Spain," the Cardinal continued
in his softest voice. "One of the charmingest things, madam, I ever saw.
Perhaps if your Majesty would try----"

"France!" the Queen cried imperiously; and she stamped on the floor.
"France! France!"

But the dog only retreated, cowering and dismayed. From a distance it
wagged its tail pitifully.

"France!" cried the Queen, almost with passion. The dog cowered.

"I am afraid, my Lord, that it has lost its accomplishments--in your
company!" the Cardinal said, a faint smile curling his lips.

The Bishop dropped a smothered oath. "It _is_ the dog!" he cried
vehemently.

But the Queen turned to him sharply, her face crimson.

"I do not agree with you!" she replied. "It is like the dog, but it is
not the dog. And more, my Lord," she continued, with vehemence equal to
his own, "I should be glad if you would explain how you came into
possession of this dog. A dog so nearly resembling my dog--and yet not
my dog--could not be found in a moment nor without some foul
contrivance."

"It has forgotten its tricks," the Bishop said.

"Nonsense!" the Queen retorted.

A great many faces had grown grave by this time; I have said that the
room was filled for the most part with the Bishop's supporters. "At any
rate I know nothing about it!" he exclaimed, wiping his brow and
pointing to me. "I offered a reward, and that knave there found the
dog." Between anger and discomfiture he stammered.

"One of my Lord's servants, I think," the Cardinal said easily.

"Oh!" the Queen answered, with a world of meaning; and she looked at me
with eyes before which I quailed. "Is that true, fellow!" she said. "Are
you in my Lord's service?"

I stammered an affirmative.

"Then I wish to hear no more," she replied haughtily. "No, my Lord.
Enough!" she continued, raising her voice to drown his protestations. "I
do not care to know whether you were more sinned against than sinning;
or a greater fool than your creature is a knave. Pray take your animal
away. Doubtless in a very short time I should have discovered the cheat
for myself. I think I see a difference now. I am sure I do. But, as it
is, I am greatly indebted to his Eminence for his aid--and his
sagacity."

She brought out the last word with withering emphasis, and amid profound
silence. The Bishop, staggered and puzzled, but too wise to persist
longer in the dog's identity, still tried desperately to utter some word
of excuse; but the Queen, whose vanity had received a serious
wound--since she had not at once known her own pet--cut him short with a
curt and freezing dismissal, and immediately turning to the Cardinal,
she requested him to introduce to her the officers who had the colours
in charge.

It may be imagined how I felt, and what terrors I experienced during
this struggle; since it required no great wit to infer that the Bishop,
if defeated, would wreak his vengeance on me. Already a dozen who had
attended my Lord of Beauvais' _levee_ that morning were fawning on the
Cardinal; the Queen had turned her shoulder to him; a great lady over
whom he bent to hide his chagrin, talked to him indeed, but flippantly,
and with eyes half closed and but part of her attention. For all these
slights, and the defeat which they indicated, I foresaw that I should
pay with my life: and in a panic, seeing no hope but in escaping on the
instant before he took his measures, I slid back and strove to steal
away through the crowd.

I reached the door in safety, and even the head of the stairs. But
there a hand gripped my shoulder, and the steward thrust a face, white
with rage and dismay, into mine. "Not so fast, Master Plotter!" he
hissed in my ear. "You have ruined us, but if your neck does not pay for
this--if you are not lashed like a dog first and hung afterwards--I am a
Spaniard! If for this I do not----"

"By the Queen's command," said a quiet voice in my other ear; and a hand
fell on that shoulder also.

The steward glanced at his rival. "He is the Bishop's man!" he cried,
throwing out his chest; and he gripped me again.

"And the Bishop is the Queen's!" was the curt and pithy reply; and the
stranger, in whom I recognized the man who had delivered the dog's cape
to me, quietly put him by. "Her Majesty has committed this person to the
Cardinal's custody until inquiry be made into the truth of his story,
and the persons who are guilty be ascertained. In the mean time, if you
have any complaint to make you can make it to his Eminence."

After that there was no more to be said or done. The steward, baffled
and bursting with rage, fell back; and the stranger, directing me by a
gesture to attend him close, descended the stairs and crossing the
courtyard, entered St. Honore. I was in a maze what I was to expect from
him; and overjoyed as I was at my present deliverance, had a sneaking
fear that I might be courting a worse fate in this inquiry; so grim and
secretive was my guide's face, and so much did that sombre dress--which
gave him somewhat of the character of an inquisitor--add to the weight
of his silence. However, when he had crossed St. Honore and entered a
lane leading to the river, he halted and turned to me.

"There are twenty crowns," he said abruptly; and he placed a purse in my
hand. "Take them, and do exactly as I bid you, and all will be well. At
the Quai de Notre Dame you will find a market-boat starting for Rouen.
Go by it, and at the Ecce Homo in the Rue St. Eloi in that city you will
find your wife and a hundred crowns. Live there quietly, and in a month
apply for work at the Chancery; it will be given you. The rest lies with
you. I have known men," he continued, with a puzzling smile, "who
started at a desk in that Chancery and, being very silent men, able to
keep a secret--able to keep a secret, mark you--lived to rent one of the
great farms."

I tried to find words to thank him.

"There is no need," he said. "For what you have done, it is too much.
For what you have to do--rule the unruly member--it is no more than is
right."

And now I agree with him. Now--though his words came true to the letter,
and to-day I hold one of the great farms on a second term--I too think
that it was no more than was right. For if M. de Conde won Rocroy for
his side in the field, the Cardinal on that day won a victory no less
eminent at court; of which victory the check administered to M. de
Beauvais--who had nothing but a good presence, and collapsing like a
pricked bladder, became within a month the most discredited of men--was
the first movement. Within a month the heads of the Importants--so, I
have said, the Bishop's party were christened--were in prison or exiled
or purchased; and all France knew that it lay in a master's hand--knew
that the mantle of Richelieu, with a double portion of the royal favour,
had fallen on Mazarin's shoulders. I need scarcely add that, before that
fact became known to all--for such things do not become certainties in a
minute--his Eminence had been happy enough to find the true Flore and
restore it to her Majesty's arms.




CRILLON'S STAKE.


On a certain wet night, in the spring of the year 1587, the rain was
doing its utmost to sweeten the streets of old Paris: the kennels were
aflood with it, and the March wind, which caused the crowded sign-boards
to creak and groan on their bearings, and ever and anon closed a shutter
with the sound of a pistol-shot, blew the downpour in sheets into
exposed doorways, and drenched to the skin the few wayfarers who were
abroad. Here and there a stray dog, bent over a bone, slunk away at the
approach of a roisterer's footstep; more rarely a passenger, whose sober
or stealthy gait whispered of business rather than pleasure, moved
cowering from street to street, under such shelter as came in his way.

About two hours before midnight, a man issued somewhat suddenly from the
darkness about the head of the Pont du Change and turned the corner into
the Rue de St. Jacques la Boucherie, a street which ran parallel with
the Quays, about half a mile east of the Louvre. His heavy cloak
concealed his figure, but he made his way in the teeth of the wind with
the spring and vigour of youth; and arriving presently at a doorway,
which had the air of retiring modestly under a couple of steep dark
gables, and yet was rendered conspicuous by the light which shone
through the unglazed grating above it, he knocked sharply on the oak.
After a short delay the door slid open of itself and the man entered. He
showed none of a stranger's surprise at the invisibility of the porter,
but after staying to shut the door, he advanced along a short passage,
which was only partially closed at the further end by a high wooden
screen. Coasting round this he entered a large low-roofed room, lighted
in part by a dozen candles, in part by a fire which burned on a raised
iron plate in the corner.

The air was thick with wood smoke, but the occupants of the room, a
dozen men, seated, some at a long table, and some here and there in
pairs, seemed able to recognize the new-comer through it, and hailed his
appearance with a cry of welcome--a cry that had in it a ring of
derision. One man who stood near the fire, impatiently kicking the logs
with his spurred boots, turned, and seeing who it was moved towards him.
"Welcome, M. de Bazan," he said briskly; "so you have come to resume our
duel! I had given up hope of you."

"I am here," the new-comer answered. He spoke curtly, and as he did so
he took off his horseman's cloak and laid it aside. The action disclosed
a man scarcely twenty, moderately well dressed, and of slight though
supple figure. His face wore an air of determination singular in one so
young, and at variance with the quick suspicious glances with which he
took in the scene. He did not waste time in staring, however, but
quickly and with a business-like air he seated himself at a small wooden
table which stood in a warm corner of the hearth, and directly under a
brace of candles. Calling for a bottle of wine, he threw a bag of coin
on the table; at the same time he hitched forward his sword until the
pommel of the weapon lay across his left thigh; a sinister movement
which the debauched and reckless looks of some of his companions seemed
to justify. The man who had addressed him took his seat opposite, and
the two, making choice of a pair of dice-boxes, began to play.

They did not use the modern game of hazard, but simply cast the dice,
each taking it in turn to throw, and a nick counting as a drawn battle.
The two staked sums higher than were usual in the company about them,
and one by one, the other gamblers forsook their tables, and came and
stood round. As the game proceeded, the young stranger's face grew more
and more pale, his eyes more feverish. But he played in silence. Not so
his backers. A volley of oaths and exclamations almost as thick as the
wood smoke that in part shrouded the game, began to follow each cast of
the dice. The air, one moment still and broken only by the hollow rattle
of the dice in the box, rang the next instant with the fierce outburst
of a score of voices.

The place, known as Simon's, was a gaming-house of the second class:
frequented, as the shabby finery of some and the tarnished arms of
others seemed to prove, by the poorer courtiers and the dubious
adventurers who live upon the great. It was used in particular by the
Guise faction, at this time in power; for though Henry of Valois was
legal and nominal King of France, Henry of Guise, the head of the
League, and the darling of Paris, imposed his will alike upon the King
and the favourites. He enjoyed the substance of power; the King had no
choice but to submit to his policy. In secret Henry the Third resented
the position, and between his immediate servants and the arrogant
followers of the Guises there was bitter enmity.

As the game proceeded, a trifle showed that the young player was either
ignorant of politics, or belonged to a party rarely represented at
Simon's. For some time he and his opponent had enjoyed equal luck. Then
they doubled the stakes, and fortune immediately declared herself
against him; with wondrous quickness his bag grew lank and thin, the
pile at the other's elbow a swollen sliding heap. The perspiration began
to stand on the young man's face. His hand trembled as he shook out the
last coins left in the bag and shoved them forward amid a murmur half of
derision half of sympathy; for if he was a stranger from the
country--that was plain, and they had recognized it at his first
appearance among them three days before--at least he played bravely. His
opponent, whose sallow face betrayed neither joy nor triumph, counted
out an equal sum, and pushed it forward without a word. The young man
took up the box, and for the first time seemed to hesitate; it could be
seen that he had bitten his lip until it bled. "After you," he muttered
at last, withdrawing his hand. He shrank from throwing his last throw.

"It is your turn," the other replied impassively, "but as you will." He
shook the box, brought it down sharply on the table and raised it. "The
Duke!" he said with an oath--he had thrown the highest possible. "Twelve
is the game."

With a shiver the lad--he was little more than a lad, though in his
heart, perhaps, the greatest gambler present--dashed down his box. He
raised it. "The King!" he cried; "long life to him!" He had also thrown
twelve. His cheek flushed a rosy red, and with a player's superstitious
belief in his luck he regarded the check given to his opponent in the
light of a presage of victory. They threw again, and he won by two
points--nine to seven. Hurrah!

"King or Duke," the tall man answered, restraining by a look the
interruption which more than one of the bystanders seemed about to
offer, "the money is yours; take it."

"Let it lie," the young man answered joyously. His eyes sparkled. When
the other had pushed an equal amount into the middle of the table, he
threw again, and with confidence.

Alas! his throw was a deuce and an ace. The elder player threw four and
two. He swept up the pile. "Better late than never," he said. And
leaning back he looked about him with a grin of satisfaction.

The young man rose. The words which had betrayed that he was not of the
Duke's faction, had cost him the sympathy the spectators had before felt
for him; and no one spoke. It was something that they kept silence, that
they did not interfere with him. His face, pale in the light of the
candles which burned beside him, was a picture of despair. Suddenly, as
if he bethought him of something, he sat down again, and with a shaking
hand took from his neck a slender gold chain with a pendant ornament.
"Will you stake against this?" he murmured with dry lips.

"Against that, or your sword, or your body, or anything but your soul!"
the other answered with a reckless laugh. He took up the chain and
examined it. "I will set you thirty crowns against it!" he said.

They threw and the young man lost.

"I will stake ten crowns against your sword if you like," the victor
continued, eyeing the curiously chased pommel.

"No," the young man replied, stung by something in the elder's tone.
"That I may want. But I will set my life against yours!"

A chuckle went round. "Bravo!" cried half a dozen voices. One man in the
rear, whose business it was to enlist men in the Duke's guard, pressed
forward, scenting a recruit.

"Your life against mine! With these?" the winner answered, holding up
the dice.

"Yes, or as you please." He had not indeed meant with those: he had
spoken in the soreness of defeat, intending a challenge.

The other shook his head. "No," he said, "no. No man can say that Michel
Berthaud ever balked his player, but it is not a fair offer. You have
lost all, my friend, and I have won all. I am rich, you are poor. 'Tis
no fair stake. But I will tell you what I will do. I will set you your
gold chain and seventy crowns--against your life if you like."

A roar of laughter hailed the proposal. "A hundred!" cried several, "a
hundred!"

"Very well. The gold chain and a hundred. Be it so!"

"But my life?" the young man muttered, gazing at him in bewilderment.
"Of what use will it be to you, M. Berthaud?"

"That is my business," was the dry answer. "If you lose, it is forfeit
to me. That is all, and the long and the short of it. To be frank, I
have a service which I wish you to perform for me."

"And if I will not perform it?"

"Then I will take your word as a gentleman that you will kill yourself.
Observe, however, that if I win I shall allow you a choice, my friend."

He leaned back with that, meeting with a faint smile and half-lowered
eye-lids, the various looks bent on him. Some stared, some nodded secret
comprehension, some laughed outright, or nudged one another and
whispered. For four evenings they, the habitues of the place, had
watched this play duel go on, but they had not looked for an end so
abnormal as this. They had known men stake wives and mistresses, love
and honour, ay, their very clothes, and go home naked through the
streets; for the streets of Paris saw strange things in those days. But
life? Well, even that they had seen men stake in effect, once, twice, a
hundred times; but never in so many words, never on a wager as novel as
this. So with an amazement which no duel, fought as was the custom in
that day, three to three, or six to six, would have evoked, they
gathered round the little table under the candles and waited for the
issue.

The young man shivered. Then, "I accept," he said slowly. In effect he
was desperate, driven to his last straits. He had lost his all, the all
of a young man sent up to Paris to make his fortune, with a horse, his
sword, and a bag of crowns--the latter saved for him by a father's stern
frugality, a mother's tender self-denial. A week ago he had never seen a
game of chance. Then he had seen; the dice had fallen in his way, the
devil of play, cursed legacy of some long-forgotten ancestor, had awoke
within him, and this was the end. "I accept," he said slowly.

His opponent, still with his secretive smile, took up the caster. But a
short, sturdy man, who was standing at his elbow, and who wore the
colours of the Duke of Guise, intervened. "No, Michel," he said, with a
good-natured glance at the young player. "Let the lad choose his bones,
and throw first or last as he pleases."

"Right," said Berthaud, yawning. "It is no matter. My star is in the
ascendant to-night. He will not win."

The young man took up the box, shook it, hesitated, swallowed, and threw
seven!

Berthaud threw carelessly--seven!

Some shouted, some drew a deep breath, or whispered an oath. These wild
spirits, who had faced death often in one form or another, were still
children, and still in a new thing found a new pleasure.

"Your star may be in the ascendant," the man muttered who had intervened
before, "but it--well, it twinkles, Michel."

Berthaud did not answer. The young man made him a sign to throw. He
threw again--eight.

The young man threw with a hand that scarcely dared to let the dice go.
Seven! He had lost.

An outburst might have been expected, some cry of violence, of despair.
It did not come. And a murmur passed round the circle. "Berthaud will
recruit him," growled one. "A queer game," muttered another, and thought
hard. Nor did the men go back to their tables. They waited to see what
would follow, what would come of it. For the young man who had lost sat
staring at the table like one in a dream; until presently his opponent
reaching out a hand touched his sleeve. "Courage!" Berthaud said, a
flicker of triumph in his eye, "a word with you aside. No need of
despair, man. You have but to do what I ask, and you will see sixty
yet."

Obedient to his gesture the young man rose, and the other drawing him
aside began to talk to him in a low voice. The remaining players
loitering about the deserted table could not hear what was said; but one
or two by feigning to strike a sudden blow, seemed to pass on their
surmises to those round them. One thing was clear. The lad objected to
the proposal made, objected fiercely and with vehemence; and at last
submitted only with reluctance. Submit in the end, however, he did, for
after some minutes of this private talk he went to his cloak, and
avoiding, as it seemed, his fellows' eyes, put it on. Berthaud
accompanied him to the door, and the winner's last words were audible.
"That is all," he said; "succeed in what I impose, M. de Bazan, and I
cry quits, and you shall have fifty crowns for your pains. Fail, and you
will but be paying your debt. But you will not fail. Remember, half an
hour after midnight. And courage!"

The young man nodded sullenly, and drawing his cloak about his throat,
went through the passage to the street. The night was a little older
than when he had entered, otherwise it was unchanged. The rain was still
falling; the wind still buffeted the creaking shutters and the swinging
sign-boards. But the man? He had entered, thinking nothing of rain or
wind, thinking little even of the horse and furniture, and the good
clothes made under his mother's eye, which he had sacrificed to refill
his purse. The warmth of the play fever coursing through his veins had
clad him in proof against cold and damp and the depression of the gloomy
streets, even against the thought of home. And for the good horse, and
the laced shirts and the gold braid, the luck could not run against him
again! He would win all back, and the crowns to boot.

So he had thought as he went in. And now? He stood a moment in the dark,
narrow chasm of a street, and looked up, letting the rain cool his brow;
looked up, and, seeing a wrack of clouds moving swiftly across the slit
of stormy sky visible between the overhanging roofs, faced in a dull
amazement the fact that he who now stood in the darkness, bankrupt even
in life, was the same man who had entered Paris so rich in hope and
youth and life a week--only a week--before. He remembered--it was an odd
thing to occur to him when his thoughts should have been full of the
events of the last hour--a fault of which he had been guilty down there
in the country; and of which, taking advantage of a wrathful father's
offer to start him in Paris, he had left the weaker sinner to bear the
brunt. And it seemed to him that here was his punishment. The old grey
house at home, quaint and weather-beaten, rose before him. He saw his
mother's herb-garden, the great stackyard, and the dry moat, half filled
with blackberry bushes, in which he had played as a boy. And on him fell
a strange calm, between apathy and resignation. This, then, was his
punishment. He would bear it like a man. There should be no flinching a
second time, no putting the burden on others' shoulders, no self-sparing
at another's cost.

He started to walk briskly in the direction of the Louvre. But when he
had gained the corner of the open space in front of the palace, whence
he had a view of the main gate between the two tennis courts, he halted
and looked up and down as if he hesitated. A watch-fire smouldering and
sputtering in the rain was burning dully before the drawbridge; the
forms of one or two men, apparently sentinels, were dimly visible about
it. After standing in doubt more then a minute, Bazan glided quickly to
the porch of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and disappeared in
the angle between it and the cloisters.

He had been stationary in this position for some half-hour--in what
bitterness of spirit, combating what regrets and painful thoughts it is
possible only to imagine--when a slight commotion took place at the gate
which faced him. Two men came out in close converse, and stood a moment
looking up as if speaking of the weather. They separated then, and one
who even by that uncertain light could be seen to be a man of tall,
spare presence, came across the open space towards the end of the Rue
des Fosses, which passed beside the cloisters. He had just entered the
street, when Bazan, who had been closely watching his movements, stepped
from the shadow of the houses and touched his sleeve.

The tall man recoiled sharply as he turned. He laid his hand on his
sword and partly drew it. "Who are you?" he said, trying in the darkness
to make out the other's features.

"M. de Crillon, is it not?" the young man asked.

"Yes. And you, young sir?"

"My name is Claude de Bazan, but you do not know me, I have a word to
say to you."

"You have chosen an odd time, my friend."

"Some things are always timely," the young fellow answered, the
excitement under which he laboured and the occasion imparting a spice of
flippancy to his tone. "I come to warn you that your life is in danger.
Do not go alone, M. de Crillon, or pass this way at night! And whatever
you do, walk for the future in the middle of the street!"

"For the warning I am obliged to you," the tall man answered, his voice
cool and satirical, while his eyes continued to scan the other's
features. "But, I say again, you have chosen a strange time to give it,
young sir. Moreover, your name is new to me, and I do not know your
face."

"Nor need you," said Bazan.

"Ay, but I think I need, craving your pardon," replied the tall, spare
man with some sternness. "I am not wont to be scared by little things,
nor will I give any man the right to say that he has frightened me with
a lighted turnip."

"Will it convince you if I tell you that I came hither to kill you?" the
young man cried impetuously.

"Yes, if you will say also why you did not--at least try?" Crillon
answered drily.

Bazan had not meant to explain himself; he had proposed to give his
warning, and to go. But on the impulse of the moment, carried away by
his excitement, he spoke, and told the story, and Crillon, after
leading him aside, so that a building sheltered them from the rain,
listened. He listened, who knew all the dark plans, all the scandals,
all the jealousies, all the vile or frantic schemings of a court, that,
half French, half Italian, mingled so grimly force and fraud. Nay, when
all was told, when Bazan, passing lightly over the resolution he had
formed to warn the victim instead of attacking him, came suddenly and
lamely to a stop, he still for a time stood silent. At last, "And what
will you do now, my friend?" he asked.

"Go back," the young man answered.

"And then?"

"Pay my debt."

The courtier swore a great oath--it was his failing--and with sudden
violence he seized his companion by the arm, and hurried him into the
roadway, and along the street. "To Simon's!" he muttered. "To Simon's,
my friend. I know the place. I will cut that villain Berthaud's throat."

"But what shall I be the better of that?" the young man answered,
somewhat bitterly. "I have none the less lost, and must pay."

Crillon stopped short, the darkness hiding alike his face and his
feelings. "So!" he said slowly, "I did not think of that! No, I did not
think of that. But do you mean it? What, if I kill him?"

"I have played for my life, and lost," Bazan answered proudly. "I
promised, and I am a gentleman."

"Pheugh!" Crillon whistled. He swore again, and stood. He was a great
man, and full of expedients, but the position was novel. Yet, after a
minute's thought, he had an idea. He started off again, taking Bazan's
arm, and impelling him onwards, with the same haste and violence. "To
Simon's! to Simon's!" he cried as before. "Courage, my friend, I will
play him for you and win you: I will redeem you. After all, it is
simple, absolutely simple."

"He will not play for me," the young man answered despondently.
Nevertheless he suffered himself to be borne onwards. "What will you set
against me?"

"Anything, everything!" his new friend cried recklessly. "Myself, if
necessary. Courage, M. de Bazan, courage! What Crillon wills, Crillon
does. You do not know me yet, but I have taken a fancy to you, I
have!"--He swore a grisly oath. "And I will make you mine."

He gave the young man no time for further objection, but, holding him
firmly by the arm, he hurried him through the streets to the door below
the two gables. On this he knocked with the air of one who had been
there before, and to whom all doors opened. In the momentary pause
before it yielded Bazan spoke. "Will you not be in danger here?" he
asked, wondering much.

"It is a Guise house? True, it is. But there is danger everywhere. No
man dies more than once or before God wills it! And I am Crillon!"

The superb air with which he said this last prepared Bazan for what
followed. The moment the door was opened, Crillon pushed through the
doorway, and with an assured step strode down the passage. He turned the
corner of the screen and stood in the room; and, calmly smiling at the
group of startled, astonished faces which were turned on him, he drew
off his cloak and flung it over his left arm. His height at all times
made him a conspicuous figure; this night he was fresh from court. He
wore black and silver, the hilt of his long sword was jewelled, the
Order of the Holy Ghost glittered on his breast; and this fine array
seemed to render more shabby the pretentious finery of the third-rate
adventurers before him. He saluted them coolly. "It is a wet night,
gentlemen," he said.

Some of those who sat farthest off had risen, and all had drawn together
as sheep club at sight of the wolf. One of them answered sullenly that
it was.

"You think I intrude, gentlemen?" he returned, smiling pleasantly,
drinking in as homage the stir his entrance had caused. For he was vain.
"I want only an old friend, M. Michel Berthaud, who is here, I think?"

"And for what do you want him?" the tall dark player answered
defiantly; he alone of those present seemed in a degree a match for the
new-comer, though even his gloomy eyes fell before Crillon's easy stare.
"For what do you want me?"

"To propose a little game to you," Crillon answered: and he moved down
the room, apparently at his ease. "My friend here has told me of his
ill-luck. He is resolved to perform his bargain. But first, M. Berthaud,
I have a proposal to make to you. His life is yours. You have won it.
Well, I will set you five hundred crowns against it."

The scowl on Berthaud's face did not relax. "No," he said
contemptuously. "I will not play with you, M. de Crillon. Let the fool
die. What is he to you?"

"Nothing, and yet I have a fancy to win him," Crillon replied lightly.
"Come, I will stake a thousand crowns against him! A thousand crowns for
a life! _Mon Dieu_," he added, with a whimsical glance at Bazan, "but
you are dear, my friend!"

Indeed, half a score of faces shone with cupidity, and twice as many
bearded lips watered. A thousand crowns! A whole thousand crowns! But to
the surprise of most--a few knew their man--Berthaud shook his head.

"No," he said, "I will not play! I won his life, and I will have it."

"Fifteen hundred crowns. I will set that! Fifteen----"

"No!"

"Two thousand, then! Two thousand, man! And I will throw in my chain. It
is worth five hundred more."

"No! No! No!"

"Then, say what you will play for!" the great man roared, his face
swelling with rage. "Thousand devils and all tonsured! I have a mind to
win his life. What will you have against it?"

"Against it?"

"Ay!"

"Yours!" said M. Berthaud, very softly.

Bazan drew in his breath--sharply: otherwise the silence was so intense
that the fall of the wood-ashes from the dying fire could be heard. The
immense, the boundless audacity of the proposal made some smile and some
start. But none smiled so grimly as M. Michel Berthaud the challenger
and none started so little as M. de Crillon, the challenged.

"A high bid!" he said, lifting his chin with something almost of humour;
and then glancing round him, as a wolf might glance, if the sheep turned
on him. "You ask much, M. Berthaud."

"I will ask less then," replied Berthaud, with irony. "If I win, I will
give you his life. He shall go free whether you win or lose, M. de
Crillon."

"That is much!" with answering irony.

"Much or little----"

"It is understood?"

"It is," Berthaud rejoined with a sarcastic bow.

"Then I accept!" Crillon cried: and with a movement so brisk that some
recoiled, he sat down at the table. "I accept. Silence!" he continued,
turning sharply upon Bazan, whose cry of remonstrance rang above the
astonished murmur of the bystanders. "Silence, fool!" He struck the
table. "It is my will. Fear nothing! I am Crillon, and I do not lose."

There was a superb self-confidence in the man, an arrogance, a courage,
which more than anything else persuaded his hearers that he was in
earnest, that he was not jesting with them.

"The terms are quite understood," he proceeded, grimly. "If I win, we go
free, M. Berthaud. If I lose, M. de Bazan goes free, and I undertake on
the honor of a nobleman to kill myself before daylight. Shall I say
within six hours? I have affairs to settle!"

Probably no one in the room felt astonishment equal to that of Berthaud.
A faint colour tinged his sallow cheeks; a fierce gleam of joy flashed
in his eyes. But all he said was, "Yes, I am satisfied."

"Then throw!" said Crillon, and leaning forward he took a candle from a
neighbouring table, and placed it beside him. "My friend," he added,
speaking to Bazan with earnest gravity, "I advise you to be quiet. If
you do not we shall quarrel."

His smile was as easy, his manner as unembarrassed, his voice as steady,
as when he had entered the room. The old gamesters who stood round the
table, and had seen, with interest indeed and some pity, but with no
great emotion, a man play his last stake, saw this, saw a man stake his
life for a whim, with very different feelings; with astonishment, with
admiration, with a sense of inferiority that did not so much gall their
pride as awaken their interest. For the moment, the man who was above
death, who risked it for a fancy, a trifle, a momentary gratification,
was a demigod. "Throw!" repeated Crillon, heedless and apparently
unconscious of the stir round him: "Throw! but beware of that candle!
Your sleeve is in it."

It was; it was singeing. Berthaud moved the candle, and as if his
enemy's _sang froid_ wounded him, he threw savagely, dashing down the
dice on the table, and lifting the box with a gesture of defiance. He
swore a frightful oath: his face was livid. He had thrown aces only.

"So!" murmured his opponent quietly. "Is that all? A thousand crowns to
a hundred that I better that! Five hundred to a hundred that I double
it! Will no one take me? Then I throw. Courage, my friend. I am
Crillon!"

He threw; an ace and a deuce.

"I waste nothing," he said.

But few heard the words--his opponent perhaps and one or two others; for
from end to end the room rang and the oaken rafters shook with a great
cry of "Long live Crillon! the brave Crillon!"--a cry which rose from a
score of throats. Then and onwards till the day of his death, many years
later, he was known throughout France by no other name. The great king's
letter to him, "Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We have fought to-day, and
you were not there!" is not yet forgotten--nay, never will be
forgotten--in a land where, more than in other, the memories of the past
have been swept away.

He rose from the table, bowing grandly, superbly, arrogantly. "Adieu, M.
Berthaud--for the present," he said; and had he not seemed too proud to
threaten, a threat might have underlain his words. "Adieu, gentlemen,"
he continued, throwing on his cloak. "A good night to you, and equal
fortune. M. de Bazan, I will trouble you to accompany me? You have
exchanged, let me tell you, one taskmaster for another."

The young man's heart was too full for words, and making no attempt to
speak, or to thank his benefactor, before those who had seen the deed,
he followed him from the room. Crillon did not speak or halt until they
stood in the Rue des Fosses; nor even there, for after a momentary
hesitation he passed through it, and led the way to the middle of the
open space before the Louvre. Here he stopped, and touched his companion
on the breast. "Now," he said, "we can speak with freedom, my friend.
You wish to thank me? Do not. Listen to me instead. I have saved your
life, ay, that have I; but I hold it at my will? Say, is it not so?
Well, I, too, in my turn wish you to do something for me."

"Anything!" said the young man, passionately. The sight of the other's
strange daring had stirred his untried nature to its depths. "You have
but to ask and have."

"Very well," Crillon answered, gravely, "be it so. I take you at your
word. Though, mind you, M. de Bazan, 'tis no light thing I ask. It is
something," pausing, "from which I shrink myself."

"Then it is nothing you ask me to do," Bazan answered.

"Not so," the courtier replied, though he looked far from ill-pleased by
the compliment. "Listen. To-morrow the king sups at the house of Madame
de Sauves. I shall be with him. Her house is in the Rue de l'Arbre Sec,
two doors from the convent. Here are a hundred crowns. Dress yourself so
that you may appear as one of my gentlemen, and wait near the gates till
I come. Then follow me in, and at supper stand behind my chair, as the
others of my suite will stand."

"And is that all?" Bazan asked in astonishment.

"No, not quite," Crillon answered dryly. "The rest I will whisper in
your ear as I pass. Only do what I bid you boldly and faithfully, my
friend, and afterwards, if all be well, I will not forget you."

"I am yours! Do with me as you will!" Bazan protested.

But to mortals the unknown is ever terrible; and for twenty-four hours
Bazan had the unknown before him. What could that be from which Crillon
himself said that he shrank--a man so brave? It could not be death, for
that he had risked on the lightest, the flimsiest, the most fantastic
provocation. Then what could it be? Bazan turned the question in his
mind, turned it a hundred times that night, turned it a hundred times as
he went about his preparations next day. Turned it and turned it, but
instinctively, though no injunctions to that effect had been given him,
took care to show himself as little as possible in public, and
especially to shun all places where he might meet those who had been
present at that strange game at Simon's.

A quarter before nine on the next evening, saw him waiting with a
beating heart outside the house in the Rue de l'Arbre Sec. He formed one
of a crowd of lackeys, and linkboys, citizens, apprentices, and chance
passers who had been attracted to the spot by the lights and by the
guards in the royal livery, who already, though the king was not come,
kept the entrance to the courtyard. Bazan pushed himself with some
difficulty into the front rank, and there waited, scanning with feverish
eagerness every one who entered.

Time passed, and no Crillon appeared, though presently a great shouting
along the street proclaimed the approach of the Duke of Guise, and that
nobleman passed slowly in, noting with a falcon's eye the faces of the
bowing throng. He was a man of grand height and imperial front--a great
scar seeming to make the latter more formidable--his smile a trifle
supercilious, his eyes somewhat near one another; and under his glance
Bazan felt for the moment small and mean. A little later, from the talk
of those about him, the young man learned that the king was drawing
near, and Henry's coach, surrounded by a dozen of the Forty-five,
lumbered along the street. It was greeted with comparative coldness,
only those who stood under the guards' eyes performing a careless
salute.

Bazan was no Parisian, though for the present in Paris, and no Leaguer,
though a Roman Catholic; and he forgot his present errand in the
excitement of his rustic loyalty. Raising his bonnet, he cried loudly
_Vive le Roi!_--cried it more than once. There were six in the coach,
but Henry, whose pale meagre face with its almond eyes and scanty beard
permitted no mistake, remarked the salutation and the giver, and his
look cast the young man into a confusion which nearly cost him dearly;
for it was only as the guards closed round the coach that he perceived
Crillon sitting in the nearer boot. The moment he did see him he pushed
forward among the running footmen who followed the coach, and succeeded
in entering with it.

The courtyard, crowded with gentlemen, lackeys and torch-bearers, was a
scene of great confusion, and Bazan had no difficulty in approaching
Crillon and exchanging a sentence with him. That effected, so completely
was he confounded by the order whispered in his ear, that he observed
nothing more until he found himself in a long gallery, waiting with many
others attached to the great men's suites, while the magnificoes
themselves talked together at the upper end. By listening to the gossip
round him, he learned that one dark handsome man among the latter was
Alphonso d'Ornano, often called the Corsican Captain. A second was M.
d'O, the Governor of Paris; a third, the Count of Soissons. But he had
scarcely time to note these, or the novel and splendid scene in which he
stood, before the double doors at the end of the gallery were thrown
widely open, and amid a sudden hush the great courtiers passed into the
supper room in which the king, the Duke of Guise, and several ladies,
already stood or sat in their places, having entered by another door.
Bazan pressed in with the flock of attendant gentlemen, and seeing
Crillon preparing to sit down not far from the dais and canopy which
marked the king's chair, he took his stand against the wall behind him.

If the words which Crillon had dropped into his ear had not occupied
three-fourths of his thoughts, Bazan would have felt a keener admiration
of the scene before him; which, as was natural, surpassed in luxury
anything the country lad had ever imagined. The room, panelled and
ceiled with cedar, was hung with blue velvet and lighted by a hundred
tapers. The table gleamed with fine napery and gold plate, with Palissy
ware and Cellini vases; and these, with the rich dresses and jewels and
fair shoulders of the ladies, combined to form a beautiful interior
which resounded with the babble of talk and laughter. It was hard to
detect danger lurking under these things, under the silk, within the
flashing, gleaming cups, behind smiling eyes; still harder to discern
below these fair appearances a peril from which a Crillon shrank.

But to Bazan, as he waited with tortured nerves, these things were
nothing. They were no more than fair flowers to the man who espies the
coils of a snake among the blossoms. Crillon's whisper had revealed all
to him--all, in one brief sentence; so that when he presently recognized
Michel Berthaud standing near the upper end of the table and on the
farther side of it, in attendance upon the Duke of Guise, he felt no
astonishment, but only a shrewd suspicion of the quarter from which the
danger might be expected.

The king, a man of thirty-seven, so effeminate in appearance that it was
hard to believe he had seen famous fields and once bidden fair to be a
great Captain, was nursing a dog on his lap, the while he listened with
a weary air to the whispers of the beautiful woman who sat next him.
Apparently he had a niggard ear even for her witcheries, and little
appetite save for the wine flask. Lassitude lived in his eyes, his long
thin fingers trembled. Bazan watched him drain his goblet of wine,
almost as soon as he sat down, and watched him, too, hold out the gold
cup to be filled again. The task was performed by an assiduous hand, and
for a moment the king poised the cup in his fingers, speaking to his
neighbour the while. Then he laid it down, but his hand did not quit its
neighbourhood.

The next moment the room rang with a cry of alarm and indignation, and
every face was turned one way. Bazan with unparalleled audacity had
stepped forward, had seized the sacred cup almost from the royal hand,
and drained it!

While some sprang from their seats, two or three seized the culprit and
held him fast. One more enthusiastic than the others or more keenly
sensitive to the outrage of which he had been guilty, aimed a fierce
blow at his breast with a poniard. The stroke was well meant, nay, was
well directed; but it was adroitly intercepted by M. de Crillon, who had
been among the first to rise. With a blow of his sheathed sword he sent
the dagger spinning towards the ceiling.

"Back!" he cried, in a voice of thunder, placing himself before the
culprit. "Stand back, I say! I will answer to the king for all!"

He cleared a space before him with his scabbard, and a quick signal
brought to his side the two guards at the nearest door, who were men of
his command. These, crossing their pikes before the prisoner, secured
him from immediate attack. By this time all in the room had risen save
the king, who appeared less moved than any by the incident. At this
point he raised his hand to procure silence.

"Is he mad?" he asked calmly. "What is it, Crillon?"

"I will satisfy your Grace," the courtier answered. But the next moment,
with a sudden change of tone, he cried loudly and rapidly, "Stop that
man, I beg you, d'Ornano! Stop him!"

The warning came too late. The Corsican sprang indeed to the door, but
the crowd impeded him; and the man to whom Crillon referred--the same
who had struck at Bazan, and who was no other than Berthaud--got to it
first, slipped out and was gone from sight, before those near the
entrance had recovered from their surprise.

"Follow him," Crillon cried loudly. "Seize him at all hazards! _Mort de
Dieu!_ He has outwitted us at last."

"His Majesty has asked, M. de Crillon," said one at the table, speaking
in the haughty, imperious tone of a man who never spoke unheeded, "what
is the meaning of all this? Perhaps you will kindly satisfy him."

"I will satisfy him," Crillon answered, grimly fixing his eyes on the
other's handsome face. "And you, too, M. de Guise. An attempt has been
made to poison my master. This young man, observing that a strange hand
poured the king's wine, has saved his Majesty's life by taking the
poison himself!"

Henry of Guise laughed scornfully. "A likely story!" he said.

"And in my house!" Madame de Sauves cried in the same tone. "His Majesty
will not believe that I----"

"I said nothing against Madame de Sauves," Crillon answered, with
firmness. "For the rest, let the king be judge. The issue is simple. If
the lad go scatheless, there was no poison in that cup and I am a liar.
If he suffer, then let the king say who lies!"

A close observer might have seen an uneasy expression flit across more
than one face, darken more than one pair of eyes. Crillon remained on
his guard facing the table, his eyes keenly vigilant. The Count of
Soissons, one of the younger Bourbons, had already stepped to the king's
side and taken place by his chair, his hand on his hilt. D'Ornano, who
had despatched two guards after Berthaud, openly drew his long sword and
placed himself on the other side of the dais. Nor was suspicion confined
to their party. Half a dozen gentlemen had risen to their feet about the
Duke of Guise, who continued to sit with folded arms, content to smile.
He was aware that at the worst here in Paris he was safe; perhaps he was
innocent of harm or intent.

The main effect, however, of Crillon's last words was to draw many eyes,
and amongst them the king's, to the prisoner's face. Bazan was leaning
against the wall, the cup still in his grasp. As they turned with a
single movement towards him, his face began to grow a shade paler, a
spasm moved his lips, and after the interval of a moment the cup fell
from his hand to the ground. Thrusting himself with a convulsive
movement from the wall, he put out his hands and groped with them as if
he could no longer see; until, one of them meeting the pike of the
nearest guard, he tried to support himself by this. At the same time he
muttered hoarsely, "M. de Crillon, you saw it! We are--we are quits!"

He would have fallen on that, but the men caught him in their arms and
held him up, amid a murmur of horror; to many brave men death in this
special form is appalling. Here and there a woman shrieked; one fainted.
Meanwhile, the young man's face was becoming livid; his neck seemed to
stiffen, his eyes to protrude. The king looked at him and shuddered.
"Saint Denis!" he muttered, the perspiration standing on his brow, "what
an escape! What an escape! Can nothing be done for him?"

"I will try, Sire," Crillon answered, abandoning for the first time his
attitude of watchfulness. Drawing a small phial from his pocket, he
directed one of the guards to force open the lad's teeth, and then
himself poured the contents of the bottle between them.

"Good lad," he muttered to himself, "he has drained the cup. I bade him
drink only half. It would have been enough. But he is young and strong.
He may surmount it."

The rest looked on, some in curiosity, some in pity, some in secret
apprehension. It was the Duke of Guise who put into words the thoughts
of many. "Those," he said scornfully, "who find the antidote, may know
the poison, M. de Crillon."

"What do you mean, Duke?" Crillon replied passionately, as he sprang to
his feet. "That I was in this? That I know more than I have told of it?
If so, you lie, sir; and you know it!"

"I know it?" the Duke cried, his eyes aflame, his cheeks reddening.
Never had he heard such words. "Do you dare to insinuate--that I know
more of this plot than yourself--if plot there be?"

"Enough!" said the king, rising in great haste, and with a face which
betrayed his emotion. "Silence, gentlemen! silence! And you, my cousin,
not another word, I command you! Who poured out the wine?"

"A villain called Berthaud," Crillon answered promptly and fiercely,
"who was in attendance upon the Duke of Guise."

"He was not in attendance on me!" the duke answered, with spirit.

"Then on Madame de Sauves."

"I know nothing of him!" cried that lady, hysterically. "I never spoke
to the man in my life. I do not know him!"

"Enough!" the king said with decision; but the gloom on his brow grew
darker. "Enough. Until Berthaud is found, let no more be said. Cousin,"
he continued to the Count of Soissons, "you will see us home. D'Ornano,
we return at once, and you will accompany us. For M. de Crillon, we
commit to him the care of this young man, to whom we appear to be
indebted, and whose thought for us we shall not forget. Madame, I kiss
your hand."

Guise's salutation he acknowledged only by a grave bow. The last of the
Valois could at times exert himself, could at times play again the hero
of Jarnac and Montcontour, could even assume a dignity no whit less
than that of Guise. As he retired all bowed low to him, and the greater
part of the assemblage--even those who had not attended him to the
house--left in his train. In three minutes Crillon, a couple of inferior
officers, and a handful of guards alone remained round the young man.

"He will recover," Crillon said, speaking to the officer next him. "He
is young, and they did not dare to make the dose too strong. We shall
not, however, convict any one now, unless Berthaud speaks."

"Berthaud is dead."

"What?"

"As dead as Clovis," the lieutenant repeated calmly. "He is lying in the
passage, M. de Crillon."

"Who killed him?" cried Crillon, leaping up in a rage. "Who dared to
kill him? Not those fools of guards when they knew it was his evidence
we wanted."

"No, no," said the other coolly. "They found him dead not twenty paces
from the house. He was a doomed man when he passed through the door. You
understand, M. de Crillon? He knew too much to live."

"_Mort de Dieu!_" cried Crillon, raising his hands in admiration. "How
clever they are! Not a thing forgotten! Well, I will to the king and
tell him. It will put him on his guard. If I had not contrived to try
the draught there and then, I could not have convinced him; and if I had
not by a lucky hazard won this young man last night, I might have
whistled for one to try it! But I must go."

Yet he lingered a minute to see how the lad progressed. The convulsions
which had for a time racked Bazan's vigorous frame had ceased, and a
profuse perspiration was breaking out on his brow.

"Yes, he will recover," said Crillon again, and with greater confidence.

As if the words had reached Bazan's brain, he opened his eyes.

"I did it!" he muttered. "I did it. We are quits, M. de Crillon!"

"Not so!" cried the other, stooping impetuously and embracing him. "Not
quits! The balance is against me now, but I will redress it. Be easy;
your fortune is made, M. de Bazan. While James Berthon de Crillon lives
you shall not lack a friend!"

He kept his word. There can be little doubt that the Laurence de Bazan
who held high office under the Minister Sully, and in particular rose to
be Deputy Superintendent of the Finances in Guienne, was our young
Bazan. This being so, it is clear that he outlived by many years his
patron: for Crillon, "le brave Crillon," whose whim it was to dare
greatly, and on small occasion, died early in the seventeenth
century--in his bed--and lies under a famous stone in the Cathedral of
Avignon. Whereas we find Bazan still flourishing, and a person of
consequence at Court, when Richelieu came to the height of his power.
Nevertheless on him there remains no stone; only some sketch of the
above, and a crabbed note at the foot of a dusty page in a dark
library.




FOR THE CAUSE

I


Paris had never seemed to the eye more peaceful than on a certain
November evening in the year 1591: and this although many a one within
its walls resented the fineness of the night as a mockery, as a scoff
alike at the pain of some and the fury of others.

The moonlight fell on roofs and towers, on the bare open space of the
Place de Greve, and the dark mass of the Louvre, and only here and there
pierced, by chance, a narrow lane, to gleam on some foul secret of the
kennel. The Seine lay a silvery loop about the Ile de la Cite--a loop
cut on this side and that by the black shadows of the Pont au Change,
and the Petit Pont, and broken again westward by the outline of the New
Bridge, which was then in building.

The city itself lay in profound quiet in the depth of the shadow. From
time to time at one of the gates, or in the vaulted lodge of the
Chatelet, a sentinel challenged or an officer spoke. But the bell of St.
Germain l'Auxerrois, which had rung through hours of the past day, was
silent. The tumult which had leaped like flame from street to street
had subsided. Peaceful men breathed again in their houses, and women, if
they still cowered by the hearth, no longer laid trembling fingers on
their ears. For a time the red fury was over: and in the narrow
channels, where at noon the mob had seethed and roared, scarcely a stray
wayfarer could now be found.

A few however were abroad: and of these some, who chanced to be
threading the network of streets between the Chatelet and the Louvre,
heard behind them the footsteps of one in great haste. Turning, they saw
pass by them a youth, wearing a sword and a student's short cloak and
cap--apparently he was a member of the University. He was pale of face,
and for his part looked neither to right nor left: saw not one of them,
and seemed bent only on getting forward.

He slackened his pace however near the corner of the Rue de Tirchape,
where it shoots out of the Rue de Bethisy; and then turning the corner
impulsively, he caught his foot in some obstacle, and, plunging forward,
would have fallen, if he had not come against a man, who seemed to be
standing still in the shadow of the corner house.

"Hold up!" exclaimed this person, withstanding the shock better than
could have been expected, for he was neither tall nor bulky. "You should
have a pretty mistress, young man, if you go to her at this pace!"

The student did not answer--did not seem to hear. He staggered against
the wall, and stood propping himself up by it. His face, pale before,
was ghastly, as he glared, horror-struck, at something beyond the
speaker. The latter, after muttering angrily, "What the plague, then, do
you go dashing about the streets like a Shrove Tuesday ox for?" turned
also and glanced behind him.

But not at that to which the student's eyes were directed. The stranger
seemed constrained to look first and by preference at the long, low
casement of a house nearly opposite them. This window was on the first
floor, and projected somewhat over the roadway. There seemed to be no
light in the room within; but the moonlight reached it, and showed a
woman's head bent on the sill--a girl's head, if one might judge from
its wealth of hair. One white wrist gleamed amid the coil, but her face
was hidden on her arms and showed not. In the whole scene--in the
casement open at this inclement time, in the girl's attitude, in her
abandonment, there was something which stirred the nerves. It was only
after a long look that the stranger averted his eyes, and cast a casual
glance at a queer, dark object, which a few paces away swung above the
street, dimly outlined against the sky. It was clear that it was that
which had fascinated his companion.

"Umph!" he ejaculated in the tone of a man who should say "Is that all?"
And he turned to the youth again. "You seem taken aback, young man?" he
said. "Surely that is no such strange sight in Paris nowadays. What with
Leaguers hanging Politiques, and Politiques hanging Leaguers, and both
burning Huguenots, I thought a dead man was no longer a bogey to
frighten children with!"

"Hush, sir, in Heaven's name!" the young man exclaimed, shuddering at
his words. And then, with a gesture of despair, "He was my father!"

The stranger whistled. "He was your father, was he!" he replied more
gently. "I dare swear too that he was an honest man, since the Sixteen
have done this. There, steady, my friend. These are no times for
weeping. Be thankful that Le Clerc and his crew have spared your home,
and your--your sister. That is rare clemency in these days, and Heaven
only knows how long it may last. You wear a sword? Then shed no tears to
rust it. Time enough to weep, man, when there is blood to be washed from
the blade."

"You speak boldly," said the youth, checking his emotion somewhat, "but
had they hung your father before his own door----"

"Good man," said the stranger with a coolness that bordered on the
cynical, "he has been dead these twenty years."

"Then your mother?" the student suggested with the feeble persistence by
which weak minds show their consciousness of contact with stronger ones,
"you had then----"

"Hung them all as high as Haman!"

"Ay, but suppose there were among them some you could not hang,"
objected the youth, in a lower tone, while he eyed his companion
narrowly, "some of the clergy, you understand?"

"They had swung--though they had all been Popes of Rome," was the blunt
answer.

The young man shook his head, and drew off a pace. He scanned the
stranger curiously, keeping his back turned to the corpse the while; but
he failed by that light to make out much one way or the other. Scarcely
a moment too was allowed him before the murmur of voices and the clash
of weapons at the farther end of the street interrupted him. "The watch
are coming," he said roughly.

"You are right," his companion assented, "and the sooner we are within
doors the better."

It was noticeable that throughout their talk which had lasted some
minutes no sign of life had appeared in any of the neighbouring houses.
Scarce a light shone from doorway or window though it was as yet but
nine o'clock. In truth fear of the Sixteen and of the mob whom they
guided was overpowering Paris--was a terror crushing out men's lives.
While the provinces of France were divided between two opinions, and
half of them owned the Huguenot Henry the Fourth--now for two years the
rightful sovereign--Paris would have none of him. The fierce bigotry of
the lower classes, the presence of some thousands of Spanish soldiers,
and the ambition and talents of the Guise family combined at once to
keep the gates of Paris closed to him, and to overawe such of the
respectable citizens as from religious sympathy in rare cases, more
often out of a desire to see the re-establishment of law and order,
would have adopted his cause. The Politiques, or moderate party, who
were indifferent about religion as such, but believed that a strong
government could be formed only by a Romanist king, were almost
non-existent in Paris. And the events of the past day, the murder of
three magistrates and several lower officials--among them poor M.
Portail, whose body now decorated the Rue de Tirchape--had not reassured
the municipal mind. No wonder that men put out their lights early, and
were loth to go to their windows, when they might see a few feet from
the casement the swollen features of a harmless, honest man, but
yesterday going to and from his work like other men.

Young Portail stole to the door of the house and knocked hurriedly. As
he did so, he looked, with something like a shiver of apprehension, at
the window above his head. But the girl neither moved nor spoke, nor
betrayed any consciousness of his presence. She might have been dead. It
was a young man, about his own age or a little older, who, after
reconnoitring him from above, cautiously drew back the door. "Whom have
you with you?" he whispered, holding it ajar, and letting the end of a
stout club be seen.

"No one," Portail replied in the same cautious tone. And he would have
entered without more ado, and closed the door behind him had not his
late companion, who had followed him across the street like his shadow,
set his foot against it. "Nay, but you are forgetting me," he said
good-humouredly.

"Go your way! we have enough to do to protect ourselves," cried Portail,
brusquely.

"The more need of me," was the careless answer.

The watch were now but a few houses away, and the stranger seemed
determined. He could scarcely be kept out without a disturbance. With an
angry oath Felix Portail held the door for him to enter; and closed it
softly behind him. Then for a minute or so the three stood silent in the
darkness of the damp-smelling passage, while with a murmur of voices and
clash of weapons, and a ruddy glimmer piercing crack and keyhole, the
guard swept by.

"Have you a light?" Felix murmured, as the noise began to die away.

"In the back room," replied the young man who had admitted them. He
seemed to be a clerk or confidential servant. "But your sister," he
continued, "is distraught. She has sat at the window all day as you see
her now--sometimes looking at _it_. Oh, Felix," in a voice shaken by
tears, "this has been a dreadful day for this house!"

The young Portail assented by a groan. "And Susanne?" he asked.

"Is with Mistress Marie, terrified almost to death, poor child. She has
been crouching all day beside her, hiding her face in her gown. But
where were you?"

"At the Sorbonne," Felix replied, in a whisper.

"Ah!" the other exclaimed, something of hidden meaning in his tone. "I
would not tell her that, if I were you. I feared it was so. But let us
go upstairs."

They went up; the stranger following, with more than one stumble by the
way. At the head of the staircase the clerk opened a door and preceded
them into a low-roofed panelled room, plainly but solidly furnished, and
lighted by a small hanging lamp of silver. A round oak table on six
curiously turned legs stood in the middle, and on it some food was laid.
A high-backed chair, before which a sheep-skin rug was spread, and two
or three stools, made up, with a great oak chest, the furniture of the
room.

The stranger turned from scrutinizing his surroundings, and stood at
gaze. Another door had opened silently; he saw framed in the doorway and
relieved by the lamplight against the darkness of the outer room the
face and figure of a tall girl; doubtless the one whom he had seen at
the window. A moment she stood pointing at them with her hand, her face
white--and whiter in seeming by reason of the black hair which fell
round it; her eyes were dilated, the neckband of her dark red gown was
torn open that she might have air. "A Provencal!" the intruder murmured
to himself. "Beautiful and a tigress."

At any rate, for the moment, beside herself. "So you have come at last!"
she said, panting, glaring at Felix with scorn, passionate scorn in word
and gesture. "Where were you while these slaves of yours did your
bidding? At the Sorbonne with the black crows! Thinking out fresh work
for them? Or dallying with your Normandy sweetheart?"

"Hush!" he said, lowering his eyes, and visibly quailing before her.
"There is a stranger here."

"There have been many strangers here to-day!" she retorted with
undiminished bitterness. "Hush, you say? Nay, but I will not be silent
for you, for any! They may tear me limb from limb, but I will accuse
them of this murder before God's throne. Coward! Parricide! Do you think
I will ask mercy from them? Come, look on your work! See what the League
have done--your holy League!--while you sat plotting with the black
crows!"

She pointed into the dark room behind her, and the movement disclosed a
younger girl clinging to her skirts, and weeping silently. "Come here,
Susanne," Felix said; he had turned pale and red and shifted from one
foot to another, under the lash of the elder girl's scorn. "Your sister
is not herself. You do no good, Marie, staying in there. See, you are
both trembling with cold."

"With cold?" was the fierce rejoinder. "Then do you warm yourselves! Sit
down and eat and drink and be comfortable and forget him! But I will not
eat nor drink while he hangs there! Shame, Felix Portail! Shame! Have
you arms and hands, and will let your father hang before his own door?"

Her voice rang shrill to the last word audible far down the street; that
said, an awkward silence fell on the room. The stranger nodded twice,
almost as if he said, "Bravo!--Bravo." The two men of the house cast
doubtful glances at one another. At length the clerk spoke. "It is
impossible, mistress," he said gently. "Were he touched, the mob would
wreck the house to-morrow."

"A little bird whispered to me as I came through the streets,"--it was
the stranger who spoke--"that Mayenne and his riders would be in town
to-morrow. Then it seems to me that our friends of the Sorbonne will not
have matters altogether their own way--to wreck or to spare!"

The Sorbonne was the Theological College of Paris; at this time it was
the headquarters of the extreme Leaguers and the Sixteen. Mayenne and
D'Aumale, the Guise princes, more than once found it necessary to check
the excesses of the party.

Marie Portail looked for the first time at the speaker. He sat on the
edge of the chest, carelessly swinging one knee over the other; a man of
middle height, neither tall nor short, with well-bronzed cheeks, a
forehead broad and white, and an aquiline nose. He wore a beard and
moustaches, and his chin jutted out. His eyes were keen, but
good-humoured. Though spare he was sinewy; and an iron-hilted sword
propped against his thigh seemed made for use rather than show. The
upper part of his dress was of brown cloth, the lower of leather. A
weather-stained cloak, which he had taken off, lay on the chest beside
him.

"You are a man!" cried Marie, her eyes leaving him again. "But as for
these----"

"Stay, mistress!" the clerk broke in. "Your brother does but collect
himself. If the Duke of Mayenne returns to-morrow, as our friend here
says is likely--and I have heard the same myself--he will keep his men
in better order. That is true. And we might risk it if the watch would
leave us a clear street."

Felix nodded sullenly. "Shut the door," he said to his sister, the deep
gloom on his countenance in sharp contrast with the excitement she
betrayed. "There is no need to let the neighbours see us."

This time she obeyed him. Susanne too crept from her skirts, and threw
herself on her knees, hiding her face on a chair. "Ay," said Marie,
looking down at her with the first expression of tenderness the stranger
had noted in her. "Let her weep. Let children weep. But let men work."

"We want a ladder," the clerk said, in a low voice. "And the longest we
have is full three feet short."

"That is just half a man," remarked he who sat on the chest.

"What mean you?" Felix asked wonderingly.

"What I said."

"But there is nothing on which we can rest the ladder," the clerk urged.

"Then that is a whole man," quoth the stranger, curtly. "Perhaps two. I
told you you would have need of me." He looked from one to the other
with a smile--a careless, reckless, self-contented smile.

"You are a soldier," said Marie. And abruptly she fixed her eyes upon
him.

"At times," he replied, shrugging his shoulders.

"For which side?"

He shook his head. "For my own," he answered naively.

"A soldier of fortune?"

"At your service, mistress; now and ever."

The clerk struck in with impatience. "If we are to do this," he said,
"we had better set about it. I will fetch the ladder."

He went out, and the other men followed more slowly down the stairs;
leaving Marie still standing gazing into the darkness of the front
room--she had opened the door again--like one in a trance. Some odd
trait in the soldier led him, as he passed out, to lay his hand on the
hair of the kneeling child with a movement infinitely tender; infinitely
at variance with the harsh clatter with which his sword next moment rang
against the stairs as he descended.

The three men were going to do that which two for certain, and all
perhaps, knew to be perilous. One went to it in gloom, reluctance and
anger, as well as with sorrow at his heart. One bustled about nervously,
and looked often behind him as if to see Marie's pale face at the
window. And one strode out as to a ball, glancing up and down the dark
lane with an air of enjoyment, which not even the grim nature of his
task could suppress. The body was hanging from a bar which crossed the
street at a considerable height, and served as a stay between the gables
of two opposite houses, of which one was two doors only from the unhappy
Portail's. The mob, with a barbarity very common in those days, had hung
him on his own threshold.

The street, as the three moved into it, seemed empty and still. But it
was impossible to say how long it would remain so. Yet the soldier
loitered, staring about him, as one remembering things. "Did not the
Admiral live in this street?" he inquired.

"De Coligny? No. Round the corner in the Rue de Bethisy," replied the
clerk, brusquely. "But see! The ladder will not reach the bar--no, not
by four feet."

"Set it against the wall then--thus," said the soldier, and having done
it himself, he mounted a few steps. Then he seemed to bethink himself.
He jumped down again. "No," he exclaimed, peering sharply into the faces
of one and the other, "I do not know you. If any one comes, my friends,
and you leave the foot of the ladder, I shall be taken like a bird on a
limed twig. Do you ascend, Monsieur Felix."

The young man drew back. He was not without courage, or experience of
rough scenes. But the Louvre was close at hand, almost within earshot on
one side, the Chatelet was scarcely farther off on the other; and both
swarmed with soldiers and the armed scourings of the streets. At any
moment a troop of these might pass; and should they detect any one
interfering with King Mob's handiwork, he would certainly dangle in a
few minutes from that same handy lamp-iron. Felix knew this, and stood
at gaze. "I do not know you either," he muttered irresolutely, his hand
still on the ladder.

A smile of surprising humour played on the soldier's face. "Nay, but you
knew _him_!" he retorted, pointing upwards with his hand. "Trust me,
young sir," he added significantly, "I am less inclined to mount
now--than I was before."

The clerk intervened before Felix could resent the insult. "Steady," he
said; "I will go up and do it."

"Not so!" Felix rejoined, pushing him aside in turn. And he ran up the
ladder. But near the top he paused, and began to descend again. "I have
no knife," he said shamefacedly.

"Pshaw! Let me come!" cried the stranger. "I see you are both good
comrades. I trust you. Besides, I am more used to this ladder work than
you are, and time is everything."

He ran up as he spoke, and, standing on the highest round but one, he
grasped the bar above his head, and swung himself lightly up, so as to
gain a seat on it. With more caution he wormed himself along it until he
reached the rope. Fortunately there was a long coil of this about the
bar; and warning his companions in a whisper, he carefully, and with
such reverence as the time and place allowed, let down the body to them.
They received it in their arms; and had just loosened the noose from the
neck when an outburst of voices and the tramp of footsteps at the nearer
end of the street surprised them. For an instant the two stood in the
gloom, breathless, stricken still, confounded. Then with a single
impulse they lifted the body between them, and huddled blindly towards
the door of the Portails' house. It opened at their touch, they stumbled
in, and it fell to behind them. The foremost of the armed watch had been
within ten paces of them. The escape was narrow.

Yet they had escaped. But what next? What of their comrade? The moment
the door was closed behind them, one at least would have rushed out
again, ay, to certain death, so strongly had the soldier's trust
appealed to his honour. But they had the body in their arms; and by the
time it was laid on the stairs, a score of men had passed. The
opportunity was over. They could do nothing but listen. "Heaven help
him!" fell from the clerk's quivering lips. Pulling the door close, they
stood, looking each moment to hear a challenge, a shot, the clash of
swords. But no. They heard the party halt under the gallows, and pass
some brutal jest, and go on. And that was all.

They could scarcely believe their ears; no, nor their eyes, when a few
minutes later, the street being now quiet, they passed out, and stood in
it shuddering. For there swung the corpse dimly outlined above them!
There! Certainly there! The clerk seized his companion's arm and drew
him back. "It was the fiend!" he stammered. "See, your father is still
there! It was the fiend who helped us!"

But at that the figure they were watching became agitated; an instant
and it slid gently to the ground. It was the soldier. "O ye gods!" he
cried, bent double with silent laughter. "Saw you ever such a trick? How
I longed to kick, if it were but my toe at them, and I forbore! Fools!
Did man ever see a body hung in its sword? But it was a good trick, eh?"
he continued, appealing to them with a simple pride in his invention. "I
had the rope loose in my hand when they came, and I drew it twice round
my neck--and one arm trust me--and swung off gently. It is not every one
who would have thought of that, my children!"

It was odd. They shook with fear, and he with laughter. He did not seem
to give a thought to the danger he had escaped. Pride in his readiness
and a keen sense of the humorous side of the incident possessed him
entirely. At the very door of the house he still chuckled from time to
time; muttering between the ebullitions, "Ah, I must tell Diane! Diane
will be pleased--at that! It was good! Very good!"

Once in the house, however, he acted with more delicacy than might have
been imagined. He stood aside while the other two carried the body
upstairs; and while they were absent, he waited patiently in the bare
room below, which showed signs of occasional use as a stable. Here the
clerk Adrian presently found him, and murmured some apology. Mistress
Marie, he said, had fainted.

"A matter which afflicts you, my friend," the soldier replied with a
grimace, "about as much as your master's death. Pooh, man, do not look
fierce! Good luck to you and your suit. Only if--but this is no house
for gallantry to-night--I had spruced myself and taken a part, you had
had to look to your one ewe lamb, I warrant you!"

The clerk turned pale and red by turns. This man seemed to read his
thoughts as if he had indeed been the fiend. "What do you wish?" he
stammered.

"Only shelter until the early morning when the streets are most quiet;
and a direction to the Rue des Lombards."

"The Rue des Lombards?"

"Yes, why not?" But though the soldier still smiled, the lines of his
mouth hardened suddenly. "Why not to the Rue des Lombards?"

"I know no reason why you should not be going there," the clerk replied
boldly. "It was only that the street is near; and a friend of my late
master's lives in it."

"His name?"

The clerk started; the question was put so abruptly, and in a tone so
imperious, it struck him as it were a blow. "Nicholas Toussaint," he
answered involuntarily.

"Ay?" replied the other, raising his hand to his chin and glancing at
Adrian with a look that for all the world reminded him of an old print
of the eleventh Louis, which hung in a room at the Hotel de Ville--so
keen and astute was it. "Your master, young man, was of the moderate
party--a Politique?"

"He was."

"A good man and a Catholic? one who loved France? A Leaguer only in
name?" the other continued with vividness.

"Yes, that is so."

"But his son? He is a Leaguer out and out--one who would rise to fortune
on the flood tide of the mob? A Sorbonnist? The priests have got hold of
him? He would do to others as they have done to his father? A friend of
Le Clerc and Boucher? That is all so, is it not?"

Adrian nodded reluctantly. This strange man confounded and yet
fascinated him: this man so reckless and gay one moment, so wary the
next; exchanging in an instant the hail of a boon companion for the tone
of a noble.

"And is your young master also a friend of this Nicholas Toussaint?" was
the next question, slowly put.

"No," said Adrian, "he has been forbidden the house. M. Toussaint does
not approve of his opinions."

"That is so, is it?" the stranger rejoined with his former gaiety. "And
now enough: where will you lodge me until morning?"

"If my closet will serve you," Felix answered with a hesitation he would
not have felt a few minutes before, "it is at your will. I will bring
some food there at once, and will let you out if you please at five."
And Adrian added some simple directions, by following which his guest
might reach the Rue des Lombards without difficulty.

An hour later if the thoughts of those who lay sleepless under that roof
could have been traced, strange contrasts would have appeared. Was Felix
Portail thinking of his dead father, or of his sweetheart in the Rue des
Lombards, or of his schemes of ambition? Was he blaming the crew of whom
until to-day he had been one, or sullenly cursing those factious
Huguenots as the root of the mischief? Was Adrian thinking of his kind
master, or of his master's daughter? Was the guest dreaming of his
narrow escape? or revolving plans beside which Felix's were but the
schemes of a rat in a drain? Perhaps Marie alone--for Susanne slept a
child's sleep of exhaustion--had her thoughts fixed on him, who only a
few hours before had been the centre of the household.

But such is life in troubled times. Pleasure and pain come mingled, and
men snatch the former from the midst of the latter with a trembling joy,
a fierce eagerness: knowing that if they wait to go a pleasuring until
the sky be clear, they may wait until nightfall.

When Adrian called his guest at cock-crow the latter rose briskly and
followed him down to the door. "Well, young sir," he said, pausing an
instant on the threshold, as he wrapped his cloak round him and took his
sheathed sword in his hand, "I am obliged to you. When I can do you a
service, I will."

"You can do me one now," the clerk replied bluntly. "It is ill work
having to do with strangers in these days. You can tell me who you are,
and to which side you belong."

"Which side? I have told you--my own. And for the rest," the soldier
continued, "I will give you a hint." He brought his lips near to the
other's ear, and whispered, "Kiss Marie--for me!"

The clerk looked up aflame with anger and surprise; but the other was
far gone striding down the street. Yet Adrian received an answer to his
question. For as the stranger disappeared in the gloom, he turned his
head and broke with an audacity that took away the listener's breath
into a well-known air,

  "Hau! Hau! Papegots!
  Faites place aux Huguenots!"

and trilled it as merrily as if he had been in the streets of Rochelle.

"Death!" the clerk exclaimed, getting back into the house, and barring
the door in a panic. "I thought so. He is a Huguenot. But if he take his
neck out of Paris unstretched, he will have the fiend's own luck, and
the Bearnais' to boot!"


II

When the clerk had re-mounted the stairs, he heard voices in the back
room. Felix and Marie were in consultation. The girl was a different
being this morning. The fire and fury of the night had sunk to a still
misery; and even to her, for his sister's sake, it seemed over-dangerous
to stay in the house and confront the rage of the mob. Mayenne might not
after all return: and in that case the Sixteen would assuredly wreak
their spite on all, however young or helpless, who might have had to do
with the removal of the body. "You must seek shelter with some friend,"
Felix urged, "before the city is astir. I can go to the University. I
shall be safe there."

"Could you not take us with you?" Marie suggested meekly.

He shook his head, his face flushing. It was hard to confess that he had
power to destroy, but none to protect. "You had better go to Nicholas
Toussaint's," he said. "You will be safe there, and he will take you in,
though he will have naught to do with me."

Marie assented with a sigh, and rose to make ready. Some few valuables
were hidden or secured, some clothes taken; and then the little party of
four passed out into the street, leaving but one solemn tenant in their
home. The cold light of a November morning gave to the lane an air,
even in their eyes, of squalor and misery. The kennel running down the
middle was choked with nastiness, while here and there the upper stories
leaned forward so far as to obscure the light.

The fugitives regarded these things little after the first shivering
glance, but hurried on their road; Felix with his sword marching on one
side of the girls, and Adrian with his club walking on the other. A
skulking dog got out of their way. The song of a belated reveller drove
them for a time under an arch. But they fell in with nothing more
formidable, and in five minutes came safely to the high wooden gates of
the courtyard in front of Nicholas Toussaint's house.

To arouse him or his servants without disturbing the neighbourhood was
another matter. There was no bell; only a heavy iron clapper. Adrian
tried this cautiously, with little hope of being heard. To his joy the
hollow sound had scarcely ceased when footsteps were heard crossing the
court, and a small trap in one of the gates was opened. An elderly man
with high cheek bones and curly grey hair looked out. His eyes lighting
on the girls lost their harshness. "Marie Portail!" he exclaimed. "Ah!
poor thing, I pity you. I have heard all. I returned to the city last
night only, or I should have been with you. And Adrian?"

"We have come," said the young man, respectfully, "to beg shelter for
Mistress Marie and her sister. It is no longer safe for them to remain
in the Rue de Tirchape."

"I can well believe it," cried Toussaint, vigorously. "I do not know
where we are safe nowadays. But there," he added in a different tone,
"no doubt the Sixteen are acting for the best."

"You will take them in then?" said Adrian with gratitude.

But to his astonishment the citizen shook his head, while an awkward
embarrassment twisted his features. "It is impossible!" he said.

Adrian doubted if he had heard aright. Nicholas Toussaint was known for
a bold man; one whom the Sixteen disliked, and even suspected of
Huguenot leanings, but one too whom they had not yet dared to attack. He
was a dealer in Norman horses, and this both led him to employ many men,
reckless daring fellows, and made him in some degree necessary to the
army. Adrian had never doubted that he would shelter the daughter of his
old friend; and his surprise on receiving this rebuff was extreme.

"But, Monsieur Toussaint--" he urged--and his face reddened with
generous warmth as he stood forward. "My master is dead! Foully
murdered! He lies who says otherwise, though he be of the Sixteen! My
mistress has few friends to protect her, and those of small power. Will
you send her and the child from your door?"

"Hush, Adrian," the girl interposed, lifting her head proudly, yet
laying her hand on the clerk's sleeve with a touch of acknowledgment
that brought the blood in redoubled force to his cheeks. "Do not press
our friend overmuch. If he will not take us in from the streets, be sure
he has some good reason to offer."

But Toussaint was dumb. Shame--a shame augmented tenfold by the clerk's
fearlessness--was so clearly written on his face, that Adrian uttered
none of the reproaches which hung on his lips. It was Felix who came
forward, and cried contemptuously, "So you have grown strangely cautious
of a sudden, M. Toussaint?"

"Ha! I thought you were there, or thereabouts!" the horse-dealer
replied, regaining his composure at once, and eyeing him with strong
disfavour.

"But Felix and I," Adrian exclaimed eagerly, "will fend for ourselves."

Toussaint shook his head. "It is impossible," he said surlily. "Quite
impossible!"

"Then hear me!" Felix interposed with excitement. "You do not deceive
me. It is not because of your daughter that you have forbidden me the
house, and will not now protect my sister! It is because we shall learn
too much. It is because you have those under your roof, whom the crows
shall pick--yet! You, I will spare for Madeline's sake; but your spies I
will string up, every one of them by----" and he swore a frightful
oath, such as the Romanists used.

Toussaint's face betrayed both fear and anger. For an instant he seemed
to hesitate. Then exclaiming, "Begone, parricide! You would have killed
your own father!" he slammed the trapdoor, and was heard retreating up
the yard with a haste and clatter which indicated his uneasiness.

The four looked at one another. Daylight had fully come. The noise of
the altercation had drawn more than one sleepy face to the window. In a
short time the streets would be alive with people, and even a delay of a
few minutes might bring destruction. They thought of this; and moved
away slowly and reluctantly, Susanne clinging to Adrian's arm, while
Felix strode ahead scowling. But when they had placed a hundred yards or
so between themselves and Toussaint's gates, they stopped, a chill sense
of desolation upon them. Whither were they to go? Felix urged that they
should seek other friends and try them. But Marie declined. If Nicholas
Toussaint dared not take them in, no other of their friends would. She
had given up hope, and longed only to get back to their home, and the
still form, which it seemed to her she should never have deserted.

They were standing discussing this when a cry caused them to turn. A
girl was running hatless along the street; a girl tall and plump of
figure, with a creamy slightly freckled face, a glory of waving golden
hair upon her shoulders, and great grey eyes that could laugh and cry at
once, even as they were doing now. "My poor Marie," she exclaimed,
taking her in her arms; "my poor little one! Come back! You are to come
back at once!" Then disengaging herself, with a blushing cheek, she
allowed Felix to embrace her. But though that young gentleman made full
use of his permission, his face did not clear. "Your father has just
turned my sister from his door," he said bitterly, "as he turned me a
month ago."

She looked at him with a tender upward glance meant for him only.
"Hush!" she begged him. "Do not speak so of my father. And he has sent
to fetch them back. He says he cannot keep them himself, but if they
will come in and rest he will see them safely disposed. Will not that
do?"

"Excellently, Miss Madeline," Adrian cried with gratitude. "And we thank
your father a thousand times."

"Nay, but--" she said slyly--"that permission does not extend to you."

"What matter?"

"What matter if Marie be safe you mean," she replied demurely. "Well, I
would I had so gallant a--clerk," with a glance at her own handsome
lover. "But come, my father is waiting at the gate for us." And she
urged haste, notwithstanding which she and Felix were the last to turn.
When she at length ran after the others her cheeks betrayed her.

"I can see what you have been doing, girl," her father cried, meeting
her within the door. "For shame, hussy! Go to your room, and take your
friends with you." And he aimed a light blow at her, which she easily
evaded.

"They will need breakfast," she persisted. She had seen her lover, and
though the interview might have had its drawbacks--best known to
herself--she cared little for a blow in comparison with that.

"They will take it in your room," he retorted. "Come, pack, girl! Pack!
I will talk to you presently," he added, with meaning.

The Portails drew her away. To them her room was a haven of rest, where
they felt safe, and could pour out their grief, and let her pity and
indignation soothe them. The horror of the last twenty-four hours began
to fall from them. They seemed to themselves to be outcasts no longer.

In the afternoon Toussaint reappeared. "On with your hoods," he cried
briskly, his good humour re-established. "I and half a dozen stout lads
will see you to a place where you can lie snug for a week."

Marie asked timidly about her father's funeral. "I will see to it,
little one," he answered. "I will let the curate of St. Germain know.
He will do what is seemly--if the mob let him," he added to himself.

"But, father," cried Madeline, "where are you going to take them?"

"To Philip Boyer's."

"What!" the girl cried in much surprise. "His house is small and Philip
and his wife are old and feeble."

"True," answered Toussaint. "But his hutch is under the Duchess's roof.
There is a touch of _our great man_ about Madame. Mayenne the crowd
neither overmuch love, nor much fear. He will die in his bed. But with
his sister it is a word and a blow. The Sixteen will not touch aught
that is under her roof."

The Duchess de Montpensier was the sister of Henry Duke of Guise, Henry
the Scarred, _Our great man_, as the Parisians loved to call him. He had
been assassinated in the ante-chamber of Henry of Valois some two years
before this time; and she had become the soul of the League, having more
of the headstrong nature which had made him popular, than either of his
brothers, Mayenne or D'Aumale.

"I see," said Madeline, kissing the girls, "you are right, father."

"Impertinent baggage!" he cried. "To your prayers and your needle. And
see that while we are away you keep close, and do not venture into the
courtyard even."

She was not a nervous girl, and she was used to be alone; but the bare,
roomy house seemed lonely after her father and his party had set out.
She wandered to the kitchen where the two old women-servants were
preparing, with the aid of a turnspit, the early supper; there she
learned that only old Simon, the lame ostler, was left in the stables,
which stood on either side of the courtyard. This was not re-assuring
news: the more as Madeline knew her father might not return for another
hour. She went thence to the long eating-room on the first floor, which
ran the full depth of the house, and had one window looking to the back
as well as several facing the courtyard. Here she opened the door of the
stove, and let the cheery glow play upon her.

Presently she grew tired of this, too, and moved to the rearward window.
It looked upon a narrow lane, and a dead wall. Still, there was a chance
of seeing some one pass, some stranger; whereas the windows which looked
on the empty courtyard were no windows at all--to Madeline.

The girl had not long looked out before her pale complexion, which the
fire had scarcely warmed, grew hot. She started, and glanced nervously
into the room behind her; then looked out again. She had seen, standing
in a nook of the wall opposite her, a figure she knew well. It was that
of her lover, and he seemed to be watching the house. Timidly she waved
her hand to him, and he, after looking up and down the lane, advanced
to the window. He could do this safely, for it was the only window in
the Toussaints' house which looked that way.

"Are you alone?" he whispered, looking up at her.

She nodded.

"And my sisters? I am here to learn what has become of them."

"Have gone to Philip Boyer's. He lives in one of the cottages on the
left of the Duchess's court."

"Ah! And you? Where is your father?" he murmured.

"He has gone to take them. I am alone; and two minutes ago I was
melancholy," she added, with a smile that should have made him happy.

"I want to talk to you," he replied. "May I climb up if I can,
Madeline?"

She shook her head, which of course meant, no. And she said, "It is
impossible." But she smiled; and that meant, yes. Or so he took it.

There was a pipe which ran up the wall a couple of feet or so on one
side of the casement. Before she understood his plan, or that he was in
earnest, he had gripped this, and was halfway up to the window.

"Oh, take care," she cried. "Do not come, Felix. Do not come. My father
will never forgive you!" Woman-like she repented, when it was too late.
But he did not listen, he came on, and when his hand was stretched out
to grasp the sill, all her fear was lest he should fall. She seized his
wrist, and helped him in. Then she drew back. "You should not have done
it, Felix," she said, drawing back from him with reproof in her eyes.

"But I wanted to see you so much," he urged, "and the glimpse I had of
you this morning was nothing."

"Well, you may come to the stove and warm yourself--a moment. Oh! how
cold your hands are, my poor boy! But you must not stay. Indeed you must
not!" And she cast terrified glances at the door.

But stolen moments are sweet and apt to be long drawn out. She had a
great deal to say, and he had a great deal it seemed to ask--so much to
ask indeed, that gradually a dim sense that he was asking about other
things than herself--about her father and the ways of the house, and
what guests they had, came over her.

It chilled her. She drew away from him, and said, suddenly, "Oh, Felix!"
and looked at him.

Nothing more. But he understood her and coloured; and tried to ask, but
asked awkwardly, "What is the matter?"

"I know of what you are thinking," she said with grave sorrow. "And it
is base of you, it is cruel! You would use even me whom you love--to
ruin my friends!"

"Hush!" he answered, letting his gloomy passion have vent for the
moment, "they are not your friends, Madeline. See what they have done
for me. It is they, or the troubles they have set on foot, that have
killed my father!" And he swore--carried away by his mistaken
resentment--never again to spare a Huguenot save her father and one
other.

She trembled and tried to close her ears. Her father had told her a
hundred times that she could not be happy with a husband divided from
her by a gulf so wide. She had said to him that it was too late. She had
given Felix her heart and she was a woman. She could not take it back,
though she knew that nothing but unhappiness could come of the match.

"God forgive you!" she cried in that moment of strained insight; and
sank in her chair as though she would weep.

He fell on his knees beside her with words of endearment; for he had
conquered himself again. And she let him soothe her, and would gladly
have believed him. She had never loved him more than now, when she knew
the price she must pay for him. She closed her eyes--for the moment--to
that terrible future, that certain future; and he was holding her in his
arms, when without warning a heavy footstep began to ascend the stairs.

They sprang apart. If even then he had had presence of mind, he might
have reached the window. But he hesitated, looking in her startled
eyes, and waiting. "Is it your father?" he whispered.

She shook her head. "He cannot have returned. We should have heard the
gates opened. There is no one in the house," she murmured faintly,
listening while she spoke.

But still the footsteps came on: and stopped at the door. Felix looked
round him with eyes of despair. Close beside him, just behind the stove,
was the door of a closet. He took two strides, and before he or she had
thought of the consequences, he was in the closet. Softly he drew the
door to again; and she sank terrified on a chair, as the door of the
room opened.

He who came in was not her father but a man of thirty-five, a stranger
to her. A man with a projecting chin. His keen grey eyes wore at the
moment of his entrance an expression of boredom and petulance, but when
he caught sight of her, this passed, as a cloud from the sky. He came
across the floor smiling. "Pardon me," he said--but said it as if no
pardon were needed, "I found the stables--insupportably dull. I set out
on a voyage of discovery. I have found my America!" And he bowed in a
style which puzzled the frightened girl.

"You want to see my father?" she stammered, "He----"

"He has gone to the Duchess's. I know it. And very ill-natured it was of
him to leave me in the stable, instead of entrusting me to your care,
mistress. La Noue," he continued, "is in the stable still, asleep on a
bundle of hay, and a pretty commotion there will be--when he finds I
have stolen away!"

Laughing with an easy carelessness that struck the citizen's daughter
with fresh astonishment, the stranger drew up the armchair, which was
commonly held sacred to M. Toussaint's use, and threw himself into it;
lazily disposing his booted feet in the glow which poured from the
stove, and looking across at his companion with admiration in his bold
eyes. At another time she might have been offended by the look: or she
might not. Women are variable. Now her fears lest Felix should be
discovered dulled her apprehension.

Yet the name of La Noue had caught her ear. She knew it well, as all
France and the Low Countries knew it in those days, for the name of one
of the boldest and stanchest soldiers on the Huguenot side.

"La Noue?" she murmured, misty suspicions beginning to take form in her
mind.

"Yes, pretty one," he replied, laughing. "La Noue and no other. Does
Bras-de-fer pass for an ogre here in Paris that you tremble so at his
name? Let me----"

But whatever the proposition he was going to offer, it came to nothing.
The dull clash of the gates outside warned both of them that Nicholas
Toussaint and his party had returned. A moment later a hasty tread
sounded on the stairs; and an elderly man wearing a cloak burst in upon
them.

His eyes swept the room while his hand still held the door; and it was
clear that what he saw did not please him. He came forward stiffly, his
brows knitted. But he said nothing; he seemed uncertain and embarrassed.

"See!" the first comer said, looking quietly up at him, but not offering
to move. "Now what do you think of your ogre? And by the rood he looks
fierce enough to eat babes! There, old friend," he continued, speaking
to the elder man in a different tone, "spare your lecture. This is
Toussaint's daughter, and as staunch I will warrant as her father."

The old noble--he had but one arm, she saw--still looked at her with
disfavour. "Girls have sweethearts, sire," he said shrewdly.

For a moment--at that word--the room seemed to go round with her. Though
something more of reproach and playful defence passed between the two
men, she heard not a syllable of it. The consciousness that her lover
was listening to every word, and that from this moment La Noue's life
was in his hands, numbed her brain. She sat helpless, hardly aware that
half a dozen men were entering, her father one of them. When a lamp was
called for--it was growing dark--she did not stir: and Toussaint, who
had not seen her, fetched it himself.

By the time he came back she had partly recovered her wits. She noted
that her father locked the door with care before he set the lamp on the
table. As its light fell on the harsh features of the men, a ray passed
between two of them, and struck her pale face. Her father saw her and
stared in astonishment.

"By heaven!" he cried. "What does the wench here?" No one answered; but
all turned and looked at her where she cowered back against the stove.
"Go, girl!" Toussaint cried, beside himself with passion. "Begone! and
presently I will deal with you!"

"Nay, stop!" La Noue interposed. "Your daughter knows too much. We
cannot let her go thus."

"Knows too much? How?" and the citizen tossed his head like a bull
balked in his charge. "What does she know?"

"His majesty----"

"Nay, let his majesty speak for himself--for once," said the man with
the grey eyes; and even in her terror and confusion Madeline saw that
all turned to him with a single movement. "Mistress Toussaint did but
chat with La Noue and myself, during her father's absence. True, she
knows us; or one of us. But if any be to blame it is I. Let her stay. I
will answer for her fidelity."

"Nay, but she is a woman, sire," some one objected.

"Ay, she is, good Poulain," and Henry turned to the speaker with a
singularly bright smile. "So we are safe; for there is no woman in
France would betray Henry of Bourbon!"

A laugh went round. Some one mentioned the Duchess.

"True!" said Henry, for Henry it was, he whom the Leaguers called the
Bearnais and the Politiques the King of Navarre, but whom later
generations have crowned as the first of French kings--Henry the Great.
"True! I had forgotten her. I must beware of her golden scissors. We
have two crowns already, and want not another of her making. But come,
let us to business without farther delay. Be seated, gentlemen; be
seated without ceremony: and while we consider whether our plans hold
good, Mistress Toussaint--" he paused and turned, to look kindly at the
terrified girl--"will play the sentry for us."

Madeline's presence within a few feet of their council-board was soon
forgotten by the eager men who sat round the table. And in a sense she
forgot them. She heard, it is true, their hopes and plans, of which the
chief, and that which brought them together to-day, was a scheme to
surprise Paris by introducing men hidden in carts laden with hay. She
heard how Henry and La Noue had entered, and who had brought them in,
and how it was proposed to smuggle them out again; and many details of
men and means and horses; and who were loyal and who disaffected, and
who might be bought over, and at what price. She even took note of the
manner of each speaker as he leaned forward, and brought his face within
the circle of light, marking who were known to her before, substantial
citizens these, constant at mass and market; and who were strangers, men
fiercer looking, thinner, haughtier, more restless, with the stamp of
constant peril at the corners of their eyes, and swords some inches
longer than their neighbours'.

She saw and heard all this, and more, and reasoned dully on it. But all
the time her mind was paralysed by the numbing sense of one great evil
awaiting her, of something with which she must presently come face to
face, though her faculties had not grasped it yet. Men's lives! Ah, yes,
men's lives! The girl had been bred a Huguenot. She had been taught to
revere the men of the religion, the men whose names were household
words; and not the weakness of the cause, not even her lover's
influence, had sapped her loyalty to it.

Presently there was a stir about the table. Some of the men rose. "Then
that arrangement meets your views, sire?" said La Noue.

"I think it is the better suggestion. Let it hold. I sleep to-night at
my good friend Mazeau's," the king answered, turning to the person he
named; "and leave to-morrow about noon by St. Martin's gate. That is
understood, is it? Then let it stand so."

He did not see--none of them saw--how the girl in the shadow by the
stove started; nor did they mark how the last trace of colour fled from
her cheeks. She was face to face with her fate now, and knew that her
own hand must work it out. The men were separating. Henry had risen and
was bidding farewell to one and another; until no more than four or five
beside Toussaint and La Noue remained with him. Then he prepared himself
to go, and girt on his sword, talking earnestly the while. Still engaged
in low converse with one of the strangers, he walked slowly, lighted by
his host to the door; he had forgotten to take leave of the girl. In
another minute he and they would have disappeared in the passage, when a
hoarse sound escaped from Madeline's lips.

It was not so much a cry as a groan, but it was enough for men whose
nerves were strained to the breaking point. All--at the moment they had
their backs to her, their faces to the king--turned swiftly. "Ha!" Henry
cried on the instant, "I had forgotten my manners. I was leaving my most
faithful sentry without a word of thanks, or a keepsake by which to
remember Henry of France."

She had risen, and was supporting herself--but she swayed as she
stood--by the arm of the chair. Never had her lover been so dear to
her; never had his faults seemed so small, his love so precious. As the
king approached, the light fell on her face, on her agonized eyes, and
he stopped short. "Toussaint!" he cried sharply, "your daughter is ill.
Look to her!" But it was noticeable that he laid his hand on his sword.

"Stay!" she cried, the word ringing shrilly through the room. "You are
betrayed! There is some one--there!" she pointed to the closet--"who has
heard--all! All! Oh, sire, mercy! mercy!"

As the last words passed the girl's writhing lips she clutched at her
throat: she seemed to fight a moment for breath, for life: then with a
stifled shriek fell in a swoon to the ground.

A second's silence. Then a whistling sound as half a dozen swords were
snatched from the scabbards. The veteran La Noue sprang to the door:
others ran to the windows and stood before them. Only Henry--after a
swift glance at Toussaint, who, pale and astonished, leaned over his
daughter--stood still, his fingers on his hilt. Another second of
suspense, and before any one spoke, the cupboard door swung slowly open,
and Felix Portail, pale to the lips, stood before them.

"What do you here?" cried Henry, restraining by a gesture those who
would have instantly flung themselves upon the spy.

"I came to see her," Felix said. He was quite calm, but a perspiration
cold as death stood on his brow, and his dilated eyes wandered from one
to another. "You surprised me. Toussaint knows--that I was her
sweetheart," he murmured.

"Ay, wretched man, you came to see her! And for what else?" Henry
replied, his eyes, as a rule, so kindly, bent on the other in a gaze
fixed and relentless.

A sudden visible quiver--as it were the agony of death--shot through
Portail's frame. He opened his mouth, but for a while no sound came. His
eyes sought the nearest sword with a horrid side-glance. "Kill me at
once," he gasped, "before she--before----"

He never finished the sentence. With an oath the nearest Huguenot lunged
at his breast, and fell back foiled by a blow from the king's hand.
"Back!" cried Henry, his eyes flashing as another sprang forward, and
would have done the work. "Will you trench on the King's justice in his
presence? Sheath your swords, all save the Sieur de la Noue, and the
gentlemen who guard the windows!"

"He must die!" several voices cried; and two men still pressed forward
viciously.

"Think, sire! Think what you do," cried La Noue himself, warning in his
voice. "He has in his hand the life of every man here! And they are your
men, risking all for the crown."

"True," Henry replied smiling; "but I ask no man to run a risk I will
not take myself."

A murmur of dissatisfaction burst forth. Several who had sheathed, drew
their swords again. "I have a wife and child!" cried one, bringing his
point to the thrust. "He dies!"

"He dies!" cried another following his example. And the two pressed
forward.

"He does not die!" exclaimed the King, his voice so ringing through the
room that all fell back once more; fell back not so much because it was
the king who spoke as in obedience to the voice which two years before
had rallied the flying squadrons at Arques, and years before that had
rung out hour after hour and day after day above the long street fight
of Cahors. "He does not die!" repeated Henry, looking from one to
another, with his chin thrust out, and his eyes glittering. "France
speaks, dare any contradict. Surely, my masters, there are no traitors
here!"

"Your majesty," said La Noue after a moment's pause, "commands our
lives."

"Thanks, Francis," Henry replied, instantly changing his tone. "And now
hear me, gentlemen. Think you that it was a light thing in this girl to
give up her lover? She might have let us go to our doom, and we none the
wiser! Would you take her gift and make her no requital? That were not
just! That were not royal! That cannot the King of France do! And now
for you, sir"--he turned with another manner to Felix, who was leaning
half-fainting against the wall--"hearken to me. You shall go free. I,
who this morning played the son to your dead father, I give you your
life for your sweetheart's sake. For her sake be true. You shall go out
alive and safe into the streets of Paris, which five minutes ago you
little thought to see again. The girl you love has ransomed you: go
therefore and be worthy of her. Or if I am wrong, if you still will
betray me--still go! Go to be damned to all eternity! Go, to leave a
name that shall live for centuries--and stand for treachery!"

He spoke the last words with such scorn that a murmur of applause broke
out even among those stern men. He took instant advantage of it. "Now
go!" he said hurriedly. "You can take the girl with you. She has but
fainted. A kiss will bring her to life. Go, and, as you love, be
silent."

The man took up his burden and went, trembling; still unable to speak.
But no hand was now raised to stop him.

When he had disappeared, La Noue turned to the king. "You will not now
sleep at Mazeau's, sire?"

Henry rubbed his chin. "Yes; let the plan stand," he answered after a
brief pause. "If he betray one, he shall betray all."

"But this is madness," La Noue urged.

The King shook his head, and smiling, clapped the veteran on the
shoulder. "Not so," he said. "The man is no traitor: I say it. And you
have never met with a longer head than Henry's."

"Never," assented La Noue bluntly, "save when there is a woman in it!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The curtain falls. The men have lived and are dead. La Noue, the
Huguenot Bayard, now exists only in a dusty memoir and a page of Motley.
Madame de Montpensier is forgotten; all of her, save her golden
scissors. Mayenne, D'Aumale, a verse preserves their names. Only
Henry--the "good King," as generations of French peasants called
him--remains a living figure: his strength and weakness, his sins and
virtues, as well known, as thoroughly appreciated by thousands now as in
the days of his life.

It follows that we cannot hope to learn much of the fortunes of people
so insignificant--save for that moment when the fate of a nation hung on
their breath--as the Portails and Toussaints. We do know that Felix
proved worthy. For though the attack on Paris which was planned at
Toussaint's house, failed, it did not fail through treachery. And we
know that Felix married Madeline, and that Adrian won Marie: but no
more. Unless certain Portails now living in various parts of the world,
whose ancestors left France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, are their descendants. And certainly it is curious that in
these families it is not rare to find the eldest son bearing the name of
Henry, and the second of Felix.




THE KING'S STRATAGEM


In the days when Henry the Fourth of France was as yet King of Navarre
only, and in that little kingdom of hills and woods which occupies the
south-western corner of the larger country, was with difficulty
supporting the Huguenot cause against the French court and the Catholic
League--in the days when every little moated town, from the Dordogne to
the Pyrenees, was a bone of contention between the young king and the
crafty queen-mother, Catherine de Medicis, a conference between these
warring personages took place in the picturesque town of La Reole. And
great was the fame of it.

La Reole still rises grey, time-worn, and half-ruined on a lofty cliff
above the broad green waters of the Garonne, forty odd miles from
Bordeaux. It is a small place now, but in the days of which we are
speaking it was important, strongly fortified, and guarded by a castle
which looked down on some hundreds of red-tiled roofs, rising in
terraces from the river. As the meeting-place of the two sovereigns it
was for the time as gay as Paris itself. Catherine had brought with her
a bevy of fair maids of honour, and trusted more perhaps in the effect
of their charms than in her own diplomacy. But the peaceful appearance
of the town was as delusive as the smooth bosom of the Gironde; for even
while every other house in its streets rang with music and silvery
laughter, each party was ready to fly to arms at a word if it saw that
any advantage could be gained thereby.

On an evening shortly before the end of the conference two men were
seated at play in a room, the deep-embrasured window of which looked
down from a considerable height upon the river. The hour was late; below
them the town lay silent. Outside, the moonlight fell bright and pure on
sleeping fields, on vineyards, and dark far-spreading woods. Within the
room a silver lamp suspended from the ceiling threw light upon the
table, but left the farther parts of the chamber in shadow. The walls
were hung with faded tapestry, and on a low bedstead in one corner lay a
handsome cloak, a sword, and one of the clumsy pistols of the period.
Across a high-backed chair lay another cloak and sword, and on the
window seat, beside a pair of saddle-bags, were strewn half a dozen
trifles such as soldiers carried from camp to camp--a silver comfit-box,
a jewelled dagger, a mask, a velvet cap.

The faces of the players, as they bent over the cards, were in shadow.
One--a slight, dark man of middle height, with a weak chin--and a mouth
that would have equally betrayed its weakness had it not been shaded by
a dark moustache--seemed, from the occasional oaths which he let drop,
to be losing heavily. Yet his opponent, a stouter and darker man, with a
sword-cut across his left temple, and the swaggering air that has at all
times marked the professional soldier, showed no signs of triumph or
elation. On the contrary, though he kept silence, or spoke only a formal
word or two, there was a gleam of anxiety and suppressed excitement in
his eyes; and more than once he looked keenly at his companion, as if to
judge of his feelings or to learn whether the time had come for some
experiment which he meditated. But for this, an observer looking in
through the window would have taken the two for that common
conjunction--the hawk and the pigeon.

At last the younger player threw down his cards with an exclamation.

"You have the luck of the evil one," he said, bitterly. "How much is
that?"

"Two thousand crowns," the other replied without emotion. "You will play
no more?"

"No! I wish to heaven I had never played at all!" was the answer. As he
spoke the loser rose, and moving to the window stood looking out. For a
few moments the elder man remained in his seat, gazing furtively at him;
at length he too rose, and, stepping softly to his companion, he touched
him on the shoulder. "Your pardon a moment, M. le Vicomte," he said.
"Am I right in concluding that the loss of this sum will inconvenience
you?"

"A thousand fiends!" the young gamester exclaimed, turning on him
wrathfully. "Is there any man whom the loss of two thousand crowns would
not inconvenience? As for me----"

"For you," the other continued smoothly, filling up the pause, "shall I
be wrong in supposing that it means something like ruin?"

"Well, sir, and if it does?" the young man retorted; and he drew himself
up, his cheek a shade paler with passion. "Depend upon it you shall be
paid. Do not be afraid of that!"

"Gently, gently, my friend," the winner answered, his patience in strong
contrast to the other's violence. "I had no intention of insulting you,
believe me. Those who play with the Vicomte de Noirterre are not wont to
doubt his honour. I spoke only in your own interest. It has occurred to
me, Vicomte, that the matter may be arranged at less cost to yourself."

"How?" was the curt question.

"May I speak freely?" The Vicomte shrugged his shoulders, and the other,
taking silence for consent, proceeded: "You, Vicomte, are governor of
Lusigny for the King of Navarre; I, of Creance, for the King of France.
Our towns lie but three leagues apart. Could I by any chance, say on one
of these fine nights, make myself master of Lusigny, it would be worth
more than two thousand crowns to me. Do you understand?"

"No," the young man answered slowly, "I do not."

"Think over what I have said, then," was the brief answer.

For a full minute there was silence in the room. The Vicomte gazed from
the window with knitted brows and compressed lips, while his companion,
seated near at hand, leant back in his chair, with an air of affected
carefulness. Outside, the rattle of arms and hum of voices told that the
watch were passing through the street. The church bell rang one o'clock.
Suddenly the Vicomte burst into a forced laugh, and, turning, took up
his cloak and sword. "The trap was well laid, M. le Capitaine," he said
almost jovially; "but I am still sober enough to take care of
myself--and of Lusigny. I wish you good night. You shall have your
money, do not fear."

"Still, I am afraid it will cost you dearly," the Captain answered, as
he rose and moved towards the door to open it for his guest. And then,
when his hand was already on the latch, he paused. "My lord," he said,
"what do you say to this, then? I will stake the two thousand crowns you
have lost to me, and another thousand to boot--against your town. Oh, no
one can hear us. If you win you go off a free man with my thousand. If
you lose, you put me in possession--one of these fine nights. Now, that
is an offer. What do you say to it? A single game to decide."

The younger man's face reddened. He turned; his eyes sought the table
and the cards; he stood irresolute. The temptation came at an
unfortunate moment; a moment when the excitement of play had given way
to depression, and he saw nothing outside the door, on the latch of
which his hand was laid, but the bleak reality of ruin. The temptation
to return, the thought that by a single hand he might set himself right
with the world, was too much for him. Slowly--he came back to the table.
"Confound you!" he said passionately. "I think you are the devil
himself!"

"Don't talk child's talk!" the other answered coldly, drawing back as
his victim advanced. "If you do not like the offer you need not take
it."

But the young man was a born gambler, and his fingers had already closed
on the cards. Picking them up idly he dropped them once, twice, thrice
on the table, his eyes gleaming with the play-fever. "If I win?" he said
doubtfully. "What then? Let us have it quite clearly."

"You carry away a thousand crowns," the Captain answered quietly. "If
you lose you contrive to leave one of the gates of Lusigny open for me
before next full moon. That is all."

"And what if I lose, and do not pay the forfeit?" the Vicomte asked,
laughing weakly.

"I trust to your honour," the Captain answered. And, strange as it may
seem, he knew his man. The young noble of the day might betray his cause
and his trust, but the debt of honour incurred at play was binding on
him.

"Well," said the Vicomte, with a deep breath, "I agree. Who is to deal?"

"As you will," the Captain replied, masking under an appearance of
indifference the excitement which darkened his cheek, and caused the
pulse in the old wound on his face to beat furiously.

"Then do you deal," said the Vicomte.

"With your permission," the Captain assented. And gathering the cards he
dealt them with a practised hand, and pushed his opponent's six across
to him.

The young man took up the hand and, as he sorted it, and looked from it
to his companion's face, he repressed a groan with difficulty. The
moonlight shining through the casement fell in silvery sheen on a few
feet of the floor. With the light something of the silence and coolness
of the night entered also, and appealed to him. For a few seconds he
hesitated. He made even as if he would have replaced the hand on the
table. But he had gone too far to retrace his steps with honour. It was
too late, and with a muttered word, which his dry lips refused to
articulate, he played the first card.

He took that trick and the next: they were secure.

"And now," said the Captain, who knew well where the pinch came. "What
next?"

The Vicomte compressed his lips. Two courses were open to him. By
adopting one he could almost for certain win one more trick: by the
other he might just possibly win two tricks. He was a gamester; he
adopted the latter course. In half a minute it was over. He had lost!

The winner nodded gravely. "The luck is with me still," he said, keeping
his eyes on the table that the light of triumph which had leapt into
them might not be seen. "When do you go back to your command, Vicomte?"

The unhappy man sat, as one stunned, his eyes on the painted cards which
had cost him so dearly. "The day after to-morrow," he muttered at last,
striving to collect himself.

"Then shall we say--the following evening?" the Captain asked
courteously.

The young man shivered. "As you will," he muttered.

"We quite understand one another," continued the winner, eyeing his man
watchfully, and speaking with more urgency. "I may depend on you, M. le
Vicomte, I presume--to keep your word?"

"The Noirterres have never been wanting to their word," the young
nobleman answered stung into passing passion. "If I live I will put
Lusigny into your hands, M. le Capitaine. Afterwards I will do my best
to recover it--in another way."

"I shall be most happy to meet you in that way," replied the Captain,
bowing lightly. And in one more minute, the door of his lodging had
closed on the other; and he was alone--alone with his triumph, his
ambition, his hopes for the future--alone with the greatness to which
his capture of Lusigny was to be the first step. He would enjoy that
greatness not a whit the less because fortune had hitherto dealt out to
him more blows than caresses, and he was still at forty, after a score
of years of roughest service, the governor of a paltry country town.

Meanwhile, in the darkness of the narrow streets, the Vicomte was making
his way to his lodgings in a state of despair difficult to describe,
impossible to exaggerate. Chilled, sobered, and affrighted he looked
back and saw how he had thrown for all and lost all, how he had saved
the dregs of his fortune at the expense of his loyalty, how he had seen
a way of escape--and lost it for ever! No wonder that as he trudged
through the mud and darkness of the sleeping town his breath came
quickly and his chest heaved, and he looked from side to side as a
hunted animal might look, uttering great sighs. Ah, if he could have
retraced the last three hours! If he could have undone that he had done!

In a fever, he entered his lodging, and securing the door behind him
stumbled up the stone stairs and entered his room. The impulse to
confide his misfortunes to some one was so strong upon him that he was
glad to see a dark form half sitting, half lying in a chair before the
dying embers of a wood fire. In those days a man's natural confidant was
his valet, the follower, half friend, half servant, who had been born on
his estate, who lay on a pallet at the foot of his bed, who carried his
_billets-doux_ and held his cloak at the duello, who rode near his
stirrup in fight and nursed him in illness, who not seldom advised him
in the choice of a wife, and lied in support of his suit.

The young Vicomte flung his cloak over a chair. "Get up, you rascal!" he
cried impatiently. "You pig, you dog!" he continued, with increasing
anger. "Sleeping there as though your master were not ruined by that
scoundrel of a Breton! Bah!" he added, gazing bitterly at his follower,
"you are of the _canaille_, and have neither honour to lose nor a town
to betray!"

The sleeping man moved in his chair but did not awake. The Vicomte, his
patience exhausted, snatched the bonnet from his head, and threw it on
the ground. "Will you listen?" he said. "Or go, if you choose look for
another master. I am ruined! Do you hear? Ruined, Gil! I have lost
all--money, land, Lusigny itself--at the cards!"

The man, roused at last, stooped with a sleepy movement, and picking up
his hat dusted it with his hand, then rose with a yawn to his feet.

"I am afraid, Vicomte," he said, in tones that, quiet as they were,
sounded like thunder in the young man's astonished and bewildered ears,
"I am afraid that if you have lost Lusigny--you have lost something
which was not yours to lose!"

As he spoke he struck the embers with his boot, and the fire, blazing
up, shone on his face. The Vicomte saw, with stupor, that the man before
him was not Gil at all--was indeed the last person in the world to whom
he should have betrayed himself. The astute smiling eyes, the aquiline
nose, the high forehead, and projecting chin, which the short beard and
moustache scarcely concealed, were only too well known to him. He
stepped back with a cry of despair. "Sir!" he said, and then his tongue
failed him. His arms dropped by his sides. He stood silent, pale,
convicted, his chin on his breast. The man to whom he had confessed his
treachery was the master whom he had agreed to betray.

"I had suspected something of this," Henry of Navarre continued, after a
lengthy pause, and with a tinge of irony in his tone. "Rosny told me
that that old fox, the Captain of Creance, was affecting your company
somewhat too much, M. le Vicomte, and I find that, as usual, his
suspicions were well-founded. What with a gentleman who shall be
nameless, who has bartered a ford and a castle for the favour of
Mademoiselle de Luynes, and yourself, and another I know of--I am blest
with some faithful followers, it seems! For shame! for shame, sir!" he
continued seating himself with dignity in the chair from which he had
risen, but turning it so that he confronted his host, "have you nothing
to say for yourself?"

The young noble stood with bowed head, his face white. This was ruin,
indeed, absolute, irremediable ruin. "Sir," he said at last, "your
Majesty has a right to my life, not to my honour."

"Your honour!" Henry exclaimed, biting contempt in his tone.

The young man started, and for a second his cheek flamed under the
well-deserved reproach; but he recovered himself. "My debt to your
Majesty," he said, "I am willing to pay."

"Since pay you must," Henry muttered softly.

"But I claim to pay also my debt to the Captain of Creance."

The King of Navarre stared. "Oh," he said. "So you would have me take
your worthless life, and give up Lusigny?"

"I am in your hands, sire."

"Pish, sir!" Henry replied in angry astonishment. "You talk like a
child. Such an offer, M. de Noirterre, is folly, and you know it. Now
listen to me. It was lucky for you that I came in to-night, intending to
question you. Your madness is known to me only, and I am willing to
overlook it. Do you hear? I am willing to pardon. Cheer up, therefore,
and be a man. You are young; I forgive you. This shall be between you
and me only," the young prince continued, his eyes softening as the
other's head sank lower, "and you need think no more of it until the day
when I shall say to you, 'Now, M. de Noirterre, for Navarre and for
Henry, strike!'"

He rose as the last words passed his lips, and held out his hand. The
Vicomte fell on one knee, and kissed it reverently, then sprang to his
feet again. "Sire," he said, his eyes shining, "you have punished me
heavily, more heavily than was needful. There is only one way in which I
can show my gratitude, and that is by ridding you of a servant who can
never again look your enemies in the face."

"What new folly is this?" Henry asked sternly. "Do you not understand
that I have forgiven you?"

"Therefore I cannot betray Lusigny, and I must acquit myself of my debt
to the Captain of Creance in the only way which remains," the young man
replied firmly. "Death is not so hard that I would not meet it twice
over rather than again betray my trust."

"This is midsummer madness!" said the King, hotly.

"Possibly," replied the Vicomte, without emotion; "yet of a kind to
which your Grace is not altogether a stranger."

The words appealed to that love of the fanciful and the chivalrous which
formed part of the young King's nature, and was one cause alike of his
weakness and his strength. In its more extravagant flights it gave
opportunity after opportunity to his enemies, in its nobler and saner
expressions it won victories which all his astuteness and diplomacy
could not have compassed. He stood now, looking with half-hidden
admiration at the man whom two minutes before he had despised.

"I think you are in jest," he said presently and with some scorn.

"No, sir," the young man answered, gravely. "In my country they have a
proverb about us. 'The Noirterres,' say they, 'have ever been bad
players but good payers.' I will not be the first to be worse than my
name!"

He spoke with so quiet a determination that the King was staggered, and
for a minute or two paced the room in silence, inwardly reviling the
obstinacy of this weak-kneed supporter, yet unable to withhold his
admiration from it. At length he stopped, with a low exclamation.

"Wait!" he cried. "I have it! _Ventre Saint Gris_, man, I have it!" His
eyes sparkled, and, with a gentle laugh, he hit the table a sounding
blow. "Ha! ha! I have it!" he repeated gaily.

The young noble gazed at him in surprise, half suspicious, half
incredulous. But when Henry in low, rapid tones had expounded his plan,
the young man's face underwent a change. Hope and life sprang into it.
The blood flew to his cheeks. His whole aspect softened. In a moment he
was on his knee, mumbling the prince's hand, his eyes moist with
gratitude. Nor was that all; the two talked long, the murmur of their
voices broken more than once by the ripple of laughter. When they at
length separated, and Henry, his face hidden by the folds of his cloak,
had stolen to his lodgings, where, no doubt, more than one watcher was
awaiting him with a mind full of anxious fears, the Vicomte threw open
his window and looked out on the night. The moon had set, but the stars
still shone peacefully in the dark canopy above. He remembered, his
throat choking with silent emotion, that he was looking towards his
home--the round towers among the walnut woods of Navarre which had been
in his family since the days of St. Louis, and which he had so lightly
risked. And he registered a vow in his heart that of all Henry's
servants he would henceforth be the most faithful.

Meanwhile the Captain of Creance was enjoying the sweets of his coming
triumph. He did not look out into the night, it is true--he was over old
for sentiment--but pacing up and down the room he planned and
calculated, considering how he might make the most of his success. He
was still comparatively young. He had years of strength before him. He
would rise high and higher. He would not easily be satisfied. The times
were troubled, opportunities were many, fools not few; bold men with
brains and hands were rare.

At the same time he knew that he could be sure of nothing until Lusigny
was actually in his possession; and he spent the next few days in
painful suspense. But no hitch occurred nor seemed likely. The Vicomte
made him the necessary communications; and men in his own pay informed
him of dispositions ordered by the governor of Lusigny which left him in
no doubt that the loser intended to pay his debt.

It was, therefore, with a heart already gay with anticipation that the
Captain rode out of Creance two hours before midnight on an evening
eight days later. The night was dark, but he knew his road well. He had
with him a powerful force, composed in part of thirty of his own
garrison, bold hardy fellows, and in part of six score horsemen, lent
him by the governor of Montauban. As the Vicomte had undertaken to
withdraw, under some pretence or other, one-half of his command and to
have one of the gates opened by a trusty hand, the Captain foresaw no
difficulty. He trotted along in excellent spirits, now stopping to scan
with approval the dark line of his troopers, now to bid them muffle the
jingle of their swords and corselets that nevertheless rang sweet music
in his ears. He looked for an easy victory; but it was not any slight
misadventure that would rob him of his prey. If necessary he would fight
and fight hard. Still, as his company wound along the river-side or
passed into the black shadow of the oak grove, which stands a mile to
the east of Lusigny, he did not expect that there would be much
fighting.

Treachery alone, he thought, could thwart him; and of treachery there
was no sign. The troopers had scarcely halted under the last clump of
trees before a figure detached itself from one of the largest trunks,
and advanced to the Captain's rein. The Captain saw with surprise that
it was the Vicomte himself. For a second he thought that something had
gone wrong, but the young noble's first words reassured him. "It is
arranged," M. de Noirterre whispered, as the Captain bent down to him.
"I have kept my word, and I think that there will be no resistance. The
planks for crossing the moat lie opposite the gate. Knock thrice at the
latter, and it will be opened. There are not fifty armed men in the
place."

"Good!" the Captain answered, in the same cautious tone. "But you----"

"I am believed to be elsewhere, and must be gone. I have far to ride to
night. Farewell."

"Till we meet again," the Captain answered; and without more he saw his
ally glide away and disappear in the darkness. A cautious word set the
troop in motion, and a very few minutes saw them standing on the edge
of the moat, the outline of the gateway tower looming above them, a
shade darker than the wrack of clouds which overhead raced silently
across the sky. A moment of suspense while one and another shivered--for
there is that in a night attack which touches the nerves of the
stoutest--and the planks were found, and as quietly as possible laid
across the moat. This was so skilfully done that it evoked no challenge
and the Captain crossing quickly with a few picked men, stood in the
twinkling of an eye under the shadow of the gateway. Still no sound was
heard save the hurried breathing of those at his elbow, the stealthy
tread of others crossing, the persistent voices of the frogs in the
water beneath. Cautiously he knocked three times and waited. The third
rap had scarcely sounded before the gate rolled silently open, and he
sprang in, followed by his men.

So far so good. A glance at the empty street and the porter's pale face
told him at once that the Vicomte had kept his word. But he was too old
a soldier to take anything for granted, and forming up his men as
quickly as they entered, he allowed no one to advance until all were
inside, and then, his trumpet sounding a wild note of defiance,
two-thirds of his force sprang forward in a compact body while the other
third remained to hold the gate. In a moment the town awoke to find
itself in the hands of the enemy.

As the Vicomte had promised, there was no resistance. In the small keep
a score of men did indeed run to arms, but only to lay their weapons
down without striking a blow when they became aware of the force opposed
to them. Their leader, sullenly acquiescing, gave up his sword and the
keys of the town to the victorious Captain; who, as he sat his horse in
the middle of the marketplace, giving his orders and sending off riders
with the news, already saw himself in fancy Governor of Angouleme and
Knight of the Holy Ghost.

As the red light of the torches fell on steel caps and polished
hauberks, on the serried ranks of pikemen, and the circle of whitefaced
townsfolks, the picturesque old square looked doubly picturesque and he
who sat in the midst, its master, doubly a hero. Every five minutes,
with a clatter of iron on the rough pavement and a shower of sparks, a
horseman sprang away to tell the news at Montauban or Cahors; and every
time that this occurred, the Captain, astride on his charger, felt a new
sense of power and triumph.

Suddenly the low murmur of voices about him was broken by a new sound,
the distant beat of hoofs, not departing but arriving, and coming each
moment nearer. It was but the tramp of a single horse, but there was
something in the sound which made the Captain prick his ears, and
secured for the arriving messenger a speedy passage through the crowd.
Even at the last the man did not spare his horse, but spurred through
the ranks to the Captain's very side, and then and then only sprang to
the ground. His face was pale, his eyes were bloodshot. His right arm
was bound up in bloodstained cloths. With an oath of amazement, the
Captain recognized the officer whom he had left in charge of Creance,
and he thundered, "What is this? What is it?"

"They have got Creance!" the man gasped, reeling as he spoke. "They have
got--Creance!"

"Who?" the Captain shrieked, his face purple with rage.

"The little man of Bearn! The King of Navarre! He assaulted it five
hundred strong an hour after you left, and had the gate down before we
could fire a dozen shots. We did what we could, but we were but one to
seven. I swear, Captain, that we did all we could. Look at this!"

Almost black in the face, the Captain swore another oath. It was not
only that he saw governorship and honours vanish like Will-o'-the-wisps,
but that

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