“For me,” said the King,
“these depositions were not necessary. Your
word, my dear Marcel, would have sufficed. For
the courts, however, perhaps it is well that you have
had them taken; moreover, they form a valuable corroboration
of the treason which you lay to the charge of Monsieur
de Saint-Eustache.”
We were standing at least,
La Fosse and I were standing, Louis XIII sat in
a room, of the Palace of Toulouse, where I had had
the honour of being brought before His Majesty.
La Fosse was there, because it would seem that the
King had grown fond of him, and could not be without
him since his coming to Toulouse.
His Majesty was, as usual, so dull
and weary not even roused by the approaching
trial of Montmorency, which was the main business that
had brought him South that even the company of this
vapid, shallow, but irrepressibly good-humoured La
Fosse, with his everlasting mythology, proved a thing
desirable.
“I will see,” said Louis,
“that your friend the Chevalier is placed under
arrest at once, and as much for his attempt upon your
life as for the unstable quality of his political
opinions, the law shall deal with him conclusively.”
He sighed. “It always pains me to proceed
to extremes against a man of his stamp. To deprive
a fool of his head seems a work of supererogation.”
I inclined my head, and smiled at
his pleasantry. Louis the just rarely permitted
himself to jest, and when he did his humour was as
like unto humour as water is like unto wine.
Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you
have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek
or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude
of his witless wit be rather provocative of sorrow.
“Nature needs meddling with
at times,” hazarded La Fosse, from behind His
Majesty’s chair. “This Saint-Eustache
is a sort of Pandora’s box, which it is well
to close ere ”
“Go to the devil,” said
the King shortly. “We are not jesting.
We have to do justice.”
“Ah! Justice,” murmured
La Fosse; “I have seen pictures of the lady.
She covers her eyes with a bandage, but is less discreet
where the other beauties of her figure are in question.”
His Majesty blushed. He was above
all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun.
To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit
of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy
or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he
might remain neither blind nor deaf.
“Monsieur de la Fosse,”
said he in an austere voice, “you weary me, and
when people weary me I send them away which
is one of the reasons why I am usually so much alone.
I beg that you will glance at that hunting-book, so
that when I have done with Monsieur de Bardelys you
may give me your impressions of it.”
La Fosse fell back, obedient but unabashed,
and, moving to a table by the window, he opened the
book Louis had pointed out.
“Now, Marcel, while that buffoon
prepares to inform me that the book has been inspired
by Diana herself, tell me what else you have to tell.”
“Naught else, Sire.”
“How naught? What of this Vicomte de Lavedan.”
“Surely Your Majesty is satisfied
that there is no charge no heedful charge
against him?”
“Aye, but there is a charge a
very heedful one. And so far you have afforded
me no proofs of his innocence to warrant my sanctioning
his enlargement.”
“I had thought, Sire, that it
would be unnecessary to advance proofs of his innocence
until there were proofs of his guilt to be refuted.
It is unusual, Your Majesty, to apprehend a gentleman
so that he may show cause why he did not deserve such
apprehension. The more usual course is to arrest
him because there are proofs of his guilt to be preferred
against him.”
Louis combed his beard pensively,
and his melancholy eyes grew thoughtful.
“A nice point, Marcel,”
said he, and he yawned. “A nice point.
You should have been a lawyer.” Then, with
an abrupt change of manner, “Do you give me
your word of honour that he is innocent?” he
asked sharply.
“If Your Majesty’s judges
offer proof of his guilt, I give you my word that
I will tear that proof to pieces.”
“That is not an answer. Do you swear his
innocence?”
“Do I know what he carries in
his conscience?” quoth I still fencing with
the question. “How can I give my word in
such a matter? Ah, Sire, it is not for nothing
that they call you Louis the Just,” I pursued,
adopting cajolery and presenting him with his own favourite
phrase. “You will never allow a man against
whom there is no shred of evidence to be confined
in prison.”
“Is there not?” he questioned.
Yet his tone grew gentler. History, he had promised
himself, should know him as Louis the Just, and he
would do naught that might jeopardize his claim to
that proud title. “There is the evidence
of this Saint-Eustache!”
“Would Your Majesty hang a dog
upon the word of that double traitor?”
“Hum! You are a great advocate,
Marcel. You avoid answering questions; you turn
questions aside by counter-questions.” He
seemed to be talking more to himself than tome.
“You are a much better advocate than the Vicomte’s
wife, for instance. She answers questions and
has a temper Ciel! what a temper!”
“You have seen the Vicomtesse?”
I exclaimed, and I grew cold with apprehension, knowing
as I did the licence of that woman’s tongue.
“Seen her?” he echoed
whimsically. “I have seen her, heard her,
well-nigh felt her. The air of this room is still
disturbed as a consequence of her presence. She
was here an hour ago.”
“And it seemed,” lisped
La Fosse, turning from his hunting-book, “as
if the three daughters of Acheron had quitted the
domain of Pluto to take embodiment in a single woman.”
“I would not have seen her,”
the King resumed as though La Fosse had not spoken,
“but she would not be denied. I heard her
voice blaspheming in the antechamber when I refused
to receive her; there was a commotion at my door;
it was dashed open, and the Swiss who held it was hurled
into my room here as though he had been a mannikin.
Dieu! Since I have reigned in France I have not
been the centre of so much commotion. She is
a strong woman, Marcel the saints defend you hereafter,
when she shall come to be your mother-in-law.
In all France, I’ll swear, her tongue is the
only stouter thing than her arm. But she’s
a fool.”
“What did she say, Sire?” I asked in my
anxiety.
“Say? She swore Ciel!
how she did swear! Not a saint in the calendar
would she let rest in peace; she dragged them all by
turns from their chapter-rolls to bear witness to
the truth of what she said.”
“That was ”
“That her husband was the foulest
traitor out of hell. But that he was a fool with
no wit of his own to make him accountable for what
he did, and that out of folly he had gone astray.
Upon those grounds she besought me to forgive him
and let him go. When I told her that he must stand
his trial, and that I could offer her but little hope
of his acquittal, she told me things about myself,
which in my conceit, and thanks to you flatterers
who have surrounded me, I had never dreamed.
“She told me I was ugly, sour-faced,
and malformed; that I was priest-ridden and a fool;
unlike my brother, who, she assured me, is a mirror
of chivalry and manly perfections. She promised
me that Heaven should never receive my soul, though
I told my beads from now till Doomsday, and she prophesied
for me a welcome among the damned when my time comes.
What more she might have foretold I cannot say.
She wearied me at last, for all her novelty, and I
dismissed her that is to say,” he
amended, “I ordered four musketeers to carry
her out. God pity you, Marcel, when you become
her daughter’s husband!”
But I had no heart to enter into his
jocularity. This woman with her ungovernable
passion and her rash tongue had destroyed everything.
“I see no likelihood of being
her daughter’s husband,” I answered mournfully.
The King looked up, and laughed.
“Down on your knees, then,” said he, “and
render thanks to Heaven.”
But I shook my head very soberly.
“To Your Majesty it is a pleasing comedy,”
said I, “but to me, helas! it is nearer far to
tragedy.”
“Come, Marcel,” said he,
“may I not laugh a little? One grows so
sad with being King of France! Tell me what vexes
you.”
“Mademoiselle de Lavedan has
promised that she will marry me only when I have saved
her father from the scaffold. I came to do it,
very full of hope, Sire. But his wife has forestalled
me and, seemingly, doomed him irrevocably.”
His glance fell; his countenance resumed
its habitual gloom. Then he looked up again,
and in the melancholy depths of his eyes I saw a gleam
of something that was very like affection.
“You know that I love you, Marcel,”
he said gently. “Were you my own son I
could not love you more. You are a profligate,
dissolute knave, and your scandals have rung in my
ears more than once; yet you are different from these
other fools, and at least you have never wearied me.
To have done that is to have done something.
I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall
if you marry this rose of Languedoc, for I take it
that she is too sweet a flower to let wither in the
stale atmosphere of Courts. This man, this Vicomte
de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why should
I not let him die, since if he dies you will not wed?”
“Do you ask me why, Sire?”
said I. “Because they call you Louis the
Just, and because no king was ever more deserving of
the title.”
He winced; he pursed his lips, and
shot a glance at La Fosse, who was deep in the mysteries
of his volume. Then he drew towards him a sheet
of paper, and, taking a quill, he sat toying with
it.
“Because they call me the Just,
I must let justice take its course,” he answered
presently.
“But,” I objected, with
a sudden hope, “the course of justice cannot
lead to the headsman in the case of the Vicomte de
Lavedan.”
“Why not?” And his solemn eyes met mine
across the table.
“Because he took no active part
in the revolt. If he was a traitor, he was no
more than a traitor at heart, and until a man commits
a crime in deed he is not amenable to the law’s
rigour. His wife has made his defection clear;
but it were unfair to punish him in the same measure
as you punish those who bore arms against you, Sire.”
“Ah!” he pondered. “Well?
What more?”
“Is that not enough, Sire?”
I cried. My heart beat quickly, and my pulses
throbbed with the suspense of that portentous moment.
He bent his head, dipped his pen and began to write.
“What punishment would you have
me mete out to him?” he asked as he wrote.
“Come, Marcel, deal fairly with me, and deal
fairly with him for as you deal with him,
so shall I deal with you through him.”
I felt myself paling in my excitement.
“There is banishment, Sire it is
usual in cases of treason that are not sufficiently
flagrant to be punished by death.”
“Yes!” He wrote busily.
“Banishment for how long, Marcel? For his
lifetime?”
“Nay, Sire. That were too long.”
“For my lifetime, then?”
“Again that were too long.”
He raised his eyes and smiled.
“Ah! You turn prophet? Well, for how
long, then? Come, man.”
“I should think five years ”
“Five years be it. Say no more.”
He wrote on for a few moments; then
he raised the sandbox and sprinkled the document.
“Tiens!” he cried,
as he dusted it and held it out to me. “There
is my warrant for the disposal of Monsieur lé
Vicomte Leon de Lavedan. He is to go into banishment
for five years, but his estates shall suffer no sequestration,
and at the end of that period he may return and enjoy
them we hope with better loyalty than in
the past. Get them to execute that warrant at
once, and see that the Vicomte starts to-day under
escort for Spain. It will also be your warrant
to Mademoiselle de Lavedan, and will afford proof
to her that your mission has been successful.”
“Sire!” I cried.
And in my gratitude I could say no more, but I sank
on my knee before him and raised his hand to my lips.
“There,” said he in a
fatherly voice. “Go now, and be happy.”
As I rose, he suddenly put up his hand.
“Ma foi, I had all but forgotten,
so much has Monsieur de Lavedan’s fate preoccupied
us.” He picked up another paper from his
table, and tossed it to me. It was my note of
hand to Chatellerault for my Picardy estates.
“Chatellerault died this morning,”
the King pursued. “He had been asking to
see you, but when he was told that you had left Toulouse,
he dictated a long confession of his misdeeds, which
he sent to me together with this note of yours.
He could not, he wrote, permit his heirs to enjoy
your estates; he had not won them; he had really forfeited
his own stakes, since he had broken the rules of play.
He has left me to deliver judgment in the matter of
his own lands passing into your possession. What
do you say to it, Marcel?”
It was almost with reluctance that
I took up that scrap of paper. It had been so
fine and heroic a thing to have cast my wealth to the
winds of heaven for love’s sake, that on my
soul I was loath to see myself master of more than
Beaugency. Then a compromise suggested itself.
“The wager, Sire,” said
I, “is one that I take shame in having entered
upon; that shame made me eager to pay it, although
fully conscious that I had not lost. But even
now, I cannot, in any case, accept the forfeit Chatellerault
was willing to suffer. Shall we shall
we forget that the wager was ever laid?”
“The decision does you honour.
It was what I had hoped from you. Go now, Marcel.
I doubt me you are eager. When your love-sickness
wanes a little we shall hope to see you at Court again.”
I sighed. “Helas, Sire, that would be never.”
“So you said once before, monsieur.
It is a foolish spirit upon which to enter into matrimony;
yet like many follies a fine
one. Adieu, Marcel!”
“Adieu, Sire!”
I had kissed his hands; I had poured
forth my thanks; I had reached the door already, and
he was in the act of turning to La Fosse, when it came
into my head to glance at the warrant he had given
me. He noticed this and my sudden halt.
“Is aught amiss?” he asked.
“You-you have omitted something,
Sire,” I ventured, and I returned to the table.
“I am already so grateful that I hesitate to
ask an additional favour. Yet it is but troubling
you to add a few strokes of the pen, and it will not
materially affect the sentence itself.”
He glanced at me, and his brows drew
together as he sought to guess my meaning.
“Well, man, what is it?” he demanded impatiently.
“It has occurred to me that
this poor Vicomte, in a strange land, alone, among
strange faces, missing the loved ones that for so many
years he has seen daily by his side, will be pitiably
lonely.”
The King’s glance was lifted
suddenly to my face. “Must I then banish
his family as well?”
“All of it will not be necessary, Your Majesty.”
For once his eyes lost their melancholy,
and as hearty a burst of laughter as ever I heard
from that poor, weary gentleman he vented then.
“Ciel! what a jester you
are! Ah, but I shall miss you!” he cried,
as, seizing the pen, he added the word I craved of
him.
“Are you content at last?”
he asked, returning the paper to me.
I glanced at it. The warrant
now stipulated that Madame la Vicomtesse
de Lavedan should bear her husband company in his
exile.
“Sire, you are too good!” I murmured.
“Tell the officer to whom you
entrust the execution of this warrant that he will
find the lady in the guardroom below, where she is
being detained, pending my pleasure. Did she
but know that it was your pleasure she has been waiting
upon, I should tremble for your future when the five
years expire.”