Bag and Baggage/The King's Star
THE KING'S STAR
I
MAÎTRE JEAN BICHE stood, with a very black and evil expression of countenance, looking over the parapet of Notre Dame Bridge. He was in that mood when violence of some sort seems the only redress for an outraged self-esteem. It was just a question with him whether he should kill himself or another—deprive the insensate world of an inspired poet, or of an uninspired patron of poetasters. So he put it, there being no such merciless critic of his fellow-minors as an unappreciated rhymester.
And yet he might have solaced himself with the reflection that the approval of an insensate world would be the reverse from reassuring to a conscious genius. But there is no reasoning with an insulted poet.
It must be understood that Maître Jean, sensualist, decadent, and, at this last, by right maturation of a diseased egoism, a homicidal maniac, was quite earnest in his sense of injury, and quite deadly in his resolve to come to some kind of terms with Fate upon it. Notoriety was really the thing he craved—he called it appreciation. Tuneful from the first, his compositions, when only a poor sizar at the 'Collège des trois langues,' had instinctively assumed a metrical cast, and had merely awaited the authority of a Mastership of the Arts to expand into the full-blown song. And he had gained his degree, and thereafter had indulged his bent, seeking a living and a living fame in one; but with singular ill-success. Though he sang high and low, no one would employ him above a trumpery figure; and here, at thirty years of age, he was sunk into a mere tavern-strummer, begging his bread, like Homer, from door to door. Odes, hymns, eclogues, rondels, pasquinades—they all came within his scope—or so he thought—and he must exchange the best of them for a mug of wine and a bed in the midden. It was an unexampled infamy; but it had to be endured. And then one day there had appeared, unexpectedly, a potential patron, and his embittered soul had been exalted at a bound to unstable heights.
It was just a stranger in a tavern, a magnificent dandiprat, who had clapped him on the shoulder over some neatly-turned epigram, and had sworn by his beard that Father Ronsard must and should hear of him; that the King himself must hear; that at a turn of the wheel he should find himself enrolled among that select company of Court songsters which wove a maze of melody about the branching corridors of the Louvre.
Jean Biche had listened petrified. Ronsard! the incomparable Ronsard, whom for years he had hated and envied and depreciated with all a poor man's spite of the successful! In a moment he found this great rival just and noble; in a moment he saw himself recognised, applauded—nay, lifted to pre-eminence. If, he reflected, in a glow of condescension, the Court emoluments were something less than princely, they would compare at least favourably with his present takings. Charles IX was credited with keeping his poets, like horses, on moderate oats, lest they should become over-blown and unfit for service. What of that, to one who had often drummed an accompaniment to his own couplets on his own empty stomach? He inflated his starved chest, he flushed and simpered; when the stranger insisted upon seeing such specimens of his art as he had about him, he protested, with an affectation of lowliness that was already vanity spurred and mounted. The two parted, after an appointment made at The Mewing Cat, the nobleman vowing, in a heat of tearful sentiment, that he would consider it the deed of his life to set those broken shoes of Maître Jean on the first rung of the ladder of fame. And after that, being, in truth, gloriously drunk, he had gone away and forgotten all about it.
Jean Biche—living meanwhile in the clouds, and feeding almost exclusively on wind—kept the appointment with punctuality, and found no impulsive patron awaiting him at The Mewing Cat, which was just a jolly tavern in the Rue de la Juiverie on the City Island. Nor did any 'come to arrive,' and in the end he had to sing for his supper. Thereafter he haunted The Mewing Cat, and always in vain; but, still living on the glamour of that meeting, and finding for himself a hundred reasons why its renewal was unavoidably postponed, he presently, in his new glorified self-confidence, began to conceive the possibility of touting for favour at the fountain-head on his own account. Why should he not submit his goods, so highly recommended, to the Sieur Ronsard himself, and so dispose of the encumbrance of a "middle-man"?
And he actually did it in the end, with a rhymed petition to the Prince of Poets, subject, younger-brotherly, adulatory, craving his interest to find him a Court patron, and even intimating the highest. After all, when it came to a question of asking, the King could give most. And then, in trepidation, but still uplifted, he awaited his answer.
None was vouchsafed him. He wrote again, and yet again. Finally, he addressed the fountain-head itself, the royal Castalia. And last of all he became importunate.
Then of a sudden one day a palace minion appeared in The Mewing Cat, and, enquiring for M. Biche, as the poet rose white and breathless staggered him with a boisterous blow on the back, and, throwing a packet on the table, roared out with a laugh, which all might hear:
"Is it, my faith, the grasshopper? 'Poor songster' thou namest thyself, and the King is in no mind to contradict thee. But call not any more under his windows, M. Biche, thy stinking sprats, or by his honour, he swears, he will have thee and thy burden cast into the Seine."
That, to be sure, was a rude way of rejecting a manuscript; but, in the sixteenth century, contributions, even, so to speak, to the Magasin du Louvre, were not returned accompanied by a printed form, or by a polite intimation that they were found unsuitable to their purpose. The unlucky poet, thus publicly gibbeted, gave one gasp, rigidly sat out the ensuing raillery, and presently crept forth, a soul wounded beyond endurance or extenuation.
Now men who have learned to live without hope will sometimes lose their reason in the reaction from a brief draught of it. Maître Jean could have borne the persistent neglect of Fortune; he could not bear her meteoric favour—a glimpse of glory shown only to be withdrawn. As he stole on, there was murder in his heart. He must take some life, if it were a life no less abject than his own. His nerves twitched to kill. It was falling dark, as he threaded his way amidst the huddle of low tenements and brawling alleys which covered the island, his hands plucking together behind his back, his eyes perpetually on the ground. He saw a red stream from some dyer's vat pour into the kennel, and he lolled his jaw at it, hanging out his tongue as if to lap. On the Pont Notre Dame he paused, and looked over the parapet into the water. Its gloomy rushing fascinated him, and he bent lower.
To plunge, and be swept whither? He dragged at his jaw hungrily a moment. It was soft and pursy, for all his half-starved condition; it dropped heavily from a weak mouth and vealy cheeks spotted with dissipation. His forehead looked low by contrast, and the hair brushed back from it, and sleeked at his neck into meagre drakes-tails, was of an indeterminate ginger colour. Hugging his mangy black mantlet about his shoulders, he bent so low as to imperil his balance.
A soft hand fell upon his shoulder, and he glanced about, momentarily startled, to find himself hemmed in by a little band of cut-purses. There was no mistaking them, Thrasonic, determined-looking fellows, with a light of mischief in their eyes. He rose erect, laughing drearily and ironically.
"Messires les Enfants de la Malte," he said, "I recognise you very well. Behold in me, your purposed victim, a wretched poet, driven by hunger to emigrate to the unknown shore, and awaiting only the appearance of M. Charon's ferry-boat in the stream below to depart. Can anyone oblige me with a denier for the passage? That given, he can cut my throat, with infinite pleasure, and so, having relieved my conscience of the single scruple which yet hampers it, step into so much of my shoes as the stones of Parnassus have left me."
They chuckled loudly; and one swaggered forward. He was a sickly-looking, weedy young man, with a silly intolerant face, and a rudimentary beard.
"I know this M. Biche," he said. "A wretched poet, i' faith—he speaks it. If any man obliges him, he is my enemy—the enemy of Bras-de-Férule. Hell will be penalty enough without his rhyming. Live, good Mr. Biche, live and prosper, we entreat thee, and presently carry thy lyre to heaven where the peacocks sing."
The band went on its way, Bras-de-Férule leading; and Jean Biche, with a taste of bile in his mouth, bent again to the river.
That miserable jest, twice uttered within the hour! Was there truth at the bottom of it? The self-conscious genius in him disdained an answer. Left to be its own solitary judge at the last, his soul swept away all bounds of moderation, and pronounced itself single, majestic, inscrutable. He was great—the greatest poet of his own or any time. He retracted his every obsequious compliment to the lesser, but more fortunate men. Fortunate? Of course. They spoke the common thought to common minds. It was all a vast conspiracy of the vulgar to keep the world for themselves, and the worthy from recognition. The golden age was ended, the gods were withdrawn; and he, comparable with Astraea, must no longer linger out a starved exile among a soulless people. But, for all that renunciatory heroism, his heart burned with hatred, and the gangrene of vanity was eating up his reason. He stooped over the parapet.
To plunge, and be swept whither? To be dragged, like a dead fish, distended, blind-eyed, from the indifferent water, and be cast for carrion into a nameless grave! For all his merit—after all his dreams and ambitions! The thought was fuel to his madness. Could he not achieve something first, something in any way remote from his calling, which should set him apart from his fellows, if only by the measure of a giant infamy?
A star of gas seemed to burst in his brain. He raised his head quickly. In the near distance he could see twinkling the long lights of the Louvre skirting the quay and shortened in perspective to a fiery arrow. He raised himself, his teeth showing, and shook a sardonic fist across the water.
"Fame!" he muttered ravenously, "fame! The King might provide it me yet, if I were to kill him for it!"
"My faith! but that is a very good reservation!" said a low voice at his elbow.
He turned, with a mortal start. There were two men, cloaked and mysterious, standing as close to him as confessors. In his absorption he had let them come upon him without a sound. The slighter of them had spoken, and he spoke again in a cultivated voice:
"I say, Maître Biche, that is a very good reservation."
"Messires!" gasped the poet. "Messires! You know me?"
"Surely," said the gentlemen. "Who does not know Maître Biche?"
The singer made a comprehensive gesture with his arms, emotional, piteous. 'All Paris!' it expressed.
"Alas! What is one to expect, with such a precentor to set the tune?" said the stranger.
"Yes, that is true," muttered Jean Biche.
"Incontrovertible," purred the other. "The Louvre is an indulgent parent to mediocrity. I prefer St. Germain, for my part. But doubtless, Messire, I speak to you in enigmas."
Jean Biche strove to answer, but could not. The gentleman touched him softly on the chest. "Listen, then," he said low. "I am in the service of Messire the King's youngest brother. I know the esteem in which he holds you—' As Apollo to Marsyas, so is Jean Biche to the Abbé Ronsard; so is natural music to acquired.' Those were his words. 'Were I King,' saith he, 'I should know whom to crown.'"
He stepped back a pace, and again approached, speaking in the same soft tone:
"Messire, as it chanced, I was with His Majesty to-day, when he sent his lackey to insult you. 'Carry this to the swollen frog,' he said, 'and bid him take warning lest he burst emulating the bull.' Ah! that stings; but no wonder. I heard; I followed with a friend; we were concealed witnesses of the result; we guessed the effect on a wronged and sensitive mind; as soon as we could escape observation, we pursued, we tracked you, we are here! " He broke off with a dramatic gesture, and added almost immediately, sighing profoundly: "Ah, Messire! if only the Duc d'Alenon were King!"
"Messires," said the poet hoarsely. "I am a desperate man. What do you want of me?"
"A poet-laureate of the truest," said the stranger.
Jean Biche laughed with dismal derision.
"A laureate of the dead? It happens to fall in with my humour—with my complaint. Your recipe for Fame, then? You want me to kill the King."
The stranger looked round hastily. There was no one within hearing.
"A laureate, on my honour," he said, "and of the living. It were a stroke that would let loose a swarm—a hornet's nest of partisans. Once delivered, you would lack no seconders. It were to win your place, had you the courage to dare it."
"And, if I refuse?"
The gentleman seemed to smile; he shrugged his shoulders. "Then very clearly," his manner intimated, "we are two bloods to one poor devil, we have given you our confidence, and the river is down there."
Jean Biche sneered bitterly.
"I hate all the world," he said, "and most, naturally enough, him who stands for the crowning expression of its insolence and inhumanity. This alternative to suicide I had myself contemplated. Your suggestion, at least, gives it a new perspective. Do with me what you will, gentlemen. I await only my instructions."
Those, however, did not, for the moment much interest him. The absorbing thing was that he was committed finally to that lesser apotheosis of infamy. He did not pretend to guess on what pretext. These Valois were always plotting, in brotherhood together, or against one another. Some rumours had reached him, as they were wont to filter through, much attenuated, to the canaille. D'Anjou, the heir-apparent, being disposed of temporarily in Poland, it would have been beyond reason to suppose that d'Alençon, the youngest and most restless of the three, would not take some advantage of his absence. And, in fact, it was whispered that the boy Duke—boy in all but seasoned villainy and dissimulation—was suspected of a leaning towards the Huguenots and the Politiques, as towards the party most to be relied on in a contingency. This shadowed-out conspiracy, no doubt, confirmed in some way the justice of that rumour. He did not know, or care to know how. These things were always going on, and were only regarded by the proletariat according as they affected the prices of bread and salt. There were only two classes in France, the task- masters and the tasked. A third, which had laboured to evolve itself—the class of reputable traders—had recently been annihilated.
A sort of mad exaltation had seized Jean Biche. He was going to be great beyond his wildest dreams. He saw red in the early stars, in the lights beginning to twinkle through the steaming murk of the river. He wanted to put his head into the Mewing Cat, and shout that the Angel of Destruction was close at hand. In truth, what with hunger, vanity and despair, his reason was gone by the board. Only a madman's secrecy kept his lips closed, and his smiling eyes from betraying the vision that filled them. He committed himself to his destiny, blindly, indifferent as to whither it carried or where deposited him.
At the end of the bridge were a couple of horses tethered to the rails. Doubtless their owners had awaited the passage of the Children of Malta before they trusted them there. One, a heavy bay roan, the larger cavalier mounted, and bade Maître Jean in a suppressed voice follow him en croupe. In another moment they were off, pounding, by way of a score of tortuous lanes and noisome alleys, towards the open country to the north-west of the city. They rode in silence, hurriedly, like men too profoundly moved for speech. Five miles from the walls, at a turn of the road, the lights of a little tavern suddenly twinkled upon them from a lonely covert. And here, at a low word from the other, the bigger horseman wheeled to a stop, and intimated to his fellow-rider that they had reached their quarters for the night. Jean Biche acquiesced, with a shrug and an inane chuckle, and descended; while the first cavalier, uttering a single "Bonne chance!" continued his road—to the Château de St. Germain-en-Laye, standing yet nine miles distant on its Montagne-du-Bon-Air, as the Revolutionists came to call it.
II
His Majesty was at the Louvre, his brother of Anjou in Poland, playing sulkily at sovereignty, the Duc d'Alençon was in the Château of St. Germain, plotting against things in general, and against his absent brother in particular. The King of France showed signs of breaking; he had never been himself since that little affair a year ago with the class of "reputable traders" on St. Bartholomew's day. What an odd thing it would be, were he to die unexpectedly and Anjou well out of the way!
Messire le Duc d'Alençon's little eyes twinkled over the prospect sometimes. He had taken some pleasure in managing his own small Court, with its serious and gay, its alchemists and its adventurers; yet he had always felt his capacities meet for the higher task. Supposing, only supposing, he should happen to have thrown in his lot with the stronger party (which at the moment seemed the Huguenot) at the date of the King's death? The difficulty was merely one of coincidence. What a pity one could not procure coincidence.
"It is possible, even that, Messire," said the Comte de la Mole, who had been closeted with His Highness for some minutes.
He was just off the road, and still booted and spurred. His handsome evil young face had a smiling leer on it, as, with one hand on hip, he pulled with the other at the point of his little 'stiletto' beard. The Duke looked at him without speaking.
The Château was very silent. It seemed to sleep among its woods and terraces without a thought of change or disturbance. Most quiet of all was this little chamber set in its heart, this muffled closet with its queer jumble of retorts and alembics and astrolabes, set staidly amid a litter of arms, and dishes of sweetmeats, and books both lewd and learned. D'Alençon was the original one of the brothers—the most daring, the most fearful, and again the most mischievous. He was only eighteen—one of the handful of boys which controlled the destinies of his time. Self-interest, convictions such as he had, inclined him to the Protestant side. M. le Comte, on the other hand, was at heart a religious Huguenot. The balance of events at the moment appeared to favour the Protestant cause. If only a leader, a princely leader, could be found to take advantage of that moment!
"It is possible, Messire," said de la Mole, "even to procure coincidence."
The Prince, sitting in a great chair, with his hands clasped, thrust out his feet and looked down at them. He was a little strong square man, very sallow and pitted with smallpox. His short wiry black hair, brushed violently back from his forehead and temples, his white teeth and set inscrutable smile, proclaimed the Italian in him. His doublet and breeches were of black velvet slashed with crimson, and the ruff at his neck might have been cleaner.
"I must accept your word for it, my dear Joseph," he murmured. "And what is Coincidence doing at this moment?"
"Coincidence, Messire," answered the cavalier, "is at this moment, I trust, drinking away the last of his reason under the care of my friend Lavollé."
The Prince just raised his eyes, and lowered them.
"Should I know Coincidence?" he asked.
"Hardly," said M. le Comte, "though I took pains to assure him otherwise. No more, in fact, than I knew him myself. Coincidence, naturally, assumes many disguises. In this case it was that of a strolling poet, who had apparently been petitioning royalty, and had met with a rebuff. The result came to hand in a certain cabaret, where I happened to be having a draught. I fancied I recognised Coincidence at once; but, to make sure, I followed him, when he went out, after a discreet interval and after having procured his pseudonym from the landlord. I found Coincidence deliberating between self-destruction and regicide, and so I was confirmed in my suspicion. I offered him, by your favour, Messire, the position of Court-poet."
"I do not wish to know his pseudonym," said the Prince suddenly.
"There is no need," answered de la Mole with perfect coolness. "I should prefer not to know it myself; but that cannot be helped. The essential point is, would you, sir, Coincidence serving, be prepared to slip out of St. Germain, and place yourself under the protection of M. Guitry and those assembled with him?"
The prince rose, much agitated.
"When, my dear Joseph," he said; "when?"
"To-morrow night, Messire, on the instant receipt of a message from me?"
"To-morrow—so soon?" His breath came quick. "To-morrow? "
"To-morrow, Messire," said the Count quietly, "is a Court ball. His Majesty, in a recrudescence of that whimsicality which he exhibited of old, is designing to play a trick upon the company. Thou hast heard speak of the Children of Malta, that notorious band of rogues and pickpockets? Well, so hath His Majesty, it seems; but he is not content with hearing. He must see them, speak with them, learn of their arts and methods at first hand. You know his humour. La Chambre is deputed to procure a representative half score of the gentlemen, who will be let loose unknown among the throng to exercise their trade, His Majesty pledging his word to confirm them their spoil, and to lead them away, at a given signal, to his private apartments. I have secret information of the trick, Messire."
D'Alençon stood, yellow- white, his tongue secretly moistening his lips, his eyes on the ground.
"Well?" he whispered.
"I say, Messire," continued the Count, "it would be reasonable to suppose that Coincidence would seize so promising an opportunity to vindicate his title to fame."
"His title, first, to admission," muttered the Prince.
De la Mole shrugged his shoulders.
"Of course," he said; "but, where Destiny contrives! I can only guess; but let us imagine, say, that Coincidence has conceived the idea of entering with the band of cut-purses itself; that he has been instructed how to identify the King by the diamond star on his cloak; that he follows among them, when all withdraw, supposing his comrades to be, not the thieves they are, but fellow-conspirators, prepared to rally about him when he does that which shall raise him at a stroke to the topmost pinnacle of fame?"
He paused, and for a terrific moment silence held. Then the Count, himself looking down, murmured ineffably:
"The poor Coincidence! Likely he will not live to suffer for his mistake. It were best, indeed, he should not. He is a crazy fellow, Messire—a fatalist, like the proper child of Destiny. And in the meantime—he shrugged his shoulders again, with an inexpressible meaning—" I have thought it best to isolate Coincidence, lest, like the smallpox, he should mark some of us with his disease."
D'Alençon glanced up, with haggard eyes.
"I do not want to know where. You have said too much already. Why did you dare to bring in my name?"
"As a guarantee, no more, Messire," said the Count imperturbably; "and since the promise it implied was an incentive. But it would carry no conviction uttered by his lips—granted that they were not silenced at once, which is improbable. Any murderer can cite Inducement; but that is not to say Inducement is guilty of the deed done in his name. Else, when we swore by God we should make the Almighty an accessory to our sins. Be tranquil; we have supplied no links here to connect his name with yours."
The Duke, listening very intently, protested with a pallid face.
"He will be supposed one of them—one of the thieves. The King will suppose it."
"The King will suppose nothing, Messire."
"That is all one. They will be all one in the retribution exacted."
"A parcel of rogues, sir—the better for everybody. There is no confessional-box so inviolable as Montfaucon."
The Prince whined pitifully: "I do not like it."
"Nor I," said de la Mole. "It is purely a matter for Coincidence—that is the difficulty; insuperable, I fear. Those who consort with rogues must take the risk of their company. For myself, I venture to prophesy no more."
He spoke very smoothly; he was furtively weighing his confederate all the time. Suddenly the Duke came to him. His eyes were staring, the palms of his hands were wet. "Joseph, my friend," he said, like one about to choke, "tell me, in the name of God—you believe my brother to be a dying man?"
De la Mole was silent a moment.
"Guitry is at hand and prepared. It is of Coincidence we speak, Messire," he then said coldly.
"But, he could not, in any case, live long?"
"Long is a relative term, Messire, like short and tall. The day is our only metre for measuring time."
"It were a small sin, Joseph, to forestall the inevitable by a metre or so—a mercy, even, to cut short the tale of miserable days to come?"
"Coincidence, Messire, is only another term for Providence."
The young Prince clapped both his hands to his ears; then, turning in a desperate way, made with his right a gesture of dismissal. De la Mole understood it, and, without another word, silently left the room.
The moment he was gone, d'Alençon fell upon his knees at a prie-Dieu, and broke into a soft hysteric babble of prayer, hardly to be distinguished from blasphemy. He acted for the best; France was in danger; the reformed religion alone promised her tranquillity; he had no part in this; he did not want to reign; it was Providence in the guise of Coincidence that used him for its helpless instrument; he preferred peace and the pursuit of his hobbies to all the lustre of a kingly apanage; he would go into a monastery.
In the midst he paused, sobbing, and looked up.
"I wonder if Guitry is to be trusted?" he muttered, with a catch in his breath.
III
The young Charles IX of France was not only a poet in himself, but the cause that poetry was in other men. That should have made him a proud king, yet there must have been times when the sycophantic swarm of grasshoppers drove him to regret his own gift. He could discriminate very clearly between the real and the pretentious, and he did; yet it is doubtful if in earlier days he would have put his foot so savagely on the poor charlatan, Jean Biche. The truth was that conceits once amusing to him had become intolerable. His whole nature had been warped in a day.
Yet he was always at heart a poet and romantic. The fact accounted for much that seemed contradictory in his character—love and cruelty, sincerity and dissimulation. He was for ever enacting a story within himself, and in the glow of it was easily moved, easily inflamed. It could become such an intense reality to him as even to affect his health. When he fired an arquebus from Louvre windows, he was playing a part into which his imagination had entered. He awoke to find his chimera actuality—as a sleepwalker might who, dreaming of wings, casts himself to the floor—and the shock of the discovery killed him.
Policy had found this imagination of his a sensitive instrument on which to play, and had tortured it unscrupulously. Left to himself, he might have been for his circumstances a good king, just and reasonable; but his bad friends, finding that strain of fantasy in him, worked upon it to their own ends and to his madness. Terror of the Spaniard, abject conciliation of the Spaniard, was the keynote of the devil's music which, throughout most of his reign, piped through the corridors of France. It was a strain mystic and elusive, but it found the bulk of the kingdom dancing and following to it. Uncursed of its infernal provocation, that carnage which choked the gutters of Paris had, perhaps, never occurred. Most certainly it would never have occurred to Charles the poet to sanction the deeds of Charles the madman. But Charles the poet was the last person allowed a voice in the matter.
The young king was a bard of the right succession. He had once written and dedicated to the Sieur Ronsard—whom he cherished, and had presented with an Abbacy among other gifts—some lines, of which the following may poorly serve
"Though we be kings, I may not set, as thou,
My anointed crown upon another's brow;
May never, like the sweet birds, hope to win
One soul. My powers end where thine begin.
Beauty and passion live upon thy sigh.
Death I can give; thou, immortality."
But that was long ago, and in happier times—times when he could hunt, himself unhounded of that pursuing conscience, and write of the greensward with a woodman's love. In those days his restless spirit had had its purely boyish side, a turn for adventure, a fondness for 'larks' and practical jokes; in these days—well, he remembered, maybe, how when they had gone to kill his dear friend the Duc de la Rochefoucauld in his bed, the victim had kicked out, laughing at his assailants, taking them, even as they stabbed him, for a disguised party from the palace, bent on one of those midnight frolics His Majesty loved. That might well have seemed to sound the knell of thoughtless hours, sickening him from all such jests in the future. He was no longer, said one, "the gentle king, benign and gracious. He is utterly changed. And there is nowadays a malignance in his face where once dwelt charity." His reason was a poisoned thing, in fact, and conscious of but few unsuffering moments. But in one of these, moved, perhaps, by some ancient strain of curiosity or adventure, he had devised the trick already mentioned to be played upon his company. It was a flash of the old espièglerie, a lucid thought recovered, a hundred years forgotten; and it lasted out its purpose.
••••••
La Chambre had succeeded in gathering his half-score of rogues, and His Majesty received the band in private audience. There were Bras-de-Férule, Pérignon of the webbed ringers, called the Duck, Mazas the Pounder, and seven others. There was an air of confident swagger about them all, which, under the royal safe-conduct, was not subdued. The King was immensely interested.
"You are welcome, gentlemen of industry," he said. "I give you the term with apologies."
"N' importe!" said Mazas, who was a good-humoured red tun of a man. "It is something to be given anything. In these hard times we must take what we can get."
"Well, it is no more than you deserve. Yet, do not abuse the times; you seem to have done very well out of them."
"Pardi," said the Pounder; "we have a large family to maintain."
"That is true," answered the King; "and la Chambre there has none. Pick his pocket for him."
"You speak too late, Messire; it is already done," said Pérignon with an air of dignity; and, to Charles's huge delight and the Captain's mortification, he produced the latter 's purse from his bosom. La Chambre wanted to reclaim it.
"No," said the King. "If you will keep such fine company, you must pay your footing." He addressed Bras-de-Férule, who appeared to be the leader. "This is all very well, but I doubt your capacity for the finer task."
"And what is that, Messire? " asked the young man. He caressed his scrap of beard, impudently, after the King's manner; and indeed, he was not unlike the King, only he was much more conceited.
"To pass muster among gentlemen," said Charles.
"Indeed, Messire," answered the other, "if they do not take us for their betters, call me a sot and depose me. Your fine fowl respect none so much as him that plucks them cleverly. The King should know it."
La Chambre looked aghast; but Charles only sniggered.
"Well," he said, "arrive in a body, and the porter at the wicket will have orders to admit you. You will see me in the room, and at the proper time will be given the signal to follow. En attendant, Messires!"
He rose, when he was alone again, and the transient excitement left his face, and left it haunted and haggard. He went up and down, stooping, coughing a little, and involuntarily his hand sought his throat, in the way Bras-de-Férule had mimicked. Once he paused at a mirror, and looked in it a moment. It showed him the very figure of exhausted self-repression, worn, tragic, pitiful. The wistful eyes, the lips compressed on too much pain, the thin straggle of hair, born of an arid soil, the deadly nausea of life. "God!" he whispered; "to be cursed at twenty-four with the wrinkles of sixty!" He had withered where he stood, in the struggle to be himself, to maintain himself, in the spell of the evil arts which were transforming him. He may have been as yellow as he was painted, but he was, no more than Malvolio, as black in his natural mind.
IV
It was significant of Jean Biche's condition that the exalted madman in him never once sought to penetrate the anonymity of either of his tempters. From the moment when he had surrendered his soul to them, he felt himself as if carried along on a wild wind of Destiny. When he left the tavern, he had truly meant to kill himself; it had needed very little to divert his murderous hand to another. Self-destruction is the last resource of the egoist, because it appears the most complete means left to him of wreaking his vengeance on a world which refuses to take him at his own valuation. He wants to kill, and, in his monstrous vanity, himself seems the most irreparable loss he can inflict on his fellows. But, his mood being homicidal, it is well for others to interpose no alternative. It is often only accident which makes the suicide instead of the assassin.
M. Lavollé was careful to apply no febrifuge to this fever of egoism. He put fuel to it, rather—material, at discretion; moral, without stint. He did not want collapsed nerves at the last; so, whenever he thought he saw a sign of physical exhaustion he prescribed stimulant, and of mental, flattery. All the time he kept himself and his victim apart and incognito, in a little room of The Crowing Cock; and, before dusk had fallen, on the evening succeeding that of their arrival, he had reason to congratulate himself on the success of his treatment. For by then the last rag of reason had been removed from his victim, and Jean Biche stood dressed up to play his part of Coincidence.
He never thought or cared to know whence his clothes had come. They had reached the tavern mysteriously, and they appeared of a quality meet for his essay. They were rich, but unobtrusive—purple and black and gold—and there was the mask for his face, and the little deadly poignard to be hidden in his bosom, since arms were not allowed to be carried at the Court festivities. He swelled like a turkey, thus arrayed. There was a fire in his brain and in his eyes. "The King, Messire," he said, "once writ a poem to the rogue Ronsard, in which he claimed the command of Death." He struck his breast. "I am already greater than the King."
He believed it, poor wretch. He strutted, and ogled himself in a scrap of glass. What if, after the deed, they were to recognise it, and make him King? He had an idea already he was striking for his crown.
Presently, mysteriously as the clothes had come, there were horses waiting at the door, and they mounted and rode off for Paris. Dismissing their steeds in the Rue St. Honoré, to one who had sprung up oddly to receive them, they descended, and proceeded on foot, by way of the Rues des Poulies and Petit Bourbon, to the Louvre Quay, where, at the gates of the courtyard, Lavollé halted his companion in good time, just as the links were being lit. He was not for the ball himself, but he had an observation to make, and a direction to give. Very soon the company began to arrive, and it was not long before a group of ten men, all compact, presented itself at the wicket among the crowd.
"It is they," he whispered, "thy confederates. Secure thine entrance, appearing to be one of them, and afterwards make no sign till the moment comes. Follow, and mark well, and luck go with thee," and he vanished.
There was a momentary block; a word and a sign were exchanged, and the next instant, treading on the heels of the Children of Malta, Jean Biche found himself, confident, triumphant, crossing the stones of that yard which, a year before, had swum in the blood of the massacre.
Thence his progress was all an intoxicated dream—of shining corridors, jewels and white bosoms, satin that whispered as it flowed, perfumes that stole the senses. And lo! he was in a great marble chamber whose ceiling, crusted with gold, was upheld by giant women, and whose spaces, lit by a thousand tapers, formed the reservoir into which all this river of splendour was discharging itself. The Salle des Cariatides! For a moment the assassin's brain reeled, not in any relenting of his purpose, but in terror lest a scene so gorgeous and unfamiliar should bewilder him and paralyse his arm from action.
••••••
They danced the pavane that night, a very stately measure derived from the peacock; and the Queen-mother, a magnificent old nourrice of a dame, sharp-eyed, firm-mouthed, as upright as a penguin, came to look on. She stood up on the daïs, immensely solid and immovable, clapping her hands in benevolent condescension, and approving in a full superior voice every more felicitous pose among the performers. But she withdrew early, and then the King, who had been seated apathetic in his chair of State, came down and mingled with his company. He was masked, as all were, and constantly moved among a little cloud of courtiers. His habit was of white satin, and the short cloak dangling from his shoulder was of ivory velvet, and conspicuous for the single diamond star fastened on it. Jean Biche, catching sight of the token for the first time, felt a sudden stab of ice in his heart. It passed, and, in the reaction, he became tenfold intoxicated with self-importance. The rising tumult of voices, the licence which grew with the hour, found their exaggerated response in his brain. As a parrot squawks or a canary sings the louder the more the human uproar swells about it, so, conscious of the growing excitement, his own rose to a delirious pitch. He swaggered until he capered; he played the gallant in such ridiculous caricatura as to attract the notice and the laughter of those near him. He thought he was making an impression, and so he was; he thought he was showing his natural fitness for a part soon to be a part of his common experience. He was amply humoured, because, at a masque, antic often hid a meaning. Maybe, too, some rumour had got about of strange company in the hall. Once in his gambols he backed into a young lady somewhat violently, and received for his pains a suspicion of a kick from her attendant cavalier. He turned, mad on the instant, to resent the insult, and saw a plump merry young woman wincing from him. "Beware," whispered a friendly voice in his ear; "it is the Queen Margot."
He stood like an angry gawk.
"Messire," she said saucily, "appears to fancy himself at tennis because there is a ball."
A burst of laughter greeted her sally, and she moved on. But from that instant his mood changed to one of black and vengeful hatred. He would come to prove to these arrogant coxcombs his title to a better respect. This insolence should be brought prostrate before him.
Thereafter his fury of excitement burned like a banked-in fire, the hotter and more ominous for its repression. He moved darkly from group to group, sinister, watchful, unclean. A thousand fantastic grievances haunted his wild and wandering fancy, or were gone in an instant to give place to that crowning exultation. But, whatever his mood, he never forgot to follow the movements of his victim, or to hold himself prepared for his cue. In these stealthy observations, he noticed a peculiar trick the King had of lifting his hand to his throat, as if it troubled him; and presently he fell to imitating him in this, with the confused fancy that it might help others to interpret the natural royalty in himself.
During all this time he instinctively avoided contact with his fellow-conspirators. It was his policy, he believed; and, whenever he identified one or other of the forms he had pursued on his entrance, he would look another way, with even an elaborate affectation of uninterest.
And it was this fantastic delicacy which, in the end, almost defeated his purpose; for, happening to turn from a burly, hot-faced cavalier, upon whose heels he had literally trodden at the wicket, he failed to observe that the moment had come, and that the man was actually then on his way to the assignation.
He gave a mortal start. The great doors at the south end of the hall stood open; the King had already passed through; a little group of men was in the act of following. A spiral of fire seemed to spring from Jean Biche's soles and to go roaring up to his head. With his eyes full of blood, going half-blindly, he pushed his way, furiously, impatiently, through the intervening throng.
"Let me pass!" he panted. "I belong to that company! I must follow! "
It was a little before the removal of the masks. A pause had occurred in the festivities; and from here and there about the room small wails and cries were audible.
"My belt!" "My collet!" "My silk cloak!"
All made way for the rude fellow, less interested in him than in the sudden disturbance. But even so he did not gain the door until the last of the conspirators had disappeared through it. The guard, on his application, passed him by, believing him to be one of the privileged; the doors closed behind him. He saw a wide and noble stairway rise before him, and already high on it the last of the company he pursued. He did not ask himself on what pretext so many conspirators had gained admission to the King's private quarters. He was ignorant of the ways of palaces, and it was enough for him that everything corresponded with the information given him by Lavollé. Pausing only one moment to gather breath, and secure his poignard in position, he stole catlike up the great staircase in pursuit of his prey. There was no one for the moment in sight. Majesty, with its ushering lackeys, Intrigue with its padded footfall, had turned the corner and vanished. Jean Biche followed.
He could hardly control the gasp forced from him. For there, standing alone in the short dim-lit length of corridor before his eyes, was the King himself. There was no mistaking the figure, stooping, hectic, with the hand at his throat, and, over its shoulder, the white velvet cloak with the diamond star. Slipping out his blade, Jean Biche took soft steps, one, two, and sprang.
••••••
Charles was delighted with the success of his practical joke. The skill of the Children of Malta, the éclat with which they played their rôle of fine gentlemen, the magnificence of their 'get-up,' justified their most arrogant boast. Being in the secret, he could follow to a certain degree their tactics, and was witness of more than one dexterous "pass." Above anything it astonished him, and sent him into fits of laughter, to observe some mortified exquisites mulcted of their beautiful satin mantlets, and going disconsolately "in their waistcoats like lackeys." He could not understand how it was done, or whither the filched property vanished; and, when at length he had given the signal, and withdrawn his confederates away to his private closet, a question as to this method of theirs was the first on his lips. Pérignon, the serenely fastidious, answered him, while his comrades were emptying their sleeves, pockets, and other receptacles of some three thousand crowns' worth of 'swag' in money and jewels.
"It is easy, Messire."
"I know," said Charles. "Un fou avise bien un sage; but, for myself, I do not see how it is possible so to rob a shrewd man, without his knowing."
With the word, conscious of a look, he clapped his hand to his shoulder, and burst into a neigh of laughter. His own cloak, diamond star and all, was gone.
Pérignon stepped back a pace, and said, with unexampled impudence, while he raised his voice:
"The fool sits here. Behold the King enter!"
A scream from without answered him on the instant—a cry piercing, sudden, mortal. The whole company, thieves and monarch, started, listened a moment, then rushed forth pell-mell. There, on the matting of the corridor, lay Bras-de-Férule, writhing in the agonies of death, the King's mantlet on his shoulders, a poignard pinning it fast between the blades. And over him stood a masked figure, frantic, exultant, the light of madness in its eyes.
"I have killed the King! " shouted Jean Biche. "Long live the King!"
His voice wavered even in its utterance. His vision had encountered the living monarch. In that instant his reason returned to him, conscious, overwhelming. He threw up his arms, with a piteous bleat.
"Poet," he cried, "save thy brother!"
With an oath, Mazas the Pounder took a single step forward and struck him full in the face.
He dropped, never to rise again.