A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden.
He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no
more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean
and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent
crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the
whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were
tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once
black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black,
ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like
hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte,
surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the
brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a
number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to
all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly
jewels hung about his neck.
As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips
perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy
leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This
figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of
a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and
blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious
merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were
gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what
Spurzheim would have called an “affective propensity to
acquisitiveness.” He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of
the King’s chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis
XI.
Presently the latter, pausing beside a pedestal on which stood a
statuette, none too unsuggestive, of the Paphian Venus, looked up in
an abstracted way.
“Still vacant, still vacant?” he said, lisping a little between his
toothless gums. “That was what you remarked, was it not, Père
Bonaventure?”
“Not in so many words, son Louis,” answered the chaplain. “But in very
truth the Priory of St. Come remains to this day a body without a
head. The severance, moreover, hath endured so long that I doubt if
any reunion of the parts, were that conceivable, could restore its
healthy circulation to the community. The good prior and his monks
have become estranged in this dull interval. His authority is out of
date. Were he yet to return--a wild hypothesis--he would think to take
them up where he left them, and, being disillusioned, chaos would
result.”
“You are convinced he is dead?”
“Either that, or held by the infidels in a captivity doomed to be
perpetual. No reasonable man can doubt it.”
“_Pasque-Dieu!_” said Louis, “that same reason is a good servant to
one’s interests. I myself am never so reasonable as when I cut off a
head that annoys me.”
He glanced, rasping his frosted chin, at the chaplain and down. He
could gauge this jocund suitor well enough; he knew him to be at heart
a libertine and self-seeker; but, inasmuch as his own faith was a
conglomeration of hypocrisy and abject superstition, he dreaded always
to question the casuistries of its anointed ministers. One could never
tell what might befall.
The matter under discussion turned upon the wisdom of appointing a new
head to the Priory of St. Come, an important foundation in the
southern quarters of the city. Long months past the King had granted a
reluctant permission to its aged chief to make a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land; and the old man had gone and he had not returned. Time went
by; no news had ever been received of the wayfarer; by degrees it had
come to be concluded that death or captivity had terminated his pious
adventure. The young monks of St. Come, freed from his restraining
hand, had begun to break bounds; scandals were getting rife;
interested observers impressed upon the King the moral certainty of
the old prior’s death, and the necessity of his bringing the monastery
again under the disciplinary control of a head. Amongst these the most
pertinacious, and, as possessing the royal ear, the most hopeful, was
the Chaplain Père Bonaventure, who greatly coveted for himself the
desirable office. It promised him almost illimitable opportunities for
the sort of life he favoured.
“This dream, father, of which you spoke,” said the King, without
raising his eyes--“it seemed to have its significance, you would
imply--some bearing on the case?”
“I would imply nothing of the sort,” answered the chaplain. “We are
expressly warned against attaching a prognostic value to these
figments--though, to be sure, we might claim our justification in Holy
Writ.”
“Given the seer,” said Louis. “Well, well; relate thy dream.”
“Methought,” said the priest, “that thou and I stood beside a church,
in the walls of which hard by appeared a little threatening fissure.
And the monks, instead of attending to their office, kept revelry; and
always with the sound of their roystering the fissure extended. But
thou, while I still urged upon thee the necessity of seeking and
amending from within the ever-widening evil, would persist in holding
me in converse, saying, ‘Patience yet a little, father, and we will
enter.’ And suddenly there came a clap of song surmounting all in
blasphemy, and with a roar the breach burst and the tower rocked and
the walls sank down upon us both, crushing out our lives.”
He ended, his eyes slewed craftily upon the other. “From Joseph,
through the royal succession,” he said, “descends the gift of
interpretation. To me it was just a dream.”
The King looked up. “_Pasque-Dieu!_” he said--“and to us a providence,
since it gives us a pretext for disposing of a pest. Go, go, in God’s
name”--he paused to raise his hat--“and be Prior of St. Come.”
He was rid at last of an importunity, though he was only to exchange
it for a worse.
He was walking in his garden one day weeks later, when there came
towards him an old, blanched figure, feverishly paddling with a
pilgrim’s crossed staff and mumbling as he approached. It was the aged
Prior of St. Come, delayed in his return by cross winds and crosser
ailments.
Louis, coming to a stop, stood conning the apparition half-petrified.
For a moment, indeed, he fancied it to be a veritable wraith, so
whitely emaciated looked the face, set in its cloudy fleece of beard
and hair, with the eyes like two black borings.
“_Adjuva nos, Domine, adjuva nos!_” he muttered, crossing himself.
The old man tottered forward, and cried in a shrill tone: “Restore to
me my fold, son Louis--restore to me my fold!”
The voice, and, more than it, the words, broke the spell. The King’s
lips tightened, shrewd and caustic. Not on such worldly interests were
a spirit bent.
“Welcome, father,” he said--“thou art welcome home.”
“No welcome,” cried the old man. “My children disown me; another sits
in my place. I but carried my pitcher to the well, and lo! when I
returned with it brimming, the door was locked against me. They feign
to know me not; they stand and revile me; let me in to them that I may
afford good evidence of my identity.”
He was a spirited ancient, and he shook his staff meaningly.
“That may not be,” said Louis smoothly, “since you are pronounced
deceased.”
“By whom?”
“By the King.”
“I am, nevertheless, very much alive.”
“Impossible, when the King himself has ruled you dead. Why else should
he have filled your office? As Prior, father, believe us, you are
hopelessly defunct; as priest and man you may yet exist on our
sufferance. We do not hold it altogether a capital offence, your thus
presuming to refute our conclusions by being alive; yet,
_Pasque-Dieu!_ the inconvenience you cause us by your
inconsiderateness is little less than monstrous. We should have liked
to hear some note of apology from you, some hint of regret for your
unconscionable survival; but there, it is a self-seeking world.”
The old man stood amazed and speechless; nor was his bewilderment
lessened by the kindness with which the King presently took his arm
and walked him off up the garden.
“A monarch’s word, father,” said Louis, “is sacred, as much to himself
as to another. Anything else that it is in our power to bestow upon
you we shall be happy to consider in the light of your palpable
deserts. Now we shall place you in the hands of M. de Comines, our
Secretary of State, with orders to him to attend to your interests.”
So, with a hundred questions as to the Grand Turk and the pilgrim’s
adventures by the way, he led him to the palace and got rid of him.
For good and all, as he supposed; but in that he was very quickly
disillusioned. The deposed prior was by no means the man to take his
cashiering meekly. Stubborn and masterful by nature, the authority of
his late achievement had but consolidated his sense of righteousness.
His interview with M. de Comines left him with no delusions. The
Secretary bowed him out with a whole bouquet of flowery phrases,
which, being cut for decorative purposes, were destined to bear no
fruit. Père Bonaventure, lolling in his chair at St. Come, laughed
securely. “_Rira bien qui rira le dernier!_” chanted his predecessor
with a bitter grimness.
He appeared at the next royal levée, and renewed his petition; his
Majesty was gentle but expostulatory. He sought to penetrate once more
into the Louvre garden, generally open to men of piety, but, being
repulsed by the guard, took his station at likely exits, and clamoured
when the King went by. His persecution of his monarch became by
degrees persistent and intolerable. Louis grew to dread the inevitable
apparition with its wail, monotonous and eternal, “Restore to me my
fold!” The creature got upon his nerves, and even threatened to spoil
his sleep. Then one day, quite suddenly and characteristically, he
resolved to rid himself of the incubus. He summoned his
provost-marshal, Tristan l’Hermite, and sitting humped in his chair,
closed one eye, and focussed the other shrewdly on his favourite.
“Tristan,” he said, “divinity utters itself in the mouths of kings--is
it not so?”
The officer, a thick-set, beetle-browed boar of a man, whose body was
encased in steel covered by a blue tabard embroidered with
fleurs-de-lys, grunted in reply. Louis remained silent.
“Why waste words, gossip?” said Tristan. “Tell me the job and the
man.”
His eyes, red and projecting, rolled in their sockets. He gave his
flock of coarse hair a contemptuous shake.
“Wherefore,” went on the other, contemplative, “to traverse a royal
decision is to commit treason against Heaven--a crime even the more
abhorrent in one who professes himself a minister of religion.”
“The man?” repeated Tristan.
“Hast thou heard speak, Tristan,” said the King, “of this troublesome
prior of St. Come?”
The Provost-Marshal turned and made for the door.
“Tristan!” cried the King; but without effect. He uncoiled himself
with a smile. “_Pasque-Dieu_,” he said, “what a precipitate fellow!
But at least I can sleep to-night with a peaceful conscience.”
And yet, when taking the air the next morning in company of this very
confidant, there, slipped in by the relaxed guard, was the familiar,
hated figure, pleading and clamouring.
“Hog! Dolt!” cried the King, maddened beyond all subterfuge, turning
on his henchman: “Did I not tell thee to rid me of the prior of St.
Come?”
“Highty-tighty, gossip!” answered the Provost--“what’s all this to-do?
And have I not?”
“The prior, I say--the prior?”
“Fast in a sack, gossip, and lying these ten hours past at the bottom
of the Seine.”
“Fool! But I meant this one!”
“Phew! Why didn’t you say so? The prior, quotha. This is not the
prior. But rest easy; the mistake is soon amended.”
“No,” said the King, who after all had a sense of humour; “this is
Heaven’s hand, and I but the poor tool in it. The prior claim is
his”--and he turned to the suppliant. “Go,” he said, “in peace, old
man. Return to thy flock. The seat is once more vacant, and thy
petition is granted.”