banqueting, Madame de Mantes was certainly not a dish to be despised;
and, to add spice to it, there was that presumptuous fellow’s wager.
Actually a wager!—Those arrears of pay had been forced upon the royal
memory altogether too often of late. So, with a gesture, Charles waved
his usual circle aside; and those that formed it saw, with astonishment
and the virulent spite of the courtier, the King withdraw with the
unknown French boy into the embrasure of the windows overlooking the
Thames.
Some bethought themselves that his Majesty had noticed the creature
already on the previous night; and whispers began to circulate.
One inventive personage declared he knew (upon positive authority) that
the little Vidame had come on an important secret mission of the French
King anent the necessity of Romanising the English Church without
delay. “Vidame, mark you, is an old French ecclesiastical title,” he
was good enough to explain. “He holds his lands in feu from some mighty
Archbishopric—formerly a Vidame was a kind of ecclesiastical marshal—does
not this furnish food for reflection, my lords? But—” “Pooh,” cried an
airy gallant (who had a French tilt to his moustache), “our good Dorset
has ever Rome in his head. Why, man, a Vidame and his Bishop, it is
well known, always hate each other cordially as ever fox and wolf; ’tis
always between them, who shall have the fattest share of church booty!
Nay, then, are you so simple? Have you looked at that smooth cheek,
those rich curls? Why, ’tis the most piquant matter—some Fair Audacity
in disguise! No more Vidame than your lordship’s self; but, believe me,
some cosy little chanoinesse, sheltering her gentle lapses under the
comfortable wing of Mother Church.”—“Hearken to Follett and his follies!”
interposed a third, a frank-faced youth, the sap of whose English
generous common-sense had not yet been withered by courtly poisons. “Nay,
neither envoy nor canoness, my lords, but as tough a youth as ever I came
across. I tried a fall with him, in the Cockpit,—having heard him brag
of a trick of Breton wrestling,—and by my soul, the lad is steel and
bow-string; he had me on my back in a twinkling and jeered at me till,
for a moment, I saw him in red! But I like the lad; he has mettle, for
all his whey face. Heard you not what his Majesty calls him: his Little
Satan!—Old Rowley hath some bit of devil’s work for him this morning. And
that’s the nut of the mystery.”
“Well, Vidame,” said the King, as soon as they were out of earshot, “let
us now arrange the hour when we are again to hear your melodious sister
warble, as though she were a bird and found our dull skies as bright as
those of France.”
Enguerrand’s lips trembled. His pale cheek grew paler still.
But he had by no means been prepared to reveal his diplomatic failure.
His plan was to temporise, in the hope of eventual success. But his
sensitive acuteness nosed a trail of bitter temper under all Charles’s
urbanity; and, flustered, he hesitated a second. The King drew his great
eyebrows together.
“Madame requires pressing, it seems. She is perhaps hoarse to-day.”
Enguerrand foresaw how, in another moment, by a gesture of that languid
white hand, the insignificant personality of Jeanne—and with it his own
equally futile existence—would be swept from Charles’s horizon. Biting
his lips, he cast about, but vainly, in his own brain, for a word which
would keep the King’s fickle humour at least a little longer on the same
bent.
Could she but be brought to take her golden chance, Jeanne would hold her
own against any adversary but relentless Time—Enguerrand knew his sister
well enough to feel certain of that. So promising an opportunity, and to
see it wrecked by a mood of monstrous folly!
His eye wandered desperately from the King’s face, whereon was writ
coming dismissal, to the dull prospect which lay beyond the window:
a leaden river under a leaden sky—merely to see the huddled, cloaked
wayfarers in the boats gliding past made one shiver.
Suddenly the boy’s eyes narrowed; he drew close to the window, peered
eagerly down; nay, he was not mistaken! Yonder, indeed, went Jeanne
… Jeanne and her woman, and at the water stairs a boat lay in wait
for them. In a flash he understood; he had been right in his surmise!
Moved by an inspiration born of the very genius for intrigue, he cried
eagerly, but under his breath, arresting the King’s attention even as he
was moving wearily away:—
“Nay, your Majesty, my sister is not hoarse, at least to my knowledge—I
found her not in her apartment, and now I perceive the reason. The lady
is not hoarse … yet seems like to become so presently! How will her sweet
notes sound, I wonder, after her water journey, this bitter day!”
“Odd’s fish!” said the King. “What prate is this, sir?”
Yet, curiosity drew him to approach the window in his turn. Through the
Whitehall water gate, down the King’s own stairs, a figure, wrapped in
a rose and grey mantle daintily held up to show little close tripping
feet, a small dame was picking her way down the miry steps. Behind her a
waiting woman in russet carried what appeared to be a lute case. Charles
turned a look, half quizzical, half interrogative, upon the Vidame.
“And is indeed that pink-and-grey bird our fair singer of last evening?”
“Even so, sire,” said Enguerrand, bowing low to conceal the agitation of
his countenance.
“Satan, my little friend,” said the King, more genially, “can you inform
me whither she may be winging her flight, from the very stairs sacred to
our own passage? Not that such ordinance can be enforced upon birds.”
“I notice, your Majesty,” said Enguerrand, now turning candid eyes full
upon the King, “the skiff is heading down river. I believe your Majesty’s
Tower lies somewhere in that direction.”
“Ha!” said the King. His deep eye lightened for a second ominously. But
as rapidly as it came, anger vanished from his countenance; and with it
the last traces of his moody, weary humour. “Odd’s fish!” he ejaculated,
“I had forgot! To the Tower, say you, Vidame? Nay, then, that minds me my
Lord Constable and myself had a merry wager touching a singing-bird. _Ma
foi_, he is early with the decoy and the lime twig!”
He paused. The Vidame looked at him in astonishment—a king to wager with
a subject! A king—and to let himself be crossed in his pleasure and to
find in the circumstance food for indulgent laughter. And the man lodged
so conveniently in his Tower! Joncelle’s vindictive young soul had been
all afire to see the Lord Constable consigned to one of his own cells.
If the Tower of London was not Charles’s Bastille, for the disposal of
inconvenient courtiers, where was the use of it? If a king made no use
of his prerogatives, where was the use of royalty?—The Vidame had yet
much to learn.
Pulling his full underlip between finger and thumb, Charles stared
alternately out of the window at the picture of grey river, vanishing
skiff, and brooding sky, and at Enguerrand’s delicate white face. Beneath
the boy’s tensely still attitude it was easy to divine quiver of nerves,
fierce eagerness.
“Why, now,” said the King at last, somewhat maliciously, “we are not too
proud to be taught by our subject. Our Lord Constable and ourself had,
as I said, a wager who should capture the linnet’s next song. My Lord
Rockhurst is an old soldier: he trusts no one. We sent a messenger: we
therefore stand to lose.”
The colour rushed to the Vidame’s face. He dropped his lids to hide the
tears of mortification that sprang to his eyes. Had the fate of some
battle, the issue of some diplomatic mission, been at stake, he might
almost have felt less keenly the reproach of his failure. To be King’s
Mercury, to set off so gaily, on so high a flight, and fall so quickly,
so hopelessly—no situation could have been more exquisitely painful to
the Vidame de Joncelles. (Poor, pious mother! could she have read, that
moment, into the soul of her son, she might well have thought that the
house she had so carefully kept swept and garnished was indeed invaded by
the seven devils.)
The King’s glance, however, was not unkind. “Nay, now,” he continued,
in ever more good-natured tones, “all is not lost yet. This infamous
Rockhurst of ours laid too tempting a stake that I should let him carry
off the prize without an effort. What say you, Little Satan? Have you a
mind to see the Tower? Your great father has been pretty busy there these
five hundred years. It should be of interest to his little son.”
He flung out his long, careless hand, as he spoke, toward the boy,
and Enguerrand, dropping on one knee, kissed it with sudden passion.
Something about that hitherto dormant part of his young anatomy,
his heart, was stirred. He had felt himself dominated by that very
carelessness and good nature against which but a little while ago he had
inwardly railed; caught a hint of a truer royalty in this careless King
than in all the pompous tyranny of his cousin of France.
Whether the inexplicable Stuart charm, which Charles, black-visaged,
saturnine, cynical as he was, possessed no less than his romantically
beautiful father and his handsome, winning brother of York, had
seized the more potently upon Enguerrand’s nature that had hitherto
been brazened in self-conceit and self-interest against all external
influence, the fact was that in that touch of his lips, the Vidame de
Joncelles devoted himself to a master.
Charles stepped back into the room, called up his gentleman-in-waiting,
and gave instant order for his barge. As he turned pleasantly then to
receive the _congées_ of the dismissed audience, a fine-looking young man
strode quickly into the room, made his way up, and bowing so low that his
profuse, fair ringlets fell in a cascade on either side of his cheek,
presented a letter for the royal hand. Enguerrand, standing close, heard
the messenger’s murmured words.
“From Miss Stewart, your Grace.”
The whole circle stepped back and grew wide while the King read. And many
a look of envy was cast upon the newcomer as Charles, thrusting the sheet
into his breast, turned a complacent countenance upon him.
“Vastly well, Sir Paul,” said Charles, with a little nod.
The young man visibly swelled with triumph. The Vidame’s busy brain
worked at high speed: Miss Stewart? That was the great fair girl who
gave the King such cold return for his notice last night.… Rumour about
Court had it, as Enguerrand knew, that she was playing a high game.…
As a man might look upon one who threatened to rob him of a mistress’s
smile, so Enguerrand glared at the messenger who had evidently succeeded
in his task. But his own hour was not yet over. In high good humour,
Charles beckoned him again to his side.
“Come,” said he, “or we shall be too late. Tide waits not for kings; and
linnets will sing only when the mood takes them.”
* * * * *
Enguerrand, seated in the royal barge, felt his heart swell with pride.
He was alone in attendance, save for the tall officer of guards, whose
face, impassive and dark as bronze over the folds of the red horse
cloak, looked forth with the indifference of the man under orders, upon
this last whim of the master. The French boy’s blood was tingling with
excitement. The raw airs, the bleak aspect of the waterway, the shadow of
the towering masonry from which they were just emerging, dark with its
story of royal tragedy, failed to depress a spirit otherwise susceptible
to physical impressions.
His failure, after all, had become more profitable than success. He was
on sudden terms of intimacy with a monarch whom he was eager to serve;
and in conjunction with the Stuart himself, he was about to inflict at
least discomfiture upon the man for whom at first sight he had conceived
hatred.
He was still child enough, moreover, to feel a titillating sense of
gratification in watching the skill and vigour of the royal watermen, the
like of which was undreamed of on French rivers; in feeling that it was
partly for him these stalwart backs bowed in rhythmic measure, that the
oars swept the waters, green now to his closer vision; that it was, in a
way, before his own passage that the craft hastily opened out to leave a
wide channel, and that every head was uncovered.
Charles’s face had fallen into its habitual expression in repose, of
somewhat bitter melancholy; and the journey was traversed in silence,
until, just in front of the archway of London Bridge, the sweep of the
tide, which had been for some time at the full, began to tell decidedly
against them. The barge came almost to a standstill.
The King roused himself from his abstraction and flung a rueful smile
over his shoulder at Enguerrand: “Said I not well? The tide waits not for
kings.”
The watermen caught the phrase, and as if stung in their pride of office
fell to at the oars with a fury which sent the sweat rolling down each
weather-beaten cheek.
“Our wily friend,” proceeded Charles, “chose his hour with judgment. The
bird has as easy a flight as the dove to the ark. We stand to be beaten,
after all, by my Lord Constable.”
Beaten! Never, if his oarsmen died for it. The brawny arms shot out in
unison; the backs bent and straightened with the rage of defiance; they
shot the bridge in triumph, the contentious waters vainly swirling and
lapping against the sides of the barge.
As they emerged into the gentler stream beyond, there was a moment’s
pause, and every man of the crew, dashing the salt sweat from his eyes,
turned involuntarily toward the royal visage. The slight smile of
approbation on Charles’s lips seemed ample guerdon for the feat; indeed,
as in the case of most saturnine countenances, its momentary relaxation
had a rare charm. They fell upon the oars again, and presently the mighty
pile of the Tower seemed to engulf them into its dark shades.
If Whitehall, stained with the blood of a king, shed a gloom about it,
even while holding the most irresponsible court in the world, what
sinister shroud enveloped these walls to every imaginative mind. The
stones of the dungeon, tradition said, had been first cemented in lime
and blood; and enough blood had since been poured out within those gates
to stain the moats forever crimson.
The water gates swung back, and the King’s barge glided in. Charles’s
face bore an air of pleasant anticipation, unwonted good fortune. He was
certain to be amused, whichever way events turned; certain at least of
some novel sensation.
III
THE LINNET’S SONG
Jeanne de Mantes sat sidewise in the deep window-seat of the parlour in
the constable’s Tower, her dark eyes roaming about her with a curiosity
not unmixed with a kind of awe. The room, dark with ancient oak to its
blackened ceiling, with its huge depth of wall, its aspect of strength,
silence, antiquity, resembled no apartment that she had ever entered.
True, she had never penetrated into the Bastille, and true, she was here
of her own free will and free to leave at her caprice; yet a small shiver
crept over her. There seemed to her something ominous, something fated,
about the place. All said and done, it was a prison. What should bring
hither those who lived for freedom and joy?
She glanced almost timidly at the man who stood, one elbow propped on the
embrasure, gazing down at her with inscrutable yet perhaps mocking eyes.
He matched his Tower, she thought, in the something dark and melancholy
which, though he might smile and court, yet remained as undisturbed as
the sombreness of the room by the leaping firelight or the early spring
flowers on the table.
Their glances met. In the light that fell upon her from grey skies and
grey wall, the texture of her face showed flawless; richly coloured, at
once soft and firm, it glowed like some southern fruit out of the cold
setting. Her lips were parted: forgotten, in the momentary feeling of
strangeness, all the modish airs and graces of the Louvre. She looked
like a child, Rockhurst thought. He smiled at her, suddenly, kindly; sat
down on the window-seat beside her and took her little amber-tinted hand
in his.
“This is a rude place for such a one as you,” he said; “and you look
about you like some creature caught against its will. Nay, you shall but
sing me a song, and take your flight again forthwith, if you so wish it.”
All the woman in her awoke, petulant, displeased. Chivalry in love, a man
who could desire and yet spare—that was not at all to her French taste.
She drew her hands quickly from his and tossed her head.
“How so,” she cried in her pretty foreign English. “Fortwit’ after my
song? But now, at once, if you prefer! Your lordship is quick tired!”
She sprang from the seat as she spoke. But he, stretching a lazy arm,
caught her by her yielding waist.
“I said, if you wish it, Mignonne. In love I am no highwayman, but a
courteous dealer.”
She feigned to struggle, brushing his cheek with her curls; then gave
him all the candour of her eyes and the glint of a smile from her wicked
lips; upon which, suddenly, he kissed them.
“Ah! highwayman, after all!” she mocked.
He drew her close to him, laughing silently.
“Milord Constable,” said she, “if one of your soldiers down there should
chance to look up, it is all over with … your reputation.”
Again he laughed, struck by the audacious humour of the soft creature
within the circle of his arm.
“Madame,” said he, then, with unexpected gravity, “my soldiers have long
ceased to look up. My reputation is too well established to be worth
looking to.”
Piqued, she thrust him from her with a quick gesture. It is one thing
to be quickly conquered; it is another to be classed among the easy
conquests.
“You’re insolent, milord!” she said, with out-thrust lip.
“My pretty one,” he answered her, “anger becomes you vastly; but as for
myself, I have a preference for the dimpled smile.”
He let his arm drop from her carelessly. She stood looking down at him,
fascinated, taunted, uncertain.
“Believe me,” he went on in the same tone, half condescending, half
caressing, “I am much older than you; I have had experience—life becomes
much pleasanter, its few good hours vastly easier of discovery, if we
agree to take certain things for granted. And, as example is ever better
than preaching, let us put my theory in practice. I, now, take it for
granted,” as he spoke his fine teeth flashed a second in a wider smile,
“that you are all virtue, yet that you harbour for my unworthy self an
amiable passion which excuses, nay, commands, a gentle lapse. You on
your side take it for granted that I am consumed with an ardour unknown
hitherto in my existence. Come, does not that place us instantly on a
delightful footing? And this being so: why, then, come back to my side.”
She palpitated between fury and the extraordinary attraction which drew
her to him. Her breast heaved, her eye first lightened, then melted. She
took an unwilling step, then paused. Almost a sob rose in her throat. In
another moment she would have flung herself on his breast, as he sat
awaiting her with that air of amused certainty that was in itself at
once part of his fascination for her and an insult to her every instinct
of pride, when suddenly she perceived that his eye had become fixed and
distant. The insolent wretch had already dropped her from his thoughts;
she was not worth to him even that pause of expectation!
Staring through the south window, up the river toward that gloomy bridge
through the arches of which she had come to him, his attention was
absorbed, his glance had gained a hawk-like keenness; the lines of his
face were set. Whatever he beheld without, it was something that evoked
far keener interest in him than the woman who had come to his call, in
preference to that of a king. This was too much!
“Adieu, milord,” she cried in a high, strained voice. But, womanlike, she
must see what it was, without there, on that hideous river, that he was
looking at.
The royal barge, with its standard and pennants, its flash of scarlet and
the long swing of red-and-gold oars, was already masked under the shadow
of the battlements; nothing but the long stretch of water, dotted with
black craft, met the searching of her angry eyes.
What is it, she asked herself; his fair one, in some well-known boat? Ah!
the owner perhaps of that face in the locket, which even his King was not
to see? What in the name of all decent pride was Jeanne de Mantes doing
here? Yet even as she moved again to leave him, with what dignity she
might, the incomprehensible being turned to her again—turned with a smile
so winning, a glance so warm and caressing, a voice so tender, that the
young woman lost her footing on her momentary plane of dignity, and found
herself floundering again between a tearful desire for surrender and that
hot anger which only a real love is able to kindle.
“How now! Adieu, say you? From your lips, sweet, that is a word I hope
never to hear.”
“Why should I remain, milord?” she said feebly. “You care not to keep me.”
“I care so much that I will not let you go.” He came after her quickly
into the room. “Why, you foolish child, how can you escape from the Tower
so long as its constable means to hold you? Do you not know, I have but
to call a word, and the drawbridge is raised, the portcullis dropped over
the waterway—that I have the right of imprisonment here, that there are
secret places where I can hide my wilful prisoners? Nay, sweet one, are
we not well together here?—You shall sing to me!”
Stirred with an emotion which, hitherto only playing with life, she had
never known before, she murmured, blushing and trembling:—
“Sing! _Eh, mon Dieu_, you hold to it, then?”
“Why,” he answered her, “was it not singing that you caught my heart?”
Delicately flattered, she suffered herself to be led to a cushioned
seat by the deep hearth; and she was already stretching out her arms
to receive the guitar, when something in his air struck her quick
apprehension, something at once of eagerness for her compliance, yet of
indifference toward herself. He shot restless glances toward the window,
seemed to strain his ear as if for some expected signal. When his eye
swept over her, it was with an impatience other than that of the fond
lover. She took the instrument from his hand, and watched him with a new,
critical closeness as he flung himself upon the settle opposite to her.
In a tone which ill concealed irritability, he cried to her:—
“Begin—begin, little bird!”
Here was some odd mystery. She folded her hands across the polished
olive-wood.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed, and it was her turn now to mock. “What a
passion for music has your lordship!”
His eye shot anger upon her, beneath contracted brow. She felt at last
that she had power, and her smile widened.
“You and your song,” said he, “are inseparable. By your graciousness I
hold you mine for a little while, nor will I be defrauded of any of the
sweetness you can give.”
The words seemed charmingly chosen; but again the underlying, unknown
purpose was perceptible. A quick inspiration came to her: here was the
moment to bargain; and Enguerrand, the little impertinent one, should
know of her easy triumph before this grey English day had turned to the
murky English night.
“If I sing,” she said, “I must have my guerdon.”
Amusement and relief sprang together into his look:—
“Nay, then, pretty one; make your own terms. Pearls for those shell-like
ears—gems for that throat—”
She shook her head till the ringlets danced.
“Speak, then,” he went on impatiently. “What jewel, what bauble?”
She bent forward with a new, adorable softness, coaxing.
“A mere trifle, indeed, milord. I but ask for that locket of yours with
which you were pleased to excite the curiosity of Whitehall last night.”
“How now!” said Rockhurst. He started, and turned the lightning of his
glance, the thunder-cloud of his brow, upon her, a man whom it was not
good to offend, and she quailed an instant. Then her hot blood rose in
jealous passion:—
“So vastly precious? Why, then, generous milord Constable, suppose I put
a high price upon my song; are you so ungallant?”
“Little madame,” retorted he, drily, “since you set a price on your
favour, you would be as vastly disappointed with this poor trinket as Eve
with the taste of her apple. Continue to desire it,” he went on, falling
back into his tone of light cynicism. “To long for anything unattainable
is one of the spices of existence.”
The firelight leaped on her angry face. She sprang to her feet, dashing
aside the guitar, which fell on the stone floor with sonorous wail.
“If I could flatter myself I was helping to provide milord’s tedium with
such a spice,” she cried, “my immediate departure would have a double
charm!”
[Illustration: She felt at last that she had power.]