settle, watched her, without moving. At this moment, grave sounds, a
trumpet call, followed by dull roll of kettledrum, rose from without
into the momentary silence of the room. Stone wall and vault gave back
the echo. There was a hurried tramp of feet, sharp cries of command. The
Frenchwoman’s hand was arrested in mid-air. She looked in startled query
at her host, who was slowly gathering his long limbs together preparatory
to rising. He met her glance with one that struck her excited fancy as
sinister, and she gave a cry like a child:—
“Let me out of this horrible place! You have no right to keep me here!”
He caught her wrist with a grasp gentle yet relentless.
“Your password, Jeanne, shall be a song—however short, but one stave, a
few notes! Your song I must have!”
He picked up the guitar, and again pressed it upon her. She put her
hand to her throat with a sob, flung a piteous glance around her like a
trapped thing, and struck a faltering chord. Then, in a sudden revulsion,
her courage rose again.
“Pah!” she cried, “’tis out of tune! _Eh, bien non!_ I will not sing! I
am French; you have no right to hold me here!”
“By the Lord!” said Rockhurst, a gleam of genuine admiration leaping to
his eye, “but I like your spirit! Be dumb, then, sweetheart. You shall
pay me by and by. Nay,” he added, smiling on her bewilderment, “let thy
mantle lie where it is; for, prithee, I would have thee assist me to
receive his Majesty.”
“His Majesty?” she cried, in fresh amazement.
“Aye,” he laughed. “Didst not hear the royal tucket sound without?
Charles in person, who always finds the world but a dull place, even
under the same roof with an old friend, if there be not the flutter
of a petticoat to liven it. But you have made me dally, little Madame
Mischief, and even my indulgent monarch expects some pretence of
ceremony.”
His hand was on the bolt of the latchet as he spoke; his last words were
almost lost in the echoes of the vaulted passage.
* * * * *
Charles paused on the threshold, his sallow face seeming darker than
usual in the grim light. His lips smiled, but there was a certain
displeasure in his eye as it roamed from Jeanne’s crimsoning countenance
to the guitar on the seat. From the gloom of the passage Enguerrand’s
white face shone out, composed save for the deep reproach of his glance
when it met that of his sister. Rockhurst alone, bowing the King into his
apartment, wore a pleasant air of unconcern.
“We verily believe our visit is inopportune,” said Charles, with
sarcastic courtesy. “We have interrupted, we fear, some dulcet music, my
Lord Constable?”
Rockhurst closed the heavy door behind his guests, then advanced to the
King’s side.
“Nay, sire,” said he, with fine geniality, “the bird came to the lure, it
is true, but no art of mine or persuasion could call forth a song.… Your
Majesty, no doubt, will prove more successful.”
“Odd’s fish!” cried Charles, with one of his rare, hearty laughs. “Say
you so, indeed, invincible Constable? Say you so, indeed, my merry
Rockhurst? Beaten? And under such auspices—alone with your fair! But
how, then, are we to put our own skill now to the test, before so many
witnesses? For we would not win our wager on the royal authority, but in
all equality, my good Lord Constable, even as in that merry moment we
entered upon it.”
Wager? Here, then, was the word of the riddle! A wager between two
irresponsible men of pleasure: who should first obtain of a woman the
petty guerdon of a song! ’Twas for that she had been wooed by both—both!
And she, who had been uplifted on a wave of magnanimous feeling, who
had flattered herself to be giving up a king for the love of a subject!
Jeanne de Mantes had grown white to the lips. She caught at the table
behind her for support, yet never had her wits been clearer. To sing for
neither would serve them both well. Aye, but to sing for Charles would
best punish him who had deepest offended. She flung one look of fury at
Rockhurst, and then turned to the King, who had let himself sink upon the
settle in front of the fire:—
“May the poor object of your Majesty’s wager inquire what are the stakes
that were set upon her favour?” she asked, with a deadly sweetness,
taking up the guitar and beginning to tune it with little, fierce hands.
Charles, who saw himself on the point of success, answered thoughtlessly,
with a schoolboy look of triumph at the constable:—
“I but bargained for a sight of the contents of that mysterious locket
which was so contumaciously denied to my curiosity last night, and—” Then
he hesitated, with a faint flush of confusion.
“His Majesty,” said Rockhurst, gravely, “with his usual magnanimity,
opposed a large guerdon to my trifling stake.”
The King, both spared and taunted by this reminder, moved uneasily on his
seat. But already the twang of the guitar in harmonious cadence brought
his light humour back to amusement again. If hesitation had still lurked
in Jeanne’s mind, the first mention of the locket had swept it away.
Her voice rose, robbed perhaps of some of its delicate sweetness, but
vibrating with unwonted fire and incisiveness. She chose a bellicose
ditty, which a Frondeuse mother had sung to her baby ears. And when she
paused, panting, on the last refrain, with a furious sweep across the
strings, Charles broke into delighted applause. Enguerrand, flushing with
triumph, caught the guitar from his sister’s hand, as with a hysterical
gesture she was about to cast it on the floor.
“I have sung!” she cried loudly, with almost a viperine movement, rising
from the seat on which she had crouched to play. “Milord Rockhurst has
lost his wager. Let him now pay!”
Rockhurst bowed urbanely toward her, drew the locket from its
hiding-place, and with a second profound obeisance, handed it, open, to
the King. As he looked, the mischievous curiosity on Charles’s face
changed to an expression of profound astonishment.
“Odd’s fish!” he cried.
He shot a lightning glance at Enguerrand, then at his Lord Constable,
and then at the picture again. And once more his expressive countenance
altered.
“Yours?” he queried.
“Yes, your Majesty,” said Rockhurst.
Charles’s eye remained pensive for a further span. But suddenly it
wandered to the Frenchwoman, and the mercurial King burst into laughter.
“Odd’s my life, but look at your sweetheart, my lord! The wench is on the
very coals of jealousy—a live trout in the frying-pan were in comfort
compared to her. Nay, we’ll have no torture in our presence. Fain would
you look at your rival, madame?”
Rockhurst made no effort to interfere, and with trembling fingers Jeanne
took the trinket from the King’s hand. In her turn she gave a cry; and
Charles laughed heartily at the amazement, relief, and disappointment of
her air.
“Why, ’tis naught but a boy!”
“Naught but a boy, indeed,” echoed Charles, “yet, we’ll go warrant what
our Lord Constable holds dearest upon earth. A likely lad! Aye, and with
a strange resemblance to Little Satan there.”
“God forbid!” ejaculated Rockhurst.
And “God forbid!” echoed Enguerrand, pertly, sharp as lightning.
Charles, who had been in high good humour, flung the lad a cold look,
under which he fell back abashed and crimsoning—only to glance up again
with a spasm of anger and hatred at the Lord Constable, as soon as the
sovereign’s head was averted.
“We knew you had an heir,” said the King; then, turning with dignity to
his host, “but, my lord Rockhurst, you have let us forget it. How is it?
He should be at our Court.”
Bowing deeply, Rockhurst answered in a low voice:—
“My son is brought up in the country, sire.”
“Nay, fie!” said Charles. “Is not that even what we would reproach you
with? So fair a stripling should never grow a mere rustic. We’ll have him
about us,” insisted the King.
Again there was that moment’s silence. Jeanne looked up from the picture
at which she had been absently gazing. This son of Rockhurst interested
her not at all; not had he been twice as handsome as the fair, spirited
face, with its odd resemblance of features and its odder dissimilitude
of expression to her own brother. She felt humiliated to have played so
foolish a part of jealousy, and more than ever baffled by the strange
personality of the man she had elected to love.
Rockhurst took back the locket, gazed at it again, closed it, and
replaced it on its chain.
“Will your Majesty forgive me,” said he, at length, “nor deem me
ungrateful if, in spite of your condescension, I yet hold that my son is
best in the country?”
“We would at least hear your reason,” said Charles, with some weariness.
“In the country, your Majesty,” replied Rockhurst, then, “my lad will
continue to revere his father, to honour womanhood, to live wholesomely …
and think purely.”
Charles’s swarthy cheek became suddenly impurpled under a pulse of anger.
“And at our Court can your paragon practise none of these virtues?”
Rockhurst turned his glance deliberately upon the Vidame de Joncelles,
who stood behind the King, his handsome chin uptilted, his eyes
insolently ready to return the constable’s gaze; then he swept a look
upon Jeanne de Mantes. That look said more eloquently than words the
thought that was in the father’s brain. Then, at last, he spoke:—
“Let me remind your Majesty of a phrase you made use of last night—‘And
he, her brother, the Little Satan!’”
The corners of Charles’s lips twitched humorously at the recollection;
his transient anger evaporated. It was the misfortune of his life that he
was always most prone to see the light side of the most serious questions.
Enguerrand, with his implike quickness, caught the relaxation of the
royal profile, and his own lips quivered with mirth. Upon Rockhurst’s
face came an expression of disdain mingled with deep melancholy.
“Your Majesty smiles,” said he, “and so does the lad yonder. Ah, your
Majesty, look at him! ’Tis a fine lad, even as my own. And you are right!
there is some resemblance, a great resemblance, between them; and your
Majesty, who saw me start at it last night, deemed I had seen a spectre.
I saw this, sire—what a court makes of youth.”
Charles’s foot had been tapping restlessly. He moved once or twice
uneasily in his chair: his merry Rockhurst had not used him to such
wearisome moods. Yet he loved the man.
“Nay, nay,” he explained at length; “I’d have you remember, my lord, that
it is my cousin of France who is responsible for our Little Satan yonder.
Nay, Rockhurst,” he went on, in his easy kindness and his sense of royal
prerogative, unable to grasp the fact that any one could be in earnest in
refusing the favour of his personal interest; “I’ll have the lad with my
own sons. We’d keep our eye upon him, man.”
Rockhurst’s glance rested on the King’s countenance now with an unwonted
tenderness.
“Alas, my beloved liege! …” he said gently.
Their gaze commingled; then the amazed displeasure in Charles’s eyes gave
place to unwilling amusement, as Rockhurst went on once more in his usual
indifferent tone:—
“The poor child would at least, your Majesty will admit, find it hard
to practise at Court the fourth commandment.… How should he honour his
father? And yet ’tis my wish that his days should be long in the land.”
“Why, then,” said the King, shortly, “there is no more to be said.”
He rose and looked a second keenly at Jeanne. Then, upon one of those
generous impulses which none could carry more gracefully into effect than
himself:—
“You lost your wager to me, my lord, with all the gallantry I expected
of so good a cavalier. But, Odd’s fish! I do not carry away altogether
a clear conscience on the subject. If you have lost in the letter, it
strikes me you have won in the spirit. I will take it, if you please,
that we have both won; I will indite forthwith an order on the exchequer
for those greedy yeomen of yours who contrive to be always under arrears
of pay.… Though, upon my life, Rockhurst, you and your fellows put me in
mind of those callow birds we used to watch, in our wandering days: it
boots little how big the last mouthful—ever a squawk for more!”
Rockhurst folded his lips upon the obvious retort. He took the sheet from
the King’s hand with an air of profound obligation:—
“Your Majesty’s veterans will be deeply gratified.”
But already Charles was weary of the subject, weary of his present
company.
“Madame,” he said, bowing toward Jeanne as he hastily got up, “we shall
importune you no longer with our presence.”
The little Frenchwoman understood very well that in these words all
royal pretensions to her favour were finally abandoned, and, in her
infatuation for Rockhurst, cared as little for the fact as for the
furious look cast upon her afresh by Enguerrand.
“Come, Vidame,” said the King. Then he added, with a malicious gesture
that pointed from Jeanne to Rockhurst, “Come, you are as much out of
place in this atmosphere of virtue as ourself!”
THE PEACOCK WALK
THE PEACOCK WALK
I
JUNE ROSES
The peacock, picking his stilted way along the lower terrace walk,
conscious of his magnificence with the sunshine on his burnished breast,
rejoiced at the sound of approaching steps: here, at last, was some one
to see and to admire.
But in vain did Juno’s bird spread and parade, advance and retreat, and
display for the newcomers the glories of his outspread tail, which defied
the sun with its fifty iridescent eyes. The elder of the two young men
interrupted but for a second an emphatic speech to cast an indifferent
glance upon the strutting splendour; while the younger poked at it idly
with the stock of his whip. Offended, and with discordant protest, the
peacock flapped on to the stone lion that heraldically guarded the
terrace stairs and swept over their heads the fall of his unappreciated
train.
Lionel Ratcliffe, the emphatic speaker, turned to survey with sullen eyes
the scene which spread away beneath the balustrade of the Peacock Walk.
It was the ripest hour of an early June day. The wood-crowned slopes,
dropping down from the garden, were bathed in mellow light. Farther away,
rich pastures, gently swelling into knolls, melted into purple haze,
until they were gathered into the distant amethystine moors. Almost as
far as the eye could reach, the land and all that stood on it—timber,
meadow, homestead, hamlet—belonged to Rockhurst, fit appanage to those
massy castle walls that rose clear-cut against the blue air, in all the
majesty of ancient power. And as he gazed, Lionel Ratcliffe’s heart grew
sombre even as his glance. A keen-faced man, old-looking for his thirty
years, somewhat below the middle height, with marked features, cold blue
eyes and thin lips that betrayed the working of an intellect as sharp as
the steel that hung by his side.
His companion was of vastly different stamp. Country bumpkin was written
on the face of Edward Hare, on every seam of his oversmart suit; country
wits stared from his prominent eye, were heralded by the laugh ever ready
upon his mouth—a mouth, one dared swear, that had known no better taste
in life than the rim of an ale can, the hard cheek of some bouncing
Dorcas.
Waking from his abstraction, Ratcliffe wheeled upon his cousin, and
resumed his indictment:—
“It is even as I tell you,” quoth he. “They are both as apt as tinder:
it needs but a spark now to set the glow. ’Slife, Ned, I little thought
thine would be the hand to strike flint!”
“Mine, Cousin Lionel?” broke in the other, whining. “Nay, nay—”
But the first, flinging out an accusing forefinger, bore down the
plaintive interruption:—
“Then why didst bring her over here to-day?—Come now, ’tis plain enough.
Dost favour my suit, or young Rockhurst’s?”
“Why, you know I’ll have none but you,” bellowed Edward Hare. “Harry
Rockhurst …?” he cried. “Phew!”
He snapped his fingers and blew through them, threw himself into an
attitude of defiance and, so doing, stumbled into his new-fangled sword
which, carry it at whatever angle he tried, seemed ever in his way.
Ratcliffe steadied his kinsman, then, still holding him by the elbow,
drew him toward the stone bench, overhung by climbing roses. Having
jerked his companion down upon it, he let himself subside beside him,
crossed his legs and proceeded, contemptuously, good-humoured yet
incisive:—
“If I wed Mistress Harcourt, your sister, is’t not a bargain? Shalt not
continue to have bed and board and bottle beneath her roof? Aye, and many
more of old Harcourt’s round pieces to chirp in thy pockets at cockfight
and hammer fair? And when we go to Whitehall …” He paused impressively.
Edward Hare was touched; his soft face became moved as by not distant
tears.
“Good Lionel … dear coz! Odd’s babers! Do I not tell thee thou shalt have
her?”
Ratcliffe resumed, casting his words into space with a sidelong
watchfulness as to their effect.
“Whereas, mark, if Diana wed another, what of thee, then, my cock? ’Tis
back to the bare ancestral acres with Sir Edward Hare. ’Tis farthing
toss and small ale. For thou art poor, lad, damned poor! And a poor
baronet—fie!”
The poor baronet made a wry face. He pushed his plumed hat off his
forehead to scratch his perplexed head.
“Aye, small ale, plague on it! Farthing toss—pooh!”
“’Twill ne’er do, eh, Ned!” laughed the other.
“No, split me, ’twill ne’er serve a man like me!”
Sir Edward Hare rose, in his indignation, and promptly tripped again over
his sword. Somewhat abashed, and trying the comfort of a new angle, he
dropped his high tone once more for one of plaint:—
“But, Lord, coz, what can I do? Di is like the bay filly: she’ll neither
lead nor drive. Ain’t I always a-singing your praises? ‘There’s the
husband for you, Di,’ say I. ‘There’s the lad for me,’ say I, twenty
times a day.”
Ratcliffe cursed his cousin in secret, as, rising in his turn, he clapped
him affectionately on the shoulder.
“I marvel at you,” he bantered. “And will you walk your filly to the gate
and expect her to take it on the standstill? Is that the way to deal with
a woman? Shouldst say to her: ‘Hast noticed Cousin Lionel’s squint?…
Prithee, sister, have ne’er a thing to do with Cousin Lionel: ’tis a sad
bad man! Ah, there are tales, sister, terrible tales!’”
Edward gaped.
“Oh, and what will she do then?”
“Why, look into mine eyes the very next time; and, not finding the
squint, perhaps find something else, something in them she never marked
before.”
The young oaf nodded portentously.
“Aye,” cried he, “and then—”
“And then—Why, I see you take me. Hast sharp wits, coz!—Then will she
begin to ponder on those dark deeds of mine, and wonder about Cousin
Lionel, and think him a very different man after all from the kinsman
who played with her and teased her all her life. But, zounds, man, such
a cock of the walk as thou art need not be lectured on the art of love!
Why, when we get that figure of thine to Court, what a stir will there be
among the beauties!”
The poor youth made no attempt to disguise his flattered emotion.
“Ecod,” he smirked, looking down at his legs, “I’ll not say but I can
hold my own among the petticoats. He, he—a word in thine ear, Lionel:
Moll, you know—” he whispered into his cousin’s curls, laughing
immoderately. “And little Prudence Prue, down at the Red Lion—” Here he
whispered again and guffawed: “Odd’s babers, she did! But Di must not
hear of it.”
With immovable gravity, the elder man submitted to these boisterous
confidences; then, holding his cousin from him at arm’s length, surveyed
him with an irony which must have pierced through anything less
thick-skinned:—
“What a blade you are! There will be no holding you at Whitehall!”
He suddenly sighed, dropped his hands, shook his head, and assumed a tone
of melancholy:—
“Heigho, but we must get thee to Court first! And these adieus will undo
all. ’Slife, man, she’s ripe for love. ’Tis rebound, ’tis nature. After
the cold fit, the hot one. After old Harcourt, the old husband promptly
and happily demised, Harry Rockhurst the stripling, live and young!…
After eighty, eighteen.…”
“Nay,” interrupted Edward, sapiently. “Harry Rockhurst is twenty.”
“Aye,” mused Lionel, “and so is our pretty Di. Lord! your worthy mother
had scarce called out, ‘Oh,’ of Diana, before my Lady Rockhurst began
her, ‘Ah,’ of that young whelp! Well, by this time, these babes will have
plighted their troth, if the gods interfere not.” He turned on Hare, his
fierce temper escaping him for an unguarded moment: “Why the foul fiend
did you let her ride over here to-day?”
Ned swelled with dudgeon.
“I? How could I prevent it, pray?”
“Poor numskull, how couldst thou?” echoed the other, half aside.—“Well,
well, I fear me, I am caught in my own springe! They might have
philandered all summer and naught have come of it.… But I must needs work
upon Grandam Chillingburgh, persuade her to summon the naughty grandchild
in all haste from a bad match—and ’tis the parting will ruin all!”
He paused, biting his lip over vexed thoughts. Then his alert ear caught
the fall of distant footsteps.
“Ah!” he cried, starting, “yonder they come! Let us to the upper terrace,
Ned, and watch them from above.”
Sir Edward, who had been endeavouring to hit a bumblebee with his whip,
and was lost in the excitement of the sport, burst into a roar of
self-applause at an unexpectedly successful stroke:—
“Saw you that? I hit him. I hit him!… A great bumblebee!”
Ratcliffe clenched his hand, exasperated. Then, recalling his
self-control, shrugged his shoulders, caught his cousin by the arm, and
marched him determinedly toward the upper terrace stairs.
* * * * *
The two whose doings were exciting so much interest in Lionel Ratcliffe’s
mind, came slowly along the Peacock Walk and halted beneath the
watchers: a pair so well-matched in youth and looks as well to justify
apparently the jealous kinsman’s fears.—Harry Rockhurst, stripling just
hardening into manhood, keeping some of his boy graciousness in the
virility of the newer stage, sunburnt, vigorous; with brown curls tossed
back from a broad forehead, and brilliant hazel eyes, keen and bold of
vision, as should be those of the noted follower of hounds and hawk:
by his side, as tall nearly as her cavalier, Diana Harcourt, the young
widow, radiant with the sun on her auburn hair!
As her lover spoke to her, she listened, not unwillingly, and her glance
rested on his face with pleasure. Yet there was something well-nigh
maternal in this complacence which might have bidden him pause.
“Diana,” the boy cried passionately, “you must hear me; I will speak.”
She moved a pace from him and, sitting down on the bench, drew a hanging
branch of wild rose to the wild rose of her cheek.
“The last of my country flowers,” she murmured.
“Stay,” he exclaimed. “Let me pluck you a posy!”
High over their unconscious heads, Lionel Ratcliffe, peering cautiously
over the balustrade, had a sneer for the childish eagerness. But Diana
took the flowers with a simple grace.
“Thank you, and thank you.… Nay, how sweet they are! And to think that
to-morrow evening we shall be so far away. ’Tis hard to leave the garden
for the town.”
* * * * *
(“Mark you, now,” whispered Ratcliffe overhead, nipping Hare by the arm,
“and take a lesson in Dan Cupid’s ways. ’Twill be: ‘Think of me, and do
not forget me!’ And a prate of hopes, and a whisper of pledges. And then
the word will hop out like a hot coal, Love! and their little world will
be all ablaze—And ’twill be Love … Love … Love, and everything lost if
some one be not at hand to spray cold water at the right moment.”
“The garden can?” suggests the practical Ned, in a mouthing undertone.
“Hush! lad,” murmured the other, “hast yet to learn metaphor. Nay—hark!
Not a breath, on thy life.”)
* * * * *
“I shall dream, I think, of the gardens of Rockhurst,” Diana was saying.
“The gardens?” echoed Harry. He was leaning against the wall, by the
bench, looking down at her, bending close. “Gardens? Is that all you
regret, Mistress Harcourt?”
“Fie,” smiled she, “I am not so ungrateful. Shall I not regret my
friends, my neighbours, good Mistress Rockhurst, and yourself?”
The boy drew back and straightened himself, galled to the quick.
“My aunt—and me! Truly, I am, madam, I am proud.” He flung himself away,
his shoulder turned ostentatiously on Diana. She laughed with indulgence;
then sighed. And, in heart-broken fashion, Harry caught up the sigh.
* * * * *
(“First stage, sighs,” reflected the watcher. “’Tis most harmless.”)
* * * * *