JEAN VOLRAN, TAPSTER, AND TRANSLATOR OF LATIN
My intention was to ask Jean Volran for an empty room in which to
examine the King's letter, and at the foot of the stair I found him
waiting. But it was not the Jean Volran I had known for a night and
morning. The obsequious smile, the almost servile cringing, were no
longer there; there was no deferential welcome for the great, no
fawning upon the happy man who bore the King's letter and was the
King's will in the flesh.
Then, had I said, Set La Voulle ablaze and thrust your hand into the
fire, _Le Roy le veult_, he would have done it and made no protest.
Now his back was as straight as my own, his mien as distant, his eye as
supercilious. He eyen outstared me, as if he were Gaspard Hellewyl and
I Jean Volran.
"You have kept me waiting, Monsieur," said he, pushing a door open and
leading the way into just such a room as I desired.
"I? I have kept you waiting? What insolence is this?"
"Tut, tut!" he retorted, turning his back on me while he closed the
door carefully. "Did you really think that for such a post as this his
Majesty had chosen a man with no better brains than to fill wine pots
for fools to empty? You have not only kept me waiting, but, what is
worse, you have wasted your time with your dilly-dallying, and made the
King to wait also. I would have had what was wanted here inside of a
week. Why the King chose to employ you at all is a mystery, unless it
was that if his plan miscarried it would please him better to see a
Flanders man hang for it. The King did not send you to Morsigny to
gather roses," he went on with a sneer and a nod at the flower I
carried buckled to my bonnet, "but I guessed the message I brought you
yesterday would put another thought than girls and girls' love tokens
into your head."
"You? None but goatherds passed Morsigny yesterday."
"And I was one of them, as I have been many things in his Majesty's
service. Now, Monsieur, the King's letter, if you please."
But there I had him at a disadvantage, and was in no mood to abate a
jot of it.
"Be what you like, goatherd, scullion, tapster," I answered, with as
brusque an incivility as his own, "that is between you and the King,
and no odds to me, but the letter is my affair."
"Why, man," he cried, too astounded at my opposition to take offence,
"don't you know you are but a catspaw, and I am here to finish the
affair? Come, come, you have cackled your little crow over me, and we
are quits--the letter, and waste no time."
"Even allowing for the goatherd and scullion," I answered, "I take you
for a kind of a gentleman, and so do not say you lie, only, I heard
nothing of this at Plessis. On the contrary, His Majesty was quite
clear, that which I began I was to finish. Show me your warrant, but I
warn you, nothing less than the King's signet and sign manual will move
me."
For a moment he stood clenching and unclenching his hands before him,
too full of passion to find words. Had he not been in his innkeeper's
dress, and so without a sword, he would have tried force, so mad with
rage was he. Then he turned aside to the window, and stared between
the bars into the court where Martin was rubbing down Roland.
"You play your game with a high hand, Monsieur," he said at last; "but
if you think I have sweated here in the grime all these weeks while you
were feasting at Morsigny, just to see you pocket the profits, you
don't know your man."
But when, with another turn of his heel, he would have stridden past
me, I stepped between him and the door.
"Monsieur, who shall pay you your wages I do not know, but you are not
coming back to stab me unawares and rob me of what the King has
committed to my trust. Since you have brought me here to this room, in
this room you shall stay until I have read his Majesty's letter. Nor
do I see why we should quarrel. If the end of this affair has indeed
been committed to you, show me some token? God knows I have no love
for the work. You have no token? No warrant? Nothing but your bare
word? Then, since you profess to know so much, tell me at least what
steps I am next to take, something, anything to prove you are in the
King's confidence, and that your bare word is not a bare lie? You
cannot? Then tell me this: if you were Gaspard Hellewyl, and I you,
how far would you trust the man who came with nothing but a blustering
wheedle of words in his mouth? Not a foot! Not an inch! Nor will I.
It is my life, Monsieur Tapster-goatherd, it is my honour, and by God!
I'll give neither the one nor the other to your keeping. Stand there
by the window, Monsieur, and if the King bids me give you the letter,
or--or anything else I control except these two, then, on the faith of
a gentleman, you shall have it, but not unless."
Three times while I spoke I saw No! in his face, though he answered
nothing; but as I ended, he half laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and
did as he was bidden with a swagger that matched his clothing badly.
Who he was, or what his rank, I never knew, but clothes so much make
the man that not even the Prince de Talmont himself would in like
circumstances have looked anything else than that very ridiculous
object--a country inn-keeper in a rage.
Partly to gain time for thought, but partly, I confess, that his
helplessness might gall him deeper, I played with the King's letter,
examining silk, seal, and superscription as if all were strange,
instead of as familiar as the bottom of my own pocket. The situation
was growing clearer to me with every passing minute, and it will have
been noticed that I do not think rapidly.
No doubt the fellow glowering at me from the window shutter was not
alone in La Voulle; no doubt, too, his ten-crowns-a-month-cut-throats
would be this, that, or the other about the inn--groom, drawer, even
cook. Three or four of these there might be, but not more. Where
there is a secret, there is no safety in numbers. Against these I had
only Martin, unless, indeed, I played the bold game of raising La
Voulle to defend its young Count, and as a climax carried him off
myself! My scheme would have to be recast, which was a pity; its very
simplicity had guaranteed success. But the nature and extent of the
change must depend on the King's wishes, so with a smiling nod of
encouragement in patience to my host at the window, I broke the seal.
Either the crackle of the paper or the polite impertinence roused him.
Setting his foot against the angle of the wall, he stiffened himself
for a spring. Once he had me on my back, circumstances would lead him.
If his own fellows came in just then, there was an end to Gaspard
Hellewyl; if La Voulle heard the scuffle, he would cry Treachery! and
trust for justification to the King's letter found in my hands. But I
saw the move, and hitched the handle of my sword forward a foot. It
was a parry to his thrust, and back he lounged again against the
shutters.
Tearing the outer wrappings to small pieces, I scattered them on the
floor. The next sheet was a blank, nor, though I held it up to the
light, could I trace a mark of any kind. Not so the third sheet, for
eight or ten words were sprawled across it in short sentences. But at
the first line the exultation of triumph over my enemy by the window
fell cold and flat; the letter was in Latin, and never a word of Latin
had I learned in my five-and-twenty years of life.
Latin! Why the plague Latin? No doubt it was part of the old Plessis
fox's scheme for hiding his identity. Neither Jacob's voice nor Esau's
hand must show the truth, though the supplanter and the Ishmaelite, he
whose hand was against every man's, joined in him their cunning.
Suppose the letter was seized upon me, what then? Outside the seal was
Commines', the writing Commines'. Inside was a tag of monkish Latin
scrawled as if an earwig had scratched its tail across the paper; who
could connect either with Louis in Plessis if Louis chose to say No!
with a sneer, and let Navarre's vengeance on the man who carried the
letter pass unrequited? No one; and let it so pass he would, if,
indeed, his virtuous indignation did not itself call aloud for
vengeance. Louis had no mercy on failures.
But Latin! Why the plague Latin? Then I began to see. The cover once
destroyed, Latin might come from Spain, from the Empire, from
England--anywhere! And behind it France lay hidden in safety. More
than that, and at the thought I ground my teeth, it was perhaps a
tongue that brute grinning from the window at my perplexity could
translate. If so, it was his turn to smile, and as I met his eye there
was little of politeness in his ridicule. No doubt dismay was stamped
across my face easier to be read than the words on the paper, and my
need was his opportunity.
Not to give him the satisfaction of sarcastically offering his
services, I spoke first.
"Do you read Latin, Monsieur?"
"Latin?" he returned, a scowl wrinkling his face. "What new nonsense
is this?" Then an inspiration broke upon him, and he came briskly
forward, his hand outstretched. "Ah! now I understand. You wish me to
translate the King's letter? Certainly, Monsieur, certainly."
But tapping my sword hilt, I motioned him off. "Keep your distance, my
good fellow. The writing is large enough to be read from where you
are."
Reversing the paper, so that the light fell full upon it, I watched his
face, and if ever a man was blankly puzzled it was my friend the
goatherd-tapster. That he was as innocent of Latin as myself I
guessed, but with the King's tools as with himself it was not wise to
assume overmuch. What he had hoped was that I would put the letter
into his hands, and once there he would have risked his skin to keep it.
"Well?"
"It is difficult," said he, playing to gain time. "I wonder why his
Maj----ah! ah! ah! I begin to see. A man grows rusty in his learning;
you find it so, do you not? But now I have it; yes, yes, just what I
expected. You know no Latin, Monsieur de Helville?"
"Not a word. French and Flemish, nothing more."
From the paper he glanced up at me cunningly, his eyes narrowed, but
with a malicious smile peeping through the lids, then back to the
paper. Out went a forefinger, and nodding his head he passed from
letter to letter, picking out the words as a child might spell his way
through a hornbook. This he did twice, till, thinking he wanted to
commit them to memory, I snatched the paper away.
"If you can translate, translate and have done with it."
"But I wish to have it exact," he protested. "Well, then, here it is,"
and again there was the cunning upward glance. "'_That which you have
brought give to him who waits; return then whence you came until the
King writes a third time._' It is as plain as day, now that I have
mastered the translation. I am he who waits; so now, Monsieur, give it
to me and let me go."
Before he spoke I knew he was playing with me, and had no more Latinity
in him than I had. For whatever quality the King had chosen him, it
was not for that of a good liar. But the splendid audacity of the lie
filled me with admiration, and that I might draw him to a greater fall
I led him on a little.
"But what are your orders, or have you, too, a letter?"
"That," he answered, with just such a little smiling nod as I had given
him, "is my affair, and between me and the King. Your own words!
Come, Monsieur, give it to me, and let me go."
"It!" said I banteringly, for I was fool enough to play him further.
"Is your Latin not rusty? And if it is rusty, may it not be wrong?
Should your 'it' not be 'him'?"
"Him?" he repeated. "Him? What do you mean? By God! I have it!
It's the boy upstairs--it's the little Count himself! Monsieur,
Monsieur, you fly at high game, and I offer you my apologies; in some
things you are not such a fool as I took you to be. To lead him like a
pet lamb with a ribbon, and into his own town, too! No violence, no
noise, nothing indiscreet! Monsieur, I could not have done as well
myself. Can a man say more?"
"But the Latin?" said I. "What of the It, Master Scholar?"
"Who said It? Not I. _That which you have brought_, was what I said;
_That, That_, not It, and _That_ is the Count de Foix!"
"And I am to return whence I came?"
"So it seems, Monsieur, and I wish you joy when they find the boy does
not return with you. I fear they'll hang you, faith of a gentleman! I
fear they will."
"Stop a minute, I'm not there yet. I was to wait the King's third
letter, was I not?"
"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "You have had two already, and so the
next must be the third--any fool can see that!"
"Just so, dear Monsieur Volran; and it was a fool who saw it. Since
when was his Majesty among the prophets? Yesterday the second letter
came, came because the King was kept waiting, and yet this, written two
months ago, foresaw it, and so the next will be the third. How, two
months ago, could the King know, there would be need for a second and
so promise a third? My compliments on your imagination, but you do not
lie well."
"Lie, Monsieur, lie?"
"Bah! Never bluster with your sheath empty; bare hands cannot bully
hard steel. God forgive us! but we all lie at times. I did awhile
back when I said I knew no Latin. I know one tag--a worthy monk taught
it to me a month ago, when, out hawking, the kite missed its stoop.
How is this it ran? _Laqueo_--let me see; _laqueo Venantium_--ah! I
forget. Like you, I am rusty. But I remember its meaning. Shall I
translate, Monsieur scholar-tapster? It has something to do with an
escape from the snare of the fowler."
"Oh," he cried, stamping, "you shall pay for this!"
With my hand upon the door I turned upon him.
"Dare so much as lift a finger, dare so much as breathe a threat, and
King's man though you are, bound up in the same bundle as me though you
are, you'll find the Morsigny gallows waiting for you here at La
Voulle; nor will Louis say more than, Curse him for a blundering ass!
It is I who hold the King's orders, not you; cross me in my obedience
at your peril!" and passing out, I struck the door noisily with the
letter.
The crackle of the paper was a louder voiced threat than my own, and as
such the man I left swearing behind me understood it.