THE MERCY OF LOUIS THE ELEVENTH
At last, late in the afternoon, the lad Blaise came for me in great
haste.
"Mademoiselle, the King is asking for you."
"For me? How can that be?"
"I only know what I am told," he answered, fumbling at his bonnet.
"Is that all Monsieur de Commines' message?"
I have studied boys as well as men, and from his confusion I guessed
his mind was burdened by more than he had delivered. At the question,
his face flushed red in the sunlight, and he broke out--
"Mademoiselle, I hate the court, and court ways. God made me for a
plain soldier, and not to truckle in mud."
"Wait," said I; "presently you will find that mud is your surest
stepping-place to fortune. What more had you to say?"
"Monsieur de Commines beseeches you not to be angry if the King thinks
evil of you; if he even puts a vile construction on your friendship for
Monsieur de Helville."
"The King can think no more vilely of me than I of him," I answered
hotly. Then my heart leaped into my mouth. Not for myself; for me the
bitterness of fear was long past: but with that illumination which they
say the drowning have at the last, I suddenly realised that Gaspard's
life hung not alone on my powers of pleading, but on my self-control.
All my grown years I had hated, loathed, and despised Louis of Valois,
not only as the merciless enemy of Navarre, but as the vilest, meanest
cunning spirit that ever made flesh contemptible. What if that
loathing and despisal crept into my pleading and pled against me? What
if that hatred, which to me was almost a religion, flashed through my
prayer and blasted the King's mercy? What if they hardened Louis'
softer mood, and so left me all my life guilty of Gaspard's blood?
What if----
"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!" cried Blaise, half piteously, half in
indignation. "Do not look so horrified, so troubled. It was a lie, we
all know it was a lie."
"Did Monsieur de Commines say, It is a lie?"
"For policy's sake, Mademoiselle----"
"Policy! policy! policy! That is Monsieur de Commines all over.
Truth? There is no truth, there is only policy. A woman's honour? her
reputation? her good name? To his slippery, pliant policy all these
are nothing. There, there, Monsieur Blaise, it is my turn to say, do
not look so horrified! Monsieur de Commines is his master's mirror."
At the first door a red-haired youth whom Blaise called Dâvidd was
waiting for us, and with him as surety we passed through guard after
guard unchallenged. Up what stairs, along what corridors, through what
anterooms we were led I do not know; nor could I tell whether the
furnishings of Plessis were those of the palace or the prison. If the
hanging, were of silk I did not see them; if there were carvings,
gildings, fretwork, my eyes passed them blindly by. Only there were
men everywhere, men who whispered eagerly together in groups of threes
and fours, and who turned to watch us curiously as we left them behind.
Before an open door, guarded as every other door had been through which
we had come, Monsieur de Commines was waiting for us.
"Come!" said he, brusquely, almost dragging me after him, while Blaise
and Dâvidd stood aside, "and remember, no matter what he may say,
remember more than de Helville's life hangs on the turn of a word."
"I am not afraid," I began.
"But I am," he interrupted, "horribly, horribly afraid."
"Hey! Is that de Helville's woman, d'Argenton?" said a weak,
whispering voice from the end of the room. It was the King, pipingly
thin and harshly raucous by turns as weakness of flesh or strength of
spirit got the upper hand. "Get out of the light, and let me look at
her. Heh! heh! heh!" and he laughed a little snickering laugh through
his nose. "What a lover he was, that de Helville! Bloused as a poppy
or peaked and pale, they were all as one to him. What is your name,
girl?"
From where he stood, a little in advance of me, I saw Monsieur de
Commines start. He even opened his mouth as if to speak, but though he
kept silence, his side-long glance was at once an entreaty and a
repetition of his warning.
"Ah! Sire," said I, "might I not be spared that?"
"You can understand, your Majesty," said Monseigneur, his voice hard
and jerky as if in bad control, "that under the circumstances
Mademoiselle would prefer----"
"Of course," broke in Louis, though how can I give the cutting contempt
of his sneer? "Modest retirement at all times becomes a woman. Meek
virtue that consorts with this Hellewyl from Navarre to Poictiers, and
heaven knows how long before, is shocked at the bare whispering of its
name! Heh! heh! heh! What do they call you, girl?"
"It is not that, Sire," said Monsieur de Commines hastily, waving a
monitory hand at me behind his back that I should keep silence. It was
a hard thing to ask a woman at such a time and under such an
imputation; but it was Gaspard's life I played for, and so I controlled
myself. "Not that, ah, no! such brazen bashfulness would truly be
absurd--in such a woman as your Majesty describes. But Hellewyl is
unhappily in disgrace----"
"Disgrace!" cried Louis, his voice strengthening to a screech. "God's
name! man, have you no better word than that? A damned treacherous cur
who has cost France a province, and you sweetly lisp he is unhappily in
disgrace! If to hang like a common thief is disgrace, and no more than
disgrace, then, yes, yes, you are right, your Monsieur de Helville is
in disgrace. But he was always a friend of yours, Monsieur le prince?"
Flinging back the scarlet cape that covered his meagre shoulders, Louis
tore open his cambric vest at the throat and lay back on his high
pillows, gasping. "Coctier! Coctier! Come to me, Coctier!--My
heart--ah! miserable sinner that I am--my heart as Father Francis says,
is deceitful and desperately weak. I cannot trust it, cannot trust it."
The King's bed faced a range of windows opening to the west. Above the
head a huge canopy projected, the hangings of which had been removed
for sake of air; only at the extreme ends were there curtains
remaining. These were drawn back as flat to the wall as the heavy silk
would pack, but the carved pillars which supported the canopy gave a
heavy, cumbersome appearance to the bed. Between these pillars
cushions had been piled, raising the King almost to a sitting posture,
but with complete and much-needed support.
Never had I seen such an anatomy of a man, and had he not been Louis of
Valois I could have wept for pity. His eyes, filmed with grey and
colourless from weakness, were sunk deep in a skull to which the skin
clung flat, yellow as ancient parchment, and forcing into relief every
bony curve and prominence. Naked in throat and chest, the tense sinews
played up and down in the lean neck with every articulation, while
across the hollow chest the bones showed like white knuckles through
the strained skin. His loose sleeves had fallen back beyond the elbow,
and the bare arms, stretched downwards on the counterpane, were
shrunken to a skeleton. For four days no razor had touched him, and a
thin frost lay upon the mouth, framing into relief the cruel straight
lines of the sunken lips, through which the gapped and blackened teeth
showed at every sneering laugh or outburst of rage. Had he died, and
had his father the devil, entering in, raised him to life again, he
could not have looked more like a mask of wasted malevolent mortality.
"Coctier!" he went on, slanting his eyes at us without turning his
head. "They will kill me, Coctier, if they cross me like this."
From behind the shelter of the twisted pillar of the bedstead a man in
a loose suit of grey stuffs leaned over him, putting a cup to his mouth.
"You hear, Monsieur d'Argenton? The responsibility is yours."
"His Majesty sent for--for--this lady," answered Monseigneur doggedly,
"and, Sire, truly you mistake. What this--lady fears, is lest your
righteous anger should strike more than Monsieur de Helville."
Sucking the liquid from the cup with as much noise and spilling of its
contents as if he had been a half-weaned child, the King pointed a
shaking finger at me.
"That--that--lady," he said, mocking, "need have no fear. I have
Monsieur--how civil you are, d'Argenton, with your Monsieurs and your
ladys!--I have the rascal Hellewyl safe, and will hurt neither her nor
hers. God forbid!" he went on unctuously, and turning his eyes towards
the side of the bed opposite to where Maître Coctier stood. There, a
guardian over the soul, as Coctier over the body--and which was the
more grievously sick, God knows!--stood a frocked monk, white bearded,
white moustached, and rigid as a statue, his hands folded humbly across
his breast. "God forbid that I should punish the innocent for the
guilty, that would be mortal sin, eh, Father Francis?"
"Then, Sire," cried Monseigneur, "we have your promise?"
"My oath, if you like, man! Why! what a mystery you make about
a--a--common----"
"She is Mademoiselle de Narbonne," said Monsieur de Commines, breaking
in curtly, as Louis paused to pick his vilest epithet.
Drawing his palms under him at each side, the King pushed himself to
such a sitting posture that for very weakness his chin fell forward on
his breast.
"Narbonne?" he whispered huskily, his jaw working with sudden
excitement. Whether from Coctier's potion or from some stimulant of
the devil, fire woke in the dull eyes; and a broad spot of red flushed
the skin above the cheek bones. "A Narbonne, you say, d'Argenton--a
Narbonne? And yet this rascal Hellewyl----"
"Monsieur de Helville's promised wife, Sire," I cried, crushing back my
indignation, and falling on my knees to this loathsome King. "A
miserable, broken-hearted woman who pleads for her lover's life. Oh,
Sire, Sire! be merciful, be gracious. As God has given you
greatness----"
"Bah!" he snarled in a splutter; "be silent, girl!" Then, with a
sudden shift to a mocking smoothness, he went on in the same breath:
"Oh! we ask your pardon! Give us time to think, Mademoiselle de
Narbonne. Narbonne? ho! ho! Narbonne? Narbonne? Come nearer,
d'Argenton," and sinking back on his pillows with a moan he beckoned to
Monseigneur. "Narbonne? What Narbonne?"
"Cousin twice or thrice removed to Jean de Foix, Sire, and guardian to
the young Gaston."
"By God! d'Argenton, we win in the end!" he broke out, shaking his
finger at me. "Cousin to Jean de Foix? That girl stands for Navarre,
and we'll wring--wring our rights out of her!"
"Oh, Sire!" cried Monseigneur, "your promise, your promise!"
"Your oath!" said a deeper voice, and Francis of Paulo laid his hands
fearlessly on the meagre shoulder nearest him. "Dare you forswear
yourself--dare you lie in the very ear of God, and the grave open at
the bed's edge?"
Round upon him turned Louis, striking upward feebly like an angry cat.
"No oath!" he cried shrilly, his yellow face suffused by excited rage.
"I swore no oath, I only said--only said--said----" His voice died
away in a quaver as his eyes met those of the white-haired monk set in
unshrinking sternness. "I submit, Father, I submit. Heaven is too
strong for me, poor weak wretch that I am. But, pray God, heaven is
worth a province. It is a long price to pay for a man's soul. But
what we must not wring we may win by consent, a consent free from all
pressure of compulsion? For that I must--I must think. Mademoiselle
de Narbonne, your pleading has moved my pity, as you see, moved it
greatly. From my heart I grieve for your sorrow. If--mark, for to-day
I say no more than _if_--if Justice allows mercy--it is France who is
offended, not I--would you wish to be the one to carry Monsieur de
Helville's pardon to Poictiers?"
"If I might, Sire," I answered, my heart beating so fast that I could
hardly draw breath.
"And if--not? If France can find no excuse, what then? Would you
still wish to say--farewell?"
"Farewell? Not that, not that; give me his life, Sire, give me his
life, and in return everything that service, everything that devotion
can do----"
"Perhaps," he broke in sharply, "perhaps you can find me excuses for
Monsieur de Helville, excuses that will satisfy--France! What will you
give--France for his life?"
"Oh, Sire!" I answered, half crying, for it seemed to me he played with
my misery, "what can I give France?"
"Navarre!" Leaning his chin on his palm, he bit furiously at his
finger-nails. "Navarre! a child for a man. No, no, no, do not answer
now, wait till you see Poictiers' market-place clear in your mind as it
will be next Sunday at dawn. Wait and think. Go away for to-day, go
away. I am tired and must rest, is it not so, Coctier? Only, I would
be merciful. Come again to-morrow, and meanwhile, think hard."
"To-morrow, Sire?" I cried, now fully weeping and too confused to grasp
the meaning of all he said. "Oh, Sire! there is so little time."
"Tut, tut! no, no, I am not so ill as that; every hour I am stronger,
is it not so, Coctier? Take her away, d'Argenton, take her away, there
is no more to be said."
"But Monsieur de Helville--Gaspard--oh, Sire, the dawn of Sunday is so
near, so very near."
He had fallen back on the cushions, his thin chest heaving as he fought
for breath, his eyes closed all but a narrow slit through which the
evil beast in him glared at me. As I took a step towards him, wringing
my hands, he shook his head, a dry, mocking smile, twitching his lips.
"The greater need to think hard," he whispered. "A child for a
man--to-morrow, when I send for you. In any case you shall see your
lover, in any case I will send word. Take her away, d'Argenton, lest
worse come to her, oath or no oath. A province for a single soul! Ah!
Dear Saint Claude! what a price to pay! Take her away, take her away!"
Not roughly, but with a force I could not combat, Monsieur de Commines
caught me by the arm, drawing me in the direction of the door, and the
last I knew of Louis of Valois was the skeleton head turned towards me
on the pillows, the yellow sunken face wrinkled into a malevolent,
smirking laugh, and a piping voice that said:
"Are you there, Father Francis? Mother of Mercy! pray for me, for I am
very weak."
Not even when we were beyond the door, not till we were midway down the
gallery, and so in comparative privacy between two sets of guards, did
he loosen his hold. At first I thought he was angry, so urgent was he,
so insistent. But no, his eyes were full of pity, and his face, white
and strained, was the face of a man in sore trouble rather than wrath.
"You have failed, Mademoiselle," said he, with a kind of fatherly
tenderness that sat strangely on one whose hair was still unsilvered.
"That was inevitable from the first. But though you have failed, it
will be a comfort hereafter that you made the trial."
"But there is still hope, Monseigneur, surely there is still hope?"
"Yes," he assented with a sudden cheerfulness, "of course you are
right, and for to-day hope is our best medicine."
"What did the King mean at the last?" I asked as as we walked slowly
onward. "He said I was to think hard. But, Monseigneur, I cannot
think. My brain is dazed, is in a whirl. He spoke of a man for a
child, but my head swims, and I cannot understand."
"Do not try to understand," he answered very gently. I never thought
so stern a man had so much of a woman's tenderness in him. "Think only
that yea or nay you are to see Monsieur de Helville again. Have you
strength for another ride to Poictiers?"
"To Poictiers to see Gaspard? Why, yes, Monseigneur. Poictiers to see
Gaspard! That is nothing."
"Then my advice is, rest. Nurse your strength, Mademoiselle; who knows
when it may be needed, or for what crisis."
And I did rest, partly because I was worn threadbare, and partly
through a draught Coctier gave me. So Friday drifted into the last day
of the week end, and on the morrow Gaspard was to die at dawn.