Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “And whom do you bring to me?”

  “A sinner.”

  “What has he done?”

  “He will tell you.”

  “I am listening.”

  There was a pause on this, a long pause; which was broken at length by a third speaker, in a tone half sullen, half miserable. “I have robbed my master,” he said.

  “Of how much?”

  “Fifty livres.”

  “Why?”

  “I lost it at play.”

  “And you are sorry.”

  “I must be sorry,” the man panted with sudden fierceness, “or hang!” Hidden though he was from us, there was a tremor in his voice that told a tale of pallid cheeks and shaking knees, and a terror fast rising to madness.

  “He makes up his accounts to-morrow?”

  “Yes.”

  Someone in the room groaned; it should have been the culprit, but unless I was mistaken the sound came through the curtains. A long pause followed. Then, “And if I help you,” the muffled voice resumed, “will you swear to lead an honest life?”

  But the answer may be guessed. I need not repeat the assurances, the protestations and vows of repentance, the cries and tears of gratitude which ensue; and to which the poor wretch, stripped of his sullen indifference, completely abandoned himself. Suffice it that we presently heard the clinking of coins, a word or two of solemn advice from the cure, and a man’s painful sobbing; then the King touched my arm, and we crept down the stairs. I was for stopping on the landing where we had hidden ourselves before; but Henry drew me on to the foot of the stairs and into the street.

  He turned towards home, and for some time did not speak. At length he asked me what I thought of it.

  “In what way, sire?”

  “Do you not think,” he said in a voice of much emotion, “that if we could do what he does, and save a man instead of hanging him, it would be better?”

  “For the man, sire, doubtless,” I answered drily; “but for the State it might not be so well. If mercy became the rule and justice the exception — there would be fewer bodies at Montfaucon and more in the streets at daylight. I feel much greater doubt on another point.”

  Shaking off the moodiness that had for a moment overcome him, Henry asked with vivacity what that was.

  “Who he is, and what is his motive?”

  “Why?” the King replied in some surprise — he was ever of so kind a nature that an appeal to his feelings displaced his judgment. “What should he be but what he seems?”

  “Benevolence itself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sire, I grant that he may be M. de Joyeuse, who has spent his life in passing in and out of monasteries, and has performed so many tricks of the kind that I could believe anything of him. But if it be not he—”

  “It was not his voice,” Henry said, positively.

  “Then there is something here,” I answered, “still unexplained. Consider the oddity of the conception, sire, the secrecy of the performance, the hour, the mode, all the surrounding circumstances! I can imagine a man currying favour with the basest and most dangerous class by such means. I can imagine a conspiracy recruited by such means. I can imagine this shibboleth of the shutter grown to a watchword as deadly as the ‘TUEZ!’ of ‘72. I can imagine all that, but I cannot imagine a man acting thus out of pure benevolence.”

  “No?” Henry said, thoughtfully. “Well, I think that I agree with you.” and far from being displeased with my warmth (as is the manner of some sovereigns when their best friends differ from them), he came over to my opinion so completely as to halt and express his intention of returning and probing the matter to the bottom. Midnight had gone, however; it would take some little time to retrace our steps; and with some difficulty I succeeded in dissuading him, promising instead to make inquiries on the morrow, and having learned who lived in the house, to turn the whole affair into a report, which should be submitted to him.

  This amused and satisfied him, and, expressing himself well content with the evening’s diversion — though we had done nothing unworthy either of a King or a Minister — he parted from me at the Arsenal, and went home with his suite.

  It did not occur to me at the time that I had promised to do anything difficult; but the news which my agents brought me next day — that the uppermost floor of the house in the Rue Pourpointerie was empty — put another face upon the matter. The landlord declared that he knew nothing of the tenant, who had rented the rooms, ready furnished, by the week; and as I had not seen the man’s face, there remained only two sources whence I could get the information I needed — the child, and the cure of St. Marceau.

  I did not know where to look for the former, however; and I had to depend on the cure. But here I carne to an obstacle I might easily have foreseen. I found him, though an honest man, obdurate in upholding his priest’s privileges; to all my inquiries he replied that the matter touched the confessional, and was within his vows; and that he neither could, nor dared — to please anyone, or for any cause, however plausible — divulge the slightest detail of the affair. I had him summoned to the arsenal, and questioned him myself, and closely; but of all armour that of the Roman priesthood is the most difficult to penetrate, and I quickly gave up the attempt.

  Baffled in the only direction in which I could hope for success, I had to confess my defeat to the King, whose curiosity was only piqued the more by the rebuff. He adjured me not to let the matter drop, and, suggesting a number of persons among whom I might possibly find the unknown, proposed also some theories. Of these, one that the benevolent was a disguised lady, who contrived in this way to give the rein at once to gallantry and charity, pleased him most; while I favoured that which had first occurred to me on the night of our sally, and held the unknown to be a clever rascal, who, to serve his ends, political or criminal, was corrupting the commonalty, and drawing people into his power.

  Things remained in this state some weeks, and, growing no wiser, I was beginning to think less of the affair — which, of itself, and apart from a whimsical interest which the King took in it, was unimportant — when one day, stopping in the Quartier du Marais to view the works at the new Place Royale, I saw the boy. He was in charge of a decent-looking servant, whose hand he was holding, and the two were gazing at a horse that, alarmed by the heaps of stone and mortar, was rearing and trying to unseat its rider. The child did not see me, and I bade Maignan follow him home, and learn where he lived and who he was.

  In an hour my equerry returned with the information I desired. The child was the only son of Fauchet, one of the Receivers-General of the Revenue; a man who kept great state in the largest of the old-fashioned houses in the Rue de Bethisy, where he, had lately entertained the King. I could not imagine anyone less likely to be concerned in treasonable practices; and, certain that I had made no mistake in the boy, I was driven for a while to believe that some servant had, perverted the child to this use. Presently, however, second thoughts, and the position of the father, taken, perhaps, with suspicions that I had for a long time entertained of Fauchet — in common with most of his kind — suggested an explanation, hitherto unconsidered. It was not an explanation very probable at first sight, nor one that would have commended itself to those who divide all men by hard and fast rules and assort them like sheep. But I had seen too much of the world to fall into this mistake, and it satisfied me. I began by weighing it carefully; I procured evidence, I had Fauchet watched; and, at length, one evening in August, I went to the Louvre.

  The King was dicing with Fernandez, the Portuguese banker; but I ventured to interrupt the game and draw him aside. He might not have taken this well, but that my first word caught his attention.

  “Sire,” I said, “the shutter is open.”

  He understood in a moment. “St. Gris!” He exclaimed with animation. “Where? At the same house?”

  “No, sire; in the Rue Cloitre Notre Dame.”

  “You have got him, then?”

  “I know w
ho he is, and why he is doing this.”

  “Why?” the King cried eagerly.

  “Well, I was going to ask for your Majesty’s company to the place,” I answered smiling. “I will undertake that you shall be amused at least as well as here, and at a cheaper rate.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That may very well be,” he said with a grimace. “That rogue Pimentel has stripped me of two thousand crowns since supper. He is plucking Bassompierre now.”

  Remembering that only that morning I had had to stop some necessary works through lack of means, I could scarcely restrain my indignation. But it was not the time to speak, and I contented myself with repeating my request. Ashamed of himself, he consented with a good grace, and bidding me go to his: closet, followed a few minutes later. He found me cloaked to the eyes, and with a soutane and priest’s hat; on my arm. “Are those for me?” he said.

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Who am I, then?”

  “The cure of St. Germain.”

  He made a wry face. “Come, Grand Master,” he said; “he died yesterday. Is not the jest rather grim?”

  “In a good cause,” I said equably.

  He flashed a roguish look at me. “Ah!” he said, “I thought that that was a wicked rule which only we Romanists avowed. But, there; don’t be angry. I am ready.”

  Coquet, the Master of the Household, let us out by one of the river gates, and we went by the new bridge and the Pont St. Michel. By the way I taught the King the role I wished him to play, but without explaining the mystery; the opportune appearance of one of my agents who was watching the end of the street bringing Henry’s remonstrances to a close.

  “It is still open?” I said.

  “Yes, your excellency.”

  “Then come, sire,” I said, “I see the boy yonder. Let us ascend, and I will undertake that before you reach the street again you shall be not only a wiser but a richer sovereign.”

  “St. Gris!” he answered with alacrity. “Why did you not say that before, and I should have asked no questions. On, on, in God’s name, and the devil take Pimentel!”

  I restrained the caustic jest that rose to my lips, and we proceeded in silence down the street. The boy, whom I had espied loitering in a doorway a little way ahead, as if the great bell above us which had just tolled eleven had drawn him out, peered at us a moment askance; and then, coming forward, accosted us. But I need not detail the particulars of a conversation which was almost word for word the same as that which had passed in the Rue de la Pourpointerie; suffice it that he made the same request with the same frank audacity, and that, granting it, we were in a moment following hint up a similar staircase.

  “This way, messieurs, this way!” he said; as he had on that other night, while we groped our way upwards in the dark. He opened a door, and a light shone out; and we entered a room that seemed, with its bare walls and rafters, its scanty stool and table and lamp, the very counterpart of that other room. In one wall appeared the dingy curtains of an alcove, closely drawn; and the shutter stood open, until, at the child’s request, expressed in the same words, I went to it and closed it.

  We were both so well muffled up and disguised, and the light of the lamp shining upwards so completely distorted the features, that I had no fear of recognition, unless the King’s voice betrayed him. But when he spoke, breaking the oppressive silence of the room, his tone was as strange and hollow as I could wish.

  “The shutter is closed,” he said; “but the shutter of God’s mercy is never closed!”

  Still, knowing that this was the crucial moment, and that we should be detected now if at all, I found it; an age before the voice behind the curtains answered “Amen!” and yet another age before the hidden speaker continued “Who are you?”

  “The cure of St. Germain,” Henry responded.

  The man behind the curtains gasped, and they were for a moment violently agitated, as if a hand seized them and let them go again. But I had reckoned that the unknown, after a pause of horror, would suppose that he had heard amiss and continue his usual catechism. And so it proved. In a voice that shook a little, he asked, “Whom do you bring to me?”

  “A sinner,” the King answered.

  “What has he done?”

  “He will tell you.”

  “I am listening,” the unknown said.

  The light in the basin flared up a little, casting dark shadows on the ceiling, and at the same moment the shutter, which I had failed to fasten securely, fell open with a grinding sound. One of the curtains swayed a little in the breeze, “I have robbed my master,” I said, slowly.

  “Of how much?”

  “A hundred and twenty thousand crowns.”

  The bed shook until the boards creaked under it; but this time no hand grasped the curtains. Instead, a strained voice — thick and coarse, yet differing from that muffled tone which we had heard before — asked, “Who are you?”

  “Jules Fauchet.”

  I waited. The King, who understood nothing but had listened to my answers with eager attention, and marked no less closely the agitation which they caused in the unknown, leant forward to listen. But the bed creaked no more; the curtain hung still; even the voice, which at last issued from the curtains, was no more like the ordinary accents of a man than are those which he utters in the paroxysms of epilepsy. “Are you — sorry?” the unknown muttered — involuntarily, I think; hoping against hope; not daring to depart from a formula which had become second nature. But I could fancy him clawing, as he spoke, at his choking throat.

  France, however, had suffered too long at the hands of that race of men, and I had been too lately vilified by them to feel much pity; and for answer I lifted a voice that to the quailing wretch must have been the voice of doom. “Sorry?” I said grimly. “I must be — or hang! For to-morrow the King examines his books, and the next day I — hang!”

  The King’s hand was on mine, to stop me before the last word was out; but his touch came too late. As it rang through the room one of the curtains before us was twitched aside, and a face glared out, so ghastly and drawn and horror-stricken, that few would have known it for that of the wealthy fermier, who had grown sleek and fat on the King’s revenues. I do not know whether he knew us, or whether, on the contrary, he found this accusation, so precise, so accurate, coming from an unknown source, still more terrible than if he had known us; but on the instant he fell forward in a swoon.

  “St. Gris!” Henry cried, looking on the body with a shudder, “you have killed him, Grand Master! It was true, was it?”

  “Yes, sire,” I answered. “But he is not dead, I think.” And going to the window I whistled for Maignan, who in a minute came to us. He was not very willing to touch the man, but I bade him lay him on the bed and loosen his clothes and throw water on his face; and presently M. Fauchet began to recover.

  I stepped a little aside that he might not see me, and accordingly the first person on whom his eyes lighted was the King, who had laid aside his hat and cloak, and taken the terrified and weeping child on his lap. M. Fauchet stared at him awhile before he recognised him; but at last the trembling man knew him, and tottering to his feet, threw himself on his knees, looking years older than when I had last seen him in the street.

  “Sire,” he said faintly, “I will make restitution.”

  Henry looked at him gravely, and nodded. “It is well,” he said. “You are fortunate, M. Fauchet; for had this come to my ears in any other way I could not have spared you. You will render your accounts and papers to M. de Sully to-morrow, and according as you are frank with him you will be treated.”

  Fauchet thanked him with abject tears, and the King rose and prepared to leave. But at the door a thought struck him, and he turned. “How long have you done this?” he said, indicating the room by a gesture, and speaking in a gentler tone.

  “Three years, sire,” the wretched man answered.

  “And how much have you distributed?”

  “Fifteen hundred crowns,
sire.”

  The King cast an indescribable look at me, wherein amusement, scorn, and astonishment were all blended. “St. Gris! man!” he said, shrugging his shoulders and drawing in his breath sharply, “you think God is as easily duped as the King! I wish I could think so.”

  He did not speak again until we were half-way back to the Louvre; when he opened his mouth to announce his intention of rewarding me with a tithe of the money recovered. It was duly paid to me, and I bought with it part of the outlying lands of Villebon — those, I mean, which extend towards Chartres. The rest of the money, notwithstanding all my efforts, was wasted here and there, Pimentel winning thirty crowns of the King that year. But the discovery led to others of a similar character, and eventually set me on the track of a greater offender, M. l’Argentier, whom I brought to justice a few months later.

  IX.

  THE MAID OF HONOUR.

  In accordance with my custom I gave an entertainment on the last day of this year to the King and Queen; who came to the Arsenal with a numerous train, and found the diversions I had provided so much to their taste that they did not leave until I was half dead with fatigue, and like to be killed with complaisance. Though this was not the most splendid entertainment I gave that year, it had the good fortune to please; and in a different and less agreeable fashion is recalled to my memory by a peculiar chain of events, whereof the first link came under my eyes during its progress.

  I have mentioned in an earlier part of these memoirs, a Portuguese adventurer who, about this time, gained large sums from the Court at play, and more than once compelled the King to have recourse to me. I had the worst opinion of this man, and did not scruple to express it on several occasions; and this the more, as his presumption fell little short of his knavery, while he treated those whom he robbed with as much arrogance as if to play with him were an honour. Holding this view of him, I was far from pleased when I discovered that the King had brought him to my house; but the feeling, though sufficiently strong, sank to nothing beside the indignation and disgust which I experienced when, the company having fallen to cards after supper, I found that the Queen had sat down with him to primero.