Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  My lord of Beauvais, with his chaplain and his pages at his shoulder, was making in his stately way towards the farther door, when he met M. de Chateauneuf, and paused to speak. When he escaped from him a dozen clients, whose obsequious bows rendered evasion impossible, still delayed him. And I had grown cold, and hot again, and he was but halfway on his progress up the crowded room, when the inner door opened, half a dozen voices cried “The Queen! The Queen!” and an usher with a silver wand passed down the room and ranked the company on either side — not without some struggling, and once a fierce oath, and twice a smothered outcry.

  Of the bevy of ladies in attendance, only half a dozen entered; for a few paces within the doorway the Queen-Mother stood still to receive my patron, who had advanced to meet her. It seemed to me that she was not best pleased to see him at that moment; her voice rang somewhat loud and peevish as she said, “What, my lord! Is it you? I came to receive the trophies from Rocroy, and did not expect to see you at this hour.”

  “I bring my own excuse, Madam,” he answered, smiling and unabashed. “Have I your Majesty’s leave to present it?” he continued, with a smirk and a low bow.

  “I came to receive the colours,” she retorted, still frowning. It seemed to me that he presumed a trifle on his favour; and either knew his ground particularly well, or was more obtuse than a clever man should have been.

  For he did not blench. “I bring your Majesty something as much to your liking as the colours!” he replied.

  Then I think she caught his meaning, for her proud Hapsburg face cleared wonderfully, and she clapped her hands together with a gesture of pleasure almost childish. “What!” she exclaimed. “Have you found — Flore?”

  “Yes, Madam,” he said, smiling gallantly. He turned. “Bonnivet!” he said.

  But Bonnivet had watched his moment. Before the name fell clear of his master’s lips, he was beside him, and with bent knee laid the dog tenderly at her Majesty’s feet. She uttered a cry of joy and stooped to caress it, her fair ringlets falling and hiding her face and her plump white shoulders. On that I did not see exactly what happened; for her ladies flocked round her, and all that reached me, where I stood by the door, took the form of excited cries of “Flore! Flore!” “Oh, the darling!” and the like. A few old men who stood nearest the wall and farthest from the Queen raised their eyebrows, and the officers standing with the colours by the door, wore fallen faces and glum looks; but nine-tenths of the crowd seemed to be carried away by the Queen’s delight, and congratulated one another as warmly as if ten Rocroys had been won.

  At that moment, while I hung in suspense, expecting each moment to be called forward, I heard a little stir at my elbow. Turning — I had advanced some way into the room — I found myself with others pushed aside to give place to a person of consequence who was entering; and I heard several voices whisper, “Mazarin!” As I looked, he came in, and pausing to speak to the foremost of the officers, gave me the opportunity — which I had never enjoyed before — of viewing him near at hand. He bore a certain likeness, to my lord of Beauvais, being tall and of a handsome and portly figure. But it was such a likeness when I looked a second time, as a jewelled lanthorn, lit within, bears to its vacant fellow. And then in a moment it flashed upon me — though now he wore his Cardinal’s robes and then had been very simply dressed — that it was he whose back I had seen, and whose dazzling thumb-ring had blinded me in the garden near the Filles Dieu.

  The thought had scarcely grown to a conviction before he passed by me, apologizing almost humbly to those whom he displaced, and courteously to all; and this, and perhaps also the fact that the mass of those present belonged to my patron’s party — who in the streets had the nick-name of “The Importants” — so that they were not quick to make room for him, rendered his progress so slow that, my name being called and everybody hustling me forward, I came face to face with the Queen almost at the moment that he did. And so I saw — though for a while I was too much excited to understand — what passed.

  Her Majesty, it seemed to me, did not look unkindly upon him. On the contrary. But my lord of Beauvais was so full of his success, and so uplifted by the presence of his many friends, that he had a mind to make the most of his triumph and even to flaunt it in his rival’s face. “Ha, the Cardinal!” he cried; and before the Queen could speak, “I hope,” with a bow and a simper, “that your Eminence has been as zealous in her Majesty’s service as I have been.”

  “As zealous, assuredly,” the Cardinal replied meekly. “For my zeal I can answer. But as effective? Alas, it is not given to all to vie with your Lordship in affairs.”

  This answer — though I detected no smack of irony in the tone — did not seem to please the Queen. “The Bishop has done me a great service. He has recovered my dog,” she said tartly.

  “He is a happy man, and the happy must look to be envied,” the Cardinal answered glibly. “Your Majesty’s dog — —”

  “Your Eminence never liked Flore!” the Queen exclaimed with feeling. And she tossed her head, as I have seen quite common women do it in the street.

  “You do me a very great wrong, Madam!” the Cardinal answered, with the look of a man much hurt. “If the dog were here — but it is not, I think.”

  “Your Eminence is for once at a loss!” the Bishop said, with a sneer; and at a word from him one of the ladies came forward, nursing the dog in her arms.

  The Cardinal looked. “Umph,” he said. He looked again, frowning.

  I did not know then that, whether the Queen liked him or disliked him, she ever took heed of his looks; and I started when she cried pettishly ——

  “Well, sir, what now? What is it?”

  The Cardinal pursed up his lips.

  My lord the Bishop could bear it no longer.

  “He will say presently,” he cried, snorting with indignation, “that it is not the dog! It is that his Eminence would say,” with a sneer, “if he dared!”

  His Eminence shrugged his shoulders very slightly, and turned the palms of his hands outwards. “Oh,” he said, “if her Majesty is satisfied I am.”

  “M’dieu!” the Queen cried, with a spirt of anger— “what do you mean?” But she turned to the lady who held the dog, and took it from her. “It is the dog!” she said, her colour high. “Do you think that I do not know my own dog?” she continued. And she set the dog on its feet. She called it “Flore! Flore!” It turned to her and wagged its tail eagerly, and jumped upon her skirts, and licked her hand.

  “Poor Flore!” said the Cardinal. “Flore!” It went to him.

  “Certainly its name is Flore,” he said: yet he continued to scan it with a puzzled eye. “It is the dog, I suppose. But it used to die at the word of command, I think?”

  “What it did, it will do!” Monseigneur de Beauvais cried scornfully. “But I see that your Eminence was right in one thing you said.”

  The Cardinal bowed.

  “That I should be envied!” the Bishop retorted, with a sneer. And he glanced round the circle. There was a slight though general titter; a great lady at the Queen’s elbow laughed out.

  “Flore,” said the Queen, “die! Die, good dog. Do you hear, m’dieu! die!”

  But the dog only gazed into her Majesty’s face with a spaniel’s soft affectionate eyes, and wagged its tail; and though she cried to it again and again, and angrily, it made no attempt to obey. On that a deep-drawn breath ran round the circle; one looked at another; and there were raised eyebrows. A score of heads were thrust forward, and some who had seemed merry enough the moment before looked grave as mutes now.

  “It used to bark for France and growl for Spain,” the Cardinal continued in his softest voice. “One of the charmingest things, madam, I ever saw. Perhaps if your Majesty would try — —”

  “France!” the Queen cried imperiously; and she stamped on the floor. “France! France!”

  But the dog only retreated, cowering and dismayed. From a distance it wagged its tail pitifully.

&
nbsp; “France!” cried the Queen, almost with passion. The dog cowered.

  “I am afraid, my Lord, that it has lost its accomplishments — in your company!” the Cardinal said, a faint smile curling his lips.

  The Bishop dropped a smothered oath. “It is the dog!” he cried vehemently.

  But the Queen turned to him sharply, her face crimson.

  “I do not agree with you!” she replied. “It is like the dog, but it is not the dog. And more, my Lord,” she continued, with vehemence equal to his own, “I should be glad if you would explain how you came into possession of this dog. A dog so nearly resembling my dog — and yet not my dog — could not be found in a moment nor without some foul contrivance.”

  “It has forgotten its tricks,” the Bishop said.

  “Nonsense!” the Queen retorted.

  A great many faces had grown grave by this time; I have said that the room was filled for the most part with the Bishop’s supporters. “At any rate I know nothing about it!” he exclaimed, wiping his brow and pointing to me. “I offered a reward, and that knave there found the dog.” Between anger and discomfiture he stammered.

  “One of my Lord’s servants, I think,” the Cardinal said easily.

  “Oh!” the Queen answered, with a world of meaning; and she looked at me with eyes before which I quailed. “Is that true, fellow!” she said. “Are you in my Lord’s service?”

  I stammered an affirmative.

  “Then I wish to hear no more,” she replied haughtily. “No, my Lord. Enough!” she continued, raising her voice to drown his protestations. “I do not care to know whether you were more sinned against than sinning; or a greater fool than your creature is a knave. Pray take your animal away. Doubtless in a very short time I should have discovered the cheat for myself. I think I see a difference now. I am sure I do. But, as it is, I am greatly indebted to his Eminence for his aid — and his sagacity.”

  She brought out the last word with withering emphasis, and amid profound silence. The Bishop, staggered and puzzled, but too wise to persist longer in the dog’s identity, still tried desperately to utter some word of excuse; but the Queen, whose vanity had received a serious wound — since she had not at once known her own pet — cut him short with a curt and freezing dismissal, and immediately turning to the Cardinal, she requested him to introduce to her the officers who had the colours in charge.

  It may be imagined how I felt, and what terrors I experienced during this struggle; since it required no great wit to infer that the Bishop, if defeated, would wreak his vengeance on me. Already a dozen who had attended my Lord of Beauvais’ levée that morning were fawning on the Cardinal; the Queen had turned her shoulder to him; a great lady over whom he bent to hide his chagrin, talked to him indeed, but flippantly, and with eyes half closed and but part of her attention. For all these slights, and the defeat which they indicated, I foresaw that I should pay with my life: and in a panic, seeing no hope but in escaping on the instant before he took his measures, I slid back and strove to steal away through the crowd.

  I reached the door in safety, and even the head of the stairs. But there a hand gripped my shoulder, and the steward thrust a face, white with rage and dismay, into mine. “Not so fast, Master Plotter!” he hissed in my ear. “You have ruined us, but if your neck does not pay for this — if you are not lashed like a dog first and hung afterwards — I am a Spaniard! If for this I do not — —”

  “By the Queen’s command,” said a quiet voice in my other ear; and a hand fell on that shoulder also.

  The steward glanced at his rival. “He is the Bishop’s man!” he cried, throwing out his chest; and he gripped me again.

  “And the Bishop is the Queen’s!” was the curt and pithy reply; and the stranger, in whom I recognized the man who had delivered the dog’s cape to me, quietly put him by. “Her Majesty has committed this person to the Cardinal’s custody until inquiry be made into the truth of his story, and the persons who are guilty be ascertained. In the mean time, if you have any complaint to make you can make it to his Eminence.”

  After that there was no more to be said or done. The steward, baffled and bursting with rage, fell back; and the stranger, directing me by a gesture to attend him close, descended the stairs and crossing the courtyard, entered St. Honoré. I was in a maze what I was to expect from him; and overjoyed as I was at my present deliverance, had a sneaking fear that I might be courting a worse fate in this inquiry; so grim and secretive was my guide’s face, and so much did that sombre dress — which gave him somewhat of the character of an inquisitor — add to the weight of his silence. However, when he had crossed St. Honoré and entered a lane leading to the river, he halted and turned to me.

  “There are twenty crowns,” he said abruptly; and he placed a purse in my hand. “Take them, and do exactly as I bid you, and all will be well. At the Quai de Notre Dame you will find a market-boat starting for Rouen. Go by it, and at the Ecce Homo in the Rue St. Eloi in that city you will find your wife and a hundred crowns. Live there quietly, and in a month apply for work at the Chancery; it will be given you. The rest lies with you. I have known men,” he continued, with a puzzling smile, “who started at a desk in that Chancery and, being very silent men, able to keep a secret — able to keep a secret, mark you — lived to rent one of the great farms.”

  I tried to find words to thank him.

  “There is no need,” he said. “For what you have done, it is too much. For what you have to do — rule the unruly member — it is no more than is right.”

  And now I agree with him. Now — though his words came true to the letter, and to-day I hold one of the great farms on a second term — I too think that it was no more than was right. For if M. de Condé won Rocroy for his side in the field, the Cardinal on that day won a victory no less eminent at court; of which victory the check administered to M. de Beauvais — who had nothing but a good presence, and collapsing like a pricked bladder, became within a month the most discredited of men — was the first movement. Within a month the heads of the Importants — so, I have said, the Bishop’s party were christened — were in prison or exiled or purchased; and all France knew that it lay in a master’s hand — knew that the mantle of Richelieu, with a double portion of the royal favour, had fallen on Mazarin’s shoulders. I need scarcely add that, before that fact became known to all — for such things do not become certainties in a minute — his Eminence had been happy enough to find the true Flore and restore it to her Majesty’s arms.

  CRILLON’S STAKE.

  On a certain wet night, in the spring of the year 1587, the rain was doing its utmost to sweeten the streets of old Paris: the kennels were aflood with it, and the March wind, which caused the crowded sign-boards to creak and groan on their bearings, and ever and anon closed a shutter with the sound of a pistol-shot, blew the downpour in sheets into exposed doorways, and drenched to the skin the few wayfarers who were abroad. Here and there a stray dog, bent over a bone, slunk away at the approach of a roisterer’s footstep; more rarely a passenger, whose sober or stealthy gait whispered of business rather than pleasure, moved cowering from street to street, under such shelter as came in his way.

  About two hours before midnight, a man issued somewhat suddenly from the darkness about the head of the Pont du Change and turned the corner into the Rue de St. Jacques la Boucherie, a street which ran parallel with the Quays, about half a mile east of the Louvre. His heavy cloak concealed his figure, but he made his way in the teeth of the wind with the spring and vigour of youth; and arriving presently at a doorway, which had the air of retiring modestly under a couple of steep dark gables, and yet was rendered conspicuous by the light which shone through the unglazed grating above it, he knocked sharply on the oak. After a short delay the door slid open of itself and the man entered. He showed none of a stranger’s surprise at the invisibility of the porter, but after staying to shut the door, he advanced along a short passage, which was only partially closed at the further end by a high wo
oden screen. Coasting round this he entered a large low-roofed room, lighted in part by a dozen candles, in part by a fire which burned on a raised iron plate in the corner.

  The air was thick with wood smoke, but the occupants of the room, a dozen men, seated, some at a long table, and some here and there in pairs, seemed able to recognize the new-comer through it, and hailed his appearance with a cry of welcome — a cry that had in it a ring of derision. One man who stood near the fire, impatiently kicking the logs with his spurred boots, turned, and seeing who it was moved towards him. “Welcome, M. de Bazan,” he said briskly; “so you have come to resume our duel! I had given up hope of you.”

  “I am here,” the new-comer answered. He spoke curtly, and as he did so he took off his horseman’s cloak and laid it aside. The action disclosed a man scarcely twenty, moderately well dressed, and of slight though supple figure. His face wore an air of determination singular in one so young, and at variance with the quick suspicious glances with which he took in the scene. He did not waste time in staring, however, but quickly and with a business-like air he seated himself at a small wooden table which stood in a warm corner of the hearth, and directly under a brace of candles. Calling for a bottle of wine, he threw a bag of coin on the table; at the same time he hitched forward his sword until the pommel of the weapon lay across his left thigh; a sinister movement which the debauched and reckless looks of some of his companions seemed to justify. The man who had addressed him took his seat opposite, and the two, making choice of a pair of dice-boxes, began to play.