Chapter 21 Bardelys the Magnificent by Rafael Sabatini
LOUIS THE JUST
“For me,” said the King, “these depositions were not necessary. Your word, my dear Marcel, would have sufficed. For the courts, however, perhaps it is well that you have had them taken; moreover, they form a valuable corroboration of the treason which you lay to the charge of Monsieur de Saint-Eustache.”
We were standing—at least, La Fosse and I were standing, Louis XIII sat—in a room, of the Palace of Toulouse, where I had had the honour of being brought before His Majesty. La Fosse was there, because it would seem that the King had grown fond of him, and could not be without him since his coming to Toulouse.
His Majesty was, as usual, so dull and weary—not even roused by the approaching trial of Montmorency, which was the main business that had brought him South that even the company of this vapid, shallow, but irrepressibly good-humoured La Fosse, with his everlasting mythology, proved a thing desirable.
“I will see,” said Louis, “that your friend the Chevalier is placed under arrest at once, and as much for his attempt upon your life as for the unstable quality of his political opinions, the law shall deal with him—conclusively.” He sighed. “It always pains me to proceed to extremes against a man of his stamp. To deprive a fool of his head seems a work of supererogation.”
I inclined my head, and smiled at his pleasantry. Louis the just rarely permitted himself to jest, and when he did his humour was as like unto humour as water is like unto wine. Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude of his witless wit be rather provocative of sorrow.
“Nature needs meddling with at times,” hazarded La Fosse, from behind His Majesty's chair. “This Saint-Eustache is a sort of Pandora's box, which it is well to close ere—”
“Go to the devil,” said the King shortly. “We are not jesting. We have to do justice.”
“Ah! Justice,” murmured La Fosse; “I have seen pictures of the lady. She covers her eyes with a bandage, but is less discreet where the other beauties of her figure are in question.”
His Majesty blushed. He was above all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun. To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he might remain neither blind nor deaf.
“Monsieur de la Fosse,” said he in an austere voice, “you weary me, and when people weary me I send them away—which is one of the reasons why I am usually so much alone. I beg that you will glance at that hunting-book, so that when I have done with Monsieur de Bardelys you may give me your impressions of it.”
La Fosse fell back, obedient but unabashed, and, moving to a table by the window, he opened the book Louis had pointed out.
“Now, Marcel, while that buffoon prepares to inform me that the book has been inspired by Diana herself, tell me what else you have to tell.”
“Naught else, Sire.”
“How naught? What of this Vicomte de Lavedan.”
“Surely Your Majesty is satisfied that there is no charge—no heedful charge against him?”
“Aye, but there is a charge—a very heedful one. And so far you have afforded me no proofs of his innocence to warrant my sanctioning his enlargement.”
“I had thought, Sire, that it would be unnecessary to advance proofs of his innocence until there were proofs of his guilt to be refuted. It is unusual, Your Majesty, to apprehend a gentleman so that he may show cause why he did not deserve such apprehension. The more usual course is to arrest him because there are proofs of his guilt to be preferred against him.”
Louis combed his beard pensively, and his melancholy eyes grew thoughtful.
“A nice point, Marcel,” said he, and he yawned. “A nice point. You should have been a lawyer.” Then, with an abrupt change of manner, “Do you give me your word of honour that he is innocent?” he asked sharply.
“If Your Majesty's judges offer proof of his guilt, I give you my word that I will tear that proof to pieces.”
“That is not an answer. Do you swear his innocence?”
“Do I know what he carries in his conscience?” quoth I still fencing with the question. “How can I give my word in such a matter? Ah, Sire, it is not for nothing that they call you Louis the Just,” I pursued, adopting cajolery and presenting him with his own favourite phrase. “You will never allow a man against whom there is no shred of evidence to be confined in prison.”
“Is there not?” he questioned. Yet his tone grew gentler. History, he had promised himself, should know him as Louis the Just, and he would do naught that might jeopardize his claim to that proud title. “There is the evidence of this Saint-Eustache!”
“Would Your Majesty hang a dog upon the word of that double traitor?”
“Hum! You are a great advocate, Marcel. You avoid answering questions; you turn questions aside by counter-questions.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than tome. “You are a much better advocate than the Vicomte's wife, for instance. She answers questions and has a temper—Ciel! what a temper!”
“You have seen the Vicomtesse?” I exclaimed, and I grew cold with apprehension, knowing as I did the licence of that woman's tongue.
“Seen her?” he echoed whimsically. “I have seen her, heard her, well-nigh felt her. The air of this room is still disturbed as a consequence of her presence. She was here an hour ago.”
“And it seemed,” lisped La Fosse, turning from his hunting-book, “as if the three daughters of Acheron had quitted the domain of Pluto to take embodiment in a single woman.”
“I would not have seen her,” the King resumed as though La Fosse had not spoken, “but she would not be denied. I heard her voice blaspheming in the antechamber when I refused to receive her; there was a commotion at my door; it was dashed open, and the Swiss who held it was hurled into my room here as though he had been a mannikin. Dieu! Since I have reigned in France I have not been the centre of so much commotion. She is a strong woman, Marcel the saints defend you hereafter, when she shall come to be your mother-in-law. In all France, I'll swear, her tongue is the only stouter thing than her arm. But she's a fool.”
“What did she say, Sire?” I asked in my anxiety.
“Say? She swore—Ciel! how she did swear! Not a saint in the calendar would she let rest in peace; she dragged them all by turns from their chapter-rolls to bear witness to the truth of what she said.”
“That was—”
“That her husband was the foulest traitor out of hell. But that he was a fool with no wit of his own to make him accountable for what he did, and that out of folly he had gone astray. Upon those grounds she besought me to forgive him and let him go. When I told her that he must stand his trial, and that I could offer her but little hope of his acquittal, she told me things about myself, which in my conceit, and thanks to you flatterers who have surrounded me, I had never dreamed.
“She told me I was ugly, sour-faced, and malformed; that I was priest-ridden and a fool; unlike my brother, who, she assured me, is a mirror of chivalry and manly perfections. She promised me that Heaven should never receive my soul, though I told my beads from now till Doomsday, and she prophesied for me a welcome among the damned when my time comes. What more she might have foretold I cannot say. She wearied me at last, for all her novelty, and I dismissed her—that is to say,” he amended, “I ordered four musketeers to carry her out. God pity you, Marcel, when you become her daughter's husband!”
But I had no heart to enter into his jocularity. This woman with her ungovernable passion and her rash tongue had destroyed everything.
“I see no likelihood of being her daughter's husband,” I answered mournfully.
The King looked up, and laughed. “Down on your knees, then,” said he, “and render thanks to Heaven.”
But I shook my head very soberly. “To Your Majesty it is a pleasing comedy,” said I, “but to me, helas! it is nearer far to tragedy.”
“Come, Marcel,” said he, “may I not laugh a little? One grows so sad with being King of France! Tell me what vexes you.”
“Mademoiselle de Lavedan has promised that she will marry me only when I have saved her father from the scaffold. I came to do it, very full of hope, Sire. But his wife has forestalled me and, seemingly, doomed him irrevocably.”
His glance fell; his countenance resumed its habitual gloom. Then he looked up again, and in the melancholy depths of his eyes I saw a gleam of something that was very like affection.
“You know that I love you, Marcel,” he said gently. “Were you my own son I could not love you more. You are a profligate, dissolute knave, and your scandals have rung in my ears more than once; yet you are different from these other fools, and at least you have never wearied me. To have done that is to have done something. I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall if you marry this rose of Languedoc, for I take it that she is too sweet a flower to let wither in the stale atmosphere of Courts. This man, this Vicomte de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why should I not let him die, since if he dies you will not wed?”
“Do you ask me why, Sire?” said I. “Because they call you Louis the Just, and because no king was ever more deserving of the title.”
He winced; he pursed his lips, and shot a glance at La Fosse, who was deep in the mysteries of his volume. Then he drew towards him a sheet of paper, and, taking a quill, he sat toying with it.
“Because they call me the Just, I must let justice take its course,” he answered presently.
“But,” I objected, with a sudden hope, “the course of justice cannot lead to the headsman in the case of the Vicomte de Lavedan.”
“Why not?” And his solemn eyes met mine across the table.
“Because he took no active part in the revolt. If he was a traitor, he was no more than a traitor at heart, and until a man commits a crime in deed he is not amenable to the law's rigour. His wife has made his defection clear; but it were unfair to punish him in the same measure as you punish those who bore arms against you, Sire.”
“Ah!” he pondered. “Well? What more?”
“Is that not enough, Sire?” I cried. My heart beat quickly, and my pulses throbbed with the suspense of that portentous moment.
He bent his head, dipped his pen and began to write.
“What punishment would you have me mete out to him?” he asked as he wrote. “Come, Marcel, deal fairly with me, and deal fairly with him—for as you deal with him, so shall I deal with you through him.”
I felt myself paling in my excitement. “There is banishment, Sire—it is usual in cases of treason that are not sufficiently flagrant to be punished by death.”
“Yes!” He wrote busily. “Banishment for how long, Marcel? For his lifetime?”
“Nay, Sire. That were too long.”
“For my lifetime, then?”
“Again that were too long.”
He raised his eyes and smiled. “Ah! You turn prophet? Well, for how long, then? Come, man.”
“I should think five years—”
“Five years be it. Say no more.”
He wrote on for a few moments; then he raised the sandbox and sprinkled the document.
“Tiens!” he cried, as he dusted it and held it out to me. “There is my warrant for the disposal of Monsieur le Vicomte Leon de Lavedan. He is to go into banishment for five years, but his estates shall suffer no sequestration, and at the end of that period he may return and enjoy them—we hope with better loyalty than in the past. Get them to execute that warrant at once, and see that the Vicomte starts to-day under escort for Spain. It will also be your warrant to Mademoiselle de Lavedan, and will afford proof to her that your mission has been successful.”
“Sire!” I cried. And in my gratitude I could say no more, but I sank on my knee before him and raised his hand to my lips.
“There,” said he in a fatherly voice. “Go now, and be happy.”
As I rose, he suddenly put up his hand.
“Ma foi, I had all but forgotten, so much has Monsieur de Lavedan's fate preoccupied us.” He picked up another paper from his table, and tossed it to me. It was my note of hand to Chatellerault for my Picardy estates.
“Chatellerault died this morning,” the King pursued. “He had been asking to see you, but when he was told that you had left Toulouse, he dictated a long confession of his misdeeds, which he sent to me together with this note of yours. He could not, he wrote, permit his heirs to enjoy your estates; he had not won them; he had really forfeited his own stakes, since he had broken the rules of play. He has left me to deliver judgment in the matter of his own lands passing into your possession. What do you say to it, Marcel?”
It was almost with reluctance that I took up that scrap of paper. It had been so fine and heroic a thing to have cast my wealth to the winds of heaven for love's sake, that on my soul I was loath to see myself master of more than Beaugency. Then a compromise suggested itself.
“The wager, Sire,” said I, “is one that I take shame in having entered upon; that shame made me eager to pay it, although fully conscious that I had not lost. But even now, I cannot, in any case, accept the forfeit Chatellerault was willing to suffer. Shall we—shall we forget that the wager was ever laid?”
“The decision does you honour. It was what I had hoped from you. Go now, Marcel. I doubt me you are eager. When your love-sickness wanes a little we shall hope to see you at Court again.”
I sighed. “Helas, Sire, that would be never.”
“So you said once before, monsieur. It is a foolish spirit upon which to enter into matrimony; yet—like many follies—a fine one. Adieu, Marcel!”
“Adieu, Sire!”
I had kissed his hands; I had poured forth my thanks; I had reached the door already, and he was in the act of turning to La Fosse, when it came into my head to glance at the warrant he had given me. He noticed this and my sudden halt.
“Is aught amiss?” he asked.
“You-you have omitted something, Sire,” I ventured, and I returned to the table. “I am already so grateful that I hesitate to ask an additional favour. Yet it is but troubling you to add a few strokes of the pen, and it will not materially affect the sentence itself.”
He glanced at me, and his brows drew together as he sought to guess my meaning.
“Well, man, what is it?” he demanded impatiently.
“It has occurred to me that this poor Vicomte, in a strange land, alone, among strange faces, missing the loved ones that for so many years he has seen daily by his side, will be pitiably lonely.”
The King's glance was lifted suddenly to my face. “Must I then banish his family as well?”
“All of it will not be necessary, Your Majesty.”
For once his eyes lost their melancholy, and as hearty a burst of laughter as ever I heard from that poor, weary gentleman he vented then.
“Ciel! what a jester you are! Ah, but I shall miss you!” he cried, as, seizing the pen, he added the word I craved of him.
“Are you content at last?” he asked, returning the paper to me.
I glanced at it. The warrant now stipulated that Madame la Vicomtesse de Lavedan should bear her husband company in his exile.
“Sire, you are too good!” I murmured.
“Tell the officer to whom you entrust the execution of this warrant that he will find the lady in the guardroom below, where she is being detained, pending my pleasure. Did she but know that it was your pleasure she has been waiting upon, I should tremble for your future when the five years expire.”