Part 10

Even in Whitefriars—that strange, knavish demesne lying at the very gates of the great legal college; that debatable land of crime, of statutory or at least traditional immunities—every dark lane had been swept as with besoms, if not clean, at least less foul. The stale airs of _Alsatia_ (as the cant word went to express that sanctuary of tricksters and cheats and huffing bullies, of skulking debtors, rejected clergymen, and disbarred lawyers, of gaudy courtesans in enforced retreat) were driven forth before the fresh and mighty breath of the gale. The gutters ran gurgling, overflowing where they would. Here and there a choked conduit sent mock waterfalls from overhanging eaves, darting and splashing even to the opposite walls. All Alsatia, which had scuttled to its burrows, was beginning to pop its head out again; but, as the denizens in the ’Friars have, as a rule, rare change of garment, few ventured as yet into the slop and drip.

Thus the two youthful gallants who now emerged from the Half Moon Tavern, in Priory Lane, had the length of the street to themselves.

“_Quelle peste—!_” said the slighter and darker of the two.

Stepping gingerly aside to give wide berth to the dismal carcase of a cat, he received the spray from an odorous gutter-spout full in the neck—and again exclaimed in French against the pestilential offence of the place.

His companion nipped him by the elbow, as he himself, less fastidiously, strode over the carcase.

“Fie, Vidame,” he cried, “’tis well we’re not at Whitehall! Never forget ’tis a forbidden word, just now.”

The Vidame Enguerrand de Joncelles tossed his black curls with a somewhat scornful look at the speaker.

“In verity, Sir Paul,” he retorted, in his precise, quaintly emphasized yet fluent English, “I believe that, eating, drinking or sleeping, Court rules and Court favour are never out of your head! As for the—” his long dark eyes glinted mischievously—“as for the ugly distemper which begins with a letter P. in both our tongues, what have people of quality to do with it? Bah! it is to kill the _canaille_—useful, like rat-bane.”

“Yet … if you will come into Alsatia—” grumbled Sir Paul Farrant; and just then, a gush of intolerable stench striking across them from an open cellar door, he drew his laced kerchief from his breast and buried nose and mouth in its folds.

The Frenchman went steadily on, scarce a flicker of disgust on his narrow, pale face.—If high-born disdain was safe to keep the plague at a distance, certes the Vidame de Joncelles—King Charles’s new favourite page at Whitehall—was proof against it.

There was silence between the comrades, until the worn, muddy steps of the Temple-Gate brought them up from the unwholesome precincts of Whitefriars into the green and airy spaces of the King’s Bench Walk. There, shaking out his kerchief, Sir Paul resumed his interrupted complaint:—

“If you will come to Alsatia.…”

“If your misunderstanding townsfolk will drive the best fence master within your shores to take sanctuary in yonder pit—for the merest peccadillo—”

“Peccadillo, Vidame!—Why, the man drew on our host of the Three Tuns in Westminster, and slit both his ears, for refusing to serve him with a flagon of claret on trust…!”

“_Perdi_, a wretched innkeeper! It was an insolence that deserved worse—The hog is not dead!—Meanwhile, instead of suiting my convenience and practising my sword-play in Westminster, I must now come seek him in this pestilent lane!”

“Why, Master Enguerrand,” said Farrant, standing still on the wet sod to stare, half in amazement, half in admiration, at the Vidame, “the fellow owed him a reckoning as long as his sword.”

“And what of it? Is not such a master as Laperrière, whose lot in life it is to deal with us nobles, one of those whom gentles daily cross sword with and condescend to take instruction from, is not such an one to be privileged? A reckoning, forsooth! A master of fence, with us in France, Sir Paul, is held a gentleman. Our King has even ennobled many. And those others there, the rabble—are they not made and born for our service? As for the rest, as for this Plague that is about, speak no more of it. If you are so frightened of a little smell, what brings you day by day to the fencing room with me?—It is your own doing.”

“Aye,” said Farrant. “But think you,” he went on in hurt tones, “I would let you alone to such dangerous grounds as Whitefriars—you a stranger and my friend, Vidame?”

They were strolling slowly down across the gardens toward the river stairs. The Vidame, as if tired by his exertions in the fencer’s room, let himself drop on a stone bench in the central alley.

“Let us rest awhile, please you, Sir Paul. As you see, the tide is still running out. The turn, which is to take us back to Whitehall, is not due until after five o’clock. Let us wait here.”

He doffed his plumed beaver and hung it upon the cane by his side; then turned his pale, dissipated face, with a smile of cynical amusement, toward his companion. Sir Paul Farrant was only one of the many friends who had gathered so assiduously about the young Frenchman—a page in the train of Madame Henriette, sister of the King—since his Majesty had taken so strong and sudden a fancy to him as to retain him in his personal service after her departure for France.

“See how the world wags,” resumed the favourite then; “you, Sir Paul, seek the dens yonder,”—he pointed to the sinister purlieus they had just left behind,—“because of a friend—I, because of an enemy.”

Farrant pricked his ears under his silken, fair curls. It was the first time he had been admitted even so far into the Vidame’s confidence. This Enguerrand, a French boy who in a few months’ time had stepped, it seemed, without the slightest effort into the inner circle of Court favour, upon the outer rim of which the indefatigable Sir Paul had scarce a footing, was an enigma to his associates. He had a handsome sister; but his success depended not on her, for had she not denied the King for the sake of the King’s friend, Lord Rockhurst? It was an open secret in Whitehall. Enough to have damned the chances of any other man, it would seem! Yet here was the lad, with his white, handsome, secret face; with his silent, insolent, easy ways; with his deep moods, his sudden rages, as close to his Majesty, as audacious and as secure of his position as young Monmouth himself. Farrant had witnessed his first introduction—he knew that there was no secret tie, no mystery save in the new page’s own personality. Sir Paul, the failure, would have given all he possessed for the talisman. Yet the talisman was no such occult thing, but an unfailing talent to amuse that most melancholy man, whom the world liked to call the Merry Monarch.

“An enemy, say you, my good Enguerrand?” cried the young baronet, lifting his foolish eyebrows a trifle higher than nature had set them. He had the curiosity of trivial natures and was all agog.

“Aye, _perdi_,” responded the other, briefly.

The wind was ruffling his dark head, blowing the heavy curls off the forehead; making patent at once the extreme youth and the prematurely worn countenance.

“And you are then a-practising against a rencounter.… O, Master Enguerrand, I pray you that I be your second!”

“Why, you shall so, then.” The words dropped from the other’s lips in careless condescension.

Enguerrand’s eyes were lost in space. Across the river, between the merry, white, flying clouds and the green fields of Surrey, he saw Heaven knows what bloody vision of triumph.

“And he—the man, the enemy?” asked Sir Paul, after a while.

“Him whom I shall kill … with that little escaping thrust of our Laperrière … yes, it shall be that … the great man? Yet none so great, Sir Paul, but that he must himself defend his honour … and none so old but that he be as much man as I—even as I am none so young but that I am as much man as he.…”

At which cryptic utterance he folded his delicate lips on silence.

Farrant stared. There was one to whom the words applied; one to whom the brother of Madame de Mantes, as all Whitehall was aware, might well owe grudge. But, forsooth, that one was so high placed, a personage of so much importance, that he dismissed the idea as preposterous. Farrant indeed had many a secret grudge himself against this powerful being, against his haughtiness and the lash of his cold mockery; but he would as soon have dreamed of seeking satisfaction from his Majesty’s own person.

Enguerrand had fallen into a deep muse. His comrade began to find the silence tedious, and took to counting the passage of the barges through the opening of the Temple water-gate, chattering in comment:—

“Yonder went the fat master of the Curriers, Tyrrell, with his pretty daughter—would I had as good a chance with her as that stout prentice who sits behind the good man’s back…! Ah, and yonder went Master Lionel Ratcliffe—mark how his men pull as if life and death depended on their oars. I’ll wager you, he’s bound for Chillingburgh House.… But, no, the skiff keeps its nose down-stream.… The tide will soon be on the turn.—Eh, as I live, here comes a royal barge—mark the swing of the scarlet oars! Old Rowley himself, perchance—nay, sink me, it is but the Lord Constable! Odd! I was thinking of him but a moment awhile … I.… ’Slife, there’s no mistaking that dark figure! I vow he casts a shade over the royal scarlet itself. Merry Rockhurst, quotha! Has any one ever seen him smile, except in mockery? How now? Why, the barge heads for the Temple stairs!—What may the Constable of the Tower be seeking in the Temple?”

The babble died abruptly on his lips, so singular a change had he marked coming over his companion’s face: a spasm of vindictiveness followed by a slow, evil smile. A chill ran through Farrant’s frame. He was no coward, but he would have given much to recall his rash offer of a few minutes ago; for he had read in the Vidame’s eyes the name of his enemy.

The barge swung with masterly ease to the landing. A quick word rang out from the head waterman, and the glistening oars were tossed in the air. The red of the men’s jackets, the crimson of the barge’s drapery, stained to rich depths and unexpected tints of orange by weather and usage, made a gay picture amid the sparkle of the water, the dancing shine and shadow, in which the figure of the Lord Constable was indeed a note of striking gravity.

The wind-ruffled feathers of the beaver were black, even as the curls that fell on his shoulders. A black cloak, silver-trimmed, was cast loosely back as he stepped from the barge, revealing a body-dress of so sombre a purple as to seem, if possible, of more severe a tone than the cloak. The keen, pale face, with the hawk’s eyes, the silver amid the raven-black of the cavalier moustache and beard,—which it was the great Lord Rockhurst’s pleasure to preserve in spite of the newer, clean-shaven fashion,—all combined to produce a singularly impressive personality.

Paul Farrant felt upon himself that sense of obtrusive inferiority, of almost physical discomfort, which the presence of the Lord Constable scarcely ever failed to evoke. His lips formed themselves for a soundless whisper. He twirled his grey beaver on the end of his cane; and, upon a second thought, tossed it to his head as giving him an air of greater ease and self-possession.

The French boy’s countenance, on the contrary, seemed now to have become lit by a kind of inner fire that was almost like inspiration. Sir Paul heard him speak to himself, in French—a tongue which he knew but imperfectly:—

“He has come! Why not now … why not this moment!… _Pardi_, why not, my Lord Rockhurst?”

As he muttered the words the Vidame laid his hat and stick deliberately on the bench and rose. Farrant, his discomposure increasing well-nigh to horror, watched him step forward, tossing back his heavy locks, as raven-black as Rockhurst’s own; and in the pallid, fine-cut young face he noted for the first time an odd resemblance to Rockhurst himself.

In the minutes that next followed, while his English friend remained sitting as if spellbound, Enguerrand, the stranger in the land, went through the crisis of his life.

So swiftly did the scene pass that the men in the barge below had but the time to push off once more and swing but a single stroke on the return journey to the humour of the tide.

Rockhurst, walking sedately up the alley, with a sweep of his tall cane to every other step, halted as he saw the young man approach; and into his gaze, which had been somewhat abstractedly fixed upon the fair green of the garden, there flashed a strange look.

Sir Paul Farrant was scarce a man of nice observation, yet he could have sworn that my lord’s eyes had for a second held a gleam of indulgence almost approaching to tenderness, as they had lighted upon the lad.

“Well met, my Lord Viscount!” cried Enguerrand, in a high, excited voice. “Aye—well met!”

If Lord Rockhurst’s glance had been kindly, it was swiftly and marvellously altered. Intolerably mocking now and cold it became, to match the tone of the response:—

“Well met … Little Satan!”

Enguerrand had been holding his passion upon a frail leash. With a bound it now leaped. This man, by whom, at their first meeting in Whitehall, he had conceived himself, in his hypersensitive French punctilio of vanity, to have been slighted, and who had treated him from the height of his crushing superiority, who had thwarted and humiliated him, robbed him (as he held) of his sister and his preferment at one swoop—how dare he now address him in this tone of contemptuous familiarity? It was well met at last, indeed! The moment he had dreamed of, sleeping or waking, these two months was within his grasp!

“My lord,” he cried still more shrilly, “his Majesty’s familiar name for me, on any other lips becomes a liberty, an insolence! An insolence, sir, a liberty I will not permit!”

To his mortification he found himself trembling from head to foot. For an appreciable moment Rockhurst ran his glance up and down the slight figure. Then he made answer; and the indifference, the placidity, of his manner was inconceivably galling:—

“True—I should not usurp his Majesty’s great privileges. But, pray, let me pass, Vidame—I have business with Master Sergeant Stafford, and I am already late, I fear, for my tryst.”

“Nay, milord, you shall not pass!—My lord, this is my tryst. It has been your pleasure to heap injuries on me, and on more than one score you owe me redress. We meet, at last, oh, at last! upon ground where the royal ordinance no longer stands between us. My Lord Viscount Rockhurst—” He was feverishly stripping his glove from his left hand as he spoke; but the Lord Constable, with a single gesture, swept him and his argument from the path with no more emotion than that of a man who rids himself of an importunate fly. With the same measured step he then resumed his course up the garden alley.

For a second the Vidame stood, staring after him, paralysed with rage. A faint snigger—of mingled relief and amusement—from the watcher on the bench started him to fresh action, as the prick of the spur starts the mettled horse. In a couple of leaps he had overtaken the stately figure, and Sir Paul Farrant wheeled round to gaze after the pair, astonishment as much as prudence keeping him rooted to his place. Enguerrand dashed the glove at Lord Rockhurst’s feet. The first impulse had aimed it at the face; but something stronger than himself, which the while only increased his fury, prevented the youth from offering this supreme insult to one whom years and honours and personal dignity placed apart even in the King’s presence.

“My lord, you—because I am a stranger, because I am, forsooth, young enough to be your son (_à Dieu ne plaise!_), you imagine you can treat me at your will and pleasure; insult me at your mood.… I stand, however, a man before you, my Lord Constable—with a name as good as yours. I demand my satisfaction.… My lord, I charge you, defend yourself!”

The young heart beat so fast, rose so high in his throat, that the words pulsed from his lips in jerks, broken with quick breaths. He drew his rapier with an almost frenzied gesture as he spoke; dashing baldrick and scabbard on one side; falling back to swing the blade with dire menace and then springing forward again, high-poised, tiptoe, only the elementary rules of honour keeping him from assault until his enemy should have likewise unsheathed.

A second or two, marked by the lad’s panting, Lord Rockhurst fixed him through half-closed eyelids. Then, without a word, with a dexterous, irresistible, upstroke of his cane, he knocked the weapon from the fierce hand. The springy steel fell and bounded like a live thing on the flagged path, to drop again, quivering, close to Rockhurst, who, with a lightning swiftness unexpected from one of such majestic bearing, instantly clapped his foot upon it.

Then the whole precincts of the garden, it seemed, were filled with the thunder of his voice:—

“Malapert…!” The Lord Constable’s brows were now drawn over his keen eyes in a withering frown. “This cane of mine should teach your youthship better manners were it not for this same strangerhood of yours, on which you thus presume! Aye, and you should have remembered this day, even with stripes, but that some freak of your Maker’s hath given you, graceless lad as you are, Vidame, a singular look of my own gracious son. For his so sweet sake … thou varlet … I spare thee. Yet will this hour have taught thee that his Majesty’s officers are not to be molested with impunity—that the Page of the Wine Flagon can have no satisfaction to demand of the King’s Lord Constable, what though his petty vanity may be a-smarting from some imagined slights.—Slights, quotha! Young master,—there can be no slights from me to you…! And for this insolence of yours to me, take you home this memento.”

With another of his startlingly sudden movements, Rockhurst stooped for the hilt of the sword that lay bent under his foot; and snapped the blade in twain, with as much ease as one may snap a twig. Tossing the hilt back at the Vidame’s feet, he went on—and it seemed that his anger had but gathered in intensity with the action:—

“Hang yonder stump of steel in your bedchamber: it may serve to remind you of a fruitful lesson learned in the Temple Gardens—how the satisfaction fit for a pert page’s receiving is a sound whipping, and how you, of my mercy, escaped receiving it!”

He stepped from the broken blade, passed the boy’s rigid figure so closely and indifferently as to brush him with his cloak, and set his deliberate way again toward the Temple Hall.

* * * * *

The Vidame stood stricken with impotent passion, sick well-nigh to swooning with the violence of his fury in conflict with his complete helplessness; white as wax, his boyish face distorted, his eyes blood-injected, swimming in tears; a white foam at the corners of his mouth, his lips drawn back in voiceless execration. The nails of his clenched hands drove themselves into the flesh. It was not until Paul Farrant rose and laid his hand on his shoulder that the palsy was broken.

The Vidame shook the touch furiously from him. His bloodshot eyes rolled from the broken weapon on the path to the other’s face, on which a malicious pleasure in his successful friend’s mortification was but ill concealed by a scarcely more tolerable air of sympathy. Had it not been for the mutilation of his weapon, Paul Farrant’s life’s blood might well have assuaged the Frenchman’s ecstasy of hatred at that moment.

Then the floodgates were loosed. Foaming, the tide of passion leaped from Enguerrand’s mouth with an eloquence that betrayed his race. Usually silent, the Vidame de Joncelles, encompassed with an almost northern reserve, yet was through his mother a child of the south; and at this hour all the exuberance of the warm land, all the acrid passion that only its children can feel and which, felt, must find word expression, broke from him in torrents of imprecations and curses, half French, half English:—

“Go thy way, then, my merry Rockhurst—go, Rakehell Rockhurst! Ha, Rakehell thou mayst be, but forget not then that I am Little Satan, and you but the servant of my Great Father!… Go thy way, sanctimonious hypocrite, you of the grave face and grey-sprinkled hair, hoary in corruption! You, put me out of your path…! My hour will come, my hour will come, my hour will come! Faugh! I spit at thee; my clean blade was too fair for thee, thou coward, thou bully, hiding behind thy state and thy years…! And that prate of paternity! I, like thy son?… Had I within my veins a drop of thy coward, hateful blood, I’d drain them and die laughing that I was rid of thee! Look at the great man…! Look! Watch the reverend seigneur! See how yonder wretches make way for my Lord Constable!—My Lord Coward!… Look you, Sir Paul, is it not an admirable spectacle? The King’s friend, the mighty in council, the example to the Court! Hi, my Lord Rockhurst—Hi, thou pattern of nobility—what of my sister, what of Jeanne de Mantes?… And afraid to fight the brother! Look, look, friends! Ha, he’s old enough to be my father, and my sister—’tis his boast! I, like his son, forsooth? And my sister has but a year of life more than mine! _O, que l’âge a ses privilèges!_ Oh, how that paternal heart beats to high thoughts! Curse thee, burn thee, drown thee … coward!”

Stragglers in the garden, attracted by the wild clamours, had now begun to gather. Up the slimy steps, from the ’Friars, like obscene beasts venturing furtively from their lairs, the frowzy, arrogant heads of thieving bullies,—“Knights of the Posts” and “Copper Captains,”—scenting a profitable quarrel, began to emerge. And these were shadowed by dismal shapes of womanhood, such as in those haunts were never far from the scenes of strife, like to the hovering carrion bird.

The Vidame, in his paroxysm, cared as little whether his words were flung to the solitary winds or to a thousand listeners. As the Lord Constable’s cloaked figure disappeared altogether from view under the Hall archway of the Inner Temple, the boy’s outburst culminated in an almost eastern flight of malediction:—

“May your shadow bring a blight wherever it falls…! May your loves, your hopes, your desires be bitter as ashes…! May your own flesh and blood turn against you! May you blast the life of your own son till he wishes he had never been born! Curse you…! May your own flesh and blood curse you! May you want and never get—seek and never find! May your pillow be haunted and your waking a horror! May your wine-cup poison you and the pest follow you and break out under your footsteps! May fire consume your pride and your hair grow white in misery, in dishonour, and then may Death be deaf to your call—!”

He fell back against a tree, breath failing on his lips; flung one arm against the bole and rested his brow upon it. Then the tears which his fire of rage had burned from his eyelids threatened to overwhelm him in the weakness that follows on all such unnatural paroxysms.

Sir Paul Farrant stood a moment, dubious. He glanced from the figure against the lime tree to the dingy rabble that were drawing ever closer in grinning curiosity and unholy expectation.—In sooth (was the thought gathering strength in his mind) the little new star of Court favour seemed like to be quenched! Yonder was the lucky youth (to dare to beard the Lord Constable.… It had been safer, almost, to have affronted the King!) broken by a mere twist of that strong hand!

A couple of Templars, grave-looking young men, had halted a few paces away; and now, with a low-voiced murmur to one another and an angry glance of scorn flung at the gentry that the clamour had gathered from below the steps into their trim gardens, they passed on their way.