Part 6

“And it is this little man who is my brother!” she cried, clasping her hands and surveying Enguerrand from head to foot, with flashing fury; “_this_ is the child who knelt beside me at our mother’s knee!”

She thrust out a lip of utter contempt: “Take thee in? Thou—thou little withered fruit … a stone inside, hard skin without; what art thou to me?”

“What am I to thee—Jeanne? To-day,” he cried, “the stepping-stone to thy fortune, if thou wilt only see it! Now listen to me.”

But even as he spoke, of a sudden his anger cooled before the expression of her face. What if she was in earnest, what of his fortunes then? It was no time to quarrel. He caught his sister round the waist and advanced his lips toward the smooth cheek. But a masterly slap met the endearment.

“I’ll be no stepping-stone to you, nor creature of the English King,” Jeanne announced, half laughing, half crying. “There’s better in London, Master Enguerrand.”

He looked at her with wicked eyes, his face whiter than usual against the three scarlet stripes.

“You’ve had a visit this morning before me!” he cried suddenly; then, with a diabolic flash of intuition, he recalled the long, soft looks she had cast upon Lord Rockhurst.

“A visit?” said the Frenchwoman, swinging herself upon her heel. “Why, yes, that might well be.” She had a private smile, as to the memory of something singularly pleasant.

“I warrant me that it is your purpose to visit before long that interesting pile they call the Tower of London. Have a care, _ma sœur_,” and his trembling lips could scarce articulate the sneer,—had he not hated that man at very first sight,—“it is there, they say, that heads are lost in England!”

“Out of my room!” she ordered.

He laughed in what was almost a convulsion of rage. To what post, to what favours, might he not have aspired, with such a beginning! Meanwhile it is always the messenger of unwelcome news who bears the blame. _Malédiction!_ His hand on the door-latch, he sent his last shaft with deadly purport to wound:—

“O Jeanne, and I had never thought thee the woman to submit to a rival! Call to mind, _ma toute belle_, milord’s smile as he gazed at the face in the locket.”

Madame de Mantes heard the furious laughter echo down the passage as the door closed. She stood in the middle of her little room nibbling at her finger. ’Twas true! He had smiled at the locket, and with what tenderness! Ah, that was very different from the mocking twist of the lips with which he had wittily courted her only an hour ago. How! a king was to be sacrificed to him, and the man dared to haggle over the full surrender of his heart! ’Twould be monstrous!

* * * * *

“Ah, there’s my Little Satan,” said the King. But his long, gloomy face relaxed into no mirth: he had had a tedious morning, and of all things Charles could least endure tedium. The lady who had been first in favour so long that her chain had become well-nigh as heavy as that of matrimony itself, had made him such a scene as his own good and faithful queen would never have permitted herself to make. And another lady, whom for some time the volatile royal fancy had pursued in vain, had shown herself more hopelessly obdurate than usual. Between chiding Palmer and elusive Stewart, Charles was as near ill-humour as his easy temper would allow—and he was therefore, characteristically, ready for any diversion to this unwonted hue of his sky. The sight of the little Vidame’s pallid, handsome face at the end of the audience room put him in mind at once of the whim he had indulged in overnight for the lady of the guitar; a linnet that trilled, a little quail for roundness and compactness.

For an _entremet_, according to the new-fangled French jargon of banqueting, Madame de Mantes was certainly not a dish to be despised; and, to add spice to it, there was that presumptuous fellow’s wager. Actually a wager!—Those arrears of pay had been forced upon the royal memory altogether too often of late. So, with a gesture, Charles waved his usual circle aside; and those that formed it saw, with astonishment and the virulent spite of the courtier, the King withdraw with the unknown French boy into the embrasure of the windows overlooking the Thames.

Some bethought themselves that his Majesty had noticed the creature already on the previous night; and whispers began to circulate.

One inventive personage declared he knew (upon positive authority) that the little Vidame had come on an important secret mission of the French King anent the necessity of Romanising the English Church without delay. “Vidame, mark you, is an old French ecclesiastical title,” he was good enough to explain. “He holds his lands in feu from some mighty Archbishopric—formerly a Vidame was a kind of ecclesiastical marshal—does not this furnish food for reflection, my lords? But—” “Pooh,” cried an airy gallant (who had a French tilt to his moustache), “our good Dorset has ever Rome in his head. Why, man, a Vidame and his Bishop, it is well known, always hate each other cordially as ever fox and wolf; ’tis always between them, who shall have the fattest share of church booty! Nay, then, are you so simple? Have you looked at that smooth cheek, those rich curls? Why, ’tis the most piquant matter—some Fair Audacity in disguise! No more Vidame than your lordship’s self; but, believe me, some cosy little chanoinesse, sheltering her gentle lapses under the comfortable wing of Mother Church.”—“Hearken to Follett and his follies!” interposed a third, a frank-faced youth, the sap of whose English generous common-sense had not yet been withered by courtly poisons. “Nay, neither envoy nor canoness, my lords, but as tough a youth as ever I came across. I tried a fall with him, in the Cockpit,—having heard him brag of a trick of Breton wrestling,—and by my soul, the lad is steel and bow-string; he had me on my back in a twinkling and jeered at me till, for a moment, I saw him in red! But I like the lad; he has mettle, for all his whey face. Heard you not what his Majesty calls him: his Little Satan!—Old Rowley hath some bit of devil’s work for him this morning. And that’s the nut of the mystery.”

“Well, Vidame,” said the King, as soon as they were out of earshot, “let us now arrange the hour when we are again to hear your melodious sister warble, as though she were a bird and found our dull skies as bright as those of France.”

Enguerrand’s lips trembled. His pale cheek grew paler still.

But he had by no means been prepared to reveal his diplomatic failure. His plan was to temporise, in the hope of eventual success. But his sensitive acuteness nosed a trail of bitter temper under all Charles’s urbanity; and, flustered, he hesitated a second. The King drew his great eyebrows together.

“Madame requires pressing, it seems. She is perhaps hoarse to-day.”

Enguerrand foresaw how, in another moment, by a gesture of that languid white hand, the insignificant personality of Jeanne—and with it his own equally futile existence—would be swept from Charles’s horizon. Biting his lips, he cast about, but vainly, in his own brain, for a word which would keep the King’s fickle humour at least a little longer on the same bent.

Could she but be brought to take her golden chance, Jeanne would hold her own against any adversary but relentless Time—Enguerrand knew his sister well enough to feel certain of that. So promising an opportunity, and to see it wrecked by a mood of monstrous folly!

His eye wandered desperately from the King’s face, whereon was writ coming dismissal, to the dull prospect which lay beyond the window: a leaden river under a leaden sky—merely to see the huddled, cloaked wayfarers in the boats gliding past made one shiver.

Suddenly the boy’s eyes narrowed; he drew close to the window, peered eagerly down; nay, he was not mistaken! Yonder, indeed, went Jeanne … Jeanne and her woman, and at the water stairs a boat lay in wait for them. In a flash he understood; he had been right in his surmise! Moved by an inspiration born of the very genius for intrigue, he cried eagerly, but under his breath, arresting the King’s attention even as he was moving wearily away:—

“Nay, your Majesty, my sister is not hoarse, at least to my knowledge—I found her not in her apartment, and now I perceive the reason. The lady is not hoarse … yet seems like to become so presently! How will her sweet notes sound, I wonder, after her water journey, this bitter day!”

“Odd’s fish!” said the King. “What prate is this, sir?”

Yet, curiosity drew him to approach the window in his turn. Through the Whitehall water gate, down the King’s own stairs, a figure, wrapped in a rose and grey mantle daintily held up to show little close tripping feet, a small dame was picking her way down the miry steps. Behind her a waiting woman in russet carried what appeared to be a lute case. Charles turned a look, half quizzical, half interrogative, upon the Vidame.

“And is indeed that pink-and-grey bird our fair singer of last evening?”

“Even so, sire,” said Enguerrand, bowing low to conceal the agitation of his countenance.

“Satan, my little friend,” said the King, more genially, “can you inform me whither she may be winging her flight, from the very stairs sacred to our own passage? Not that such ordinance can be enforced upon birds.”

“I notice, your Majesty,” said Enguerrand, now turning candid eyes full upon the King, “the skiff is heading down river. I believe your Majesty’s Tower lies somewhere in that direction.”

“Ha!” said the King. His deep eye lightened for a second ominously. But as rapidly as it came, anger vanished from his countenance; and with it the last traces of his moody, weary humour. “Odd’s fish!” he ejaculated, “I had forgot! To the Tower, say you, Vidame? Nay, then, that minds me my Lord Constable and myself had a merry wager touching a singing-bird. _Ma foi_, he is early with the decoy and the lime twig!”

He paused. The Vidame looked at him in astonishment—a king to wager with a subject! A king—and to let himself be crossed in his pleasure and to find in the circumstance food for indulgent laughter. And the man lodged so conveniently in his Tower! Joncelle’s vindictive young soul had been all afire to see the Lord Constable consigned to one of his own cells. If the Tower of London was not Charles’s Bastille, for the disposal of inconvenient courtiers, where was the use of it? If a king made no use of his prerogatives, where was the use of royalty?—The Vidame had yet much to learn.

Pulling his full underlip between finger and thumb, Charles stared alternately out of the window at the picture of grey river, vanishing skiff, and brooding sky, and at Enguerrand’s delicate white face. Beneath the boy’s tensely still attitude it was easy to divine quiver of nerves, fierce eagerness.

“Why, now,” said the King at last, somewhat maliciously, “we are not too proud to be taught by our subject. Our Lord Constable and ourself had, as I said, a wager who should capture the linnet’s next song. My Lord Rockhurst is an old soldier: he trusts no one. We sent a messenger: we therefore stand to lose.”

The colour rushed to the Vidame’s face. He dropped his lids to hide the tears of mortification that sprang to his eyes. Had the fate of some battle, the issue of some diplomatic mission, been at stake, he might almost have felt less keenly the reproach of his failure. To be King’s Mercury, to set off so gaily, on so high a flight, and fall so quickly, so hopelessly—no situation could have been more exquisitely painful to the Vidame de Joncelles. (Poor, pious mother! could she have read, that moment, into the soul of her son, she might well have thought that the house she had so carefully kept swept and garnished was indeed invaded by the seven devils.)

The King’s glance, however, was not unkind. “Nay, now,” he continued, in ever more good-natured tones, “all is not lost yet. This infamous Rockhurst of ours laid too tempting a stake that I should let him carry off the prize without an effort. What say you, Little Satan? Have you a mind to see the Tower? Your great father has been pretty busy there these five hundred years. It should be of interest to his little son.”

He flung out his long, careless hand, as he spoke, toward the boy, and Enguerrand, dropping on one knee, kissed it with sudden passion. Something about that hitherto dormant part of his young anatomy, his heart, was stirred. He had felt himself dominated by that very carelessness and good nature against which but a little while ago he had inwardly railed; caught a hint of a truer royalty in this careless King than in all the pompous tyranny of his cousin of France.

Whether the inexplicable Stuart charm, which Charles, black-visaged, saturnine, cynical as he was, possessed no less than his romantically beautiful father and his handsome, winning brother of York, had seized the more potently upon Enguerrand’s nature that had hitherto been brazened in self-conceit and self-interest against all external influence, the fact was that in that touch of his lips, the Vidame de Joncelles devoted himself to a master.

Charles stepped back into the room, called up his gentleman-in-waiting, and gave instant order for his barge. As he turned pleasantly then to receive the _congées_ of the dismissed audience, a fine-looking young man strode quickly into the room, made his way up, and bowing so low that his profuse, fair ringlets fell in a cascade on either side of his cheek, presented a letter for the royal hand. Enguerrand, standing close, heard the messenger’s murmured words.

“From Miss Stewart, your Grace.”

The whole circle stepped back and grew wide while the King read. And many a look of envy was cast upon the newcomer as Charles, thrusting the sheet into his breast, turned a complacent countenance upon him.

“Vastly well, Sir Paul,” said Charles, with a little nod.

The young man visibly swelled with triumph. The Vidame’s busy brain worked at high speed: Miss Stewart? That was the great fair girl who gave the King such cold return for his notice last night.… Rumour about Court had it, as Enguerrand knew, that she was playing a high game.…

As a man might look upon one who threatened to rob him of a mistress’s smile, so Enguerrand glared at the messenger who had evidently succeeded in his task. But his own hour was not yet over. In high good humour, Charles beckoned him again to his side.

“Come,” said he, “or we shall be too late. Tide waits not for kings; and linnets will sing only when the mood takes them.”

* * * * *

Enguerrand, seated in the royal barge, felt his heart swell with pride. He was alone in attendance, save for the tall officer of guards, whose face, impassive and dark as bronze over the folds of the red horse cloak, looked forth with the indifference of the man under orders, upon this last whim of the master. The French boy’s blood was tingling with excitement. The raw airs, the bleak aspect of the waterway, the shadow of the towering masonry from which they were just emerging, dark with its story of royal tragedy, failed to depress a spirit otherwise susceptible to physical impressions.

His failure, after all, had become more profitable than success. He was on sudden terms of intimacy with a monarch whom he was eager to serve; and in conjunction with the Stuart himself, he was about to inflict at least discomfiture upon the man for whom at first sight he had conceived hatred.

He was still child enough, moreover, to feel a titillating sense of gratification in watching the skill and vigour of the royal watermen, the like of which was undreamed of on French rivers; in feeling that it was partly for him these stalwart backs bowed in rhythmic measure, that the oars swept the waters, green now to his closer vision; that it was, in a way, before his own passage that the craft hastily opened out to leave a wide channel, and that every head was uncovered.

Charles’s face had fallen into its habitual expression in repose, of somewhat bitter melancholy; and the journey was traversed in silence, until, just in front of the archway of London Bridge, the sweep of the tide, which had been for some time at the full, began to tell decidedly against them. The barge came almost to a standstill.

The King roused himself from his abstraction and flung a rueful smile over his shoulder at Enguerrand: “Said I not well? The tide waits not for kings.”

The watermen caught the phrase, and as if stung in their pride of office fell to at the oars with a fury which sent the sweat rolling down each weather-beaten cheek.

“Our wily friend,” proceeded Charles, “chose his hour with judgment. The bird has as easy a flight as the dove to the ark. We stand to be beaten, after all, by my Lord Constable.”

Beaten! Never, if his oarsmen died for it. The brawny arms shot out in unison; the backs bent and straightened with the rage of defiance; they shot the bridge in triumph, the contentious waters vainly swirling and lapping against the sides of the barge.

As they emerged into the gentler stream beyond, there was a moment’s pause, and every man of the crew, dashing the salt sweat from his eyes, turned involuntarily toward the royal visage. The slight smile of approbation on Charles’s lips seemed ample guerdon for the feat; indeed, as in the case of most saturnine countenances, its momentary relaxation had a rare charm. They fell upon the oars again, and presently the mighty pile of the Tower seemed to engulf them into its dark shades.

If Whitehall, stained with the blood of a king, shed a gloom about it, even while holding the most irresponsible court in the world, what sinister shroud enveloped these walls to every imaginative mind. The stones of the dungeon, tradition said, had been first cemented in lime and blood; and enough blood had since been poured out within those gates to stain the moats forever crimson.

The water gates swung back, and the King’s barge glided in. Charles’s face bore an air of pleasant anticipation, unwonted good fortune. He was certain to be amused, whichever way events turned; certain at least of some novel sensation.

III

THE LINNET’S SONG

Jeanne de Mantes sat sidewise in the deep window-seat of the parlour in the constable’s Tower, her dark eyes roaming about her with a curiosity not unmixed with a kind of awe. The room, dark with ancient oak to its blackened ceiling, with its huge depth of wall, its aspect of strength, silence, antiquity, resembled no apartment that she had ever entered. True, she had never penetrated into the Bastille, and true, she was here of her own free will and free to leave at her caprice; yet a small shiver crept over her. There seemed to her something ominous, something fated, about the place. All said and done, it was a prison. What should bring hither those who lived for freedom and joy?

She glanced almost timidly at the man who stood, one elbow propped on the embrasure, gazing down at her with inscrutable yet perhaps mocking eyes. He matched his Tower, she thought, in the something dark and melancholy which, though he might smile and court, yet remained as undisturbed as the sombreness of the room by the leaping firelight or the early spring flowers on the table.

Their glances met. In the light that fell upon her from grey skies and grey wall, the texture of her face showed flawless; richly coloured, at once soft and firm, it glowed like some southern fruit out of the cold setting. Her lips were parted: forgotten, in the momentary feeling of strangeness, all the modish airs and graces of the Louvre. She looked like a child, Rockhurst thought. He smiled at her, suddenly, kindly; sat down on the window-seat beside her and took her little amber-tinted hand in his.

“This is a rude place for such a one as you,” he said; “and you look about you like some creature caught against its will. Nay, you shall but sing me a song, and take your flight again forthwith, if you so wish it.”

All the woman in her awoke, petulant, displeased. Chivalry in love, a man who could desire and yet spare—that was not at all to her French taste. She drew her hands quickly from his and tossed her head.

“How so,” she cried in her pretty foreign English. “Fortwit’ after my song? But now, at once, if you prefer! Your lordship is quick tired!”

She sprang from the seat as she spoke. But he, stretching a lazy arm, caught her by her yielding waist.

“I said, if you wish it, Mignonne. In love I am no highwayman, but a courteous dealer.”

She feigned to struggle, brushing his cheek with her curls; then gave him all the candour of her eyes and the glint of a smile from her wicked lips; upon which, suddenly, he kissed them.

“Ah! highwayman, after all!” she mocked.

He drew her close to him, laughing silently.

“Milord Constable,” said she, “if one of your soldiers down there should chance to look up, it is all over with … your reputation.”

Again he laughed, struck by the audacious humour of the soft creature within the circle of his arm.

“Madame,” said he, then, with unexpected gravity, “my soldiers have long ceased to look up. My reputation is too well established to be worth looking to.”

Piqued, she thrust him from her with a quick gesture. It is one thing to be quickly conquered; it is another to be classed among the easy conquests.

“You’re insolent, milord!” she said, with out-thrust lip.

“My pretty one,” he answered her, “anger becomes you vastly; but as for myself, I have a preference for the dimpled smile.”

He let his arm drop from her carelessly. She stood looking down at him, fascinated, taunted, uncertain.

“Believe me,” he went on in the same tone, half condescending, half caressing, “I am much older than you; I have had experience—life becomes much pleasanter, its few good hours vastly easier of discovery, if we agree to take certain things for granted. And, as example is ever better than preaching, let us put my theory in practice. I, now, take it for granted,” as he spoke his fine teeth flashed a second in a wider smile, “that you are all virtue, yet that you harbour for my unworthy self an amiable passion which excuses, nay, commands, a gentle lapse. You on your side take it for granted that I am consumed with an ardour unknown hitherto in my existence. Come, does not that place us instantly on a delightful footing? And this being so: why, then, come back to my side.”

She palpitated between fury and the extraordinary attraction which drew her to him. Her breast heaved, her eye first lightened, then melted. She took an unwilling step, then paused. Almost a sob rose in her throat. In another moment she would have flung herself on his breast, as he sat awaiting her with that air of amused certainty that was in itself at once part of his fascination for her and an insult to her every instinct of pride, when suddenly she perceived that his eye had become fixed and distant. The insolent wretch had already dropped her from his thoughts; she was not worth to him even that pause of expectation!

Staring through the south window, up the river toward that gloomy bridge through the arches of which she had come to him, his attention was absorbed, his glance had gained a hawk-like keenness; the lines of his face were set. Whatever he beheld without, it was something that evoked far keener interest in him than the woman who had come to his call, in preference to that of a king. This was too much!

“Adieu, milord,” she cried in a high, strained voice. But, womanlike, she must see what it was, without there, on that hideous river, that he was looking at.

The royal barge, with its standard and pennants, its flash of scarlet and the long swing of red-and-gold oars, was already masked under the shadow of the battlements; nothing but the long stretch of water, dotted with black craft, met the searching of her angry eyes.