“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.