The Grey Cloak Part 8

"Whom are you shielding?" demanded the prince with an oath. He was alarmed.

"Since I refused to tell his Eminence it is not probable that I shall tell your Highness."

Beaufort left in a rage. The prince's lackey spent a most uncomfortable hour that night when his Highness, son of Monsieur le Duc de Vendome, retired.

The Chevalier espied a yellow _caleche_, Mademoiselle de Longueville herself in the act of entering it. Mademoiselle was the only person he knew to be in the confidence of Diane.

"Messieurs, will you permit me to speak to Mademoiselle de Longueville?" he asked.

"Do you think that monsieur can see mademoiselle?" said one to the other, humorously.

"It is too dark for him to see her. His Eminence said nothing about Monsieur le Chevalier speaking to any one he could not see."

"Thanks, Messieurs, thanks!" And the Chevalier hastened to the _caleche_. "Mademoiselle . . ."

"Monsieur," she interrupted, "I have a message for you. A certain lady whom we both know requests me to say that she forbids you further to address her. Her reasons . . . Well, she gives none. As for me, Monsieur, I believe you to be a gentleman and a man of honor who is above exile and calumny."

"G.o.d bless you, Mademoiselle. Tell her for me that whatever her indictments are, I am innocent; and that we do not love when we do not trust."

She gave him a curious glance. "You have not yet discovered who she is?"

"No, Mademoiselle. Will you tell me?"

"She is . . . No; to tell you would be wrong and it would do you no good. Forget her, Chevalier. I should." And she drew the curtain and ordered her lackeys to drive on.

"It is snowing," said the Chevalier, irrelevantly, when the musketeers rejoined him.

"So it is, so it is," one replied. "Put on your hat, Monsieur, or my word for it, you will catch a devil of a chill."

The Chevalier put on his hat. "Five years . . . his Eminence said five years?"

"Yes, Monsieur. But what are five years to a man like yourself? You have youth and money, and the little Roch.e.l.laises are pretty. My word!

the time will pa.s.s quickly enough. Come; we will go to your lodging.

Did his Eminence say anything about wine, Georges?" to his companion.

"Nothing prohibitory. I once heard him say '_Bonum vinum laetificat cor hominis_.'"

"What does that mean?"

"Good wine rejoices the heart of man. Let us watch for the dawn with the Chevalier, who is a man in all things. Monsieur, whoever your friend may be, I hope he is not without grat.i.tude."

"Yes, yes! Let's off to the Chevalier's. The Candlestick has some fine burgundy. It is cold and wine warms the heart."

The Chevalier burst into a despairing laugh, "Wine! That is the word, my comrades. On to the Candlestick!" he cried in a high voice. He caught the musketeers by the arms and dragged them toward the gate.

"Wine rejoices the heart of man: and one forgets. Let Mazarin take away my liberty; praise be to Bacchus, he can not take away my thirst!

And oh! I shall be thirsty these five long years. On to the Candlestick! I know a mellow vintage; and we three shall put the candle out to-night."

And the three of them made off for the Candlestick.

Dawn. A Swiss leaned sleepily against one of the stone abutments which supported the barriers of the Porte Saint Antoine. These barriers would not be raised for the general public till nine; yet the Swiss, rubbing his gummed eyes, saw the approach of three men, one of whom was leading a handsome Spanish jennet. The three men walked unevenly, now and then laughing uproariously and slapping one another on the back.

Presently one stepped upon a slippery cobble and went sprawling into the snow, to the great merriment of his companions, who had some difficulty in raising the fallen man to his feet.

"Go along with you, Messieurs," said the Swiss enviously; "you are all drunk."

"Go along yourself," said Georges, a.s.suming a baccha.n.a.lian pose.

"What do you want?" asked the Swiss, laughing.

"To pa.s.s this gentleman out of the city," said Georges; "and here is the order."

"Very good," replied the Swiss.

The Chevalier climbed into the saddle. Breton was to follow with the personal effects. The barriers creaked, opened the way, and the Chevalier pa.s.sed forth. There was a cheering word or two, a waving of hats, and then the barriers fell back into place. A quarter of a mile away, having reached an elevation, the exile stopped his horse and turned in the saddle. As he strained his bloodshot eyes toward the city, the mask of intoxication fell away from his face, leaving it worn and wretched. The snow lay everywhere, white, untrampled, blinding.

The pale yellow beams of the sun broke in brilliant flashes against the windows of the Priory of Jacobins, while above the city, the still sleeping city, rose long spiral threads of opal-tinted smoke.

Five years. And for what? Friendship. How simple to have told Mazarin that he had loaned the cloak to Victor de Saumaise. A dozen words. His head was throbbing violently and his throat was hot. He took off his hat and the keen air of morning cooled his damp forehead.

Five years. He could see this year drag itself to its dismal end, and another, and another, till five had come and gone, each growing infinitely longer and duller and more hopeless. Of what use were youth and riches without a Paris? Friendship? Was he not, as Mazarin had pointed out, a fool for his pains? It was giving away five years of life and love. A word? No. He straightened in the saddle, and the fumes of wine receded from his brain, leaving a temporary clearness.

Yes, he was right, a hundred times right. Victor would have done the same for him, and he could do no less for Victor. And there was something fine and lofty in the sacrifice to him who until now had never sacrificed so much as an hour from his worldly pleasures. It appealed to all that was good in him, leaving a wholesomeness in his heart that was tonic and elevating.

And yet . . . How strongly her face appeared before him! If only he could have stayed long enough to explain to her, to convince her of his loyalty; ah, then would this exile be a summer's rustication. He fumbled at his throat and drew forth a ruby-studded miniature. He kissed it and hid it from sight. By proxy she had turned him aside in contempt. Why? What had he done? . . . Did she think him guilty of De Brissac's death? or, worse still, of conducting an intrigue with Madame de Brissac, whom he had never seen?

"Ah, well, Victor offered his life for mine. I can do no less than give him five years in exchange. And where is yesterday?" He had pa.s.sed along this very road yesterday. "Eh, where indeed is yesterday?"

He looked once more toward Paris, then turned his back toward it forever.

CHAPTER V

THE HORN OF PLENTY AND MONSIEUR DE SAUMAISE'S POTPIE

Night, with fold on fold of ragged purple, with wide obliterating hand, came roughly down upon the ancient city of Roch.e.l.le, which seemed slowly to draw itself together and a.s.sume the proportions of a huge, menacing rock. Of the roof lines, but lately of many hues and reaches, there now remained only a long series of grotesque black profiles which zigzagged from north to south, from ruined wall to ruined wall. The last dull silver gleam of day trembled a moment on the far careening horizon, then vanished; and presently the storm which had threatened all through the day broke forth, doubly furious. A silent stinging snow whipped in from the sea, and the lordly voices of the surges rose to inharmonious thunders in the straits of Antioch, or burst in rugged chorus against the rock-bound coasts of the gloomy promontory and the isles of Re and Oleron. As the vigor of the storm increased, the harbor towers Saint Nicholas and the Chain, looming in the blur like suppliant arms, and the sea walls began gradually to waver and recede in the acc.u.mulating haze, while across the dim yellow flame in the tower of the Lantern the snow flurried in grey, shapeless, interminable shadows. Hither and thither the wind rushed, bold and bl.u.s.terous, sometimes carrying landward the intermittent crashing of the surf as it fell, wrathful yet impotent, on the great dike by which, twenty-odd years before, the immortal Richelieu had snuffed the last heroic spark of the Reformists.

The little ships, the great ships, the fisherman's sloop, the king's corvette, and the merchantman, all lay anch.o.r.ed in the basin and harbor, their prows boring into the gale, their crude hulls rising and falling, tossing and plunging, tugging like living things at their hempen cables. The snow fell upon them, changing them into phantoms, all seemingly eager to join in the mad revel of the storm. And the lights at the mastheads, swooping now downward, now upward, now from side to side, dappled the troubled waters with sickly gold. A desert of marshes behind it, a limitless sea before it, gave to this brave old city an isolation at once splendid and melancholy; and thrice melancholy it stood this wild March night, witnessing as it did the final travail of winter, pregnant with spring.

At seven o'clock the ice-clad packet from Dieppe entered the harbor and dropped anchor. Among those who disembarked were two Jesuit priests and an Iroquois Indian, who immediately set out for the episcopal palace. They pa.s.sed un.o.bserved through the streets, for the blinding, whirling snow turned them into shadow-shapes, or effaced them totally from sight. Besides, wayfarers were few and the hardy mariners had by this time sought the warm chimney in the favorite inn. For well they knew that there were times when G.o.d wished to be alone with His sea; and he was either a poor Catholic or a bad Huguenot who refused to be convinced that the Master had contrived the sea and the storm for His own especial pastime.

The favorite inn! What a call to food and wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl of a Holland clay propped in a h.o.r.n.y fist, he might listen tranquilly to the sobbing of the tempest in the gaping chimney. What if the night voiced its pains shrewdly, walls encompa.s.sed him; what if its frozen tears melted on the panes or smoked on the trampled threshold, glowing logs sent forth a permeating heat, expanding his sense of luxury and content. What with the solace of the new-found weed, and the genial brothers of the sea surrounding, tempests offered no terrors to him.

Listen. Perhaps here is some indomitable Ulysses, who, scorning a blind immortalizer, recites his own rude Odyssey. What exploits! What adventures on the broad seas and in the new-found wildernesses of the West! Ah, but a man was a man then; there were no mythic G.o.ds to guide or to thwart him; and he rose or fell according to the might of his arm and the length of his sword. Hate sought no flimsy pretexts, but came forth boldly; love entered the lists neither with caution nor with mental reservation; and favor, though inconsiderate as ever, was not n.i.g.g.ard with her largess. Truly the mariner had not to draw on his imagination; the age of which he was a picturesque particle was a brave and gallant one: an Odyssey indeed, composed of Richelieus, sons and grandsons of the great Henri, Buckinghams, Stuarts, Cromwells, Mazarins, and Monks; Maries de Medicis, Annes of Austria, Mesdames de Longueville; of Royalists, Frondeurs, and Commonwealth; of Catholics, Huguenots, and Puritans. Some were dead, it is true; but never a great ship pa.s.ses without leaving a turbulent wake. And there, in the West, rising serenely above all these tangles of civil wars and political intrigues, was the splendid star of New France. Happy and envied was the mariner who could tell of its vast riches, of its endless forests, of its cruel brown savages, of its mighty rivers and freshwater seas.

New France! How many a ruined gamester, hearing these words, lifted his head, the fires of hope lighting anew in his burnt-out eyes? How many a fallen house looked longingly toward this promised land? New France! Was not the name itself Fortune's earnest, her pledge of treasures lightly to be won? The gamester went to his garret to dream of golden dice, the fallen n.o.ble of rehabilitated castles, the peasant of freedom and liberty. Even the solemn monk, tossing on his pallet, pierced with his gaze the grey walls of his monastery, annihilated the s.p.a.ce between him and the fruitful wilderness, and saw in fancy the building of great cities and cathedrals and a glittering miter on his own tonsured head.

In that day there was situate in the Rue du Palais, south of the harbor, an inn which was the delight of all those mariners whose palates were still unimpaired by the brine of the seven seas, and whose purses spoke well of the hazards of chance. Erected at the time when Henri II and Diane de Poitiers turned the sober city into one of licentious dalliance, it had cheered the wayfarer during four generations. It was three stories high, constructed of stone, gabled and balconied, with a roof which resembled an a.s.sortment of fanciful noses. Here and there the brown walls were lightened by patches of plaster and sea-cobble; for though the buildings in the Rue du Palais had stood in the shelter of the walls and fortifications, few had been exempt from Monseigneur the Cardinal's iron compliments to the Huguenots.

Swinging on an iron bar which projected from the porticoed entrance, and supported by two grimacing cherubs, once daintily pink, but now verging on rubicundity, a change due either to the vicissitudes of the weather or to the close proximity to the wine-cellars,--was a horn of plenty, the pristine glory of which had also departed. This invitation often excited the stranger's laughter; but the Roch.e.l.lais themselves never laughed at it, for to them it represented a familiar object, which, however incongruous or ridiculous, is always dear to the human heart. At night a green lantern was attached to the horn. At the left of the building was a walled court pierced by a gate which gave entrance to the stables. For not only the jolly mariners found pleasure at the Corne d'Abondance. The wild bloods of the town came thither to riot and play, to junket and carouse. The inn had seen many a mad night, and on the stone flooring lay written many an invisible epitaph.