Under the Rose Part 21

"Even if the leaden disk should fall from my lance and leave the point bare?" said the trooper, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Even that!" responded the free baron, hastily.

"_Laissez-aller!_" cried the marshals, giving the signal to begin.

Above, in her white box, the princess turned pale. With bated breath and parted lips, she watched the lines sweep forward, and, like two great waves meeting, collide with a crash. The dust that arose seemed an all-enshrouding mist. Beneath it the figures appeared, vague, undefined, in a maze of uncertainty.

"Oh!" exclaimed Louise, striving to penetrate the cloud; "he is victorious!"

"They have killed him!" said Jacqueline, at the same time staring toward another part of the field.

"Killed him!--what--" began the princess, now rosy with excitement.

"No; he has won," added the maid, in the next breath, as a portion of the obscuring mantle was swept aside.

"Of course! Where are your eyes?" rejoined her mistress triumphantly.

"The duke, is one of the emperor's greatest knights."

"In this case, Madam, it is but natural your sight should be better than my own," half-mockingly returned the maid.

And, in truth, the princess was right, for the king's guest, through overwhelming strength and greater momentum, had lightly plucked from his seat a stalwart adversary. Others of his following failed not in the "attaint," and horses and troopers floundered in the sand. Apart from the duke's victory, two especial incidents, one comic, stood out in the confused picture.

That which partook of the humorous aspect, and was seen and appreciated by all, had for its central figure an unwilling actor, the king's hunchback. Like the famous steed builded by the Greeks, Triboulet's "wooden horse" contained unknown elements of danger, and even while the jester was congratulating himself upon absolute immunity from peril the nag started and quivered. At the flourish of the bra.s.s instruments his ears, that had lain back, were now p.r.i.c.ked forward; he had once, in his palmy, coltish time, been a battle charger, and, perhaps, some memory of those martial days, the waving of plumes and the clashing of arms, reawoke his combative spirit of old. Or, possibly his brute intelligence penetrated the dwarf's knavish pusillanimity, and, changing his tactics that he might still range on the side of perversity, resolved himself from immobility into a rampant agency of motion. Furiously he dashed into the thick of the conflict, and Triboulet, paralyzed with fear and dropping his lance, was borne helplessly onward, execrating the nag and his capricious humor.

Opposed to the hunchback rode Villot, who, upon reaching the dwarf and observing his predicament, good-naturedly turned aside his point, but was unable to avoid striking him with the handle as he rode by. To Triboulet that blow, reechoing in the hollow depths of his steel sh.e.l.l, sounded like the dissolution of the universe, and, not doubting his last moment had come, mechanically he fell to earth, abandoning to its own resources the equine Fate that had served him so ill. Striking the ground, and, still finding consciousness had not deserted him, instinct prompted him to demonstrate that if his armor was too heavy for him to run away in, as the smithy-_valet de chambre_ had significantly affirmed, yet he possessed the undoubted strength and ability to crawl.

Thus, amid the guffaws of the peasantry and the smiles of the n.o.bles, he swiftly scampered from beneath the horses' feet, hurriedly left the scene of strife, and finally reached triumphantly the haven of his tent.

The other incident, witnessed by Jacqueline, was of a more serious nature. As the lines swept together, with the dust rising before, she perceived that the duke's trooper had swerved from his course and was bearing down upon the duke's fool.

"Oh," she whispered to herself, "the master now retaliates on the jester." And held her breath.

Had he, too, observed these sudden perfidious tactics? Apparently.

Yet he seemed not to shun the issue.

"Why does he not turn aside?" thought the maid. "He might yet do it.

A fool and a knight, forsooth!"

But the fool p.r.i.c.ked his horse deeply; it sprang to the struggle madly; crash! like a thunderbolt, steed and rider leaped upon the trooper.

Then it was Jacqueline had murmured: "They have killed him!" not doubting for a moment but that he had sped to destruction.

A second swift glance, and through the veil, less obscure, she saw the jester riding, unharmed, his lance unbroken. Had he escaped, after all? And the trooper? He lay among the trampling horses' feet. She saw him now. How had it all come about? Her mind was bewildered, but in spite of the princess' a.s.sertion to the contrary, her sight seemed unusually clear.

"Good lance, fool!" cried a voice from the king's box.

"The jester rides well," said another. "The knight's lance even pa.s.sed over his head, while the fool's struck fairly with terrific force."

"But why did he select the jester as an adversary?" continued the first speaker.

"Mistakes will happen in the confusion of a _melee_--and he has paid for his error," was the answer. And Jacqueline knew that none would be held accountable for the treacherous a.s.sault.

Now the fool had dismounted and she observed that he was bending over another jester who had been unhorsed. "Why," she murmured to herself in surprise, "Caillette! As good a soldier as a fool. Who among the jesters could have unseated him?"

But her wonderment would have increased, could she have overheard the conversation between the duke's fool and Caillette, as the former lifted the other from the sands and a.s.sisted him to walk, or rather limp, to the jesters' pavilion.

"Did I not tell you to beware of the false duke?" muttered Caillette, not omitting a parenthesis of deceptive groans.

"Ah, if it had only been he, instead," began the fool.

"Why," interrupted the seemingly injured man, "think you to stand up against the boar of Hochfels?"

"I would I might try!" said the other quickly.

"Your success with the trooper has turned your head," laughed Caillette, softly. "One last word. Look to yourself and fear not for me. Mine injuries--which I surmise are internal as they are not visible--will excuse me for the day. Nor shall I tarry at the palace for the physician, but go straight on without bolus, simples or pills, a very Mercury for speed. Danger will I eschew and a pretty maid shall hold me no longer than it takes to give her a kiss in pa.s.sing. Here leave me at the tent. Turn back to the field, or they will suspect.

Trust no one, and--you'll mind it not in a friend, one who would serve you to the end?--forget the princess! Serve her, save her, as you will, but, remember, women are but creatures of the moment. Adieu, _mon ami_!"

And Caillette turned as one in grievous physical pain to an attendant, bidding him speedily remove the armor, while the duke's fool, more deeply stirred than he cared to show, moved again to the lists.

CHAPTER XIII

A CHAPLET FOR THE DUKE

Loud rang encomium and blessing on the king, as the people that night crowded in the rear courtyard around the great tables set in the open air, and groaning beneath viands, nutritious and succulent. What swain or yokel had not a meed of praise for the monarch when he beheld this burden of good cheer, and, at the end of each board, elevated a little and garlanded with roses, a rotund and portly cask of wine, with a spigot projecting hospitably tablewards?

Forgotten were the tax-lists under which the commonalty labored; it was "Hosanna" for Francis, and not a plowman nor tiller of the soil bethought himself that he had fully paid for the snack and sup that night. How could he, having had no one to think for him; for then Rousseau had not lived, Voltaire was unborn, and the most daring approach to lese-majesty had been Rabelais' jocose: "The wearers of the crown and scepter are born under the same constellation as those of cap and bells."

Upon the green, smoking torches illumined the people and the surroundings; beneath a great oven, the bright coals cast a vivid glow far and near. Close to the broad face of a cask--round and large like that of a full-fed host presiding at the head of the board--sat the Franciscan monk, whose gluttonous eye wandered from quail to partridge, thence onward to pastry or pie, with the spigot at the end of the orbit of observation. Nor as it made this comprehensive survey did his glance omit a casual inventory of the robust charms of a bouncing maid on the opposite side of the table. Scattered amid the honest, good-natured visages of the trusting peasants were the pinched adventurers from Paris, the dwellers of that quarter sacred to themselves. Yonder plump, frisky dame seemed like the lamb; the gaunt knave by her side, the wolf.

At length the company could eat no more, although there yet remained a void for drinking, and as the cups went circling and circling, their laughter mingled with the distant strains of music from the great, gorgeously lighted pavilion, where the king and his guests were a.s.sembled to close the tourney fittingly with the celebration of the final event--the awarding of the prize for the day.

"Can you tell me, good sir, to whom the umpires of the field have given their judgment?" said a townsman to his country neighbor.

"Did you not hear the king of arms decide the Duke of Friedwald was the victor?" answered the other.

"A decision of courtesy, perhaps?" insinuated the Parisian.

"Nay; two spears he broke, and overcame three adversaries during the day. Fairly he won the award."

"I wish we might see the presentation," interrupted a maid, pertly, her longing eyes straying to the bright lights afar.

"Presentation!" repeated the countryman. "Did we not witness the sport? A fig for the presentation! Give me the cask and a juicy haunch, with a la.s.s like yourself to dance with after, and the n.o.bles are welcome to the sight of the prize and all the ceremony that goes with it."

Within the king's pavilion, the spectacle alluded to, regretfully by the girl and indifferently by the man, was at that moment being enacted. Upon a throne of honor, the lady of the tournament, attended by two maids, looked down on a brilliant a.s.semblage, through which now approached the king and the princess' betrothed. The latter seemed somewhat thoughtful; his eye had but encountered that of the duke's fool, whose gaze expressed a disdainful confidence the other fain would have fathomed. But for that unfortunate meeting in the lists which had sealed the lips of the only person who had divined the hidden danger, the free baron would now have been master of the _plaisant's_ designs.

Above, in the palace, the trooper with the red mustaches lay on his couch unconscious.

For how long? The court physician could not say. The soldier might remain insensible for hours. Thus had the jester served himself with that stroke better than he knew, and he of Hochfels bit his lip and fumed inwardly, but to no purpose. Not that he believed the peril to be great, but the fact he could not grasp it goaded him, and he cursed the trooper for a dolt and a poltroon that a mere fool should have vanquished him. And so he had left him, with a last look of disgust at the silent lips that could not do his bidding, and had proceeded to the royal pavilion, where the final act of the day's drama--more momentous than the king or other spectators realized--was to be performed; an act in which he would have appeared with much complacency, but that his chagrin preyed somewhat on his vanity.