Under the Red Robe by Stanley John Weyman (positive books to read txt) 📕

It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-east, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be heavy with smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city’s smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south and the prospect of riding day after day and league after league across heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom and the open air, and hope and uncertainty; while I came back under doom, and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate.

For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the hard saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings, and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and Paris I asked myself what honour was, and what good it could do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I were not a fool following a Jack o’ Lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom I was returning would not be the first to gibe at my folly?

However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle’s looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low, And therefore—though not without many a secret struggle and quaking—I came, on the last evening but one of November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the Luxembourg on my way to the Pont au Change.

The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my horse’s hoofs, the first babel of street cries—the first breath, in a word, of Paris—there came a new temptation; to go for one last night to Zaton’s, to see the tables again and the faces of surprise, to be for an hour or two the old Berault. That would be no breach of honour, for in any case I could not reach the Cardinal before to-morrow. And it could do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a thing worth struggling about, indeed; only—only I had in my inmost heart a suspicion that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; and that there even such a talisman as the memory of a woman’s looks and words might lose its virtue.

Still, I think that I should have succumbed in the end if I had not received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which sobered me effectually. As I passed the gates, a coach, followed by two outriders, swept out of the Palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and I reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. By chance as it whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and I saw for a second by the waning light—the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot—a face inside.

A face and no more, and that only for a second. But it froze me. It was Richelieu’s, the Cardinal’s; but not as I had been wont to see it—keen, cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in every feature. This face was contorted with the rage of impatience, was grim with the fever of haste, and the fear of death. The eyes burned under the pale brow, the moustache bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I could fancy the man crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ and gnawing his nails in the impotence of passion; and I shrank back as if I had been struck. The next moment the outriders splashed me, the coach was a hundred paces ahead, and I was left chilled and wondering, foreseeing the worst, and no longer in any mood for Zaton’s.

Such a revelation of such a man was enough to appal me, for a moment conscience cried out that he must have heard that Cocheforet had escaped him, and through me. But I dismissed the idea as soon as formed. In the vast meshes of the Cardinal’s schemes Cocheforet could be only a small fish; and to account for the face in the coach I needed a cataclysm, a catastrophe, a misfortune as far above ordinary mishaps as this man’s intellect rose above the common run of minds.

It was almost dark when I crossed the bridges, and crept despondently to the Rue Savonnerie. After stabling my horse I took my bag and holsters, and climbing the stairs to my old landlord’s—I remember that the place had grown, as it seemed to me, strangely mean and small and ill-smelling in my absence—I knocked at the door. It was promptly opened by the little tailor himself, who threw up his arms and opened his eyes at sight of me.

‘By Saint Genevieve!’ he said, ‘if it is not M. de Berault?’

‘It is,’ I said. It touched me a little, after my lonely journey, to find him so glad to see me; though I had never done him a greater benefit than sometimes to unbend with him and borrow his money. ‘You look surprised, little man!’ I continued, as he made way for me to enter. ‘I’ll be sworn that you have been pawning my goods and letting my room, you knave!’ ‘Never, your Excellency!’ he answered. ‘On the contrary, I have been expecting you.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘To-day?’

‘To-day or to-morrow,’ he answered, following me in and closing the door. ‘The first thing I said when I heard the news this morning was—now we shall have M. de Berault back again. Your Excellency will pardon the children,’ he continued, bobbing round me, as