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

And now where is he? What have you done with him? He knows much, and the sooner I know it the better. Are your people bringing him, M. de Berault?’

‘No, Monseigneur,’ I stammered, with dry lips. His very good-humour, his benignity, appalled me. I knew how terrible would be the change, how fearful his rage, when I should tell him the truth. And yet that I, Gil de Berault, should tremble before any man! With that thought I spurred myself, as it were, to the task. ‘No, your Eminence,’ I said, with the energy of despair. ‘I have not brought him, because I have set him free.’

‘Because you have—WHAT?’ he exclaimed. He leaned forward as he spoke, his hands on the arm of the chair; and his eyes growing each instant smaller, seemed to read my soul.

‘Because I have let him go,’ I repeated.

‘And why?’ he said, in a voice like the rasping of a file.

‘Because I took him unfairly,’ I answered.

‘Because, Monseigneur, I am a gentleman, and this task should have been given to one who was not. I took him, if you must know,’ I continued impatiently—the fence once crossed I was growing bolder—‘by dogging a woman’s steps and winning her confidence and betraying it. And whatever I have done ill in my life—of which you were good enough to throw something in my teeth when I was last here—I have never done that, and I will not!’

‘And so you set him free?’

‘Yes.’

‘After you had brought him to Auch?’

‘Yes.’

‘And, in point of fact, saved him from falling into the hands of the Commandant at Auch?’

‘Yes,’ I answered desperately to all.

‘Then, what of the trust I placed in you, sirrah?’ he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. ‘You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the trust I placed in you?’

‘The answer is simple,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders with a touch of my old self. ‘I am here to pay the penalty.’

‘And do you think that I do not know why?’ he retorted, striking one hand on the arm of his chair with a force that startled me. ‘Because you have heard, sir, that my power is gone! Because you have heard that I, who was yesterday the King’s right hand, am to-day dried up, withered and paralysed! Because you have heard—but have a care! have a care!’ he continued with extraordinary vehemence, and in a voice like a dog’s snarl. ‘You and those others! Have a care, I say, or you may find yourselves mistaken yet.’

‘As Heaven shall judge me,’ I answered solemnly, ‘that is not true. Until I reached Paris last night I knew nothing of this report. I came here with a single mind, to redeem my honour by placing again in your Eminence’s hands that which you gave me on trust, and here I do place it.’

For a moment he remained in the same attitude, staring at me fixedly. Then his face relaxed somewhat.

‘Be good enough to ring that bell,’ he said.

It stood on a table near me. I rang it, and a velvet-footed man in black came in, and gliding up to the Cardinal, placed a paper in his hand. The Cardinal looked at it; while the man stood with his head obsequiously bent, and my heart beat furiously.

‘Very good,’ his Eminence said, after a pause which seemed to me to be endless, ‘Let the doors be thrown open.’

The man bowed low, and retired behind the screen. I heard a little bell ring somewhere in the silence, and in a moment the Cardinal stood up.

‘Follow me!’ he said, with a strange flash of his keen eyes.

Astonished, I stood aside while he passed to the screen; then I followed him. Outside the first door, which stood open, we found eight or nine persons—pages, a monk, the major-domo, and several guards waiting like mutes. These signed to me to precede them and fell in behind us, and in that order we passed through the first room and the second, where the clerks stood with bent heads to receive us. The last door, the door of the ante-chamber, flew open as we approached, voices cried, ‘Room! Room for his Eminence!’ we passed through two lines of bowing lackeys, and entered—an empty chamber.

The ushers did not know how to look at one another; the lackeys trembled in their shoes. But the Cardinal walked on, apparently unmoved, until he had passed slowly half the length of the chamber. Then he turned himself about, looking first to one side and then to the other, with a low laugh of derision.

‘Father,’ he said in his thin voice, ‘what does the Psalmist say? “I am become like a pelican in the wilderness and like an owl that is in the desert!”’

The monk mumbled assent.

‘And later in the same psalm, is it not written, “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure?”’

‘It is so,’ the father answered. ‘Amen.’

‘Doubtless though, that refers to another life,’ the Cardinal said, with his slow wintry smile. ‘In the meantime we will go back to our books, and serve God and the King in small things if not in great. Come, father, this is no longer a place for us. VANITAS VANITATUM OMNIA VANITAS! We will retire.’

And as solemnly as we had come we marched back through the first and second and third doors until we stood again in the silence of the Cardinal’s chamber—he and I and the velvet-footed man in black. For a while Richelieu seemed to forget me. He stood brooding on the hearth, his eyes on a small fire, which burned there though the weather was warm. Once I heard him laugh, and twice he uttered in a tone of bitter mockery the words,—

‘Fools! Fools! Fools!’

At last he looked up, saw me, and started.

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I had forgotten you. Well, you are fortunate, M. de Berault. Yesterday I had a hundred clients; to-day I have only one, and I cannot afford to hang him. But for your liberty that is another matter.’

I would have said something, pleaded something; but he turned abruptly to the table, and sitting down wrote a few lines on a piece of paper. Then he rang his bell, while I stood waiting and confounded.

The man in black came from behind the screen.

‘Take this letter and that gentleman to the upper guard-room,’ the Cardinal said sharply. ‘I can hear no more,’ he continued, frowning and raising his hand to forbid interruption. ‘The matter is ended, M. de Berault. Be thankful.’

In a moment I