Some of those who sat farthest off had risen, and all had drawn together as sheep club at sight of the wolf. One of them answered sullenly that it was.
“You think I intrude, gentlemen?” he returned, smiling pleasantly, drinking in as homage the stir his entrance had caused. For he was vain. “I want only an old friend, M. Michel Berthaud, who is here, I think?”
“And for what do you want him?” the tall dark player answered defiantly; he alone of those present seemed in a degree a match for the new-comer, though even his gloomy eyes fell before Crillon’s easy stare. “For what do you want me?”
“To propose a little game to you,” Crillon answered: and he moved down the room, apparently at his ease. “My friend here has told me of his ill-luck. He is resolved to perform his bargain. But first, M. Berthaud, I have a proposal to make to you. His life is yours. You have won it. Well, I will set you five hundred crowns against it.”
The scowl on Berthaud’s face did not relax. “No,” he said contemptuously. “I will not play with you, M. de Crillon. Let the fool die. What is he to you?”
“Nothing, and yet I have a fancy to win him,” Crillon replied lightly. “Come, I will stake a thousand crowns against him! A thousand crowns for a life! Mon Dieu,” he added, with a whimsical glance at Bazan, “but you are dear, my friend!”
Indeed, half a score of faces shone with cupidity, and twice as many bearded lips watered. A thousand crowns! A whole thousand crowns! But to the surprise of most — a few knew their man — Berthaud shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I will not play! I won his life, and I will have it.”
“Fifteen hundred crowns. I will set that! Fifteen — —”
“No!”
“Two thousand, then! Two thousand, man! And I will throw in my chain. It is worth five hundred more.”
“No! No! No!”
“Then, say what you will play for!” the great man roared, his face swelling with rage. “Thousand devils and all tonsured! I have a mind to win his life. What will you have against it?”
“Against it?”
“Ay!”
“Yours!” said M. Berthaud, very softly.
Bazan drew in his breath — sharply: otherwise the silence was so intense that the fall of the wood-ashes from the dying fire could be heard. The immense, the boundless audacity of the proposal made some smile and some start. But none smiled so grimly as M. Michel Berthaud the challenger and none started so little as M. de Crillon, the challenged.
“A high bid!” he said, lifting his chin with something almost of humour; and then glancing round him, as a wolf might glance, if the sheep turned on him. “You ask much, M. Berthaud.”
“I will ask less then,” replied Berthaud, with irony. “If I win, I will give you his life. He shall go free whether you win or lose, M. de Crillon.”
“That is much!” with answering irony.
“Much or little — —”
“It is understood?”
“It is,” Berthaud rejoined with a sarcastic bow.
“Then I accept!” Crillon cried: and with a movement so brisk that some recoiled, he sat down at the table. “I accept. Silence!” he continued, turning sharply upon Bazan, whose cry of remonstrance rang above the astonished murmur of the bystanders. “Silence, fool!” He struck the table. “It is my will. Fear nothing! I am Crillon, and I do not lose.”
There was a superb self-confidence in the man, an arrogance, a courage, which more than anything else persuaded his hearers that he was in earnest, that he was not jesting with them.
“The terms are quite understood,” he proceeded, grimly. “If I win, we go free, M. Berthaud. If I lose, M. de Bazan goes free, and I undertake on the honor of a nobleman to kill myself before daylight. Shall I say within six hours? I have affairs to settle!”
Probably no one in the room felt astonishment equal to that of Berthaud. A faint colour tinged his sallow cheeks; a fierce gleam of joy flashed in his eyes. But all he said was, “Yes, I am satisfied.”
“Then throw!” said Crillon, and leaning forward he took a candle from a neighbouring table, and placed it beside him. “My friend,” he added, speaking to Bazan with earnest gravity, “I advise you to be quiet. If you do not we shall quarrel.”
His smile was as easy, his manner as unembarrassed, his voice as steady, as when he had entered the room. The old gamesters who stood round the table, and had seen, with interest indeed and some pity, but with no great emotion, a man play his last stake, saw this, saw a man stake his life for a whim, with very different feelings; with astonishment, with admiration, with a sense of inferiority that did not so much gall their pride as awaken their interest. For the moment, the man who was above death, who risked it for a fancy, a trifle, a momentary gratification, was a demigod. “Throw!” repeated Crillon, heedless and apparently unconscious of the stir round him: “Throw! but beware of that candle! Your sleeve is in it.”
It was; it was singeing. Berthaud moved the candle, and as if his enemy’s sang froid wounded him, he threw savagely, dashing down the dice on the table, and lifting the box with a gesture of defiance. He swore a frightful oath: his face was livid. He had thrown aces only.
“So!” murmured his opponent quietly. “Is that all? A thousand crowns to a hundred that I better that! Five hundred to a hundred that I double it! Will no one take me? Then I throw. Courage, my friend. I am Crillon!”
He threw; an ace and a deuce.
“I waste nothing,” he said.
But few heard the words — his opponent perhaps and one or two others; for from end to end the room rang and the oaken rafters shook with a great cry of “Long live Crillon! the brave Crillon!” — a cry which rose from a score of throats. Then and onwards till the day of his death, many years later, he was known throughout France by no other name. The great king’s letter to him, “Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We have fought to-day, and you were not there!” is not yet forgotten — nay, never will be forgotten — in a land where, more than in other, the memories of the past have been swept away.
He rose from the table, bowing grandly, superbly, arrogantly. “Adieu, M. Berthaud — for the present,” he said; and had he not seemed too proud to threaten, a threat might have underlain his words. “Adieu, gentlemen,” he continued, throwing on his cloak. “A good night to you, and equal fortune. M. de Bazan, I will trouble you to accompany me? You have exchanged, let me tell you, one taskmaster for another.”
The young man’s heart was too full for words, and making no attempt to speak, or to thank his benefactor, before those who had seen the deed, he followed him from the room. Crillon did not speak or halt until they stood in the Rue des Fosses; nor even there, for after a momentary hesitation he passed through it, and led the way to the middle of the open space before the Louvre. Here he stopped, and touched his companion on the breast. “Now,” he said, “we can speak with freedom, my friend. You wish to thank me? Do not. Listen to me instead. I have saved your life, ay, that have I; but I hold it at my will? Say, is it not so? Well, I, too, in my turn wish you to do something for me.”
“Anything!” said the young man, passionately. The sight of the other’s strange daring had stirred his untried nature to its depths. “You have but to ask and have.”
“Very well,” Crillon answered, gravely, “be it so. I take you at your word. Though, mind you, M. de Bazan, ’tis no light thing I ask. It is something,” pausing, “from which I shrink myself.”
“Then it is nothing you ask me to do,” Bazan answered.
“Not so,” the courtier replied, though he looked far from ill-pleased by the compliment. “Listen. To-morrow the king sups at the house of Madame de Sauves. I shall be with him. Her house is in the Rue de l’Arbre Sec, two doors from the convent. Here are a hundred crowns. Dress yourself so that you may appear as one of my gentlemen, and wait near the gates till I come. Then follow me in, and at supper stand behind my chair, as the others of my suite will stand.”
“And is that all?
” Bazan asked in astonishment.
“No, not quite,” Crillon answered dryly. “The rest I will whisper in your ear as I pass. Only do what I bid you boldly and faithfully, my friend, and afterwards, if all be well, I will not forget you.”
“I am yours! Do with me as you will!” Bazan protested.
But to mortals the unknown is ever terrible; and for twenty-four hours Bazan had the unknown before him. What could that be from which Crillon himself said that he shrank — a man so brave? It could not be death, for that he had risked on the lightest, the flimsiest, the most fantastic provocation. Then what could it be? Bazan turned the question in his mind, turned it a hundred times that night, turned it a hundred times as he went about his preparations next day. Turned it and turned it, but instinctively, though no injunctions to that effect had been given him, took care to show himself as little as possible in public, and especially to shun all places where he might meet those who had been present at that strange game at Simon’s.
A quarter before nine on the next evening, saw him waiting with a beating heart outside the house in the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. He formed one of a crowd of lackeys, and linkboys, citizens, apprentices, and chance passers who had been attracted to the spot by the lights and by the guards in the royal livery, who already, though the king was not come, kept the entrance to the courtyard. Bazan pushed himself with some difficulty into the front rank, and there waited, scanning with feverish eagerness every one who entered.
Time passed, and no Crillon appeared, though presently a great shouting along the street proclaimed the approach of the Duke of Guise, and that nobleman passed slowly in, noting with a falcon’s eye the faces of the bowing throng. He was a man of grand height and imperial front — a great scar seeming to make the latter more formidable — his smile a trifle supercilious, his eyes somewhat near one another; and under his glance Bazan felt for the moment small and mean. A little later, from the talk of those about him, the young man learned that the king was drawing near, and Henry’s coach, surrounded by a dozen of the Forty-five, lumbered along the street. It was greeted with comparative coldness, only those who stood under the guards’ eyes performing a careless salute.
Bazan was no Parisian, though for the present in Paris, and no Leaguer, though a Roman Catholic; and he forgot his present errand in the excitement of his rustic loyalty. Raising his bonnet, he cried loudly Vive le Roi! — cried it more than once. There were six in the coach, but Henry, whose pale meagre face with its almond eyes and scanty beard permitted no mistake, remarked the salutation and the giver, and his look cast the young man into a confusion which nearly cost him dearly; for it was only as the guards closed round the coach that he perceived Crillon sitting in the nearer boot. The moment he did see him he pushed forward among the running footmen who followed the coach, and succeeded in entering with it.
The courtyard, crowded with gentlemen, lackeys and torch-bearers, was a scene of great confusion, and Bazan had no difficulty in approaching Crillon and exchanging a sentence with him. That effected, so completely was he confounded by the order whispered in his ear, that he observed nothing more until he found himself in a long gallery, waiting with many others attached to the great men’s suites, while the magnificoes themselves talked together at the upper end. By listening to the gossip round him, he learned that one dark handsome man among the latter was Alphonso d’Ornano, often called the Corsican Captain. A second was M. d’O, the Governor of Paris; a third, the Count of Soissons. But he had scarcely time to note these, or the novel and splendid scene in which he stood, before the double doors at the end of the gallery were thrown widely open, and amid a sudden hush the great courtiers passed into the supper room in which the king, the Duke of Guise, and several ladies, already stood or sat in their places, having entered by another door. Bazan pressed in with the flock of attendant gentlemen, and seeing Crillon preparing to sit down not far from the daïs and canopy which marked the king’s chair, he took his stand against the wall behind him.
If the words which Crillon had dropped into his ear had not occupied three-fourths of his thoughts, Bazan would have felt a keener admiration of the scene before him; which, as was natural, surpassed in luxury anything the country lad had ever imagined. The room, panelled and ceiled with cedar, was hung with blue velvet and lighted by a hundred tapers. The table gleamed with fine napery and gold plate, with Palissy ware and Cellini vases; and these, with the rich dresses and jewels and fair shoulders of the ladies, combined to form a beautiful interior which resounded with the babble of talk and laughter. It was hard to detect danger lurking under these things, under the silk, within the flashing, gleaming cups, behind smiling eyes; still harder to discern below these fair appearances a peril from which a Crillon shrank.
But to Bazan, as he waited with tortured nerves, these things were nothing. They were no more than fair flowers to the man who espies the coils of a snake among the blossoms. Crillon’s whisper had revealed all to him — all, in one brief sentence; so that when he presently recognized Michel Berthaud standing near the upper end of the table and on the farther side of it, in attendance upon the Duke of Guise, he felt no astonishment, but only a shrewd suspicion of the quarter from which the danger might be expected.
The king, a man of thirty-seven, so effeminate in appearance that it was hard to believe he had seen famous fields and once bidden fair to be a great Captain, was nursing a dog on his lap, the while he listened with a weary air to the whispers of the beautiful woman who sat next him. Apparently he had a niggard ear even for her witcheries, and little appetite save for the wine flask. Lassitude lived in his eyes, his long thin fingers trembled. Bazan watched him drain his goblet of wine, almost as soon as he sat down, and watched him, too, hold out the gold cup to be filled again. The task was performed by an assiduous hand, and for a moment the king poised the cup in his fingers, speaking to his neighbour the while. Then he laid it down, but his hand did not quit its neighbourhood.
The next moment the room rang with a cry of alarm and indignation, and every face was turned one way. Bazan with unparalleled audacity had stepped forward, had seized the sacred cup almost from the royal hand, and drained it!
While some sprang from their seats, two or three seized the culprit and held him fast. One more enthusiastic than the others or more keenly sensitive to the outrage of which he had been guilty, aimed a fierce blow at his breast with a poniard. The stroke was well meant, nay, was well directed; but it was adroitly intercepted by M. de Crillon, who had been among the first to rise. With a blow of his sheathed sword he sent the dagger spinning towards the ceiling.
“Back!” he cried, in a voice of thunder, placing himself before the culprit. “Stand back, I say! I will answer to the king for all!”
He cleared a space before him with his scabbard, and a quick signal brought to his side the two guards at the nearest door, who were men of his command. These, crossing their pikes before the prisoner, secured him from immediate attack. By this time all in the room had risen save the king, who appeared less moved than any by the incident. At this point he raised his hand to procure silence.
“Is he mad?” he asked calmly. “What is it, Crillon?”
“I will satisfy your Grace,” the courtier answered. But the next moment, with a sudden change of tone, he cried loudly and rapidly, “Stop that man, I beg you, d’Ornano! Stop him!”
The warning came too late. The Corsican sprang indeed to the door, but the crowd impeded him; and the man to whom Crillon referred — the same who had struck at Bazan, and who was no other than Berthaud — got to it first, slipped out and was gone from sight, before those near the entrance had recovered from their surprise.
“Follow him,” Crillon cried loudly. “Seize him at all hazards! Mort de Dieu! He has outwitted us at last.”
“His Majesty has asked, M. de Crillon,” said one at the table, speaking in the haughty, imperious tone of a man who never spoke unheeded, “what is the meaning of all this? Perhaps you will kindly satis
fy him.”
“I will satisfy him,” Crillon answered, grimly fixing his eyes on the other’s handsome face. “And you, too, M. de Guise. An attempt has been made to poison my master. This young man, observing that a strange hand poured the king’s wine, has saved his Majesty’s life by taking the poison himself!”
Henry of Guise laughed scornfully. “A likely story!” he said.
“And in my house!” Madame de Sauves cried in the same tone. “His Majesty will not believe that I — —”
“I said nothing against Madame de Sauves,” Crillon answered, with firmness. “For the rest, let the king be judge. The issue is simple. If the lad go scatheless, there was no poison in that cup and I am a liar. If he suffer, then let the king say who lies!”
A close observer might have seen an uneasy expression flit across more than one face, darken more than one pair of eyes. Crillon remained on his guard facing the table, his eyes keenly vigilant. The Count of Soissons, one of the younger Bourbons, had already stepped to the king’s side and taken place by his chair, his hand on his hilt. D’Ornano, who had despatched two guards after Berthaud, openly drew his long sword and placed himself on the other side of the daïs. Nor was suspicion confined to their party. Half a dozen gentlemen had risen to their feet about the Duke of Guise, who continued to sit with folded arms, content to smile. He was aware that at the worst here in Paris he was safe; perhaps he was innocent of harm or intent.
The main effect, however, of Crillon’s last words was to draw many eyes, and amongst them the king’s, to the prisoner’s face. Bazan was leaning against the wall, the cup still in his grasp. As they turned with a single movement towards him, his face began to grow a shade paler, a spasm moved his lips, and after the interval of a moment the cup fell from his hand to the ground. Thrusting himself with a convulsive movement from the wall, he put out his hands and groped with them as if he could no longer see; until, one of them meeting the pike of the nearest guard, he tried to support himself by this. At the same time he muttered hoarsely, “M. de Crillon, you saw it! We are — we are quits!”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 795