Part 39

"Who am I, then?"

"The cure of St. Germain."

He made a wry face. "Come, Grand Master," he said; "he died yesterday. Is not the jest rather grim?"

"In a good cause," I said equably.

He flashed a roguish look at me. "Ah!" he said, "I thought that that was a wicked rule which only we Romanists avowed. But, there; don't be angry. I am ready."

Coquet, the Master of the Household, let us out by one of the river gates, and we went by the new bridge and the Pont St. Michel. By the way I taught the King the role I wished him to play, but without explaining the mystery; the opportune appearance of one of my agents who was watching the end of the street bringing Henry's remonstrances to a close.

"It is still open?" I said.

"Yes, your excellency."

"Then come, sire," I said, "I see the boy yonder. Let us ascend, and I will undertake that before you reach the street again you shall be not only a wiser but a richer sovereign."

"St. Gris!" he answered with alacrity. "Why did you not say that before, and I should have asked no questions. On, on, in God's name, and the devil take Pimentel!"

I restrained the caustic jest that rose to my lips, and we proceeded in silence down the street. The boy, whom I had espied loitering in a doorway a little way ahead, as if the great bell above us which had just tolled eleven had drawn him out, peered at us a moment askance; and then, coming forward, accosted us. But I need not detail the particulars of a conversation which was almost word for word the same as that which had passed in the Rue de la Pourpointerie; suffice it that he made the same request with the same frank audacity, and that, granting it, we were in a moment following hint up a similar staircase.

"This way, messieurs, this way!" he said; as he had on that other night, while we groped our way upwards in the dark. He opened a door, and a light shone out; and we entered a room that seemed, with its bare walls and rafters, its scanty stool and table and lamp, the very counterpart of that other room. In one wall appeared the dingy curtains of an alcove, closely drawn; and the shutter stood open, until, at the child's request, expressed in the same words, I went to it and closed it.

We were both so well muffled up and disguised, and the light of the lamp shining upwards so completely distorted the features, that I had no fear of recognition, unless the King's voice betrayed him. But when he spoke, breaking the oppressive silence of the room, his tone was as strange and hollow as I could wish.

"The shutter is closed," he said; "but the shutter of God's mercy is never closed!"

Still, knowing that this was the crucial moment, and that we should be detected now if at all, I found it; an age before the voice behind the curtains answered "Amen!" and yet another age before the hidden speaker continued "Who are you?"

"The cure of St. Germain," Henry responded.

The man behind the curtains gasped, and they were for a moment violently agitated, as if a hand seized them and let them go again. But I had reckoned that the unknown, after a pause of horror, would suppose that he had heard amiss and continue his usual catechism. And so it proved. In a voice that shook a little, he asked, "Whom do you bring to me?"

"A sinner," the King answered.

"What has he done?"

"He will tell you."

"I am listening," the unknown said.

The light in the basin flared up a little, casting dark shadows on the ceiling, and at the same moment the shutter, which I had failed to fasten securely, fell open with a grinding sound. One of the curtains swayed a little in the breeze, "I have robbed my master," I said, slowly.

"Of how much?"

"A hundred and twenty thousand crowns."

The bed shook until the boards creaked under it; but this time no hand grasped the curtains. Instead, a strained voice--thick and coarse, yet differing from that muffled tone which we had heard before--asked, "Who are you?"

"Jules Fauchet."

I waited. The King, who understood nothing but had listened to my answers with eager attention, and marked no less closely the agitation which they caused in the unknown, leant forward to listen. But the bed creaked no more; the curtain hung still; even the voice, which at last issued from the curtains, was no more like the ordinary accents of a man than are those which he utters in the paroxysms of epilepsy. "Are you--sorry?" the unknown muttered--involuntarily, I think; hoping against hope; not daring to depart from a formula which had become second nature. But I could fancy him clawing, as he spoke, at his choking throat.

France, however, had suffered too long at the hands of that race of men, and I had been too lately vilified by them to feel much pity; and for answer I lifted a voice that to the quailing wretch must have been the voice of doom. "Sorry?" I said grimly. "I must be--or hang! For to-morrow the King examines his books, and the next day I--hang!"