Part 10

French Yolande was less politic. Perhaps she had hoped to hold the King's fancy more surely than her fellows. She, too, winged her compliment, but she barbed it with a question.

"Who is the happiest she in all the world?" she asked. "Whom does the King's pleasure consecrate to-night?"

Robert smiled enigmatically, teasing her with his eyes, teasing her with his fan. All the women leaned forward their heads, hoping for an answer. Robert let his gaze travel over their eager faces and laughed aloud, mockingly.

"Sweet creatures of prey, I will not tell you this secret, for if you knew you would make an end of her between you, and very surely I would have her live to see another sunrise. To-morrow, who knows, I may care no more, and then you may make common cause against her."

He yawned slightly behind the fan, and then made a little gesture of dismissal, which sent the three women scurrying back from his immediate presence to the places they had quitted in the courtly ranks. His eyes, quietly indifferent, travelled over the body of Church dignitaries, waiting patiently till he should be pleased to tire of women's talk and turn to them; his gaze rested with no show of interest upon the gray church and the great effigy of the archangel. He beckoned Hildebrand to his side.

"Is this the goal of our generosity?" he asked, pointing disdainfully with the fan to the sacred house. Hildebrand answered with deferential familiarity.

"This is the church of St. Michael, sire. Your amiable father set it here in the tenth year of your life."

"Yes, yes, I have heard the story," Robert said, again checking a desire to yawn. "My excellent parent, fretting over some childish sickness that presumed upon our person, vowed to build this shrine to his patron saint if I recovered. As if such men as I ever died in childhood!"

Hildebrand agreed, obsequiously. "May the King live forever," he murmured. Robert surveyed the church again with cold disfavor.

"Whoever wrought that image, wrought it well," he said. "It is pity to think of so much skill and so much good metal going to the composition of a mere saint that might have moulded me a Venus."

Hildebrand raised his hands in pitying protestation against the folly of the late King.

"Your royal father was something weak of wit," he sneered. Robert sighed commiseratingly.

"Poor man, he meant well," he condescended. "Measured by our standard he must needs seem puny--as, indeed, what king of them all, Christian or Pagan, would not?" His manner so far had been in agreement with his supple companion, but suddenly a change came over his temper, and he turned on Hildebrand a frown so coldly menacing that the favorite recoiled in surprise and alarm.

"Still, he had the honor to beget me," he added. "So you will do well not to speak lightly of him, my good Hildebrand."

The embarrassed favorite tried to recover his ground and his composure.

"Sire, you are always right," he stammered. "The tree from which so royal a rose sprang--"

Robert, having enjoyed his friend's discomfiture, was now weary of it, and interrupted his apologies with a raised hand.

"Enough," he said, and, turning from Hildebrand in the direction of the group of ecclesiastics, he deigned for the first time to regard them as if they really existed and were not mere gorgeous puppets set up there as portion of the pageant of his pride. The archbishop of Syracuse and his fellows had waited in their splendid vestments as patiently for any sign of the King's favor as any light lady of the court, and this slight show of it served to stir them into delighted animation.

Few in that synod of slaves had served the Church in the days of Robert the Good. In his six-weeks' reign, Robert the Bad had worked wonders, and now his armies, civil and ecclesiastic, were generalled by his servants imported from Naples. Such soldiers, such churchmen as had offered opposition to his imperious humors had been either banished or imprisoned, or at the best flung from their offices without reward or appeal, and the young Prince had both sword and crozier at his absolute command, for it pleased Robert's fancy to proclaim himself religious as well as military head of the state, to whom the proudest of prelates was no more and no less a pawn than a captain of the guard.

Contempt smiled in the eyes of the King and on his lips as he saw the new-made archbishop of Syracuse move eagerly forward in response to the disdainful gesture which told him that the King remembered his existence. He was followed by two priests who bore between them on a stand of ebony a magnificent reliquary, a masterpiece of Byzantine handicraft, its gold and jewels glowing like the fires of fairyland in the mellow evening sunlight.

"Sire," said the archbishop, "this is your princely gift to this poor temple; this is the reliquary, fashioned by the most cunning artificers of your realms, rich in outward seeming, richer still in holding in its core the precious relics of a saint."

Robert looked at the reliquary with sufficient attention to assure himself that it was as magnificent an offering as his pride could desire.

"It is a pleasing piece of work," he said. "Look at it, ladies fair; there be jewels here as bright as your eyes, as red as your lips. Truly, I shall be famous for my piety."

He turned with a little shrill laugh of satisfaction to the three women, who in obedience to the invitation of his speech had come near him and were gazing in greedy admiration at the precious vessel.

"It would have made me a rare jewel-box," Messalinda sighed.

"I would have made it a casket for love-songs," Faustina muttered.

Yolande, eager to be quickest in saying something that should please the King, looked up reverentially at Robert.

"Some day, sire," she said, "your precious bones will be so shrined and worshipped."