_ CHAPTER XVII. STEPHEN LA MOTHE ASKS THE WRONG QUESTION
Only the very foolish or the very weak man seeks to hide from his own soul the full, naked, unpalatable truth about himself. The fool follows the principle which governs the libel upon the intelligence of the ostrich, and vainly tries to persuade himself that what he does not see does not exist, while the weak man dares not open the doors of the cupboard hidden in every life for shivering terror of the secrets he knows are there. Wiser wickedness deliberately airs his skeleton now and then, and thereby the grisly presence grows less grisly, and the hollow rattle of the bones less threatening. The articulation remains the same, but the tone, so to speak, is more subdued.
And Stephen La Mothe, being neither a fool nor altogether weak, was not afraid to admit to himself that Commines' angry contempt had described the day-by-day life at Amboise with sufficient accuracy, at least so far as the Dauphin and Ursula de Vesc were concerned. The bitter fling at his friendship for Villon did not trouble him. It was simply the high light added to the picture to bring out its general truth.
Yes, he had played games of make-believe with the boy, such as Louis had spoken of half in tolerance and half with the vexation of a clever father who resents that his only son is not as clever as himself. He had--no, he had not philandered in the rose garden. The associations of the word stirred him to revolt. Dairy-maids might philander, kitchen wenches and such-like common flesh might philander, but never Ursula of the grey eyes, Ursula of the tender, firm mouth. Ursula philander? Never! never! The thought was desecration. What was it Louis had said? All women are the same under the skin. It was a cynic's lie, and Louis had never known Ursula de Vesc.
Lifting a lute he touched the strings lightly. He was in one of the smaller rooms of the Chateau, one the girl used more, almost, than any other, and little suggestions of her were scattered about it. On a bench was a piece of woman's work with the threaded needle pushed through the stuff as when she laid it aside, flowers she had gathered were on the table, the portiere masking the door was her embroidery. Perhaps all these forced an association of ideas. Picking the strings out one by one half unconsciously, the air of the love song followed the shift of the hand, and equally unconsciously his voice took up the rhythm, first in an undertone, then louder and louder:
"Heigh-ho! Love is my sun,
Love is my moon and the stars by night.
Heigh-ho! hour there is none,
Love of my heart, but thou art my light;
Never forsaking,
Noon or day-breaking,
Midnights of sorrow thy comforts make bright.
Heigh-ho! Love is my life,
Live I in loving and love I to live:
Heigh-ho!----"
"Monsieur La Mothe, Monsieur La Mothe, have you deceived us all these days?"
Down went the lute with a clang which jarred its every string into discord, and La Mothe sprang to his feet.
"Deceived you, mademoiselle! How?"
"That first night--I do not like to remember it even now, but Monsieur Villon told us you were both poet and singer, but you denied it. And now I hear you singing----"
"Not singing, mademoiselle."
"Singing," she persisted, with a pretty emphasis which La Mothe found very pleasant. "We shall have a new play to-night. A Court of High Justice, and Monsieur La Mothe arraigned for defrauding Amboise of a pleasure these ten days. I shall prosecute, Charles must be judge, and your sentence will be to sing every song you know."
"Then I shall escape lightly; I know so few."
"There! You have confessed, and your punishment must begin at once. Villon was right: Amboise is dull; sing for me, Monsieur La Mothe."
"But," protested La Mothe, "Villon was wrong as well as right in what he told you that night."
"What? A minstrel who wanders France with his knapsack and his lute and yet cannot sing?" If the raillery yet remained in the gay voice, it was a raillery which shifted its significance from pleasant badinage to something deeper, and the tender mouth which La Mothe was so sure could never lend itself to philandering lost its tenderness. More than once he had caught just such expression when the perilous ground of the relationships between father and son had been trodden upon in an attempt to justify the King. Then it had been impersonal, now he was reminded of his first night in Amboise, when her cold suspicion had been frankly unveiled. But the hardening of the face was only for a moment. "Truly, now," she went on, "have you never made verses?"
"Very bad ones, mademoiselle."
"A poet tells the truth! The skies will fall! But perhaps it is not the truth; perhaps you are as unjust to your verses as you are to your singing." Seating herself in a low chair, she looked up at him with a dangerous but unconscious kindness in her eyes. "Now sit there in that window-seat and let me judge. With the sun behind you you will look like Apollo with his lyre. No, not Apollo. Apollo was the sun itself. Why are men so much more difficult to duplicate in simile than women?"
"Not all women. I know one for whom there is no duplicate."
"A poet's divine imagination!"
"A man's reverent thankfulness."
The grey eyes kindled, and as the unconscious kindliness grew yet more kindly La Mothe told himself he had surely advanced a siege trench towards the defences. As to Ursula, she could not have told why these last days had been the pleasantest of her life, and would have indignantly denied that Stephen La Mothe was in any way the cause. Women do not admit such truths as openly as men, not even to themselves. But Amboise was no longer dull, the rose garden no longer a mere relief from the greyness of the hours spent behind the grim walls which circled it. The sunshine was the same, the budding flowers were the same, the glorious shift from winter to summer, but they were the same with a difference, a difference she never paused to analyze. Spring--the spring of her life--had come upon her unawares.
But a more acknowledged element in the pleasant comfort of these days had been a sense of support. One of the most corroding sorrows of life is to be lonely, alienated from sympathy and guidance, and in Amboise Ursula de Vesc had been very solitary. La Follette was politic, cautiously non-committal; Hugues of a class apart; Commines an avowed opponent; Charles too young for companionship; Villon a contempt, and at times a loathing. Into this solitariness had come Stephen La Mothe, and the very reaction from acute suspicion had drawn her towards him. Repentance for an unmerited blame is much nearer akin to love than any depths of pity. Then to repentance was added gratitude, to gratitude admiration, and to all three propinquity. Blessed be propinquity! If Hymen ever raises an altar to his most devoted hand-maid it will be to the dear goddess Propinquity! Yes! these days had been very pleasant days.
But an unfailing charm in a charming woman is that one can never tell what she will do next. Though the grey eyes kindled and the kindliness in them grew yet more kindly, though the soft embroideries in the delicate lawn were ruffled by a quicker breath, the natural perversity of her sex must needs answer perversely, and Ursula de Vesc blew up his siege trench with a bombshell.
"Monsieur La Mothe, were you ever at Valmy?"
"Yes, mademoiselle." There was no shadow of hesitation in the reply, though the abrupt change of subject was as startling as the question itself.
"Of course. Music opens all doors. Monsieur La Mothe, I congratulate you."
"That having been in Valmy I am now in Amboise?"
"Upon better than that. Some day I may tell you."
"But this is the best possible, and I congratulate myself. No! Good as this is, there is a better than the best! Mademoiselle----"
"But you sing as well as make verses, do you not--you, whose music opened the gates even of Valmy? Indeed, I heard you just now. You are another Orpheus, and Valmy a very similar interior. You don't like me to say so? Very well, my lute is in your hand, and I am waiting. Did they teach you in Poitou to keep ladies waiting?"
"Poitou?" repeated La Mothe; "but I never said I had been in Poitou."
"Oh! but as a minstrel you wander everywhere, or--what was it?--as a poor gentleman seeing France, and so to Poitou. Anjou, Guienne, anywhere would do as well--except Flanders, where Monsieur de Commines comes from, and where I wish Monsieur de Commines had remained," she added.
"You dislike Monsieur de Commines? Mademoiselle, if you knew him better; how I wish you did. There was once a friendless boy--"
"Is this another fairy tale?" Though she interrupted him with so little ceremony, there was no asperity in the voice. It was as if she said, "Even good women have their limitations. I may forgive Philip de Commines, but you cannot expect me to praise him."
"As true a story as the other."
"And you believe in that other?"
"With all my heart."
"Then why does the father not show himself fatherly?"
"Is it not the part of the son to say, 'Father, I have sinned'?"
"I see," she said, some of the old bitterness creeping into her tone, "the prodigal of twelve years old who is rioting in Amboise--you see how he riots--should ask forgiveness," and as she spoke Stephen La Mothe, with a sudden sense of chill, remembered that other prodigal of twelve years old who was hung on the Valmy gallows that the roads of France might be safe. If Commines was right, the parallel was complete--horribly complete. But she gave him no time to dwell upon the coincidence. "You put a heavy charge upon me," she went on, the furrows deepening on her forehead. "Would to God I could see what is best, what is right. I must think. I must think. Play to me, Monsieur La Mothe, but not too loudly, and do not call me rude if I do not listen. I know that must sound strange, but at times music helps me to think. Is it not so with you?"
The question was apologetic, and as such La Mothe understood it. He understood, too, the straits in which she found herself. So powerful was her influence over Charles, the boy would certainly act on her advice. Her knowledge of Stephen La Mothe was greater than he supposed. If he was right, and she held her peace, this breach between father and son would not only remain unhealed but would be widened by Louis' natural resentment at the rejection of his covert overtures; but if La Mothe was mistaken she knew the old King well enough to be certain that he would use the boy's unwelcome advances against him in some cunning fashion. Which way lay wisdom? Or, as she had put it--raising the question to a higher plane--which was the right?
"If you please," she said imperiously. "Yes, I mean it. Play David to the evil spirit of my doubt," and with a laugh to cover his sense of embarrassment La Mothe obeyed, touching the instrument very softly.
But she could not have told whether he played a drinking-song or a Miserere. With her, as with many, the quiet rhythm of the music stimulated thought, and gradually the perplexity cleared from her mind. Stephen La Mothe was not a fool, that counted for much. He was honest, that counted for much more. The King was notoriously ailing and, being superstitious, might well repent; no high motive, but a probable one. Philip de Commines' visit to Amboise was not by chance, and nothing less than his master's orders would have kept him so long from Valmy. If Stephen La Mothe was right, then these orders must surely have a connection with the King's changed disposition towards the Dauphin. She would watch Commines, doing nothing hastily, and by his actions would shape her course.
With the relaxation from concentrated thought the swing of the music's rise and fall caught her ear. It was a ballad air, and new to her. Shifting her chair, she looked up at La Mothe as he bent over his instrument. Streaming through the windows behind him the cunning sunshine lit the brown of his hair to a red-gold. She had never seen just such a colour in a man, and the Apollo simile was not so unapt.
"Sing," she said suddenly, and again La Mothe obeyed, catching up the air almost unconsciously.
"Lilies White and Roses Red,
Gracious sweetness past compare,
Beauty's self to thee hath fled,
Lilies White and Roses Red:
Lover's service bows its head,
Awed by witchery so fair,
Lilies White and Roses Red,
Gracious sweetness past compare."
"Are they your own verses?"
"No, I wish they were. I only think them."
Their eyes met for a moment, then she looked aside and there was silence. Her thoughts, or that brief glance--Apollo was a god, good to look upon--had so warmed her cheeks that the refrain of the Triolet was almost justified. The lines of anxious care were smoothed from the forehead, and the half-smile of the new-drawn Cupid's bow was a little tremulous. A sudden determination moved La Mothe. Never had he seen her so gracious, so womanly, so completely the one sweet woman in all the world. Pushing the lute aside, he leaned forward.
"Mademoiselle," he began earnestly, "do you remember ten days ago I said there was a question I would dare to ask you when you knew me better?"
"I remember," she said, turning a little from him that the light might not fall upon her face to betray her. She said she remembered, but the truth was that in the tumult of her thoughts the recollection was vague. "Yes, I think I know you better."
"It is a very bold question, and one which might well offend. And yet you know I would not willingly offend you?"
"Yes, I am sure of that." The rustling of the lawn and laces on her breast was a little more tempestuous, but the voice was very level, very quiet. As to Stephen La Mothe, he felt that earth and sun and stars had disappeared and they two alone were left out of all the world.
"So bold, so presumptuous," he went on, "that it is hard to find words at all. But you forgive me in advance?"
At that she smiled a little. She did not think there would be much need for pardon. Was there any question Apollo--Stephen La Mothe, that is--might not ask? She knew now why these ten days had been the happiest of her life.
"Yes, Monsieur La Mothe, you are forgiven beforehand."
"Then--is there any plot in Amboise against the King? From you a simple 'no' is enough. I ask no proof, a simple word, nothing more."
Unconsciously he had forced a pleading into his voice, an urging, as if it was not so much the truth he sought as a denial at all costs; but as she turned in her chair, rising as she turned so that she looked down upon him, he broke off. It would have taken a much bolder man than Stephen La Mothe to have maintained his covert accusation--and what else was it?--in the face of the angry surprise which needed no expression in words.
"Was that your question? You have spied upon us all these days--suspected us--accused us in your thoughts? You have pretended friendship, devotion--God knows what monstrous lie--and all the while you spied--spied. But you shall have your answer in your single word. No, Monsieur La Mothe; such women as I am do not plot against their King, nor teach sons to revolt against their fathers."
"Mademoiselle----" he began.
But not even the scornful indignation vouchsafed him a second glance as she swept past him without a word. At the door she paused and, half turning, looked back across her shoulder, a spot of scarlet on either cheek.
"I had forgotten my message. I had already told Jean Saxe, in case I failed to find you. The Dauphin bids you join him at the Burnt Mill at three o'clock; but if it were not that the Dauphin's word is a command, even to you I would say be otherwise engaged, Monsieur La Mothe, since I must be of the party."
"But, Mademoiselle----"
He spoke to an empty room, and if Ursula de Vesc closed the door between them with a greater vigour than the politeness strict deportment demanded she may surely be excused. It may be that even the angels lose their tempers at times over the follies of a blind humanity.
As to Stephen La Mothe, he stood staring at the closed door as if he were not only alone in the room but in the very world itself; or, rather, as if the world had suddenly dropped from under his feet and the shock bewildered him. She had been so gracious, so very sweet and gracious. He had been forgiven in advance; why such bitter offence? A single word was all he had asked--one little word. Then he flushed all over with a peculiar pricking sensation down the spine. Could it be that she expected a very different question; one whose answer might have been a Yes? If that were so--but it was absurd, and he called himself many hard names for having such an idea a single moment. To have thought such a thought of Ursula de Vesc was as preposterous as saying she would philander in a rose garden. _