The Grey Cloak, Harold MacGrath [smart books to read TXT] 📗

favor!"

The roisterers filled their glasses. "To Paris, Chevalier, to court!"

"To the beautiful unknown," whispered the poet into his friend's ear.

"Thanks, Messieurs," said the Chevalier. "Paris!" and a thousand flashes of candle-light darted from the brimming glasses.

The scene was not without its picturesqueness. The low crockery shelves of polished mahogany running the length of the room and filled with rare porcelain, costly Italian glass, medieval silver, antique flagons, loving-cups of gold inlaid with amber and garnets; a dazzling array of candlesticks; a fireplace of shining mosaics; the mahogany table littered with broken glass, full and empty bottles, broken pipes, pools of overturned wine, shredded playing cards, cracked dice, and dead candles; somber-toned pictures and rusted armor lining the walls; the brilliant uniforms of the officers from Fort Louis, the laces and satins of the civilians; the flushed faces, some handsome, some sodden, some made hideous by the chisel and mallet of vice: all these produced a scene at once attractive and repelling.

"Vicomte," said the Chevalier, "we are all drunk. Let us see if there be steady hands among us. I make you a wager."

"On what?"

"There are eight candles on your side of the table, eight on mine. I will undertake to snuff mine in less time than it takes you to snuff yours. Say fifty pistoles to make it interesting."

"Done!" said the vicomte.

Perhaps Victor was the soberest man among them, next to the vicomte, who had jestingly been accused of having hollow bones, so marvelous was his capacity for wine and the art of concealing the effects. Several times the poet had crossed the vicomte's glance as it was leveled in the Chevalier's direction. Each time the vicomte's lips had been twisted into a half smile which was not unmixed with pitying contempt. Somehow the poet did not wholly trust the vicomte. Genius has strange instincts. While Victor admired the vicomte's wit, his courage, his recklessness, there was a depth to this man which did not challenge investigation, but rather repelled it. What did that half smile signify? Victor shrugged. Perhaps it was all his imagination. Perhaps it was because he had seen the vicomte look at Madame de Brissac . . . as he himself had often looked. Ah well, love is a thing over which neither man nor woman has control; and perhaps his half-defined antagonism was based upon jealousy. There was some satisfaction to know that the vicomte's head was in no less danger than his own. He brushed aside these thoughts, and centered his interest in the game which was about to begin.

The vicomte drew his sword, and accepted that of Lieutenant de Vandreuil of the fort, while the Chevalier joined to his own the rapier of his poet-friend. Both the vicomte and the Chevalier held enviable reputations as fancy swordsmen. To snuff a candle with a pair of swords held scissorwise is a feat to be accomplished only by an expert. Interest in the sport was always high; and to-night individual wagers as to the outcome sprang up around the table. "Saumaise," said the vicomte, "will you hold the watch?"

"With pleasure, Vicomte," accepting the vicomte's handsome time-piece. "Messieurs, it is now twenty-nine minutes after ten; promptly at thirty I shall give the word, preceding it with a one-two-three. Are you ready?"

The contestants nodded. Several seconds passed, in absolute silence.

"One-two-three-go!"

The Chevalier succeeded in snuffing his candles three seconds sooner than the vicomte. The applause was loud. Breton was directed to go to the cellars and fetch a dozen bottles of white chambertin.

"You would have won, Vicomte," said the Chevalier, "but for a floating wick."

"Your courtesy exceeds everything," returned the vicomte, bowing with drunken exaggeration.

The doors slid back, and Jehan appeared on the threshold.

"Monsieur le Comte," he said, "Monsieur le Marquis, your father, desires to speak to you." Jehan viewed the scene phlegmatically,

"What!" The Chevalier set down his glass. His companions did likewise. "You are jesting, Jehan."

"No, Monsieur. This moment he commanded me to approach you."

"The marquis wishes to speak to me, you say?" The Chevalier looked about him to see how this news affected his friends. They were exchanging blank inquiries. "Tell Monsieur le Marquis that I will be with him presently."

"Now, Monsieur; pardon me, but he wishes to see you now."

"The devil! Messieurs, accept my excuses. My father is old and is doubtless attacked by a sudden chill. I will return immediately."

At the Chevalier's entrance the marquis did not rise; he merely turned his head. The Chevalier approached his chair, frowning.

"Monsieur," said the son, "Jehan has interrupted me to say that you desired to speak to me. Are you ill?"

"Not more than usual," answered the marquis dryly, catching the sarcasm underlying the Chevalier's solicitude. "It is regarding a matter far more serious and important than the state of my health. I am weary, Monsieur le Comte; weary of your dissipations, your carousals, your companions; I am weary of your continued disrespect."

"Monsieur, you never taught me to respect you," quietly, the flush gone from his cheeks.

The marquis nodded toward his wife's portrait, as if to say: "You see, Madame?" To his son he said: "If you can not respect me as your father, at least you might respect my age."

"Ah; honest age is always worthy of respect. But is yours honest, Monsieur? Have you not aged yourself?"

The marquis grew thoughtful at the conflict in view. "Monsieur, when I asked you to marry Mademoiselle de Montbazon, I forgot to say that she was not my daughter, but legally and legitimately the daughter of her father, the Duc de Montbazon."

This curious turn threw the Chevalier into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. The marquis waited patiently.

"I had no such thought. But your suggestion, had it occurred, might naturally have appealed to me. The supposition would not have been unreasonable."

"The lad is a wit!" cried the marquis, in mock admiration.

The Chevalier bowed. "Monsieur, if my presence at your hôtel is not agreeable to you, I will leave at once. It is a small matter where I spend the night, as I return to court to-morrow."

"Ah! And what brought about this good fortune which has returned you to her Majesty's graces?" The marquis never mentioned Mazarin.

"The cause would scarcely interest you, Monsieur," coldly. The roisterers were becoming hilarious once more, and the Chevalier grew restive.

"No, nothing interests me; but one grows weary of wine-bibbers and roisterers, of spendthrifts and sponges."

"Monsieur is old and can not appreciate the natural exuberance of youth."

The marquis fumbled at his lips.

"Surely, Monsieur," went on the Chevalier, the devil of banter in his tones, "surely you are not going to preach me a sermon after having taught me life from your own book?"

"Monsieur, attend to me. You have disappointed me in a hundred ways."

"What! have I not proved an apt scholar? Have I not succeeded in being written in Rochelle as a drunkard and a gamester? Perhaps I have not concerned myself sufficiently with women? Ah well, Monsieur, I am young yet; there is still time to make me totally hateful, not only to others, but to myself."

All these replies, which passed above and below the marquis's guard, pierced the quick; and the marquis, whose impulse had been good, but whose approach to the vital point of discussion was without tact, began to lose patience; and a cold anger awoke in his eyes.

"Monsieur le Comte," he said, rising, "I have summoned you here to discuss not the past, but the future." He was quite as tall as his son, but gaunt and with loosely hanging clothes.

"The future?" said the Chevalier. "Best assured, Monsieur, that you shall have no hand in mine."

"Be not too certain of that," replied the marquis, his lips parting in that chilling smile with which he had formerly greeted opponents on the field of honor. "And, after all, you might have the politeness to remember that I am, whatever else, still your father."

The Chevalier bowed ironically. Had he been less drunk he would have read the warning which lay in his father's eyes, now brilliant with the spirit of conflict. But he rushed on to his doom, as it was written he should. Paris was in his mind, Paris and mademoiselle, whose letter lay warm against his heart. He turned to his mother's portrait, and again bowed, sweeping the floor with the plume of his hat.

"Madame, yours was a fortunate escape. Would that I had gone with you on the journey. Have you a spirit? Well, then, observe me; note the bister about my eyes, the swollen lips, the shaking hand. 'Twas a lesson I learned some years ago from Monsieur le Marquis, your husband, my father. You, Madame, died at my birth, therefore I have known no mother. Am I a drunkard, a wine-bibber, a roisterer by night? Say then, who taught me? Before I became of age my foolish heart was filled with love which must spend itself upon something. I offered this love, filial and respectful, to Monsieur le Marquis. Madame, the bottle was more responsive to this outburst of generous youth than Monsieur le Marquis, to whom I was a living plaything, a clay which he molded as a pastime-too readily, alas! And now, behold! he speaks of respect. It would be droll if it were not sad. True, he gave me gold; but he also taught me how to use this devil-key which unlocks the pathways of the world, wine-cellars and women's hearts. Respect? Has he ever taken me by the hand as natural fathers take their sons, and asked me to be his comrade? Has he ever taught me to rise to heights, to scorn the petty forms and molds of life? Have I not been as the captive eagle, drawn down at every flight? And for this . . . respect? Oh, Madame, scarcely! And often I thought of the happiness of beholding my father depending on me in his old age!"

"You thought that, Monsieur?" interrupted the marquis, his eyes losing some of their metallic hardness. "You thought that?" What irony lay in the taste of this knowledge!

"Monsieur," said the Chevalier with drunken asperity, "permit me to say that you are interrupting a fine apostrophe! . . . And as a culmination, he would have me wed the daughter of your mortal enemy, his mistress! It is some mad dream, Madame; we shall soon awake."

"Even immediately," replied the marquis calmly. The Chevalier had snuffed more than candles this night. He had snuffed also the belated paternal spark of affection which had suddenly kindled in his father's breast. "Your apostrophe, as you are pleased to term the maudlin talk of a drunken fool, is being addressed to my wife."

"Well?" insolently.

"Your mother, while worthy and beautiful, was not sufficiently noble to merit Rubens's brush. It is to be regretted, but I never had a portrait of your mother."

The roisterers burst into song again . . . .