The boy a.s.sented.
"Who are you, then?"
Jehan opened his mouth to answer, but Father Bernard interposed. "Tell His Majesty," he said, "what you told me."
After a moment"s hesitation the boy complied, speaking fast, with his face on his breast and a flushed cheek. Nevertheless, in the silence every word reached the ear. "I am Jehan de Bault," he pattered in his treble voice, "seigneur of I know not where, and lord of seventeen lordships in the county of Perigord----" and so on, and so on, through the quaint formula to which we have listened more than once.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred who heard him, heard him with incredulous surprise, and took the tale for a mountebank"s patter; though patter, they acknowledged it was of a novel kind, aptly made and well spoken. Two or three of the bolder laughed. There had been little to laugh at before. The king moved restlessly in his chair, saying, "Pish! Wh-hat is this rubbish? What is he s-saying?"
The President frowned, and taking his cue from the king, was about to rebuke the boy sharply, when one who had not before spoken, but whose voice in an instant produced silence among high and low, intervened. "The tale rings true!" the Cardinal said, in low, suave accents. "But there is no family of Bault in Perigord, is there?"
"With His Majesty"s permission, no!" replied a bluff, hearty voice; and therewith the elderly soldier who had come in with the king advanced a pace to the side of his master"s chair. "I am of Perigord, and know, your Eminence," he continued. "More. Two months ago I saw this lad--I recognise him now--at the fair of Fecamp. He was differently dressed then, but he had the same tale, except that he did not mention Perigord."
"S-someone has taught it him," said the king.
"Your Majesty is doubtless right," the President answered obsequiously. Then to the boy he continued, "Speak, boy; who taught it you?"
But Jehan only shook his head and looked puzzled. At last, being pressed, he said, "At Bault, in Perigord."
"There is no such place!" M. de Bresly cried roundly.
Father Bernard looked distressed. He began to repent that he had led the child to tell the tale; he began to fear that it might hurt instead of helping. Perhaps after all he had been too credulous. But again the Cardinal came to the rescue.
"Is there any family in Perigord can boast of three marshals, M. de Bresly?" he asked, in his thin incisive tones.
"None that I know of. Several that can boast of two."
"The blood of Roland?"
M. de Bresly shrugged his shoulders. "It is common to all of us," he said, smiling.
The great Cardinal smiled, too--a flickering, quickly-pa.s.sing smile. Then he leaned forward and fixed the boy with his fierce black eyes. "What was your father"s name?" he said.
Jehan shook his head, impotently, miserably.
"Where did you live?"
The same result. The king threw himself back and muttered, "It is no good." The President moved in his seat. Some in the galleries began to whisper.
But the Cardinal raised his hand imperiously. "Can you read?" he said.
"No," Jehan murmured.
"Then your arms?" The Cardinal spoke rapidly now, and his face was growing hard. "They were over the gate, over the door, over the fireplace. Think--look back--reflect. What were they?"
For a moment. Jehan stared at him in bewilderment, flinching under the gaze of those piercing eyes. Then on a sudden the boy"s face grew crimson. He raised his hand eagerly. "Or, on a mount vert!" he cried impetuously--and stopped. But presently, in a different voice, he added slowly, "It was a tree--on a hill."
With a swift look of triumph the Cardinal turned to M. de Bresly. "Now," he said, "that belongs to----"
The soldier nodded almost sulkily. "It is Madame de Vidoche"s," he said.
"And her name was----"
"Martinbault. Mademoiselle de Martinbault!"
A murmur of astonishment rose from every part of the court. For a moment the King, the Cardinal, the President, M. de Bresly, all were inaudible. The air seemed full of exclamations, questions, answers; it rang with the words, "Bault--Martinbault!" Everywhere people rose to see the boy, or craned forward and slipped with a clattering noise. Etiquette, reverence, even the presence of the king, went for nothing in the rush of excitement. It was long before the ushers could obtain silence, or any get a hearing.
Then M. de Bresly, who looked as much excited as any, and as red in the face, was found to be speaking. "Pardieu, sire, it may be so!" he was heard to say. "It is true enough, as I now remember. A child was lost in that family about eight years back. But it was at the time of the Roch.e.l.le expedition; the province was full of trouble, and M. and Madame de Martinbault were just dead; and little was made of it. All the same, this may be the boy. Nay, it is a thousand to one he is!"
"What is he, then, to M--Madame de V--Vidoche?" the king asked, with an effort. He was vastly excited--for him.
"A brother, sire," M. de Bresly answered.
That word pierced at last through the dulness which wrapped madame"s faculties, and had made her impervious to all that had gone before. She rose slowly, listened, looked at the boy---looked with growing wonder, like one awakening from a dream. Possibly in that moment the later years fell from her, and she saw herself again a child--a tall, lanky girl playing in the garden of the old chateau with a little toddling boy who ran and lisped, beat her st.u.r.dily with fat, bare arms or cuddled to her for kisses. For with a sudden gesture she stretched out her hands, and cried in a clear voice, "Jean! Jean! It is little Jean!"
It became the fashion--a fashion which lasted half a dozen years at least--to call that Christmas the Martinbault Christmas; so loudly did those who were present at that famous examination, and the discovery which attended it, profess that it exceeded all the other amus.e.m.e.nts of the year, not excepting even the great ball at the Palais Cardinal, from which every lady carried off an etrenne worth a year"s pin-money. The story became the rage. Those who had been present drove their friends, who had not been so fortunate, to the verge of madness. From the court the tale spread to the markets. Men made a broadsheet of it, and sold it in the streets--in the Rue Touchet, and under the gallows at Montfaucon, where the body of Solomon Notredame withered in the spring rains. Had Madame de Vidoche and the child stayed in Paris, it must have offended their ears ten times a day.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "A MAN HALF-NAKED ... CRAWLED ON TO THE HIGHROAD" (p. 212).]
But they did not. As soon as madame could be moved, she retired with the boy to the old house four leagues from Perigueux, and there, in the quiet land where the name of Martinbault ranked with the name of the king, she sought to forget her married life. She took her maiden t.i.tle, and in the boy"s breeding, in works of mercy, in a hundred n.o.ble and fitting duties entirely to her taste, succeeded in finding peace, and presently happiness. But one thing neither time, nor change, nor in the event love, could erase from her mind; and that was a deep-seated dread of the great city in which she had suffered so much. She never returned to Paris.
About a year after the trial a man with crafty, foxy eyes came wandering through Perigueux, with a monkey on his shoulder. He saw not far from the road--as his evil-star would have it--an old chateau standing low among trees. The place promised well, and he went to it and began to perform before the servants in the courtyard. Presently the lord of the house, a young boy, came out to see him.
More need not be said, save that an hour later a man, half naked, covered with duckweed, and aching in every bone, crawled on to the highroad, and went on his way in sadness--with his mouth full of curses; and that for years afterwards a monkey, answering to the name of Taras, teased the dogs, and plucked the ivy, and gambolled at will on the great south terrace at Martinbault.
THE END.