Breaking the seal, the emperor opened the missive. "It is well," he said at length, folding the parchment. "The king was even on his way to the chateau to await our coming, when he met Caillette and received our communication. Go you to the camp"--to the messenger--"where we shall presently return." And as the man rode away: "The king begs we will continue our journey at our leisure," he added, "and announces he will receive us at the chateau."
"And have I your permission to return to Friedwald, Sire?" asked the other in a low voice.
"Alone?"
"Nay; I would conduct the constable"s daughter there to safety."
"And thus needlessly court Francis" resentment? Not yet."
The young man said no word, but his face hardened.
"Tut!" said the emperor, dryly, although not unkindly. "Where"s fealty now? Fine words; fine words! A slender chit of a maid, forsooth.
Without lands, without dowry; with naught--save herself."
"Is she not enough, Sire?"
"Francis is more easily disarmed in his own castle by his own hospitality than in the battle-field," observed Charles, without replying to this question. "In field have we conquered him; in palace hath he conquered himself, and our friendship. Therefore you and the maid return in our train to the king"s court."
"At your order, Sire."
But the young man"s voice was cold, ominous.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE FAVORITE IS ALARMED
Thus it befell that both Robert of Friedwald and Jacqueline accompanied the emperor to the little town, the scene of their late adventures, and that they who had been fool and joculatrix rode once more through the street they had ne"er expected to see again. The flags were flying; cannon boomed; they advanced beneath wreaths of roses, the way paved with flowers. Standing at the door of his inn, the landlord dropped his jaw in amazement as his glance fell upon the jestress and her companion behind the great emperor himself. His surprise, too, was abruptly voiced by a ragged, wayworn person not far distant in the crowd, whose fingers had been busy about the pockets of his neighbors; fingers which had a deft habit of working by themselves, while his eyes were bent elsewhere and his lips joined in the general acclaim; fingers which like antennas seemed to have a special intelligence of their own.
Now those long weapons of abstraction and appropriation ceased their deft work; he became all eyes.
"Good lack! Who may the n.o.ble gentleman behind the emperor be?" he exclaimed. "Surely "tis the duke"s fool."
"And ride with the emperor?" said a burly citizen at his elbow. ""Tis thou who art the fool."
"Truly I think so," answered the other. "I see; believe; but may not understand."
At that moment the duke"s gaze in pa.s.sing chanced to rest upon the pinched and over-curious face of the scamp-student; a gleam of recollection shone in his glance. "_Gladius gemmatus!_" cried the scholar, and a smile on the n.o.ble"s countenance told him he had heard.
Turning the problem in his mind, the vagrant-philosopher forgot about pilfering and the procession itself, when a soldier touched him roughly on the shoulder.
"Are you the scamp-student?" said the trooper.
"Now they"ll hang me with these spoils in my pockets," thought the scholar. But as bravely as might be, he replied: "The former I am; the latter I would be."
"Then the Duke of Friedwald sent me to give you this purse," remarked the man, suiting the action to the word. "He bade me say "tis to take the place of a bit of silver you once did not earn." And the trooper vanished.
"Well-a-day!" commented the burly citizen, regarding the gold pieces and the philosopher in wonderment of his own. "You may be a fool, but you must be an honest knave."
At the chateau the meeting between the two monarchs was unreservedly cordial on both sides. They spoke with satisfaction of the peace now existing between them and of other matters social and political. The emperor deplored deeply the untimely demise of Francis" son, Charles, who had caught the infection of plague while sleeping at Abbeville.
Later the misalliance of the princess was cautiously touched upon.
That lady, said Francis gravely, to whom the gaieties of the court at the present time could not fail to be distasteful, had left the chateau immediately upon her return. Ever of a devout mind, she had repaired to a convent and announced her intention of devoting herself, and her not inconsiderable fortune, to a higher and more spiritual life.
Charles, who at that period of his lofty estates himself hesitated between the monastery and the court, applauded her resolution, to which the king perfunctorily and but half-heartedly responded.
Shortly after, the emperor, fatigued by his journey, begged leave to retire to his apartments, whither he went, accompanied by his "brother of France" and followed by his attendants. At the door Francis, with many expressions of good will, took leave of his royal guest for the time being, and, turning, encountered the Duke of Friedwald.
Francis, himself once accustomed to a.s.sume the disguise of an archer of the royal guard the better to pursue his love follies among the people, now gazed curiously upon one who had befooled the entire court.
"You took your departure, my Lord," said the king, quietly, "without waiting for the order of your going."
"He who enacts the fool, your Majesty, without patent to office must needs have good legs," replied the young man. "Else will he have his fingers burnt."
"Only his fingers?" returned the monarch with a smile, somewhat sardonic.
"Truly," thought the other, as Francis strode away, "the king regrets the fool"s escape from Notre Dame and the f.a.gots."
During the next day Charles called first for his leech and then for a priest, but whether the former or the latter, or both, temporarily a.s.suaged the restlessness of mortal disease, that night he was enabled to be present at the character dances given in his honor by the ladies of the court in the great gallery of the chateau.
At a signal from the cornet, gitterns, violas and pipes began to play, and Francis and his august guest, accompanied by Queen Eleanor, and the emperor"s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, entered the hall, followed by the dauphin and Catharine de Medici, Diane de Poitiers, the d.u.c.h.esse d"Etampes; marshal, chancellor and others of the king"s friends and counselors; courtiers, poets, jesters, philosophers; a goodly company, such as few monarchs could summon at their beck and call. Charles" eye lighted; even his austere nature momentarily kindled amid that brilliant spectacle; Francis" palace of pleasure was an intoxicating antidote to spleen or hypochondria. And when the court ladies, in a dazzling band, appeared in the dance, led by the d.u.c.h.esse d"Etampes, he openly expressed his approval.
"Ah, Madam," he said to the Queen of Navarre, "there is little of the monastery about our good brother"s court."
"Did your Majesty expect we should cloister you?" she answered, with a lively glance.
He gazed meditatively upon the "Rose of Valois," or the "Pearl of the Valois," as she was sometimes called; then a shadow fell upon him; the futility of ambition; the emptiness of pleasure. In scanty attire, the d.u.c.h.esse d"Etampes, with the king, flashed before him; the former, all beauty, all grace, her little feet trampling down care, so lightly.
Somberly he watched her, and sighed. Mentally he compared himself to Francis; they had traveled the road of life together, discarding their youth at the same turn of the highway; yet here was his French brother, indefatigable in the pursuit of merriment, while his own soul sang _miserere_ to the tune of Francis" fiddles. Yet, had he overheard the conversation of the favorite and the king, the emperor"s moodiness would not, perhaps, have been unmixed with a stronger feeling.
"Sire," the d.u.c.h.ess was saying in her most persuasive manner, "while you have Charles--once your keeper--in your power, here in the chateau, you will surely punish him for the past and avenge yourself? You will make him revoke the treaty of Madrid, or shut him up in one of Louis XI"s...o...b..iettes?"
"I will persuade him if I can," replied the king coldly, "but never force him. My honor, Madam, is dearer to me than my interests."
The favorite said no more of a cherished project, knowing Francis"
temper and his stubbornness when crossed. She merely shrugged her white shoulders and watched him closely. The monarch had not scrupled once to break his covenant with Charles, holding that treaties made under duress, by _force majeure_, were legally void, while now-- But the king was composed of contradictions, or--was her own influence waning?
She had observed a new expression cross his countenance when in the retinue of the emperor he had noted the daughter of the constable; such a tenderness as she remembered at Bayonne when the king had looked upon her, the d.u.c.h.ess, for the first time. When she next spoke her words were the outcome of this train of thought.
"To think the jestress, Jacqueline, should turn out the daughter of that traitor, the Constable of Dubrois," she observed, keenly.
"A traitor, certainly," said Francis, "but also a brave man. Perhaps we pressed him too hard," he added retrospectively. "We were young in years and hot-tempered."
"Your Majesty remembers the girl--a dark-browed, bold creature?"
remarked the d.u.c.h.ess, smiling amiably.
"Dark-browed, perhaps, Madam; but I observed nothing bold in her demeanor," answered the king.
"What! a jestress and not bold! A girl who frequented Fools" hall; who ran away from court with the _plaisant_!" She glanced at him mischievously, like a wilful child, but before his frown the smile faded; involuntarily she clenched her hands.
"Madam," he replied cynically, "I have always noticed that women are poor judges of their own s.e.x."