Marguerite de Valois Part 147

"In that case I shall be less uneasy. Now what are your Majesty's commands?"

"Return to your apartments, Henriot, I am in pain. I will see my dogs and then go to bed."

"Sire," said Henry, "your Majesty ought to send for a physician. Your trouble is perhaps more serious than you imagine."

"I have sent for Maitre Ambroise Pare, Henriot."

"Then I shall retire more satisfied."

"Upon my soul," said the King, "I believe that of all my family you are the only one who really loves me."

"Is this indeed your opinion, sire?"

"On the word of a gentleman."

"Then commend me to Monsieur de Nancey as a man your deep anger may not allow to live a month. By this means you will have me many years to love you."

"Monsieur de Nancey!" cried Charles.

The captain of the guards entered.

"I commit into your hands the most guilty man of my kingdom. You will answer for him with your life."

Henry a.s.sumed an air of consternation, and followed Monsieur de Nancey.

CHAPTER LIII.

ACTeON.

Charles, left alone, wondered greatly at not having seen either of his favorites, his nurse Madeleine or his greyhound Acteon.

"Nurse must have gone to chant psalms with some Huguenot of her acquaintance," said he to himself; "and Acteon is probably still angry with me for the whipping I gave him this morning."

Charles took a candle and went into his nurse's room. The good woman was not there. From her chamber a door opened into the armory, it may be remembered. The King started towards this door, but as he did so he was seized with one of those spasms he had already felt, and which seemed to attack him suddenly. He felt as if his entrails were being run through with a red-hot iron, and an unquenchable thirst consumed him. Seeing a cup of milk on the table, he swallowed it at a gulp, and felt somewhat relieved.

Taking the candle he had set down, he entered the armory.

To his great astonishment Acteon did not come to meet him. Had he been shut up? If so, he would have known that his master had returned from hunting, and would have barked.

Charles called and whistled, but no animal appeared. He advanced a few steps, and as the light from the candle fell upon a corner of the room, he perceived an inert something lying there on the floor.

"Why! h.e.l.lo, Acteon!" cried Charles. He whistled again, but the dog did not stir. Charles hastened forward and touched him; the poor beast was stiff and cold. From his throat, contracted by pain, several drops of gall had fallen, mixed with foamy and b.l.o.o.d.y saliva. The dog had found an old cap of his master's in the armory, and had died with his head resting on this object, which represented a friend.

At the sight, which made him forget his own pain and restored all his energy, rage boiled in Charles's veins. He would have cried out; but, restrained as they are in their greatness, kings are not free to yield to that first impulse which every man turns to the profit of his pa.s.sion or to his defence. Charles reflected that there had been some treason, and was silent.

Then he knelt down before his dog and with experienced eye examined the body. The eyes were gla.s.sy, the tongue red and covered with pustules. It was a strange disease, and one which made Charles shudder. The King put on his gloves, which he had taken off and slipped into his belt, opened the livid lips of the dog to examine his teeth, and perceived in the interstices some white-looking fragments clinging to the sharp points of the molars. He took out these pieces, and saw that they were paper. Near where the paper had been the swelling was greater, the gums were swollen, and the skin looked as if it had been eaten by vitriol.

Charles gazed carefully around him. On the carpet lay two or three bits of the paper similar to that which he had already recognized in the dog's mouth. One of the pieces, larger than the others, showed the marks of a woodcut. Charles's hair stood on end, for he recognized a fragment of the picture which represented a gentleman hawking, and which Acteon had torn from the treatise on hunting.

"Ah!" said he, turning pale; "the book was poisoned!"

Then, suddenly remembering:

"A thousand devils!" he exclaimed, "I touched every page with my finger, and at every page I raised my finger to my lips. These fainting-spells, these attacks of pain and vomiting! I am a dead man!"

For an instant Charles remained motionless under the weight of this terrible thought. Then, rising with a dull groan, he hastened to the door of the armory.

"Maitre Rene!" he cried, "I want Maitre Rene, the Florentine; send some one as quickly as possible to the Pont Saint Michel and bring him to me!

He must be here within ten minutes. Let some one mount a horse and lead another that he may come more quickly. If Maitre Ambroise Pare arrives have him wait."

A guard went instantly to carry out the King's commands.

"Oh!" murmured Charles, "if I have to put everybody to the torture, I will know who gave this book to Henriot;" and with perspiration on his brow, clenched hands, and heaving breast, he stood with his eyes fixed on the body of his dead dog.

Ten minutes later the Florentine knocked timidly and not without some anxiety at the door of the King's apartments. There are some consciences to which the sky is never clear.

"Enter!" said Charles.

The perfumer appeared. Charles went towards him with imperious air and compressed lip.

"Your Majesty sent for me," said Rene, trembling.

"You are a skilful chemist, are you not?"

"Sire"--

"And you know all that the cleverest doctors know?"

"Your Majesty exaggerates."

"No; my mother has told me so. Besides, I have confidence in you, and I prefer to consult you rather than any one else. See," he continued, pointing to the dog, "look at what this animal has between his teeth, I beg you, and tell me of what he died."

While Rene, candle in hand, bent over the floor as much to hide his emotion as to obey the King, Charles stood up, his eyes fixed on the man, waiting with an impatience easy to understand for the reply which was to be his sentence of death or his a.s.surance of safety.

Rene drew a kind of scalpel from his pocket, opened it, and with the point detached from the mouth of the greyhound the particles of paper which adhered to the gums; then he looked long and attentively at the humor and the blood which oozed from each wound.

"Sire," said he, trembling, "the symptoms are very bad."

Charles felt an icy shudder run through his veins to his very heart.

"Yes," said he, "the dog has been poisoned, has he not?"

"I fear so, sire."