Yet, curiosity drew him to approach the window in his turn. Through the Whitehall water gate, down the King’s own stairs, a figure, wrapped in a rose and grey mantle daintily held up to show little close tripping feet, a small dame was picking her way down the miry steps. Behind her a waiting woman in russet carried what appeared to be a lute case. Charles turned a look, half quizzical, half interrogative, upon the Vidame.
“And is indeed that pink-and-grey bird our fair singer of last evening?”
“Even so, sire,” said Enguerrand, bowing low to conceal the agitation of his countenance.
“Satan, my little friend,” said the King, more genially, “can you inform me whither she may be winging her flight, from the very stairs sacred to our own passage? Not that such ordinance can be enforced upon birds.”
“I notice, your Majesty,” said Enguerrand, now turning candid eyes full upon the King, “the skiff is heading down river. I believe your Majesty’s Tower lies somewhere in that direction.”
“Ha!” said the King. His deep eye lightened for a second ominously. But as rapidly as it came, anger vanished from his countenance; and with it the last traces of his moody, weary humour. “Odd’s fish!” he ejaculated, “I had forgot! To the Tower, say you, Vidame? Nay, then, that minds me my Lord Constable and myself had a merry wager touching a singing-bird. Ma foi, he is early with the decoy and the lime twig!”
He paused. The Vidame looked at him in astonishment—a king to wager with a subject! A king—and to let himself be crossed in his pleasure and to find in the circumstance food for indulgent laughter. And the man lodged so conveniently in his Tower! Joncelle’s vindictive young soul had been all afire to see the Lord Constable consigned to one of his own cells. If the Tower of London was not Charles’s Bastille, for the disposal of inconvenient courtiers, where was the use of it? If a king made no use of his prerogatives, where was the use of royalty?—The Vidame had yet much to learn.
Pulling his full underlip between finger and thumb, Charles stared alternately out of the window at the picture of grey river, vanishing skiff, and brooding sky, and at Enguerrand’s delicate white face. Beneath the boy’s tensely still attitude it was easy to divine quiver of nerves, fierce eagerness.
“Why, now,” said the King at last, somewhat maliciously, “we are not too proud to be taught by our subject. Our Lord Constable and ourself had, as I said, a wager who should capture the linnet’s next song. My Lord Rockhurst is an old soldier: he trusts no one. We sent a messenger: we therefore stand to lose.”
The colour rushed to the Vidame’s face. He dropped his lids to hide the tears of mortification that sprang to his eyes. Had the fate of some battle, the issue of some diplomatic mission, been at stake, he might almost have felt less keenly the reproach of his failure. To be King’s Mercury, to set off so gaily, on so high a flight, and fall so quickly, so hopelessly—no situation could have been more exquisitely painful to the Vidame de Joncelles. (Poor, pious mother! could she have read, that moment, into the soul of her son, she might well have thought that the house she had so carefully kept swept and garnished was indeed invaded by the seven devils.)