"As for that," retorted the man in a sing-song voice, "no one can tell whether a medicine be antidote or poison, unless as leechcraft and chirurgery point out—"
"His days are numbered," quoth the free baron to himself, staring downward. But as he spoke he imagined he saw the red mustachios move, while one eye certainly glared with intelligent hatred upon the doctor and turned with anxious solicitude upon his master. The latter immediately knelt by the bedside and laid his hand upon the already cold one of the soldier.
"Speak!" he said.
It was the command of an officer to a trooper, an authoritative bidding, and seemed to summon a last rallying energy from the failing heart. The man's gaze showed that he understood. From the free baron's eye flashed a glance of savage power and force.
"Speak!" he repeated, cruelly, imperatively.
The mustachios quivered; the leader bent his head low, so low his face almost touched the soldier's. A voice—was it a voice, so faint it sounded?—breathed a few words:
"The emperor—Spain—Caillette gone!"
Quickly the free baron sprang to his feet. The soldier seemed to fall asleep; his face calm and tranquil as a campaigner's before the bivouac fire at the hour of rest; the ugliness of his features glossed by a new-found dignity; only his mustachios strangely fierce, vivid, formidable, against the peace and pallor of his countenance. The leech looked at him; stopped stirring the drug; leaned over him; straightened himself; took the vial once more from the table and threw the medicine out of the window. Then he methodically began gathering up bottles and other receptacles, which he placed neatly in a handbag. The free baron passed through the door, leaving the cheerless practitioner still gravely engaged in getting together his small belongings.
Soberly the king's guest walked down the echoing stairway out into the open air of the court. The emperor in Spain? It seemed not unlikely. Charles spent much of his time in that country, nor was it improbable he had gone there quietly, without flourish of trumpet, for some purpose of his own. His ways were not always manifest; his personality and mind-workings were characterized by concealment. If the emperor had gone to Spain, a messenger, riding post-haste, could reach Charles in time to enable that monarch to interpose in the nuptials and override the confidence the free baron had established for himself in the court of Francis. An impediment offered by Charles would be equivalent to the abandonment of the entire marital enterprise.
Pausing before a massive arched doorway that led into a wing of the castle where the free baron knew the jesters and certain of the gentlemen of the chamber lodged, the master of Hochfels, in answer to his inquiries from a servant, learned that Caillette had not been in his apartments since the day before; that he had ridden from the tournament, ostensibly to return to his rooms, but nothing had been heard of him since. And the oddest part of it was, as the old woman volubly explained when the free baron had pushed his way into the tastefully furnished chambers of the absent fool, the jester had been desperately wounded; had groaned much when the duke's plaisant had assisted him from the field, and had been barely able to mount his horse with the assistance of a squire.