"Uncle, is it my fault that I am living a lie in Amboise?"
"Grey Roland changed all that for you ten days ago. There was the game in your hands, and you threw it away! A touch of the heel, a single twitch of the bridle—there, there, say nothing: perhaps at your age I would have had the same scruples. But what answer am I to return to the King?"
"That I will do all he bade me; do it with all my heart to the very letter," answered La Mothe. And with that Commines had to be content.
"You go too slow," said Villon. "You go too fast," said Commines. Between such cross fires what was a poor lover to do? There was once, La Mothe remembered, a man who had an only son and an ass. But the problem is older than the imagination of any fabulist, and as new as the newest day in the world. "Thou shalt die," said the Lord God. "Thou shalt not surely die," said the devil.
"I will take my own way," he said. "It is my life I have to live, not theirs." And that afternoon came his opportunity to prove that a man knows best how his own life should be shaped.
CHAPTER XVII
STEPHEN LA MOTHE ASKS THE WRONG QUESTION
Only the very foolish or the very weak man seeks to hide from his own soul the full, naked, unpalatable truth about himself. The fool follows the principle which governs the libel upon the intelligence of the ostrich, and vainly tries to persuade himself that what he does not see does not exist, while the weak man dares not open the doors of the cupboard hidden in every life for shivering terror of the secrets he knows are there. Wiser wickedness deliberately airs his skeleton now and then, and thereby the grisly presence grows less grisly, and the hollow rattle of the bones less threatening. The articulation remains the same, but the tone, so to speak, is more subdued.
And Stephen La Mothe, being neither a fool nor altogether weak, was not afraid to admit to himself that Commines' angry contempt had described the day-by-day life at Amboise with sufficient accuracy, at least so far as the Dauphin and Ursula de Vesc were concerned. The bitter fling at his friendship for Villon did not trouble him. It was simply the high light added to the picture to bring out its general truth.
Yes, he had played games of make-believe with the boy, such as Louis had spoken of half in tolerance and half with the vexation of a clever father who resents that his only son is not as clever as himself. He had—no, he had not philandered in the rose garden. The associations of the word stirred him to revolt. Dairy-maids might philander, kitchen wenches and such-like common flesh might philander, but never Ursula of the grey eyes, Ursula of the tender, firm mouth. Ursula philander? Never! never! The thought was desecration. What was it Louis had said? All women are the same under the skin. It was a cynic's lie, and Louis had never known Ursula de Vesc.