Three or four dogs stood or sprawled beside him, good courtiers all! for they seemed to know his mood, and lay quiet, waiting for the change. One, a coarse-jowled brindled beast that panted for fatness, cowered on its haunches a foot or two away from the couch-head. No member of the court was present, but knots of the King's archers, half-armoured, but with sword and dagger, and carrying their bows, were on guard at every point that commanded the court.
As minute after minute passed, and the King still lay as one dead, there was ample time for the picture to fix itself in my memory. Then, suddenly, the sightless eyes rolled in their sockets, and he awoke.
"Sire," said Monseigneur, as, hat in hand, I went down on one knee, "here is Monsieur de Helville."
"The compatriot of Monsieur Jehan Flemalle?"
"Your majesty's faithful servant."
"Faithful as England, and for the same cause," answered Louis, beckoning with his fingers to the big-jowled dog crouching near him.
The brute saw and understood, for, though the lips twitched till the fangs showed, it flattened itself on its belly and inched nearer to the thin hand it feared. But though the King called the dog, his eyes never left my face, and as I said of the face a moment back so now I say, My God! what eyes they were! Ice and fire, cold, inscrutable, implacable; dead as grey ash, but with the smouldering heat of the ember not far below the film; remorseless eyes that groped the secrets of a man's thoughts as the delicate fingers of the blind grope a face.
"I call him England, after my dear brother Edward," went on Louis, "because though he shows his teeth and would fly at me if he dared, a sop will always bribe him, and, like the King whose premature decease we all so bitterly lament, he will die at last of over-eating. God and Saint Claude forgive me if I seem to speak evil of the dead! Are you as faithful as this my dog, Monsieur de Helville?"
For a moment I was silent, partly because the shrewd, malevolent, fixed gaze fascinated me as men say a serpent fascinates a bird, partly because he had cleft the truth to the very core. I had told Mademoiselle that I owed the King no loyalty, I had even been in two minds as to letting Jan Flemael's plot run a triumphant course; to gain my own ends, and my own ends alone, had brought me to Plessis. As the King had said, my fidelity was no greater than that of the cowed bull-dog, and thereby came a lesson.
The poor brute had crept reluctantly within reach of the beckoning hand, and the thin fingers that looked so frail, but had so much iron of will in them, had gripped the loose skin of the plethoric neck, twisting it till the dog wheezed in an agony of breathlessness. Let the grip close in another half-inch, and it would choke.