At these words, the King, who had gone a few steps towards the door, turned sharply round, and the two men looked at each other with an expression that no brush, nor words, could render.
"Good-bye, gossip," said Louis, at last, in a sharp voice, as he put his bonnet straight.
"May God and the Virgin keep you in their good grace!" the usurer replied humbly, as he escorted the King to the street.
After so long a friendship these two men found a barrier raised between them by distrust and money, whereas they had hitherto been quite agreed on matters of money and distrust; but they knew each other so well, they were so much in the habit of intimacy, that the King could guess from the miser's tone as he rashly said, "Whenever Your Majesty pleases," the annoyance his visits would thenceforth be to his treasurer, just as Cornélius had discerned a declaration of war in the way Louis had said "Good-bye, gossip."
So Louis XI. and his banker parted, very uncertain as to what, for the future, their demeanor was to be. The monarch, indeed, knew the Fleming's secret; but the Fleming on his part could, through his connections, secure the grandest conquest any king of France had yet achieved—that of the domains of the House of Burgundy, which were just then the object of envy to every sovereign in Europe.
The famous Margaret's choice would be guided by the good folks of Ghent and the Flemings about her. Hoogworst's gold and influence would tell for a great deal in the negotiations opened by Desquerdes, the captain to whom Louis XI. had given the command of the army on the Belgian frontier. Thus these two master foxes were in the position of duelists whose strength had been neutralized by some stroke of fate.
And whether it was that from that day the King's health had failed visibly, or that Cornélius in part promoted the arrival in France of Marguerite of Burgundy, who came to Amboise in July 1438 to be married to the Dauphin in the chapel of the château, the King claimed no fine from his treasurer and no trial was held; but they remained in the half-cordial terms of an armed friendship.
Happily for the miser, a rumor got about that his sister had committed the thefts, and that she had been privily executed by Tristan. Otherwise, and if the true story had become known, the whole town would have risen in arms to destroy the Malemaison before the King could possibly have defended it.
However, if all this historical guesswork has some foundation with regard to Louis XI.'s inaction, Master Cornélius Hoogworst cannot be accused of supineness. He spent the first days after this fatal morning in a constant hurry. Like a beast of prey shut up in a cage, he came and went, scenting gold in every corner of his dwelling; he examined every cranny; he tapped the walls; he demanded his treasure of the trees in the garden, of the foundations, of the turret roofs, of earth, and of heaven. Often he would stand for hours looking at everything around him, his eyes searching vacancy. He tried the miracles and second-sight of magic powers, endeavoring to see his gold through space and solid obstacles.
He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought, consumed by an idea that gnawed at his vitals, and yet more cruelly racked by the perennial torments of his duel with himself, since his love of gold had turned to rend itself; it was a sort of incomplete suicide comprehending all the pangs of living and of dying. Never had a vice so effectually entrapped itself; for the miser who inadvertently locks himself into the subterranean cell where his wealth is buried, has, like Sardanapalus, the satisfaction of perishing in the midst of it. But Cornélius, at once the robber and the robbed, and in the secret of neither, possessed, and yet did not possess, his treasures—a quite new, quite whimsical form of torture, but perpetually excruciating.