Nor, when he turned round swiftly an instant afterwards, was there any sign of Humphrey. He could not see a human mass rolling over and over in those turbulent, leaping waters, nor a white face gleaming from them, nor any glassy, lifeless eyes glaring up into the leaden skies above. The body was gone and had left no sign behind.
Boisfleury went back now to the stable, and, taking the lantern from the hook on which it hung, placed it on the floor and carefully picked up all the straw tinged or soaked with blood that he could find. Next, he picked up Humphrey's rapier--the cloak, he knew well enough, was on the victim's back excepting that part of it which he had wound tightly round his arm ere he attacked Fleur de Mai. Finally--after having carefully arranged some clean straw in the vacant stall with his hands--while all the time watched by the gleaming, startled eyes of the horses gazing at him over the divisions of the other stalls--he blew out the lamp and, shutting the door behind him, went over to the river again.
"There is no score to pay now," he murmured, as he flung the tinged straw and the rapier into the Rhine. "None, here, in Basle. None by Boisfleury. But elsewhere? And by others! Ah!"
[CHAPTER XVII]
"The Splendid One"--"Le Dieudonné"--otherwise Louis XIV., King of France and Navarre, sat in the Galerie des Cerfs at Fontainebleau before a blazing log fire, his feet and legs encased in long, heavy riding boots, half a dozen dogs round him, and, on his lap, a little spaniel of the breed afterwards known in England as that of King Charles, with whose long silky ears he toyed.
Near the King, yet still at some distance from him, were many members of his family and Court, including the Queen, who sat before a second fire farther down the room in the riding-dress in which she had that day accompanied her husband to a wild stag hunt in the forest. A little distance off, chattering, laughing--in discreetly subdued tones--were women who bore, or were yet to bear, names that the world will never forget. One there was, who, although already a recipient of the favours of Le Roi Soleil if not as yet of his love, sat plainly dressed and with her eyes demurely cast down, near to Madame de Montespan--mâitresse en titre--and only raised those eyes at some sallies from the children of the latter who played around her knees. After which she would let them steal swiftly towards the face of the ruler of France's destiny as well as of the destiny of half Europe. Yet, sometimes, too, she would smile softly at some thought not aroused by the children's gambols, when her lips would part and disclose her teeth which were already giving signs of the decay that, later, was to take entire possession of them. When this occurred, those near her would wonder what the woman who, as Françoise d'Aubigne, had been born in a prison, was thinking of. Perhaps, they speculated to themselves, on the jokes and gibes of her dead husband, the diseased and crippled poet, romancer and dramatist, Paul Scarron. Or, perhaps, on the lovers she had so often run to meet (when she was supposed to be at mass or confession) in the little, green-hung parloir lent her by Ninon de l'Enclos for her rendezvous: perhaps of the manner in which, slowly but surely, she was spinning her web around the King and enfolding him in it even as the spider spins its web and enfolds and strangles the fly.
Near her were, however, other women who, had they had their way, would themselves have strangled the life out of this woman, now, by creation and gift of estate and brevet, Madame de Maintenon, as willingly as she was secretly strangling the will and power out of Louis; women whom once the King had loved more fiercely than--though not so subserviently as--he was now beginning to love her. Close by la femme funeste was the once lovely Duchesse de Châtillon--now grown fat and troubled with a nervous twitching of the face--who had once disputed with Madame de Beauvais, who had never been lovely and who squinted, the right of having been Louis' first love. Here, too, was the beautiful Mdlle. d'Argenson now married to a husband who was reported to beat her; and many others. While, had the phantoms of all those whom the King had adored and then neglected, and then cast off, been able to appear, the room would have been full of sombre shadows.
Before the King there was placed a small table on which, at this moment, was piled up in great disarray a vast heap of letters that had that afternoon arrived by special courier, and which he was at this time engaged in reading after his return from the stag hunt. Or rather, he was engaged in reading all those which a courtier who sat next to him in a smaller, less comfortable chair, handed to him after he himself had perused them. This courtier was no less a person than the Marquis de Louvois, whose precise position was that of Minister of War but who, during the ascendancy that he had for some years been gradually obtaining over the King--in which ascendancy he ran a race of deadly rivalry with Madame de Maintenon--had become his right hand.
"Two letters, both of the same import," Louis said now, placing one which he held in his hand face downwards on top of another he had previously laid on the table; "two letters from two women, and each telling the same story. Letters coming, you observe, from widely different cities. One from London. The other from Geneva. Almost, it seems, there must be some truth in what they tell."
The King might also have added, had he not doubtless entirely forgotten the fact, that the two women from whom those letters came had each been strongly affected towards him and his interests if they had not, like so many others, allowed themselves to love him.