CHAPTER I
SOWING THE WINDS
I suppose there is no man who would care to have sunlight in all his life; but I hardly think there is one who could have sunk to the deep as I did, and yet have been coward enough to live, as I do—I, Gaspard de Vibrac.
As I write these lines in my study in lonely Vibrac, the four white stars on my shield, carved in relief above the fireplace, seem to burn red with the memory of my shame, and nothing can wipe out that stain in my ’scutcheon—nothing, nothing!
Thank God! I am the last of my house! Thank God! No young feet patter up and down the long corridors; no young voices shrill through these silent rooms. They would grow up to know me as the “Shame of Vibrac.” The very villagers, my serfs, dogs, whom I could send to the carcau with a nod of my head, scowl as they doff their caps to me, and the children shiver and shrink behind their mothers’ skirts on those rare occasions when I come out of the château. I suppose they know the story—and I live!
And is this the pity of God? He has spared my life. Good men, honorable gentlemen, my friends—I had such friends once—have died like vermin. The Lake of Geneva holds all that is left of Maligny, le beau cadet, as we called him; the Vidame died at the galleys, chained to the scum of mankind. But he died, Maligny died, even Achon died, that merciless priest! And I live as a leper! I have come to know that death is the pity of God.
Forty years back there was life and strength, a hot heart, and no count kept of the score. Since then I have paid and paid; but the hideous total of my debt yet looms as large as ever.
As I look back into the past, it seems but as yesterday to me that gray afternoon, the day following the St. Germain’s Affair, when Court and city were alike convulsed with terror at the discovery of the conspiracy that was to end in the shambles at Amboise, and I rode from the Louvre, through the buzzing streets of Paris, to my house in the Rue Coquillière.
Of course I was hilt deep in the matter, and, even as I rode, there was a list of names in my pocket that would have brought the heads of the owners thereof to the block did but the Cardinal of Lorraine or Catherine de Medicis cast but an eye on the scroll. Prudence had counselled me to leave Paris, as most of the others had done; but as yet I was sure that the Flies of Guise had not settled upon me, and again, when a man is four-and-twenty and in love, prudence is cast to the four winds of heaven. And so I risked my neck for a pair of blue eyes, as many another man has done, and will do, and whilst I rode I placed my hand at my breast pocket, not to feel if the scroll of names was safe, but to assure myself that a letter and a delicate embroidered glove lay there over my heart. They were there; but even through my madness I felt a touch of shame, and my hand dropped to my side, for glove and letter had come from another man’s wife—and he was my friend.
In a few yards I was at my own gates, and riding into the courtyard, dismounted and hurried within. I wanted to gaze upon the glove again, to read the letter once more, and to think—if ever man had need for reflection I had then.