"Ay, sir, and like your learning," answered Le Glorieux; "when Power sends Folly to entreat the approach of Wisdom, 'tis a sure sign what foot the patient halts upon."
"How if I refuse to come, when summoned at so late an hour by such a messenger?" said Galeotti.
"In that case we will consult your ease, and carry you," said Le Glorieux. "Here are half a score of stout Burgundian yeomen at the door, with whom He of Crèvecoeur has furnished me to that effect. For know, that my friend Charles of Burgundy and I have not taken away our kinsman Louis's crown, which he was ass enough to put into our power, but have only filed and clipt it a little; and, though reduced to the size of a spangle, it is still pure gold. In plain terms, he is still paramount over his own people, yourself included, and Most Christian King of the old dining-hall in the Castle of Peronne, to which you, as his liege subject, are presently obliged to repair."
"I attend you, sir," said Martius Galeotti, and accompanied Le Glorieux accordingly – seeing, perhaps, that no evasion was possible.
"Ay, sir," said the Fool, as they went towards the Castle, "you do well; for we treat our kinsman as men use an old famished lion in his cage, and thrust him now and then a calf to mumble, to keep his old jaws in exercise."
"Do you mean," said Martius, "that the King intends me bodily injury?"
"Nay, that you can guess better than I," said the jester; "for, though the night be cloudy, I warrant you can see the stars through the mist. I know nothing of the matter, not I – only my mother always told me to go warily near an old rat in a trap, for he was never so much disposed to bite."
The Astrologer asked no more questions, and Le Glorieux, according to the custom of those of his class, continued to run on in a wild and disordered strain of sarcasm and folly mingled together, until he delivered the philosopher to the guard at the castle-gate of Peronne; where he was passed from warder to warder, and at length admitted within Herbert's Tower.
The hints of the jester had not been lost on Martius Galeotti, and he saw something which seemed to confirm them in the look and manner of Tristan, whose mode of addressing him, as he marshalled him to the King's bedchamber, was lowering, sullen, and ominous. A close observer of what passed on earth, as well as among the heavenly bodies, the pulley and the rope also caught the Astrologer's eye; and as the latter was in a state of vibration, he concluded that some one who had been busy adjusting it had been interrupted in the work by his sudden arrival. All this he saw, and summoned together his subtilty to evade the impending danger, resolved, should he find that impossible, to defend himself to the last against whomsoever should assail him.
Thus resolved, and with a step and look corresponding to the determination he had taken, Martius presented himself before Louis, alike unabashed at the miscarriage of his predictions, and undismayed at the Monarch's anger, and its probable consequences.