"As Heaven shall judge me," I answered solemnly, "that is not true. Until I reached Paris last night I knew nothing of this report. I came here with a single mind, to redeem my honour by placing again in Your Eminence's hands that which you gave me on trust."
For a moment he remained in the same attitude, staring at me fixedly. Then his face somewhat relaxed. "Be good enough to ring that bell," he said.
It stood on a table near me. I rang it, and a velvet-footed man in black came in, and gliding up to the Cardinal placed a paper in his hand. The Cardinal looked at it while the man stood with his head obsequiously bent; my heart beat furiously. "Very good," the Cardinal said, after a pause, which seemed to me to be endless. "Let the doors be thrown open."
The man bowed low, and retired behind the screen. I heard a little bell ring, somewhere in the silence, and in a moment the Cardinal stood up. "Follow me!" he said, with a strange flash of his keen eyes.
Astonished, I stood aside while he passed to the screen; then I followed him. Outside the first door, which stood open, we found eight or nine persons,--pages, a monk, the major-domo, and several guards waiting like mutes. These signed to me to precede them, and fell in behind us, and in that order we passed through the first room and the second, where the clerks stood with bent heads to receive us. The last door, the door of the ante-chamber, flew open as we approached; a score of voices cried, "Place! Place for His Eminence!" We passed without pause through two lines of bowing lackeys, and entered--an empty room!
The ushers did not know how to look at one another. The lackeys trembled in their shoes. But the Cardinal walked on, apparently unmoved, until he had passed slowly half the length of the chamber. Then he turned himself about, looking first to one side; and then to another, with a low laugh of derision. "Father," he said, in his thin voice, "what does the psalmist say? 'I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert!'"
The monk mumbled assent.
"And later, in the same psalm is it not written, 'They shall perish, but thou shalt endure!'"
"It is so," the father answered. "Amen."
"Doubtless that refers to another life," the Cardinal continued, with his slow, wintry smile. "In the meantime we will go back to our book? and our prayers, and serve God and the King in small things, if not in great. Come, father, this is no longer a place for us. Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas! We will retire."