In Kings' Byways

by Stanley John Weyman

I had now all that I wanted. Accordingly I spoke of another matter, and shortly afterwards Nicholas withdrew. He left me in much suspicion; so that for nearly half an hour I walked up and down the room, unable to decide whether I should treat the warning of the snowball with contempt, as the work of a discharged servant; or on that very account attach the more credit to it. By-and-by I remembered that the last sheet of the roll I had audited bore date the previous day; whence it was clear that Felix had been dismissed within the last twenty-four hours, and perhaps after the delivery of his note to me. Such a coincidence, which seemed no less pertinent than strange, opened a wide field for conjecture; and the possibility that Nicholas had called on me to sound me and learn what I knew occurring to my mind, brought me to a final determination to seek out this Felix, and without the delay of an hour sift the matter to the bottom.

Doubtless I shall seem to some to have acted precipitately, and built much on small foundations. I answer that I had the life of the King my master to guard, and in that cause dared neglect no precaution, however trivial, nor any indication, however remote. Would that all my care and vigilance had longer sufficed to preserve for France the life of that great man! But God willed otherwise.

I sent word at once to La Font, my valet-de-chambre, the same who persuaded me to my first marriage, to come to me; and directing him to make secret inquiry where Felix, a clerk in the Chamber of Accounts, lodged, bade him report to me on my return from the Great Hall, where, it will be remembered, it was my custom to give audience after dinner to all who had business with me. As it happened, I was detained that day, and found him awaiting me. A man of few words, as soon as the door was shut, "At the 'Three Half Moons,'" he said, "in the Faubourg St. Honoré, my lord."

"That is near the Louvre," I answered. "Get me my cloak, and your own also; and bring your pistols. I am for a walk, and you will accompany me."

He was a good man, La Font, and devoted to my interests. "It will be night in half an hour," he answered respectfully. "You will take some of the Swiss?"

"In one word, no!" I rejoined. "We will go out by the stable entrance, and until we return, I will bid Maignan keep the door, and admit no one."

The crowd of those who daily left the Arsenal at nightfall happened to be augmented on this occasion by a troop of my clients from Mantes; tenants on the lands of Rosny, who had lingered after the hour of audience to see the courts and garden. By mingling with these we passed out unobserved; nor, once in the streets, where a thaw had set in, that filled the kennel with water, was La Font long in bringing me to the house I sought. It stood on the outskirts of the St. Honoré Faubourg, in a quarter sufficiently respectable, and a street marked neither by squalor nor ostentation—from one or other of which all desperate enterprises take their rise. The house, which was high and narrow, presented only two windows to the street, but the staircase was clean, and it was impossible to cross the threshold without feeling a prepossession in Felix's favour. Already I began to think that I had come on a fool's errand.

"Which floor?" I asked La Font.

"The highest," he answered.

I went up softly and he followed me. Under the tiles I found a door, and heard some one moving beyond it. Bidding La Font remain on guard, and come to my aid only if I called him, I knocked boldly. A gentle voice bade me enter, and I did so.