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The King’s Fool

“God speed all travellers, Barney O’Pray; especially those whom the devil pursues. Haste, man, haste! Ahead are the lights of Waterford Inn . . .”

Sir Michael Mohan’s dark, handsome face wore a reckless smile as he flung the words back over his shoulder, over the sweaty flanks of the big grey mare he bestrode, at his henchman, the O’Pray. Behind them—how far he did not know, but still a goodly distance—the King’s men rode in chase. But never a horse in all Ireland could match Grey Ellen’s speed, and Barney, on a little roan, was hard put to keep his master in sight. Behind them lay the Glen of Morrah and the tumbledown, ancestral home of the Mohans, granted now to a Sassenach, one Sir Peter de Launay, who, not content with that, had hastened Sir Michael’s departure from the home of his fathers by the old and easy trick of having his agents plant pikes and muskets at Mohan Hall, and raising the cry of “Rebel!”

Into the inn-yard, over the sounding cobbles, they clattered. It was a chill night of early autumn, the stars bright in a sky swept clean and blue by the zesty wind. Lights glowed warmly from the mullioned windows of the tavern kept by Kate Rafferty, wife of the same Mark Rafferty whose lugger would this very night bear them away to France and safety, and such an adventuresome living as could be picked up by a penniless young knight whose sole fortune now was the horse he rode.

They sprang from their saddles, threw the bridles to a languid hostler and hastened indoors. Kate Rafferty, astonishment on her pretty face, met them at the threshold. She was related, in some labyrinthine way that Sir Michael could never make head or tail of, to Barney O’Pray.

“It’s off to France we are this night,” whispered Barney to the blue-eyed Mrs. Mark, after she had curtseyed thrice to his master. “Mark is always ready for us. An’ we are leavin’ Grey Ellen and the roan here with you, young Katie. Now we could do with a dhrop of the crathur—a farewell dhrop of Old Ireland’s best, for many’s the long day will go by before we taste the like again. Och, now, mavourneen!” Barney stayed the quick tears that beaded Katie’s lovely lashes. “Sure, we go with a smile . . . on our lips . . .”

Barney turned away from her and followed Sir Michael to a shadowed corner of the tap-room, beyond the wavering radiance of the candles. There were some dozen men in the room, seamen mostly, who had manifested little interest in the newcomers or in their whispered word to Katie Rafferty. Almost in the centre of the room, at a large table, three men were sitting, drinking the ale for which the Waterford Inn was famous, and annoying such of the barmaids as had to pass their way. Barney watched them with interest and presently leaned forward and whispered to Sir Michael, who sat, chin cupped in hands, seeing and hearing nothing.

“Did you mark that, your honor? See the gay blade in the russet coat and fine cuffs of lace. ’Tis Sir Peter de Launay, no less, and he’s no more than a drunken blaggard, if you can judge from his talk and actions here.”

Michael turned and looked at De Launay, a man some few years older than himself, but older far in the ways of wickedness. His face was thin, sharp, pallid, the eyes small, of a color grey as slate, and his white wig was carefully powdered as his hands, with rings bedight, were soft and slender. A fop, a rogue; withal, thought Michael, a dangerous man. Now, as Katie set food and drink before them, De Launay drew from his breast pocket a miniature. Its gold frame glinted dully as he set it on the wet table before him and bade his companions drink a toast to it.

“To Diane,” he cried, careless of who might hear, “the sweetest, the proudest lady in the Court of France—in all the world, by heavens, the finest! Is she not, Geoff Mardon? Is she not, Leffingwell?”

“Aye,” his companions agreed in concert.

“I’ll brook no word to the contrary,” said De Launay with drunken dignity. “For she is to be my lady and bring me great fortune. Let all drink to her.” He swung about in his chair, asking those there to admit that his Diane was of all women the fairest and best. But his speech was not good and Michael Mohan despised a man who would make the woman he loved the toast of a common tap-room.

Michael busied himself then, as did Barney O’Pray, with his food. From the corner of his eye he watched the progress of Sir Peter de Launay, who, not content with a general admission of Diane’s supremacy among her sex, was now going to each individual in the tap-room and exacting personal tribute. Into the shadowy nook close by the huge hearth, whereon logs crackled and a big black kettle sang monotonously, he came. His hand descended roughly on Michael’s shoulder and on Michael’s cheek his wine-freighted breath was hot.

“You with the pretty black curls,” said he. “Damme, are you indifferent to beauty, you rogue! Is not this”—he thrust the miniature before Michael’s eyes—“is not this the loveliest of women? Drink a toast to her, I bid you, or—”

The face that Michael saw was indeed a lovely one, a soft, creamy oval, with eyes whose magic, whose wistfulness and laughter the painter had captured well. Her hair was a lighter gold than that which framed her, and the white, pure grace of her bosom, her gentle mouth, made Michael in some way sad, as great beauty always did to him.

“Yes,” he said softly, setting down his tankard and glancing over at Barney who was almost invisible in the gloom. “I do not hesitate to admit her lovely—even the loveliest among women; but how she could stoop to such an ineffable blackguard as yourself, defies my powers of understanding. At your service!”

He snatched the miniature from De Launay’s paralyzed hand and his cudgel was quick to parry the mad thrust of the outraged lover’s rapier—to parry it, then to crash down on the wrist that held the sword and send it flying in a shining arc across the room. Barney was at Sir Michael’s side now. They whom De Launay had called Geoff Mardon and Leffingwell rallied with drunken slowness to their comrade’s assistance. Barney swiftly thrust a table in their way and tangled them with chairs and benches.

“I’ll keep this picture, De Launay,” said Michael. “I’ll take it in exchange for what you have taken from me. Perhaps—who knows?—the better of the bargain will be mine. So . . . until we meet . . .”

With a light laugh, a wave of his hand, he followed Barney from the tap-room out into the cold clear moonlight of the autumn evening. They struck across the fields, through many a thick hedge and over many a grey stone wall. From the inn-yard, distantly, they heard shouts, the clatter of horses’ hoofs on the cobbles. But they did not fear pursuit. Barney knew every inch of this country, and for men far gone in liquor to pursue them on horseback over bog and hedge and wall would be worse than suicide.

“ ’Tis a fine prize you’ve won, your honor,” said Barney, “and it was a splendid winning.”

“It is something,” laughed Michael. “It may bring me luck. ’Twas no lie the fool gave us; she is very pretty, Barney.” He took the miniature from his pocket and studied it in the moon’s wan light. “No, Barney O’Pray; not pretty, not pretty, I tell you—divine!”

They came into the straggling streets of Youghal, Sir Michael and Barney O’Pray, walking briskly; for now, too early yet for the homesickness to come upon them, they were eager to be on their way. A sea voyage was no novelty to Michael who had studied for three years in France, going back and forth as many times. His father, Sir Patrick Mohan, in spite of the ceaseless levies of the De Launay clan, had prospered in a fashion, and had been able to give his motherless son an excellent education. Yes, it would be good to visit France again. It would be good, he told himself fiercely, fighting the sick pain in his breast, to be out of Ireland, away from the environment of penury and dire need, of futility and oppression. He must not look upon himself as a coward—not for this. He fled from no field of honor, but from a contest in which all the odds were against him. And he could, he would, come back. Yet bitterly he thought: “How many others such as I, leaving this land they love, have promised themselves they would come back and set things to rights—and have never come back, or, having returned, fell again into the old ways of sadness.”

The night forbade such musing; the moon made silver on the sea and the tracery of masts and rigging was black, silhouetted against the bluish silvern sky. And down at the quays where they came now, the blocks creaked softly with the gurgling rise and fall of vessels, and all about was the salty, fishlike smell of ancient wharves and piling green with the corrosion of brine.

Mark Rafferty’s vessel was christened the Gull, than which in all the wide world there could be no greater misnomer, for she was a stub-nosed, wide-beamed, ill-favored lugger that crept upon her way with such speed as would have shocked a turtle into swimming on his back. So Barney said, and though he knew nothing whatever about boats he was not far wrong.

In the stuffy, smoky little cabin below decks, Sir Michael sat facing his henchman across the swinging table. The miniature he had taken from De Launay was in his hand.

“Take not that which is precious,” said Sir Michael, “into the highways and byways for all men to look upon and cheapen it. But why I took it and why I kept it, I do not know. Perhaps, in milder mood I will return it.”

Barney nodded approvingly. He had boundless faith in witches, gipsies, banshees and in the “good people” whom he claimed often to have seen. Ould Meg, an ancient gipsy, who had foretold a great love for his young master and a happy marriage with “a daughter of Deirdre”—a girl of his own people—was a Delphian oracle to Barney, and the idea of Michael falling in love with some “foreign hussy” whose picture he had captured in a tavern brawl outraged the O’Pray sense of the proprieties.

“Barney,” said Sir Michael gravely, “what shall we do when we get to France? Perhaps I shall sing and dance jigs in the street and you collect the coins the Frenchmen throw us.”

“God forbid,” said Barney. “Sure it’s a high post they’ll be givin’ ye at once, your honor.”

“I could have had that without going to France; they would have given me a high post in Dublin—you know the kind—with hempen trimmings.”

Michael liked being again in Paris. The Gull had set them ashore safe and sound at Havre-de-Grace and they had journeyed on foot to Paris. At an inn called Les Trois Canards, a haunt of Michael’s student days, they had taken a room, and now they were walking in the great square in front of Notre Dame de Paris, an edifice which delighted Barney far more than anything he had yet seen in France.

“If only poor Father Tom McCrory had a church like that now! Wirra, it would be fine! The roof of his own chapel leaks like a sieve. Och! And such fine sweet bells are a credit to the priest in charge. And it must be a proud beadle that rings them. Do you hear them now, your honor?”

Michael could not help but hear them as they rolled and clanged so sonorously that their music seemed to fill the heavens. And the sunlight shone on the great façade, towering like a cliff above the pigmy host below. He had been a mere boy, carefree, spendthrift, thoughtless, when last he had stood there and listened to the bells of Notre Dame; now he was Sir Michael Mohan, and boyhood, even youth, was behind him. He was a man with a man’s work to do. For such as he there was only one career—that of arms. Here he must write his epics with the sword and find his moments of high inspiration in the bloody heat of battle.

A multitude poured, seemingly from all quarters, into the square. There was a tumult of shouting and laughter. Students, citizens, soldiers, civilians, mingled in the mêlée which, when they fought their way into it, they found to centre round a droll-looking vehicle made of a great tub set on four solid wooden wheels and drawn by a dismal donkey. In the tub, strange charioteer, was a jester in motleyed costume, with ass-eared, tight-fitting cap and its tinkling bells; in his hand a sceptre crowned by his likeness, and his face was painted, seamed and marked after the manner of clowns, and his gestures were an exaggerated aping of a king bestowing smiles and regal benediction upon his worshipping subjects.

Barney O’Pray was enthralled. His voice rose above the rest in shouts of acclamation, but Michael was silent and curious, for he had often speculated on persons such as this—the fools of princes, paid, earning their livelihood by pandering to the uncertain humor of rulers. And the fool’s chariot passing quite close to him, he had a good look at the charioteer. Beneath the fool’s masque was a young face, a fine face, and though the mouth was parted in wild laugh and elfin grimace, there was no laughter in the jester’s eyes.

“It is Pepin Clopinard,” Michael explained to his henchman when the procession had gone by. “He is the King’s jester and sort of a popular idol. Whenever he rides out in state as we have seen him now, the crowds acclaim him. Such strange acclaim! I wonder what he thinks, what he feels in his heart, that fool. Do you know, Barney? Can you guess?”

“No, your honor. But he seems to be a very popular fellow and even the King need not be ashamed of such a welcome. But what does he feel in his heart, your honor?”

“Hatred,” said Michael, “and contempt for those who laugh. He is a man as much as they; not a beast to be caged and stared at and derided. Did you ever stop to consider how hideous it must be for a man who finds beauty in sunsets and green hills, in friends and a hearty fireside—how hideous to be clad in motley and made forever to play the fool? In yon poor wretch’s eyes I saw . . .”

Barney walked pensively by the side of his young master, and to his own light, mercurial disposition this thoughtfulness of Sir Michael’s gave short-lived pause. For it was not in Barney’s merry heart to grieve much or worry long about the sorrows of this world. And why his master should be concerned with a jester was beyond comprehension.

“ ’Tis too old in his ways he is becoming,” thought Barney. “Now, with the gold Mark Rafferty gave me for Grey Ellen and the little roan and that I accumulated myself and gave to his honor, ’tis a fine coat of blue velvet and lace and a handsome sword he should be getting for himself. And ’tis adventure he needs to shake him out of pondering on the fortunes of fools and kings.”

For Grey Ellen, a brute much coveted by the horse-loving gentry, Mark Rafferty had almost emptied the tin box of gold coins that was his bank on board the Gull. And whatever else there was, over and above what he had paid, when he disposed of the mare, he would bring to Barney a week hence at Havre. Thus, there was no immediate worry and O’Pray’s thoughts dwelt persistently on the importance of Michael being clad as befitted a gentleman of noble birth.

It was well, perhaps, that Michael did not hasten to acquire finer raiment. The second afternoon of their stay in the capital of Louis le Bien-Aimé, he and Barney strolled again through the streets. This time they followed the winding lanes and tortuous byways of Montmartre, and Michael pointed out to his gaping henchman the queer little taverns and wine shops where he used to go in his student days at the Sorbonne.

“There,” said Michael, indicating a gabled old dwelling in the cellar of which was a tavern marked by a signboard bearing what once may have looked like a lion, “is the Tavern of the Lion, and many were the gay evenings we spent there. Is it only four years ago? It seems so long, so remote—hello!”

Out of the sunken doorway of the Tavern of the Lion, a noisy crowd of youths came pushing and streaming. The air was filled with snatches of song and doggerel verse, lampooning this preceptor and that; here was an epigram from Horace; there a shouted axiom of the scholastics. Then, suddenly, from the laughing group a tall, skinny youth detached himself and ran at breakneck speed across the cobbled lane, straight at Sir Michael and Barney O’Pray.

“The gay young blood!” said Barney. “An’ would he be makin’ sport of us! Sure, our fathers slit his fathers’ throats long years ago an’ if it’s a taste of the blackthorn he’s seeking—”

“Wait—”

The youth was almost upon them. There was an ecstatic smile on his bright, impudent face. He wore an elegant jerkin of buff, a blue hat with a saucy cock’s feather. He was a most headlong and impetuous young man, for not until Michael had, perforce, to put out arms to catch him and keep them both from falling to the ground, did he stay his mad career.

“Michael, mon ange!” he cried. “Mon brave Irlandais! Mon—” He was too breathless to utter more, and Michael, what with astonishment and mirth and loss of breath from the violent impact, could for a moment find only words sufficient to restrain Barney from his obvious intention of taking the intruder by the scruff of the neck.

“What is he calling us, your honor? What is the young blaggard sayin’?”

Michael was shaking hands warmly now with the other and speaking to him in English. The O’Pray learned that this was Louvigny de Dronsart, who had begun his studies at the University the last year Michael was there and who, since his family would not let him leave until he had taken his degree of Master of Arts, would likely—so he said himself—remain there for ever, since he pursued learning mostly in such profane halls as the Tavern of the Lion and the other gay resorts of Montmartre, and much preferred the writing of amorous ballads to treatises in Latin and Greek.

“But what are you doing here, Michael Mohan?” Much to Barney’s disgust, the volatile Louvigny then forsook English for his native tongue and talked to Michael in the elegant jargon of the students. “And you bring your pet monkey with you this time?” Louvigny winked and jerked an insolent thumb at Barney.

“Ah, now, your honor! What does he say about me? Is it an insult—”

“No—oh, no,” said Michael. “He says you are, barring myself the best looking Irishman who ever came to Paris.”

Barney, mollified but still suspicious, followed the two youths who walked arm-in-arm, talking volubly, down the ancient streets. And, with a touch of proper pride, Barney noted that, while De Dronsart’s clothes were of the finest, he was but an insignificant stripling beside the dark young Mohan.

“We are here, Louvigny,” Michael explained. “Because it was necessary either to leave Ireland or go to prison and perhaps stay there. You would not understand, since you have never been one of a conquered race. In one way, I am glad I came; there is nothing in Ireland now for me, for any man; and yet—”

“Exile is not pleasant,” said Louvigny. “But for you, my master, so young, so strong . . .” He pressed Michael’s biceps with awed appreciation. “And with the sword you have no equal. You speak French such as any Parisian might be proud of, and in the army of France you will find many of your countrymen. Very soon it will be an Irish army, they say. And you would be welcomed. We need such as you, what with our hands full at home and the English casting covetous eyes on our stronghold in New France. Ah, that is where I should like to be, my brave Mohan . . . in Quebec. There a man has a chance to prove himself, and here am I, a wretched schoolboy, useless both to God and country. Some of these days, mark you well, I shall go to New France.”

“A cold place, filled with snow, with savages and fierce beasts, I have heard tell,” said Michael. “You would not like it, Louvigny.”

“The great Champlain liked it so well that he gave up wealth and honors in France to live and die there. So, too, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. Those who come back say there is a spell upon that land; a great magic is there, even more than in your land of fairies and witches. But what will you do, Sir Michael Mohan?”

“Oh, no doubt, I shall use my skill with the sword that you have vaunted, help fight another nation’s battles, be brave in a cause that’s not my own, love where my love does not lie, and die with Erin’s name upon my lips. What more is there to look forward to for such as I?”

“A thousand things!” said Louvigny whose youthful dreams were outraged by this cynicism in one who should, he thought, think and feel as he. “A good cause makes always a gallant fight . . .” He wielded an imaginary rapier, much to the edification of Barney O’Pray whose heart was already warming to him. “Bravery is always splendid for a man and it is not hard to love our women. Come, Michael, tomorrow night at the Comte de Lussac’s there is a levee. You must come. Some of your compatriots will be there, some who know your family, and there we can see about getting you a commission in the army. Tell me you will come!”

“But—” Michael hesitated to commit himself. The glitter and dazzle of such assemblages had never appealed to him, and now that his heart was heavy, that loneliness and care of the future seemed to press upon him, he had no inclination for the exquisite amenities of Parisian court life.

Louvigny was quick to perceive his indecision.

“Tiens!” he said brightly with a birdlike smile at Michael. “You will come home with me—you and the red monkey here. There is only my father and he will remember you most kindly. Guy—you knew Guy, my brother—is now in Spain on some silly mission. He owned the finest wardrobe in Paris—la-la—such quantities of lace and ruffles, of silk shirts and velvet coats as would make Solomon’s glory pale. From it you shall choose what you will, since it appears you left Ireland in some haste, mon brave. But come now—”

Louvigny would take no denial, and after an hour’s brisk walking they reached the town house of the Marquis de Dronsart, an imposing dwelling with a garden bright with autumnal bloom, with lawns shaven to miraculous smoothness and hedges trimmed to a nicety.

They went to the room set aside for Michael, a great, oak-panelled room with a wide casement, a quaint four-poster bed and an elegant Oriental carpet of blue and gold—strange contrast, thought Michael, with his stripped and barren chamber in the house of Mohan.

“I impose upon you, Louvigny,” he said. “This is too much. And this—” He pointed to the clothes which were presently laid out on the long table, beside which hovered a smiling lackey. “I cannot—”

“But you must. Please, my dear fellow—” Louvigny was most earnest now. His brown sparkling eyes pleaded with Michael and his thin face wore a tense expression as if, by a masterly effort of his will, he could force Michael to array himself in this finery. “You must remember, Sir Michael,” he said with mock dignity, “you are our guest and a great ambassador from Ireland and—you must not refuse me—I have found no friend since you went away who is so dear to me as you. You will . . . ah, bon!”

In his delight, he chased the lackey out of the room, ordering him to send Barney up from the kitchen, and himself superintended Michael’s change of costume. Louvigny’s admiration for the young Irishman was nothing short of hero-worship. Michael was some two years older than he, and Michael had the gifts he coveted—great strength of body, poise, a face of striking interest. Louvigny was pale and weak; all his life seemed lived in the intensity of his spirit, seemed to be in his eyes, in his volatile ways and lively gestures.

“But what—name of a name—is this? I must see—let me see! You have a sweetheart then—mon dieu!”

Louvigny’s hand shook as he held up the gold-framed miniature that Michael, preparatory to disrobing, had taken from his pocket. Michael looked uncomfortable, then concerned, as he saw the effect the picture had produced on Louvigny. It was as if he had seen an apparition. He held the miniature much as one might hold a smoking grenade likely at any minute to go off and blow one into limbo.

“Is the lady so hard to look upon then?” chided Michael. “Faith, there are those who think that beside her, Artemis and Aphrodite, Helen and Cleopatra, fade into the insignificance of kitchen wenches. Sure, I might by now have been a corpse had I not admitted her ladyship there the most lovely of all women in saecula saeculorum.”

Louvigny had in part recovered his equilibrium, but his astonishment had not abated and his curiosity had grown mightily.

“I can name offhand,” said he, “a dozen men who would kill you for that picture. Where in heaven’s name did you get it? Why do you carry it about with you? And—”

“Wait,” said Michael. “Your questions come like apples from an inverted sack. I can tell you it all in a few words: I took the miniature from one Sir Peter de Launay in the course of a tavern brawl the night I left Ireland, in exchange for my house and lands, and because I did not think him proper custodian for so much of this world’s beauty.”

“At that,” said Louvigny, “many would say you made a goodly exchange. So lovely, so seemingly fickle, so miserable in her heart—”

“Is she that?”

Louvigny had taken the picture to the window, better to study those baffling, wondrous eyes, the aureate hair and winsome face. Now he turned quickly.

“She must be miserable,” he said fervently. “Perhaps no one other than myself thinks that there is sorrow in her, but I—somehow, I can tell where sorrow is. I have seen her—this Diane de Merville, ward of the King—and the moment I saw her I said to myself, ‘In her heart she is not happy’.”

“Diane de Merville,” repeated Michael. “Faix and troth, Louvigny, ’tis a charming name she has!”

“She is as lovely,” said Louvigny simply, “as all the goddesses and women you have named. Much of her beauty, I think, comes from your own people; her mother was an Irishwoman, Ora Esmond. The family were, like yourself, exiles. The Comte de Merville loved his Ora well. Now they are both gone; there is only Diane and, if something is not done, there will be a dearth of young men in France, since the fools persist in killing one another for love of her.”

“Quite so,” said Michael. “And she is a daughter of Deirdre! Barney, you scamp”—the O’Pray had appeared and hovered in the background—“the lady whose picture we stole with the blackthorn is an Irishwoman, no less. At least, in part. Her mother was an Esmond.”

“Then God be praised!” said Barney.

“I hope, Michael, that you, too, will not hit upon the rock of disaster for love of her,” said Louvigny. “This De Launay you speak of I seem to recall. He has many friends in France and, yes, I think he was seeking her hand in marriage. If she gave him this picture he is the only one, among the dozens who have loved her, to be so honored. But no doubt he pilfered it. She would give her picture to no man—especially this one, which was painted by Armand Giroux. She valued it greatly. It is most like her of all her portraits. Mon dieu, it speaks, smiles at one!”

“Then I shall return it to her,” said Michael. “It is of no value to me.”

“Do not, if you love life and happiness, tell her that, or she will scratch your eyes out first and then have you thrown into the Bastille, later to be torn by angry wolves. Diane’s picture of no value to you! It is unheard of. I can get you a thousand gold pieces for it tomorrow, tonight even. More, . . . it is priceless.”

“To me,” repeated Michael, his lips twisted in a queer little smile, “it is of no value. So much beauty saddens me, and beauty so remote piques me. Why should a man who cannot read carry a precious book about with him? Or a man who cannot hear have a godlike harper at his beck and call? Would you have the fair Diane make of me a Tantalus, starving for that which is ever beyond his reach?”

“No,” said Louvigny. “And you would not enter the lists and fight for her favor? She has one of the amplest fortunes in France.”

“Still less then would I enter the lists,” said Michael. “Not but what I could do with a fortune. But it were enough to be a fool without being a greedy one. And, in fine, my heart is free.”

In the shadows where he sat now, Louvigny smiled. He had heard others boast, even as Michael boasted now, that Diane could not trouble them. And then they had seen Diane—Louvigny wondered if she would not be at the Comte de Lussac’s tomorrow night with the fat old ogress who was her duenna. La Marquise Santoyard, always looking like a great cat filled to repletion with plump mice. Perhaps Diane would be there and Louvigny hoped that Michael, for his own sake would not, in returning Diane’s picture, tell her it was of no value to him.

Out of the hundreds who thronged, the next night, the grand salon of the Comte de Lussac’s palace, Diane, it seemed to Michael’s eyes, blazed as a great beacon among a forest of tiny tapers. They all receded into a blurred, hazy back-drop against which, small, haughty, breath-taking in her loveliness, she stood alone. Yes, she was all that De Launay, all that Louvigny de Dronsart had said. And Louvigny, standing now at his side, pressed his arm and muttered:

“Have a care, Michael! You see I have not exaggerated. There are many here who can lay strong claim to beauty, but beside her claims, theirs are a mockery. When you are presented to her, you will, I pray, be careful; for even in such assemblages as this, she has been known to lose her lovely temper and, careless of who might hear, make known her feelings. It is her Irish heritage, I suppose, to have those spells of temper and even at such moments she is lovely. And, of course, she is always forgiven her outbursts, though a blind man could see she does not care whether or not one condones—if you will come with me—”

“But is it necessary that I be presented to her?” demanded Michael. “Perhaps it were better that we wait, my friend. The picture I can return to her tomorrow—”

“Then you do not wish to keep her picture?”

“It is not for me to choose. I have no right to it. She need not know whence it comes to her.”

“She will turn Paris inside out to learn and she will be as angry with you for returning it as she would be if she found it in your possession.” Louvigny sighed. “No man can know how to please her. She is most difficult.”

“Oh,” said Michael, “any man who knew how to handle her sisters could deal with her. But perhaps I have the advantage of you Frenchmen, since I am Irish and know what it is that makes her, as you call it, difficult. And now to wear the glassy smile, Louvigny, and make my compliments to our host.”

The young Irishman attracted much attention. He was one of a nation which had many strong, individual links with France; his warlike countrymen held high offices in the armies of Louis XV; and this youth, assured, smiling, debonair, pleased the nice fancy of the gay courtiers. The men admired his sturdy carriage and fearless, sparkling eye; the women his dark, curly hair and whimsical ways. But Michael did not like their interest. His thoughts tonight were far away.

Presently Louvigny was at his elbow rescuing him from two bewhiskered generals and a captain of dragoons.

“Your hour,” whispered Louvigny, “has come. She has stooped for the first time in my recollection, or in that of any other man . . . She commands . . . yes, that is the word . . . that you be presented to her and . . .”

Michael, a strange, unfamiliar throbbing in his breast, walked at Louvigny’s side through the laughing groups of revellers. He had not sought this meeting, he told himself. He did not want to meet her. And yet it was foolish to be agitated over this pretty, spoiled minx, who would doubtless try to pay him back for not having at once sought to be presented to her. Louvigny made him quickly known and melted away, and Michael stood alone before her.

There was challenge in her eyes and in his own. There was faint whimsy in his smile and he knew she did not like it. He saw a quick movement of her foot and he, from having met her like before, knew that she wanted to stamp it. But her voice was soft, velvety even, and her manner most gracious.

“You are from Ireland, they tell me; so I wanted to meet you. My mother told me so much of that country when I was little. My mother was one of your people.”

“Ah, sure you are, too,” said Michael, and his voice, in spite of his resolve to be cool and aloof, was a caress. “Your blue eyes are like the sky of night in the Glen of Morrah and your hair is the gold flax the fairies weave, and all about you is the wistfulness of the Celt.”

Diane frowned. It was not usual for strange young men to speak thus to her, to be so ready with their compliments. She had expected him to be shy, embarrassed, dumbfounded by her beauty. And still, in his eyes, at the corners of his mouth, was that suggestion of a smile, as if he talked to a child, amusing it and being amused by it. And his words reached her, as the light compliments of the others failed to do. Perhaps it was the mystic way he said them, the low music of his voice.

“No doubt,” she said with a pert toss of her gleaming head, “you speak thus to any and all young ladies, even Chinese, if they have had an Irish ancestor somewhere in the past. Is there not a stone you kiss that renders your tongue ready with such pretty words whether your heart feels them or not?”

“So ’tis said,” laughed Michael, enjoying her. Yes, she was one of his own. There was wildness, fierceness there with her beauty and youth. Suddenly, or perhaps from long gazing at her likeness in the quiet hours of his dreaming, he loved her and knew himself a fool for loving her.

“And are there not, too, some others who have heard these same things from your lips?”

Michael looked thoughtful and studied his brown hands, guiltless of jewels. Then he looked whimsically up at her and it was not he but some spirit which had crept into him, that spoke now.

“Only one other, milady, have I told them to—or so you might say. I have spoken such pretty things to the picture I carry next my heart.”

In her eyes coldness covered the ancient curiosity of woman. Her red lips tightened a little and she swung her blue fan in a blue and silver arc over the silver of her dress and her foot tapped the floor. Then she smiled, and Michael was very glad, for his own boldness had daunted him.

“I knew it,” she said. Her finger petulantly touched her lips. “Is she one of your own race—an Irish girl? Is she—like me? Are her eyes blue and is her hair like mine?”

“She might be your sister,” said Michael, “so much alike are you.”

“I do not believe it,” said Diane angrily, and this time her foot did stamp the floor. “Oh, go away from me—stay—oh, why do you annoy me! Please, please, let me see—just one look!”

“I cannot . . . here,” Michael was uneasy. Louvigny had told him and, anyway, he knew that she might make a scene. With that hair and those fearless eyes—.

“Then where?” she demanded. “Oh, I don’t want to see the silly old picture anyway. Probably she is ugly!”

“Love sees through its own eyes,” teased Michael. “Would you stroll in the garden with me?”

The leaves were cool and green and the grass still wet and silvered with gossamer. Diane wore blue lighter than her eyes, and her hair was bright in the moonlight that filtered down through the leaf-screen.

They stood in silence, the challenge had died from their eyes and now was a questing, old, old as the world, yet newer than the rose that on the bush hard by would open at dawn from its bud in the sun.

“Now, Sir Michael, you will let me see?” she said. “And you will not think me a wanton, silly thing for asking?”

Wordlessly, and his hand somewhat a-tremble, Michael took the miniature from his pocket and held it face down. But she must have seen. She gave a little cry and, reaching, turned it up. Her lips parted and she stared from it to him. And, without further ado, he took her in his arms and his lips lingered long on hers.

“It is strange,” said Michael, “it is wondrous, Diane. And to you . . . is it the same?”

“Yes. But we are mad,” she whispered. “I . . .” She looked fearfully about her. “They would put you away from me.”

“And I should love you more. Sure, love is a kind of madness, I’ve heard tell. And this must be love that makes ugly the thought of parting from you even for a moment, that makes long absence something to be dreaded. Once an old gipsy told me I should love a daughter of Deirdre, and I laughed at her, for I dared not think of love . . .”

His face clouded and a pensiveness as sombre as his declaration of love had been light-hearted and thoughtless, came upon him. He dared not think of love, yet here was love, this that made the world a lovelier, brighter place and made life, ah, so easy, since his battles would be fought for her, and for her his victories won . . .

“You are not happy,” chided Diane. “If to love me is to suffer, then better not to love.”

Michael shook his head impatiently.

“I love you,” he said. “That much is settled. It is as irrevocable as the words snatched from one’s lips by the winds. But now, what?”

“Now,” said Diane hastily, placing a steady hand upon his shoulder and standing on tiptoe to peer through the hedge. “Now you must go, for there comes a slow, stately and ominous figure under a purple shawl, and I must have time to compose myself. Go, Michael and . . . and . . .”

She clung closely to him, her hands hard upon his arms, her lips against his. Then she pushed him lightly away and averted her face. She cried.

“Why . . .!” began Michael; then yielding to her insistent gestures, he went reluctantly away.

That night he dreamed, and in his dreams he was winning great victories and splendid acclamations. Then he found himself in the crowded square before Notre Dame. Once more he saw the ridiculous cart, made of a great tub on large wooden wheels, and a weary ass hauling it, and in the tub was Pepin Clopinard, the King’s Fool, his face ghastly with the stuff he put on it, and there was hell in Clopin’s eyes.

In the darkness, rain dripped from the leaves of a great chestnut tree and the gusts of autumnal wind shook it now and then as if a giant’s fingers had clasped the trunk and sought to uproot it from its stronghold in the earth. In the streaming mist the coach and its span of sodden greys was scarcely visible to the two men, Sir Michael Mohan and Barney O’Pray, who waited by the west gate of the Marquis Santoyard’s garden—the gate that had been several times the entry to Michael’s fond trysting with her, for whom now he waited with an expectancy breathless and strangely sweet.

“ ’Tis hard to believe, Barney,” he whispered for the third time in the half-hour they had waited there, drenched but careless of the drenching. “Think you she will come, man? Or can it be that at the last minute something prevented her, our plans were found out and . . .”

“Devil a bit of it,” said Barney, whose ideal night for an elopement was something far remote from this, but who was enjoying it nevertheless hugely. “She will come any minute now, your honor. Sure, heaven has smiled upon your suit and you will win to wife the fairest lady in all France. Didn’t the Marquis of Waterford himself pay you well for Grey Ellen, and is not the snug little brig, the Bonhomme Lafarge, waitin’ for us at Havre, ready to put to sea . . .”

The gate latch rattled softly and the gate swung open just wide enough to admit the slight figure of Diane, enveloped in a dark rain-cape, its hood framing her face as soft and starlike as a nun’s. She laughed gleefully, and Sir Michael muttered thanksgivings to heaven for such women as this, who could laugh when a strong man’s nerves were strained and worn to shreds and jumped at every untoward sound—the neigh of the horses, the creak of the carriage.

There was a tender moment which rejoiced the heart of Barney. Then Michael helped her into the chaise and climbed in beside her while Barney stuffed bags and portmanteaux, shawls and umbrellas securely into the boot. Then they were off, down the narrow lane to the high road that led through the outlying villages of the Seine toward Havre. She sat silently, happily, her hand in Michael’s. It seemed that even now their joy was beginning, for they were free. In a short time they would be on the water, leaving France, leaving the old things that they loved and hated far behind, going to a new life in a new world and taking youth and love, most priceless things, there with them.

“Just a short while now, Diane,” said Michael. “It is all arranged. To the Carolinas we go, and there my cousin, Evan Redmond, will be waiting to receive us, and there is land for the asking. Then the long, full years stretch before us. You won’t regret leaving . . . all this?”

“I leave nothing, but I go to all,” she said with pretty seriousness. “Without you, Michael . . . the sound of your voice, that is a caress, the smile in your eyes . . .”

There arose a wild shout from the O’Pray’s lips—the sound of the whip. They were jolted cruelly in their seat at the chaise leaped ahead. Diane clung close to him, fear beyond all words in her heart. The chaise rocked, jolted, slipped. Like sudden fireflies, pine links glowed, crackled, smoked darkly in the mist, their light gleaming on the trappings of horses, on drawn swords held by figures that loomed giantesque in the garish light.

Michael cautioned her to sit still. He leaped from the coach and stood side by side with the O’Pray, who, with wild Gaelic cries and fiercely swinging blackthorn, beat back the soldiers who pressed in upon him. Michael’s rapier was out of its scabbard even as his foot touched the ground. With a ringing, clashing sound, almost joyous in his ears, it parried a vicious thrust, its point shooting down to his attacker’s wrist, which went limp, the sword clattering on the cobbled way. But others, more than Michael could count, took his place; a lightning of clashing steel played about him. There was a wild, barbaric cry—the ancient slogan of the Mohans on his lips as he cut and slashed, parried and thrust; and it was echoed from Barney O’Pray who beat the dancing blades aside like reeds and cracked many a Frenchman’s skull.

Backs against the chaise now, they fought; the rapier seemed to leap from Michael’s right hand to his left. Ah, this man was wise with his sword, this tall fellow who forced himself ahead of the others. Michael’s tricks were not new to him. Perhaps he, too, had studied in the school of Maître Falconard. He was a very devil. But there—in the shoulder. And even so, he was not finished. Others bore in from the sides. But to hurl the blazing pine-knot was a sickening thing. Straight at the chaise window it flew and Michael, catching it, hurled it back. But in that instant he was hit—a burning, stabbing pain in his side and the warm wet of blood. Then they bore him down, down into swimming darkness out of which he called to her. “Diane . . . Diane . . .”

“Faix an’ troth, ’tis a fine prison, it is, taken all in all,” said Barney. “None better have I been thrown into. Shame on Ireland that Dublin Gaol is the best it can boast. Sure, next to this it looks like a hencoop no less and the straw here is neither moldy nor stale.”

Michael, despite the stiffness of his side, the ringing ache of his head and the bitterness in his heart, was forced to smile at the spirit of a race that would compare the Bastille with Dublin Gaol and draw comfort from the fact that the straw in one was better than in the other. Michael found no comfort in that fact, but he was thankful that Barney had been permitted to share the same cell. Beyond a cracked skull and a face lined redly by rapier cuts, the O’Pray was undamaged and his spirits had suffered not at all.

“They didn’t make such quick work of us, your honor. And had Mark Rafferty, say, or me Uncle Thomas been there, it would have been a different story. But how, think ye, did they get wind of it?”

“That I do not know. Nor does it matter,” said Michael with a shrug. “There were so many who wanted her and for it to be even whispered that she was running off with me—I dare say it is a serious offense in France to go off with a young lady for love, when a number of the courtiers want her for money. Even her picture they have taken from me.”

Barney sighed deeply.

“We’ll be of stout heart and good spirits, your honor, an’ wax fat on cold water and black bread. It’s pampering us, they are here.”

The yellow sunlight of morning streamed down upon the straw where Sir Michael lay, his white ruffled linen shirt stained with blood and torn; mud dried upon his stockings and buckled shoes. He stretched, the pain in his side made him grimace and in his ears was a loud ringing.

“I hope they give us time to get well before they execute us,” announced the O’Pray, and with this cheery wish sat himself down in a corner.

In the days that followed, Barney had opportunity to relate his stories, endless though they were. No letters might the prisoners send out, and no visitors were permitted them; otherwise had Louvigny surely come to cheer them up. Two weeks went by, and Barney, so he said, was just becoming fond of his surroundings, when their gaoler, a merry, roly-poly little Gascon with a hook-nose and brown beard, announced that they would be taken away after nightfall.

“Where?” He shrugged, although Michael had not questioned him. “For what?” Again he shrugged. “Who can tell?” He spread his hands in a gesture of nescience, picked up the empty earthen amphora in which their water was brought and trundled out of the cell.

“We go from here this night,” explained Michael to his henchman, who knew no words of French save “yes” and “no” and often confused them. “The turnkey does not know where we are to be taken or what will be done with us.”

“Indeed a pleasant prospect,” said Barney.

The bells of the city—Orleans, Beaugency, Notre Dame de Paris—chimed and clanged sonorously at evening, and below and about them was the hum of the great metropolis. And somewhere there, mused Michael sadly, was Diane, alone with the little ghosts of all their splendid visions. Chin cupped in hands, even as his, no doubt she looked, too, into nothingness and had no thoughts but of him, as he thought only of her.

They came when the prison-watch called the midnight hour, dark figures caped and booted, guided by the turnkey’s smoky lanthorn. The prisoners’ hands were bound; they marched with their silent guards down the prison corridors and out into the courtyard where no moon shone, where they could feel the dust whirling dry about their legs and shivered in the chill wind of night. Then they were placed in tumbrils and driven from the Bastille—surely, thought Michael to their death.

But the drive was long, too long for those who were to die. They passed out of Paris, the wooden wheels loud on the deserted highways. Barney O’Pray sang softly and Michael listening, thought of other nights, velvet, cool, magicked by the stars and the shadowed lakes of Ireland. This ride was interminable. The two guards who sat in the rear of the tumbril were as silent as mutes; the driver said an occasional word to his horses. It occurred to Michael that they were going to the sea—but why to the sea? Were they being sent back to Ireland or perhaps to be sold as slaves in the islands of the Antilles?

The tumbril rumbled down narrow lanes now, and dark against the dark sky he saw the tracery of spars and rigging; heard the gurgle and rush of the water and in his nostrils felt the salt sea savor and the smell of tar and fish.

They were hurried aboard a vessel—a small brig, as far as Michael could judge—and thrust below hatches into a windowless, evil-smelling cubbyhole with only sacks to lie on. The hatch above was battened down, the tramp of feet on the deck-planking receded and died. Barney O’Pray said, “Thanks be to God for this small favor—suffocation instead of guillotination or strangulation!” And then even he lapsed into silence and pillowed young Mohan’s throbbing head on his breast.

At noon of the first day at sea, Sir Michael and Barney O’Pray were allowed on deck. The vessel—a brig she proved to be—was called L’Aiglon, a misnomer as great as that committed when Mark Rafferty’s ancient tub was christened the Gull. L’Aiglon seemed to be manned mostly by Basques, squat, swarthy fellows with blue velvet berets, who manifested a lively interest in their passengers. The red hair and freckles of Barney delighted them and furnished sport for their lively wit, but inasmuch as Michael translated all their jibes as compliments and assured Barney they were admiring him, there was no bloodshed.

“Sure, what are the little baboons jabberin’ about now?” demanded Barney. “Would ye think now that grown men would go around wearin’ hats like Scotsmen? That black devil there—I’d like to lower me blackthorn on his thick skull, I would. Now, what in the name of all the bards of Tara is that? Sure, is it a circus we have here?”

“That” was a man who came walking along the deck on his hands, no mean feat, since the Channel was rough and choppy and L’Aiglon, with a brisk, fog-laden wind on her quarter, rolled and wallowed like a turtle. The hand walker came nimbly to his feet and seated himself on a water-butt. He was a mere youth, they saw now, dark, good-looking, and much of the build of Sir Michael Mohan, but his face, lined, pensive, showed an age of worry, of defeat, of something unnameable, that was not in the clear, smiling face of the Mohan of Morrah. His clothes were sombre, of expensive material and excellent cut, and about him was such an air of mystery and mockery that Michael found it hard to tear his eyes away from the stranger’s face. What was it he saw there that vibrated a chord in him that had been shaken before? This man—somewhere he had seen him—somewhere . . . His was not a face from the crowd, not one of the thousands seen and forever forgotten. No, one could never forget those black, piercing eyes, betimes hard as polished jet, betimes soft with a sadness ineffable.

From his seat on the water-butt he cocked his head impudently at Michael and waved his hand in an exaggerated salutation. He smirked, he grimaced and gestured in such a way that Barney begged leave to go throttle him and throw him over the side.

“ ’Tis a shipful of monkeys, crew an’ all,” muttered Barney. “What ails the lad? Sure, he acts as if Old Nick himself had taken possession of him an’ was peepin’ out through those big black eyes of his. Had I not better go and put him out o’ misery, your honor?”

Michael shook his head. He was at a loss entirely to account for the young man’s peculiar actions, but he did not take them amiss. He felt a vague pity for this youth, for his crazy pantomime. The stranger’s face was thin and white. It had an elfin, sly and derisive look. His hair was black, abundant, rippling out under a plumed hat, rakishly atilt on his head. All about him, Michael saw with swift intuition, was pose, pretense, acting. Perhaps the stern, caustic gravity that succeeded his mocking grin as they strolled toward him, was his natural expression. Michael was not sure that he liked it better. The strange youth seemed now as anxious not to speak with them as previously he had been eager to attract their attention. He looked out into the greyness of sea and sky, brushed the beaded mist from his hair, drummed with his fingers on the staves of the water-butt, whistled a madrigal.

Michael, nonplussed, hesitant at this sudden volte face, stopped a few yards away from the stranger’s perch. Barney, in the rear, muttered something about the man’s being “a poor, crazy body that had best be left to perform his antics in peace.” But Michael, sensing the unusual, his friendly nature sick unto desperation for someone youthful and interesting, smiled cheerfully at the fellow and said:

“Since it is fellow passengers we are or fellow prisoners—and, in faith, it is all the same—may I make so bold as to enquire your name and our destination? The first I am unselfishly interested in knowing; the second selfishly, for, damme, if I have any idea at all.”

The youth turned slowly around from his interested scrutiny of the murky Channel and a single gull, drab and lonely, that had circled the ship with screeling cry, and now, as if satisfied or discouraged, was becoming a speck in the greyness through which swiftly it winged its landward way.

“My name?” he said flippantly, “Jacques Blorion. My destination—hell.”

“Eh!” A lively grin grew from the faint smile on Michael’s lips. “Then we sail on uncharted seas, sir. And it cannot be that we are all bound for the same place.”

“Perhaps not,” said Monsieur Blorion, as if for him the interview was ended. After a moment, however, he favored Michael with a dark, direct stare in which were venom and mockery. And, in that instant, again Michael pitied him and wondered what twist was in his spirit, what drop of gall had spoiled the fountainhead of his youth; for a youth he was and no more. Even, the down on his lip was such as a boy might sprout in playing at manhood. Michael longed to get behind that barrier of mockery and bitterness; get behind it and touch the young heart that must be there. But Blorion’s isolation, his supreme aloofness and disdain, repelled any present advances.

“I fancy, Sir Michael Mohan, that, if I reach hell at the end of this voyage, there will be an Irishman with me.”

Michael hid his astonishment that this stranger should be so familiar with his name. The captain of the L’Aiglon, no doubt, had told him of it when gossiping.

“You could find no better company, Monsieur Blorion. But I assure you I had not that destination in view. Anyway, what makes you so sure that we are bound for the shades of Acheron? ’Tis no Stygian River we sail upon, but the waters of the English Channel. Your stomach will tell you that, man, unless you are a better sailor than Michael Mohan. Look at Barney O’Pray now, leaning over the rail. A sick man he is, by the lord, already.”

“Let him be,” said Blorion impatiently. “And try not to be like the rest of your countrymen, always wandering, being side-tracked, divagating, digressing. Notice now; we were talking about our destination and you have brought the conversation around to your freckled-faced idiot of a servitor. Plague take him! Now, if you will heed me, I shall explain why I think both you and I are bound for hell. Were you not in heaven a few weeks ago?”

“I was,” said Michael softly, thinking of her whom he never ceased to think of. “In the highest heaven.”

“So, too, was I,” said Blorion. And Michael, in an access of horror, of the warmest sympathy, as for a stricken dumb brute, saw that Blorion, though his mouth smirked and his eyes mocked, was crying in his heart, crying like a little boy, a child that finds itself alone in some deserted, unknown place.

“Very good,” continued the strange young man, with never a quaver in his voice, never a visible sign of sorrow. “It is then agreed that we were in heaven yesterday. Now, are we there today?”

“No,” said Michael.

“Then we are still falling; eventually we must land in hell.”

“Faith, ’tis a pretty point you have made, sir.” He called to Barney. “Barney, my lad, come here until I present you to this gentleman. Talk about your Father Dominic O’Leary and Father Tim Dolan! Divil a one of them could hold a candle to this man for logic and pushing a thing to its proper conclusion. He proves it is to hell we are bound—there and no place else.”

Barney turned a woebegone face, for a moment, from the rail, nodded and turned back again.

“To be sure, your honor,” were the faint words the wind brought Michael.

“You interest me, Monsieur Blorion,” said Michael, all his levity vanished. “As well by your clear statement of your case and mine as by the fact that you know aught about me. Has the captain of this gallant vessel been telling you my story?”

“I have not talked with him,” said Blorion. “Nor to any of the crew. They are merely Basques—good fellows, but crude, uncomprehending.” Monsieur Blorion adopted an air of superiority that made Michael laugh, for Michael had seen the cook and a seaman playing at draughts in the galley door and was but biding his time until he should have a chance at one or other of them. Blorion seemed to grasp what was going on in his mind. Bitterness cropped out again, bitterness that was always with him, like a serpent, drawing itself in for a moment, then darting itself forth.

“You are laughing at me,” accused Blorion. “At my pretenses, at my calling these dirty fishermen crude and uncomprehending. Do you know who and what I am, Sir Michael Mohan?”

“I do not,” said Michael promptly.

“A peasant’s brat from Angoulême,” said Blorion. “And I am a fool.” He laughed long and mirthlessly. Barney looked once more from the rail, uttered something that sounded like a prayer, then went back to his communion with the waters. But the laughter grated upon Michael, retched him. It was tortured; it was hideous.

“Peasants are not to be scorned,” said Michael with gravity. “And, as for being a fool, are we not all open to be called by that name? Sure, there was a Man nailed to a cross once. They called Him a fool.”

Blorion seemed weak and spent, as if his laughter were like a fit that exhausted him. He pressed his hands against his white cheeks, rubbed them up and down.

“That is so,” he said, when Michael, deeply engrossed in trying to make head and tail of him, had forgotten what the last observation was. “Aye, that is indeed so. I fancy you are, in your fashion, as big as fool as I. Yet you are no peasant’s brat. Your blood is as good as hers they tore you away from. Oh, I know—” He smiled craftily. “I know a great deal that you don’t know and that you will never know unless I tell you. I held a high place at Court, you see. Louis, that good, kind and illustrious king, and I were gossips—gossips, mind you, sirrah—no less! I used to whisper in his ear, and he in mine. He may have whispered your story in my ear.”

Michael’s puzzlement grew apace. This weird fellow, this bundle of conceit, inferiority, acrimoniousness, knew more about his affairs, and, doubtless Diane’s, than he did himself. Wisely, he did not seek to force Jacques Blorion with questions. The fellow was waiting to be questioned, waiting to refuse to answer and gloat over Michael’s baffled curiosity. There was a sly twinkle in Michael’s eye as he thrust hands in pockets and whistled Barney’s favorite, the Colleen Dhas.

It produced the effect he had foreseen and wanted. Blorion fidgeted. He jumped down from his throne on the water-butt and paced the deck.

“Dammed Irishman,” Michael heard him say, and whistled the louder. At last . . . “Stop. I beg you to stop,” said Blorion.

“Ah, I am sorry you do not like the music,” said Michael humbly. “But wait till you hear Barney O’Pray; he is ten times worse, for I have a good sense of sound and can tell a crow from a throstle, God be praised!”

“I heard said you were a race of madmen,” muttered Blorion. “Do you not know you are going to your death?”

The words, the tone of his voice, not bitter or mocking now, but filled with brotherly sorrow, gave Michael pause. His hands came out of his pockets, hung at his sides.

“Death?” he said steadily. “What makes you say that, Blorion? Why should they send me across the seas to die? Is it to Ireland we go?”

“To Quebec,” said Blorion. “To New France.”

“Eh! You tell me—”

“Did you not know?” Blorion was impatient. “Of course, we go to New France. Sacred name! I thought you had guessed that long ago or knew it. Apparently, you know very little of your own affairs.”

“I have not had the chance to think of my affairs for several weeks,” said Michael. “Someone kindly took the responsibility off my shoulders.”

“You know who,” said Blorion. “The King’s men. You were unfortunate, Sir Michael, in your choice of a sweetheart, as she was in the choice of a lover.”

“No doubt she was,” admitted Michael. “But I—you do not know, Blorion, though you know quite a lot.”

“Much more than you think. Seriously, had it been any girl in France other than Diane de Merville with whom you so quickly and beautifully fell in love—ah, yes, they had to admit it was a beautiful manifestation—you might have . . . no matter . . . For they talked about you at Court, about your good looks, your fine carriage and air de noblesse. Even La Pompadour, had you sought her favor, might have smiled on you and on your suit for Diane’s hand. As it was, she defeated you even as she defeated me—”

“La Pompadour! She defeated me! Why, she is but a noble harlot!”

Monsieur Blorion laughed.

“She is the ruler of France. Make no mistake about it, Sir Michael. You and I are here on this wretched boat, bound for Quebec, for . . . Well, we are thus because we did not realize, or for a moment forgot, that Antoinette Poisson, was mistress of our destinies. She hates those who forget. And you sought to run away with Diane de Merville, whom she had long since promised to Gaston Crevier, the Sieur d’Anvers, if you please.”

“I know him not,” said Michael, wondering at all this that had gone on under the apparent but treacherous smoothness of his love for Diane—spying, intrigue, the anger of the King’s mistress.

“You will know him,” vowed Blorion. “In the hell to which you are going, he is one of the archfiends. Oh, it is, on the surface, a pleasant hell, this New France. I have heard said the wine flows freely there, but so does blood. The gold is plentiful too, but so is misery. The cross rears itself high, but in its shadow men burn at the stake. And there is corruption, debauchery, friponnerie. And of all this the leader is one François Bigot, a handsome pig; and with him Gaston Crevier . . . who is not handsome.”

“And they are sending me out for Gaston to look after me,” said Michael. “Faith, I am sure we will not be friends.”

“Yes, they are sending you out to Gaston,” said Monsieur Blorion dully. “Not that they did not want to do away with you in the Bastille, but merely that you had friends—the Marquis de Dronsart ranks high in the King’s favor—and, due to his representations, Louis had the death sentence changed to one committing you to New France, to such punishment there as the authorities deemed fitting. It was simply sentencing you to a more cruel death, with, perhaps, her you love to witness it.”

“They would—”

“Of a certainty. You know not the depths of their hearts, Sir Michael; how, when the gratifications of ordinary pleasures are exhausted, they seek stimulus for their jaded passions in cruelties subtle and refined. Think you not that Antoinette Poisson, La Pompadour, would gloat upon the image of you hanging from the gallows while she you loved and who loved you, looked up at your dead face, where the protuberant eyes, the discolored flesh and mouth distorted, made horrid mockery of her dreams? It is even so.”

“And blindly I walked into the midst of such things,” said Michael pensively. “Walked with my head in the clouds while all about my feet were snares and gins that even a stupid rabbit might have perceived. I was a fool, a fool without motley, without the asses’ ears, the mock sceptre or the pig bladders in which dried pease make a rattle, but a fool none the less.”

Monsieur Blorion started, stared sharply at the young Irishman for a moment. Then, as if satisfied with what he saw, he laughed with a trace of sardonic mirth and said dryly,

“All fools do not wear motley, Sir Michael; nor are all who wear it, fools. Life plays its pretty pranks.”

“Yes,” agreed Michael. “It makes strange sport of us. But now that you have told me all about myself, my friend, and imparted to me the cheering news that I am but going from the frying-pan into the fire, will you not describe to me the particular sport that life has had with you? From your mien I gather it has been cruel.”

“Aye, most cruel,” nodded Blorion, once more seating himself on his cask as on a throne and gathering up his legs under him. “But describe it to you, sir, I will not. Your affairs were no care of mine. They were forced upon me as, from my high and responsible position in the Court of Louis XV, were full many others. But my sorrows can be no care of yours and I would not inflict them upon you. I hold them close to me, enfin, hugging my miseries, battening upon bitterness as I thought to—”

He stopped abruptly and resumed his monotonous study of sea and sky. Grey smoky clouds blew wispily across an obscure sky, and of the sun the faint, twilight radiance was the only sign. L’Aiglon splashed and wallowed in the deep troughs and in her clumsy rigging was an infernal din of stridently creaking blocks, straining stays and flapping canvas. The captain, a paunchy giant of a man with multiple chins and eyes dwarfed and rendered porcine from the excess of flesh on his cheeks, bellowed orders from the lofty poop and the seamen went agilely about their execution.

Seeing that Monsieur Blorion would talk no more, Michael took his leave and walked over to Barney O’Pray who, still in the unpleasant throes of seasickness, was praying softly, cataloguing all the saints, angels and archangels, and calling upon them to come to the rescue of his agonized body.

“Och! It’s glad I’ll be when this accursed vessel reaches Ireland, your honor. And once having set foot there, never will I leave it again . . . unless, of course, your honor says so.”

Michael smiled wanly. Though the darkness of Dublin Gaol might hang over him, even the shadow of the gallows, ’twould be sweet to be in Ireland.

“We are not going to Ireland . . .” He laid a hand gently on Barney’s shoulder. “It is to Quebec, to the New World, we are going.”

“No!” Wonderment, grief, delight, expectancy, flashed over Barney O’Pray’s face even as fast as his eyes blinked four times. “Is it so, your honor? ’Tis a place I have always wanted to see. And did his lordship who uses his hands for feet tell ye that?”

“He did. Also, that we shall be no better off in the New France than we were in the Old. It seems that I am in the ill graces of the King’s favorite for trying to win Diane. And I am being sent to him who would have her, one Gaston Crevier, Sieur d’Anvers, that he may fittingly punish me for my boldness—”

“Oh, time enough to think of him,” said Barney. “We’ll be too much for them all, mark me, your honor. Once I am rid of this evil pain that is makin’ me life an unbroken misery, I’ll take the vessel here single-handed. ’Tis odd I should get ill; the O’Prays were great seamen. Did you ever hear of how an O’Pray saved the day for England when the Spaniards sent their great Armada?”

“Not now,” pleaded Michael. And mercifully then a seaman came and ordered them below. It was twilight and the grey murk had thickened; a long, slow swell was on the sea. Monsieur Blorion still sat, a forlorn figure, on his water cask, his legs curled up under him, his chin propped in his cupped hands, his eyes gazing afar off . . .

All during L’Aiglon’s slow, crawling passage across the Atlantic, that dark and sullen sky brooded over her. Never a ray of sunlight pierced through that leaden pall and no sail showed upon the vague horizon; neither gull nor albatross circled her stubby spars; no whale blew or flying-fish skimmed the slowly rising and falling billows. The cheery Basques even lost their quips and laughter and ceased to poke rude fun at Barney O’Pray. Blorion had lapsed into a profound and forbidding silence from which Michael could not jolt him. There was a tension on board the brig, a tension bred of gloom and the chill winds of early winter and the salt spray that stung and blinded, all without cease, without respite.

“ ’Tis like a tumbril of the sea,” muttered Michael. “As if death were at her helm. And it is all so dark and drab—fit to drive men mad.”

The knives had flashed the twelfth day out, and a tall, insolent fellow, a Venetian, had died at the hands of a Basque, one Laripo, a little man of gigantic strength. And that was because the Venetian played and sang . . . even so. The same tunes, the same ballads that had rejoiced Laripo and his comrades at the outset of the voyage, had driven him to frenzy. And the Venetian would not stop. Michael saw the waters close smoothly over him in his winding-sheet weighted by round shot. And L’Aiglon wallowed and plodded toward those unknown shores.

The seamen whispered of ice in the great gulf and in the wide river down which they must sail to reach Quebec. It would be late November when they sighted the outlying islands of the realm of New France. The winters there were bitter, the seamen said—it was Laripo who talked to Michael—speaking of great, deep snows, of lands held in the grip of ice, of men walking on racquets woven of thongs to keep them from sinking in the snow . . .

“Methinks you need have no fear of such things, monsieur,” said Laripo, regarding Michael with pity in his sombre eyes, in his Punch-like face. “It is true that you go to the tender mercies of Gaston Crevier, le Sieur d’Anvers, is it not? What a pity! There they hang one and place one’s body in a cage at the crossroads for all to look upon. What have you done, monsieur, that such should be your fate?”

“I have loved,” said Michael.

“No doubt a greater crime than mine,” smiled Laripo. “Our good Captain Degouin has promised that I shall hang, too, from the yardarm when we cast anchor before Quebec. Ah, well, love is a more pleasant crime to have committed than murder.”

Through days and weeks of bitter, unwavering monotony, L’Aiglon sailed, until it seemed to Michael that they must be encompassing the globe and would reach Cathay instead of the land Cristoforo Colombo had discovered; and Barney O’Pray vowed that they had passed America by in the night and would presently sail over the rim of the world; which, in spite of savants and geographers, Barney tenaciously believed to be flat as a pancake.

“And think of the commotion a ship must cause when after fallin’ for years and years it fetches up in hell! ’Tis an awful thought,” said Barney.

As if the skies out of their lowering murkiness and the seas out of their sullen heaving had bred a mad typhoon, a storm broke upon the little vessel just when they had sailed into the great Gulf of St. Lawrence, and at the prospect of soon making their landfall, the Basques had begun again to smile and jolly one another. The wild sea drove the little vessel onward, picked it up, whirled it, tossed it about like a straw in a torrent. The foremast in the first onslaught of the wind came crashing down and the shrieked oaths and prayers of men pinioned under the weight of spars rose faintly above the hurly-burly of the wind. The seas, frothing white in the darkness, swept over the vessel, carrying away everything that was not securely lashed, smashing through the hatchways, pouring water into her hold to join that which flooded through her sprung and gaping seams. All was chaos and panic. No semblance of order was there, when a shout could scarce be heard a foot away from the lips of him who shouted.

With the water swirling about their hips they fought and struggled for the boats. Michael, though he could not see, knew that men died there in their eager, frenzied fight for life. His own hands clung to the gunnel of the ship’s longboat. Barney O’Pray was close to him. The boat was half filled with water, and the seas, sweeping over the deck, mocked at their every effort to launch it. Then, unexpectedly aiding, a huge comber struck the vessel broadside-on, heeling her over till the decks inclined at a giddy angle and longboat and seamen, like tumbled pigmies with a toy, were shot helter-skelter into the sea.

The icy water closed over Michael’s head. His motions seemed like those of a paralytic, for in legs, arms and body was a dead numbness. He fought to the surface; his flailing arms struck against the boat which, almost full of water, floated with its gunnels awash like a water-soaked log. He clung to it with the frenzy of despair, fearing to climb aboard lest it founder under him. He shouted to Barney O’Pray, but there was no answer. He shouted again with failing power, and this time a hand touched his—a hand on which he felt heavy rings. He guessed it was Blorion.

All night in the welter and moil of the seas, Michael clung with senseless fingers, with the iron grip of those who cling with the hands alone to life, and when the dawn broke, grey and haggard, slowly lighting the waves with sickly radiance, he saw that one other clung to the upturned boat with him—Monsieur Blorion. Of L’Aiglon, its captain and crew, and of Barney O’Pray whom Michael had loved well, there was no sign. They drifted, just they two, in that great, seemingly limitless waste of waters. And if in their hearts was a terror born of loneliness, of experiences new and harrowing, their brine-encrusted lips smiled bravely enough. The wound in Michael’s side, partly healed, had opened and the salt water agonized it, but he seemed to have come off better than Blorion whose face was ghastly and body limp, as if only in his white, beringed hands was strength remaining.

“Fate still sports, Sir Michael,” Blorion called weakly, with a piteous effort at gaiety. “Does she save us for a worse death?”

“There is no being up to the hussy,” frowned Michael. “And she has taken Barney away from me . . .” Over the waters his dark eyes gazed in vain, seeking the loyal, merry fellow who had gladly followed him into exile, even unto death. “But, look you, monsieur, we shall make fight for it! Come now; with our hands we can bail the water from this boat.”

“And then?”

“And then we can sit down,” said Michael. “You must not give up the ghost, Blorion. Come now, with whatever you have. And how did you manage to hang on with all those clothes?”

Blorion was wearing a greatcoat, fawn-colored, of many capes; a sodden muffler of blue and white check was about his neck so tightly that it seemed to be strangling him. He had no interest in living, it seemed to Michael, no desire to bestir himself. Listlessly he splashed water from the boat while Michael bailed industriously. Presently, Michael climbed aboard and scooped the water over the side in great handfuls. He dragged Blorion to a resting across the thwarts and fell to bailing anew. Blorion watched him dully, a flicker of disdain on his pallid, corpselike face to which the dark hair was plastered dankly.

“Such energy in the very face of death!” he said.

“ ‘Sure, you’re not dead till you’re buried,’ as the man in Wicklow said when he climbed out of his coffin at the wake. But I see you are much fatigued, Blorion. Do you rest there and presently you will be dry and feeling more yourself.”

Blorion smiled with that old, old cynicism and Michael, bent forward, hands on knees, preparatory to resuming his scattering of the water, saw in the man’s eyes that which he seemed to have known before, yet could not recall. He went busily to work, helped now by a bottom-board which he tore up with a Gargantuan effort and used to paddle the water out. Soon the boat was much lighter and Michael, feeling weariness and vertigo now and a consuming thirst, sat weakly down.

The sun did not shine; a gusty, chilling wind helped to dry their sodden garments, but made them suffer, cutting their numbed bodies to the bone. Blorion shivered and coughed, but seeing Michael’s scant attire—a torn shirt of once fine linen, and velvet breeches—he offered him his greatcoat, saying he had no need of it. But Michael would have none of that.

They drifted aimlessly, for the tiller was smashed and there was no means of rigging a sail, for which Blorion’s coat had served well. Michael strove manfully to instill courage and hope into his listless companion, telling him they were in the great gulf, that they could not be far from land, that a vessel would surely sight them. But Blorion only smiled wearily and Michael knew, with pity, with understanding, that here was a man who had not the will to live.

It was so. Night came. Michael lay down in the stern and fell into deep slumber that lasted until dawn. And at dawn he was alone.

“God have mercy on him,” he said softly. “A queer, a troubled soul was his. And this—” He picked up the greatcoat that Blorion had very gently laid over him, that had fallen to the bottom of the boat. “Sure, he should not have done that. Why, why—” Yet Michael felt that, wherever the strange man was now, his eyes had lost their mockery, his smile its cynicism, his voice its bitterness. “Perhaps,” whispered Michael through his parched and cracked lips, “perhaps he is at peace now.”

But the loneliness was hideous for Michael Mohan, and his strong heart quailed when he dwelt upon what his own end might be. If only there were a drop of water to wet his tortured throat; if only, out of that hellish murk, the sun would gleam. He felt delirium come upon him; he laughed, he babbled. He saw the grinning, freckled face of Barney, the face of Diane smiling at him, her lips shaping his name. He walked again through the Glen of Morrah, heard the birds’ song and the gurgle of the little burn. He flung his hands high in air and fought with glimmering reason the impulse to leap over the side of the boat into those waters that lyingly offered rest. Then, mercifully, he became unconscious and lay as one dead on the bottom of the longboat, Blorion’s legacy, the coat of many capes, clutched in his gaunt hands.

There were strange faces taking shape out of the shifting mists, and the buzzing in his ears resolved itself into voices speaking swiftly in French. His lips burned with the brandy that had been forced between them and in his body was a vast, a complete weariness as though all life and vitality had been drained from it. This was the cabin of a ship; richly panelled it was in dark, redly gleaming wood, mahogany. The couch whereon he lay had a silken covering. He could feel its smoothness under his fingers, against his cheek.

There were three men standing near him. Engrossed in their conversation they did not heed his return to consciousness. One wore the elegant costume of a French noble, a buff-colored coat of exquisite cut, with huge cuffs and an abundance of snowy lace peeping therefrom. His profile was hawk-like, the chin arrogant, the brow and nose imperious, and his voice was haughty as he spoke to the other two, one evidently the captain of the vessel, the other a mate.

“No doubt, captain,” the gentleman was saying, “this Blorion is the only survivor of the wreck of the L’Aiglon. I received tidings from France that he was being sent out to amuse us at Quebec and, my faith, there was no one else aboard the tub whom I would so gladly see survive. A merry fellow, this Blorion, by all accounts. You can see from these letters that were sewn in his coat that His Majesty, as well as La Pompadour herself, was mightily pleased with him. And had not the fool so far forgotten his station as to fall in love with Heloïse de Valois and even make some headway with his suit, he might have prospered—who can tell? In Quebec, at any rate, he will be welcome. The welcome I had prepared for the Irish dog, Sir Michael Mohan, was of a sort quite different. But the sea has relieved me of the pleasant duty of hanging him.”

“Sure, a right, cheery sort of gentleman this is,” mused Michael, his eyes shut tight. “Think of that now! And I am Blorion. And this is—”

“Sieur d’Anvers,” said the captain. “Think you it would be worth while to cruise about in quest of other survivors?”

“To the devil with them,” said d’Anvers. “Let us hasten to Quebec before ice forms on the river. Methinks, François Bigot, Cadet and Verron will be impatient to hear from the King’s Fool the latest gossip of the Court; and the master-tailors of Quebec will have a task for them most unique—to fit out our jester here with motley, with a cap with asses’ ears, bells and whatnot. But what a godsend he will be in the long winter nights beside the roaring fire . . . Ho! Jacques Blorion, dit Pepin Clopinard, dit le fou du roi, Blorion, are you not awake yet?”

He crossed over to Michael’s couch and shook him roughly. Slowly, Michael’s lids opened and his dark eyes, full of mischief, stared up into those, shifty, ferretlike, of Gaston Crevier, Sieur d’Anvers.

“Let me be, fool,” he said impishly. “A sad thing it is for a man just back from the dead to look on a face as ugly as yours. For a moment I thought I had gone to hell and it was the devil himself who was shaking me. Get you gone!”

“You see!” Gaston Crevier laughed heartily. “A pretty, caustic wit! We shall be merry this winter in Quebec!”

“For once,” said the King’s Fool, “your lips speak truth.” And he turned his face to the wall that they might not see the twisted, bitter smile—a smile much like Blorion’s, which Michael well recalled now.

The dark little tailor shop of Maître Gabbon was located not far from La Place d’Armes in a narrow thoroughfare known as the Alley of the Pigeons, for there, summer and winter, the birds flocked, fluttering and splashing in the puddles, rising up with a great whirr-whirr of wings and sweeping down in hordes for the handfuls of corn—rare alas, in these days of the Friponne—which Fernand Lachance, the corn-dealer, whose shop adjoined Maître Gabbon’s, sometimes threw to them. In spring, the alley was filled with their softly guttural cooing as they made their nestings in the eaves.

Maître Gabbon’s shop was a gloomy place. Most of the day he worked by the light of tallow candles, his bespectacled eyes close down on the cloth he was sewing. A good tailor, Maître Gabbon, none better in Quebec. He was much in vogue among the gay crowd that gathered like silly butterflies around the bright flame which was François Bigot, the Intendant.

“Pox take them!” muttered old Gabbon, squinting over his horn spectacles at the work in hand—this time the splendid cassock of my lord bishop which his grace would not entrust to the skill of the nuns but must needs send to Maître Gabbon. “What do they care? Let me work my fingers to the bone over their fine lace and broadcloth, brocade and silly folderols. Quick work and slow pay. ‘Ah, splendid! Magnificent, Maître Gabbon! In truth, did His Majesty know that we had such a grand tailor in New France, ’tis back to Paris you would go and we should be left to wear homespun, for to none other than you would we entrust rich fabrics!’ So they say to me, but when it comes to paying, then ’tis a different story. Even my lord the Intendant, who sends his man Charleroi Fortin to me with this fool commission to make—”

“Talking to yourself again, Maître Gabbon?” said a cheery voice from the doorway. “A good sign, indeed. It means you have money in the bank.”

“Not a sou, Gil Martin; not a penny have I, in the bank or out of it. You notaries have the good time, little work and plenty of money.”

The notary, a red-faced man, blear-eyed, with a bulbous nose and pendulous lower lip, three-cornered hat and a great surtout muffling him to the neck against the biting November blast, shuffled over to the table on which Maître Gabbon sat, his spindle legs crossed; the bishop’s red and black cassock draped over his knees.

“What are your troubles now?” asked the notary, sitting down on a rickety chair and crossing his legs with a palpable effort. “What fresh worries have you, Maître Gabbon—any which require the services of a first-class notary? There is none better in Quebec or, for that matter, in the whole of New France, than Gil Martin, at your service.”

“You have prospered,” said old Gabbon sourly. He was a perennial pessimist and it is doubtful if, had all his debtors come in at the moment and paid him in full, filling his shop with gold pieces, that he would have felt any better, for then there would be nothing to complain of.

“A pox upon them all!” muttered the tailor, ignoring Gil’s questions. “Devil take them and burn them!”

“Who now?”

“All, all; can one choose among rogues? But this that happened at the first hour this morning is too much for an honest man to bear. Ecoutez!—I was sewing on the cassock of my lord bishop, as you see me now, Gil Martin, when I heard the pigeons rise up with a great hubbub and presently a horse stopped before my door and a man dismounted and entered the shop. It was Charleroi Fortin—you know the young rogue—a worthy servant of his master . . .”

“Easy, Maître Gabbon! Would you have the Intendant down upon us? One must be careful these days. All the corn in New France is in François Bigot’s granaries, the King’s granaries, and it is easy for a man to starve, or die a worse way.”

“I care not,” muttered the tailor. “It passeth all endurance. This insolent, swaggering lackey pokes his face up into mine, Gil Martin, and squints his eyes at me.

“ ‘Have you come,’ I ask him, ‘to pay the Intendant’s reckoning? For one fine coat he owes me, for three silk, ruffled shirts—’

“ ‘Hold your tongue, old fool!’ says the rogue. ‘Or my lord will soon stop its wagging in a way you will not like. I have a most important commission for you, and, mind me, it must be executed with dispatch. Know you aught of the costume fools wear?’

“ ‘Indeed,’ said I promptly, ‘I know very well all that relates to what fools should wear. Have I not been tailor to two Intendants, a Governor and countless ones like yourself?’

“At that, he placed his hand on his sword, scowled at me and bade me be still.

“ ‘Look you, Maître Gabbon,’ says he. ‘It is not the time for fooling.’

“ ‘Yourself began it,’ says I, ‘with all this talk of fools.’

“ ‘I mean fool in its secondary or tertiary significance,’ he says. ‘I mean a jester’s costume—that of a court fool.’

“It was in my mind to tell him that they should all have been wearing fools’ suits long ago at the Intendant’s palace, but I held my peace, and the scoundrel explained that the Intendant wanted a jester’s costume made at once; that the King’s fool had arrived from France and was to entertain the fine folk at Chateau St. Louis and at Beaumanoir. In faith, ’twas all they needed and naught worse.”

“I have so heard it rumored in the Place d’Armes,” said the notary interestedly. “And at the Canoterie they spoke of it this morning. This jester, it seems, arrived in Quebec last night on the Lys d’or, the King’s vessel which was bringing the Sieur d’Anvers back from Acadie. They picked up this unfortunate at sea, sole survivor of L’Aiglon, which met a storm and consequent disaster in the great gulf. It would appear that the clown is sent here for punishment and it hath been laid down by no less a person than the king, no doubt advised therein by his mistress, that the fool be not permitted to wear any costume other than his cap and bells—a stern penalty—poena severa.”

“Aye,” nodded Maître Gabbon. “He will be like the bishop, always the same arrayed.”

“Ciel!” cried the notary. “How can you compare—?”

“No offense intended,” apologized the tailor. “You know what I meant, Gil.”

“And you are to make a fool’s suit for this Pepin Clopinard who foolishly fell in love with a Court damsel and got himself sent into exile and forever condemned to be a fool instead of a happy lover.”

“A fool in either case,” muttered the tailor, a confirmed woman-hater. “Yes, I am to make his costume this very day. I told Charleroi Fortin I had not the green-and-red cloth for the motley and he, pointing to the cassock of his Grace, said I might use that for the red. A veritable scoffer!”

The notary, horrified, nodded assent, then fell to watching Maître Gabbon’s long nimble fingers, the precise rise and fall of his needle as he rendered the cassock of Monseigneur as good as new.

The Lys d’or had scudded down the St. Lawrence and dropped anchor before Quebec, under the gigantic brow of the rock, fortress-crowned, that was the great stronghold of France in the New World. The pale, cold brilliance of a full moon lighted the huge cliff, the houses of the town, the spires of the churches. The hour was late and few lights burned, but at the landing-stage torches glowed, sending lines of light over the water. Never had Michael seen a sight so grand, so different from the gentle, mellow beauty of the scenes in his homeland. This towering rock, this mighty river, dwarfed him, as it dwarfed all mankind. The vessels riding at anchor looked like tiny waterbugs beneath a bridge.

“With a few cannons and a handful of brave men,” he thought, “ ’twould be easier to defend than Gibraltar. No wonder they feel so secure, perched up on a cliff like that—”

“Come, fool, ’tis time to make your obeisance to the Lord of New France.” The harsh voice of the Sieur d’Anvers interrupted Michael’s ecstatic contemplation of the rock and brought home to him the precariousness of his situation. So far he had passed successfully as the jester, Pepin Clopinard. His ready wit, thorough knowledge of French, and merry ways had stood him in good stead. But might there not be some in Quebec who, having seen Pepin at the Court of Versailles, would denounce him as an impostor?

“I come, brother,” returned Michael. “But ’tis well they know your face here, for surely they would otherwise pick on you as the fool.”

The boat from the Lys d’or moved swiftly, propelled by four sturdy rowers, across the water to the landing-place, Michael sitting in the stern with Gaston Crevier and Captain Frenchard of the Lys d’or. Michael still wore the greatcoat of Jacques Blorion, dit Clopinard, in the lining of which, wrapped in waterproof paper, his rescuers had found the letters and passports which marked him for what he was not.

At the landing, they were met by the link-bearers whose light had guided them and who now extinguished their pine-knot torches, since the moon made all as bright and radiant as the day. A youth stepped forward to greet the Sieur d’Anvers.

“My lord Bigot awaits you,” he said, “since sundown.”

“We shall go to him at once, Charleroi,” said Crevier. “Will you take charge of my prize?” He indicated Michael. “Behold the King’s fool. This is he, Pepin Clopinard.”

Charleroi turned interestedly to Michael and walked by his side, following Gaston Crevier and the captain of the Lys d’or. Charleroi Fortin was a sort of valet and jack-of-all-trades, good and evil, in the service of the Intendant Bigot. He was a native-born Canadian and knew little or nothing of France and what went on at Versailles, though he had heard the news received at the time the Lys d’or left for Acadie, that L’Aiglon was bringing the King’s fool and a mad Irishman to Quebec. The fool, he had pictured as a hunchback, not a sturdy, handsome youth with the bearing of a prince.

“Methinks, fool,” said Charleroi softly, “you will find yourself not out of place here.”

“So I have already judged,” said Michael. “The Sieur d’Anvers and myself were brothers from the moment we met. And I have no doubt ’twill be so with the rest. What need have they of one fool more?”

“It was not need,” said Charleroi, “as you yourself know. We have heard that you sought to run off with a Court damsel; none but a fool would! But, look you, they will not hold that against you here. It was for this Irishman, Sir Michael Mohan, that they had the merry welcome. He would have been forthwith hanged.”

“And rightly,” said Michael. “An insolent scamp he was!”

“The Sieur d’Anvers was like a madman when he heard the news that the Irishman tried to run off with Diane de Merville. Gaston Crevier loves her—in his fashion—but he loves her money a great deal more. There are wide lands here belonging to her and it is rumored that she comes soon to Quebec.”

“God speed her ladyship!” murmured Michael.

“And here she will be married to Gaston Crevier.”

“The devil take him,” said Michael. “The crow would mate with the dove, then.”

“The dove does not have any say in the matter. She is a ward of the King. She must do his will.”

Michael, thinking of Diane, despising the man for whom she was destined, fell silent. His companion watched him curiously, marvelling that such a man should be a Court fool, his business to make dolts laugh, to play the clown even though there was misery in his heart.

They came presently to the Intendant’s Palace and entered there. Bigot had forsaken amusement for one night, since he was eager to know the success of Gaston Crevier’s mission to the Acadians, a quiet, pastoral folk, but so loyal to France that it was not difficult to keep them hostile to the English, even though they knew that Bigot’s greed and treachery had betrayed them.

The Sieur d’Anvers’ success in Acadie dwindled into insignificance when the Intendant learned that he brought with him no less a personage than the once beloved fool of Louis le Bien-Aimé. Bigot doted on royalty and all things pertinent thereto. He considered it a mark of special favor, of the King as well as of La Pompadour, that the ambitious and fallen jester should be sent to Quebec and not to the guillotine. But when he ordered the jester to be brought to him and gazed for the first time on the wan, proud face of Michael Mohan, he gave a start of sincere amazement.

“Mon dieu!” he said. “No wonder they sent you away! Is it possible that you should have been forced to play the fool?”

“Verily,” answered Michael, unsmiling. “And is it matter of wonder, when one with such thick wit and lack of sense as yourself is chosen to play the Intendant?”

“Eh . . .?” Bigot’s face reddened; then, realizing the fool’s license, he laughed heartily. “Bien! I see it now, my fool; it was your wit, your quickness of retort, that pleased His Majesty.”

“A very dull fellow, the King,” said Michael dryly, “with courtiers and officials stupider still. There must needs be one around him to give voice to a thought now and then.”

“Not so dull is he, meseems,” answered the Intendant, tapping a letter on the table before him. “I wondered at first when I saw the punishment he had arranged for you—that you be never permitted to discard the cap and bells, that you never appear among your fellows without the painted, grotesque face of the clown, that until you die you play the fool . . .”

“How different from the King,” murmured Michael, “who, if I mistake not, will play the fool into eternity, while my playing stops with death—by his august decree.”

“Had you always worn the fool’s face,” said Bigot, “you would not now be an exile and under His Majesty’s displeasure, the lover of Heloïse de Valois. Vraiment, you aimed high, fool. Of a certainty, Lucifer was as handsome as you, and it may well be, though the Bible says not so, that he was the Lord’s jester—”

“Splendid, my lord,” laughed Michael. “You are indeed a great scholar. But to carry the comparison further: Lucifer fell into hell, and here, by the ill grace of God or the King, am I.”

“Your thoughts travel swift,” scowled Bigot. “Yet Quebec may very well prove a hell for such as merit punishment. Eh, Gaston Crevier? The Irishman now, who, like yourself, Pepin Clopinard, aimed too high—had he been delivered into our hands . . .” The Intendant’s beringed finger made a suggestive half-circle about his neck.

“Yes, we were ready for him,” said the Sieur d’Anvers. “It was another refutation of your statement, fool, that the King is stupid—this sending of Sir Michael Mohan to be punished by the true lover of her he sought to win.”

“Only a woman’s brain could think up such petty forms of revenge,” said Michael. “And you do not, messieurs, tell me that Diane de Merville prefers my fine gentleman here to the Irish knight—a scarecrow to Apollo?”

Bigot was hurt by the slighting reference to La Pompadour, in whose favor he stood high; Gaston Crevier, by the unkind comparison. Truly, this fool did not belie the reports they had heard of him; his was a sharp and caustic, a merciless wit.

“Tell us of this Irishman,” commanded Bigot. “And speak the truth for once.”

“Not all the truth, messieurs . . .” Michael was enjoying his position of security and the freedom to say what he would, as is the privilege of fools, idiots and children. “It would hurt too much. The man is dead now, gone down into the deep sea, and, even if I willed otherwise, I might not speak ill of him. But he was a gallant young man, as fine and handsome as myself, I do assure you. And, had he come to Quebec, I do think he would have laid you two rogues by the heels before you got your noose about his neck. An Irishman, mind you, he was, and they are a ghostly people. Their spirits come back from the grave and out of the sea to find those they loved in life and those who sought to do them wrong.”

“Fichtre!” said Bigot. “Our fool romances, Gaston. Enough, fool; the long winter sets in soon and the river turns to ice; then the wood fires roar and rumble in the great chimneys and the spiced wine is good when seasoned still further with merry jest. Do you rid your spirit of its venom and give us more kindly wit. Gaston, I have good news for you, my friend, which I received only yesterday from France; your darling Diane will be here within the week.”

Crevier’s sinister visage wore what must have been a look of delight. He rubbed his long hands together and the knuckles cracked like dry bones. Michael, who had stepped into the background, away from the guttering candles in great holders of bronze that adorned the Intendant’s table, smiled with glee no whit less than the Sieur d’Anvers. Diane was coming. They would tell her he was dead—and he would be standing by her side and his privileged hand might at that moment caress her hair and his whisper change her sorrow to happiness matching his. Aye, they might put the fool’s garb upon him, but it was they who were fools.

Bigot presently called Charleroi Fortin to him and directed him to find a lodging for “the handsome fool” in one of the rooms of the palace, to give him food and drink and in the morning to commission Maître Gabbon, in the Alley of the Pigeons, with the making of the jester’s garb.

“And you, my fool, stir not from your room until it is brought you, and the pigments wherewith to daub your pretty face. Were the fair ladies of New France to see what beauty lay under the fool’s masque, I fear me we might have a repetition of what happened at Versailles.”

“Your excellency speaks in prophetic vein tonight,” said Michael softly. “With the tongue of a great seer . . . But, know you that a true woman loves a man for what is in his heart, not for what his visage shows, since eyes lie, lips lie, but the heart lieth not. I bid you, messieurs, a very good night. And I, too, shall become for the moment a prophet. I think I shall much enjoy your company and can promise that you will find me as witty and ready with an answer as any Fool who ever had to put up with King or Intendant.”

When, escorted by Charleroi, the jester had gone, Bigot and Gaston Crevier looked at each other with strange surmise. Bigot, shrugged his shoulders, laughed . . .

“Tomorrow, in his fool’s motley, we shall find him more to our liking, Gaston. But his wit just now is too much like a fine rapier and he looks as knowing as a Jesuit. Should his presence here prove annoying”—he spread out an expressive hand—“what is one fool more or less? Let us think no more of him. We have cares enough; the good habitants grow restive, calling our levies extortionate and say that I feed to the fowls the corn I take from them. Now, my friend, is the time to take what one can lay hands upon. The Lily wilts above Quebec and the Rose, methinks, begins to take root. Treason? Bah! It is only common sense, and what can a king expect of his servants when he is ruled by a woman? Give ear to me . . .”

And the Intendant, than whom there was no bigger scoundrel before, nor has been since, went into a clever account of how more gold should flow into his coffers from the oppressed and poverty-stricken people, already bled to the point of revolt.

“And you, Gaston,” said the Intendant with an oily smile, laying a plump hand on Crevier’s, “you will not forget when the lands and monies at the De Merville are yours, that François Bigot did all in his power to bring you this lovely bride. Fate robbed you of a pleasant task in drowning the Irishman, your rival; and it shall be my pleasure to see that any objections the fair Diane may have to you will, by one means or another, be quickly overcome. Does a woman know her heart? She does not; one loves a jester, the other an Irishman. What further proof would you, when there are such as you and I about, their countrymen, and ourselves matchless lovers?”

“But you, my lord, have no designs—?”

“To win your Diane? Shame take you for the thought, Gaston! I marry!” The Intendant ticked off names on his fingers—“Angélique, Madeleine, Flora, Léonie . . .” He laughed softly. “It shall never be said that François Bigot was a glutton in love. No, I am well content as I am, and you, my dear Crevier, have a clear field ahead of you.”

Which was not so. In a little bare room up under the eaves, Michael Mohan leaned upon the wide window sill and gazed out upon the stars in the sky and the stars in the shining river, mirrored. And he looked wistfully off toward where the sea was that had taken Barney, whom he loved, away from him, but would bring back Diane.

The sun, streaming in with morning freshness, awakened Michael from deep slumber, in which he had dreamed he wore a jester’s suit of gold and silver motley, and rode in a chariot of some effulgent material more dazzling than the sun and drawn by Grey Ellen.

“A fine dream entirely,” he said, feeling much refreshed and little troubled by the wound in his side that the salt water, at first irritating, had finally helped to heal. He got up agilely from the narrow bed with its noisy mattress of dry straw, and laved himself well with icy water from a brown earthen pitcher that stood in a great basin of the same rude make and material.

During his ablutions he gazed betimes out the window which looked upon the river, now gay and gleaming in the chill sunlight. He could see the Lys d’Or, the flag floating leisurely from her masthead. Other vessels rode at anchor, little schooners and a merchantman, and there was a ceaseless darting back and forth of small boats and canoes—slender, speedy craft which pleased Michael greatly, for there was about them a freedom and grace that he had never seen in any other boat.

The high hills across the river were blue-hazed and dark with their forests of evergreens that gloomily overshadowed the fast fading and falling leaves of their feebler brethren, the birch, maple, willow and chestnut, now almost bare of their summer foliage. A tall maple stood close to Michael’s window. He counted the leaves remaining on it—eleven. And even as he finished counting, one fluttered down on the breeze. He wondered if there would be any left when Diane came.

Presently, a key turned in the lock—the first intimation Michael had that he was, for the time at least, a prisoner. Charleroi Fortin entered, followed by a crone bearing food on a round tray.

“Good morning, monsieur,” said Charleroi. “I trust you have slept well.”

“I have that, and thank you,” said Michael, sitting on his bed and watching with approval the work of the old dame as she set the dishes out on the small deal table. He had a hearty appetite always, and this was tempting fare—a small loaf, browned and crisp, a plate of large trout, gleaming like gold, and a jug of milk. He invited Charleroi to join him, but the youth had already breakfasted.

“I was abroad early,” he explained, watching Michael’s attack on the food with appreciation. “I had work to do on your behalf at my lord the Intendant’s behest. To Maître Gabbon, the tailor, I went, and caused him much consternation by telling him to have ready before sunset a jester’s garb; then to Ludovic Frinette, the perruquier, who is also adept with the paints and make-up; then to Jacques Vautrin, the farrier; then—”

“A deal of trouble I have put you to,” said Michael. “But, then, I suppose it is not often you have the like of me at Quebec.”

“Never before,” said Charleroi. “Bigot, of course, is delighted at the prospect of the entertainment you will afford him and his followers. But I heard from a servant of the Governor’s that Vaudreuil-Cavagnal himself remarked the King had done better to send, not his fool, but the most intelligent man he could lay hands on. Things are come to a pretty pass here, what with corruption and . . .”

Charleroi seemed to recollect himself. He checked his nimble tongue and went to look out the window, remarking that Michael, in his position of Court fool, would soon learn all there was to be known about what went on in New France.

“Be cautious with what you learn,” advised Charleroi. “The Intendant, under his debonair ways and genial manner, is swift and cruel to punish those whose tongues wag. This I tell you for your own good. Now, you will bide here until your punishment is to begin. I fancy it must be quite a severe punishment for a man of spirit to be forced always to play the fool.”

“I fancy,” said Michael, “ ’twere still worse punishment for the fool to have to play the man of spirit. In other words, ’tis often easier to climb down a mountain than to ascend it. I assure you, good youth, that I do look forward with some pleasure to this that you call punishment.”

The sunset was red, fading to orange and yellow, and it was shot through with sound, the bells of the city, their clangor echoing from hill to hill, filling all the quiet air with their vibrant notes. The hours had not lagged, for Michael could not tire of looking at the view outspread before him, at the quaint houses that climbed the cliff, the ceaseless variety of those who passed in the street below—monks in their long cassocks and sugar-loaf hats; Indians of the Huron tribe, who dwelt in the protection of the city, for they were a weak and diminished race now, no longer able to cope with their ancient foe, the Iroquois; trappers, coureurs des bois, in gaudy ceintures flechées, fur caps and moccasins; soldiers of the guard in blue coats and white leggings, gentlemen and ladies in gaily colored costumes such as Michael had seen in Paris. He thought of Diane. Soon she would walk among them, and from his window he could look down on her and in his fool’s garb he might even walk by her side and whisper words of love to her. Then he would devise a means of escape for them both.

“Sure, the king and his crafty mistress did but further our plans, for here am I in the New World, and she will be here soon. Thus far it is as we schemed together. They may laugh at the fool, but ’tis he who laughs last that most enjoys his laughter. I walk in a dead man’s shoes and find my safety in them, for these men, so crafty and unscrupulous, would surely put Michael Mohan to death. How Blorion would laugh to see me wearing his costume and his name! And when I outwit them, as surely I will, he will rest more easily in his grave. But, oh, for Barney O’Pray, who, of all men, could most enjoy this fine bit of deception! Gladly now would I listen to the history of Paddy Dean the drover, Luke Monahan the haunted cobbler, and Shamus O’Brien the Connaughtman—aye, three times over would I hearken willingly to them. But the poor fellow’s tongue is stilled now and I’ll hear him no more. Barney, Barney, why did ye die?”

“Sure, because I could not live any longer.” It was only fancy, the vivid fancy of the Celt, that made Michael hear that laughing reply, just such as Barney would surely make.

“Why, I seemed to hear his voice speaking right in my ear!” muttered Michael. “But there is no one in this little room, no one near me. It was his ghost that came and spoke to me, and a very welcome ghost it is.”

Now came Maître Gabbon with the jester’s costume, swiftly and splendidly executed, with some of the gaudy woven cloth of the habitants, with bells borrowed from the fine harness of the Intendant’s favorite horse.

Maître Gabbon could not contain his amazement when he saw him who was to play the fool.

“The handsomest youth I have ever laid eyes on,” he told Gil Martin that evening. “No wonder he was sent away from the Court of Versailles. I doubt not that he turned all the women’s heads and was more beloved than the King himself. Here they have guarded against that, for none shall see his face. He must always appear as the clown; and death waits upon him, so has the King decreed, should he dare to go abroad as his natural self. God save us! ’Tis a cruel punishment for one so handsome and young.”

After Maître Gabbon came Ludovic Frinette, the perruquier, who brought with him the pigments necessary for painting the face.

“And these,” he said, “you will find quite agreeable and harmless, monsieur. Better they are than those you would get in France, for I have read deeply and am well versed in the lore of such men as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarotti, Raphael Sanzio, who knew all there is to know about pigments. These you will find to your complete satisfaction.”

When they had gone—the tailor, the perruquier, and Charleroi Fortin—Michael gazed upon the gaudy uniform he was to wear. He laughed gaily, for to him it was great sport, and no more pleasant punishment could he think of, under the circumstances.

“And thus,” he said, “does Michael Mohan, the first of his family to don the fool’s garb, step from the rôle of knight into that of jester. And God grant that with the putting on of this motley, of cap and bells, there accrue to his servant a wider wisdom and a stronger courage to fulfill all things for His greater glory!”

Next morning the good folk of Quebec saw a strange sight, rumors of which had been bruited abroad; so that early in the morning a great crowd had forgathered in front of the Intendant’s Palace and with much jostling and laughing waited impatiently for the first jester of New France. At an upstairs window stood the Intendant, with him Cadet and Gaston Crevier; and presently they were joined by Angélique des Méloises, Bigot’s mistress, and the Baronne de St. Ives, a visitor to Quebec, a widow with no signs of mourning.

The sunlight was gay, glinting on the grey stone façades of the houses. Tomorrow, the old habitants said, there might be a coating of ice on the river. It was long since time for that; the leaves were almost gone, the squirrels and groundhogs had long ago gone into winter quarters, and the wild geese had swung by in lonely cohorts honking their southward way. But this day was warm; the sun felt good on the old men’s faces and in their aged bones.

The bellman came pushing his way through the crowd, a proclamation in his hand; and having stationed himself on the steps of the chateau read therefrom, squinting over his spectacles with profound importance as though he dealt not with a jester but with some kingly culprit.

“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” And the bell loudly clanged for silence, which was gladly given. “Hear ye all, knights and burghers of New France, these gracious tidings from our Sovereign Lord, King Louis XV of France: Whereas it has pleased His Majesty to afford you a signal mark of his high esteem and to temper the rigor of your lives in this land where you must for the glory of king and country submit to many hardships; and whereas Jacques Blorion dit Pepin Clopinard, jester at the Court of Versailles, hath been found guilty of unseemly conduct in tampering with the affections of a lady-in-waiting, it is decreed that Jacques Blorion dit Pepin Clopinard, the King’s fool, shall be until death condemned to wear the garb of the jester and go about with painted face that the people may draw amusement therefrom; and that, should he once discard the costume and disguise appointed for him, he shall be hanged by the neck . . .”

Interrupting the bellman’s loud harangue came a clatter of hooves from the chateau stableyard. The shouts of the mob drowned out the crier’s voice, and into the street trotted the strangest turnout that ever the people had gazed upon. A great vat from the brewery was mounted on two rude wooden wheels; a donkey, gaily caparisoned, with bells a-jangle, drew the cart, in which was seated the grotesquely painted, motley-clad figure of the King’s fool. Pig’s bladders in which dried peas rattled were hung from a little stick he held in one hand, and in the other was a green-and-red sceptre, its head carved to his likeness.

Shouts and huzzas filled the air, dogs and urchins pursued the cart, people shouted from the windows. Such merriment Quebec had never before seen. Up steep hill and down, the strange chariot trundled, drawn by the willing donkey; and the jester, smirking and bowing, bestowed his benediction upon the throngs who acclaimed him. On the painted mask was a clownish smile, but under it, too, was a smile of purest mirth and merriment, for in Michael Mohan’s heart was that which could let him appreciate and enjoy to the full such a bizarre situation.

“Sure, my own mother would not recognize her son in all this fool’s finery,” he muttered. “Devil a one in the colony has ever set eyes on the real Pepin Clopinard. And since the King’s decree will never permit me to show my face, here am I safe and sound behind the paint and powder. Michael Mohan is dead for the nonce. Long live the King’s fool!”

Loudly he called to his donkey: “Hey, François. Go quickly, François, my angel!” And the townsfolk, quick to gather that he had christened the little mule—actually named Claudette, and loaned by the Ursulines for the occasion—in honor or derision of the Intendant, cheered him anew and voted him a right hearty fool and a grand acquisition.

Along the narrow byways of the lower town, François trotted with good grace, the crowd, save the lame and the halt and those who frowned on the whole proceeding as frivolous and unbecoming, still following the jester’s cart. Then, coming toward him, Michael perceived that which made him rein in his steed and stand like an image carven in marble. Two men, coureurs des bois, were marching toward him, and between them was a creature, all tattered, mud bespattered, weary and unkempt. It was the body of a scarecrow but it had the face, freckled above the red growth of beard, of no less a personage than Barney O’Pray!

“God be praised!” murmured Michael. “The sea gives up its dead! And God be merciful that it give up no more of them!”

Until the coureurs des bois and Barney came up to the cart, Michael waited; then he hailed them, asking from what field they had pilfered the scarecrow, since it could not be human.

The crowd roared and the jolly coureurs des bois explained that the man had been found wandering in the woods some days back in the land of Gaspé. And he was both deaf and dumb; of a certainty he was, for neither could he speak nor hear when spoken to.

“Deaf and dumb, is he?” thought Michael. “Sure, he has the ears of a weasel, the tongue of a parrot, and the cunning of a fox that he lets you think otherwise. For, did he open his mouth he would betray himself since he cannot speak or understand a word of French.”

“Let His Highness ride with me,” commanded Michael. “Put him in the cart. Such a distinguished guest should not be compelled to walk when this elegant conveyance is at his disposal.”

Willingly, they hoisted Barney O’Pray, already christened Le Rouge, “The Red,” into the tub with the jester, and Michael called to François, bidding him make haste. Murder gleamed in Barney’s blue eyes, but, having cleverly protected himself thus far by feigning the lack of speech and hearing, he was not going to betray himself on account of a fool. And, thanks to the jolting of the cart, the hubbub of the following crowd, no one marked his utter upset when the painted fool grimaced at him and said in his mother tongue:

“Ah, ye blaggard Irishman, ’tis neither deaf nor dumb ye are at all. Barney O’Pray is your name. And where is the rascal, Michael Mohan, that ye serve?”

Barney’s jaws sagged. He prayed piously, thinking this was surely the devil who had got him in his clutches.

“Sure, your honor,” he mumbled. “I was—”

“Howld your tongue,” commanded Michael. “Go on as you have started. ’Tis a coronation gift you are to me entirely. The saints be praised, Barney O’Pray, since you are restored to me!” And forthwith, pretending to stumble, the jester fell into the scarecrow’s arms and the donkey rode on untended. Nor was it hard, then, for Barney to feign lack of speech, for no word would come to him; so great was his joy.

François Bigot, the Intendant of New France, what with the polite robbery he carried on, with his schemes and dissipation, had little time and less inclination to bother with a deaf and dumb man found wandering in the wilds of Gaspé. Still less time had the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the Governor, busy now with the work of strengthening the fortifications of the seemingly impregnable citadel of Quebec. Barney O’Pray, called Le Rouge, and looked upon, even respected, as a harmless body and a sort of curiosity, was put to work with a shovel among the workmen engaged in throwing up redoubts against an attack that some said was impossible, but others, wiser, knew to be inevitable. There, Barney, for whom the sun had shone again when he discovered his master, worked with a will. Tenaciously he guarded his deafness and muteness, and passed the silent time of penance in mulling over a multitude of stories and recollections which, when occasion offered, he would pour forth on Michael.

The first afternoon as he worked, the jester rode up in his cart, climbed out and seated himself on a boulder, watching with evident relish the red-headed one’s exertions with the shovel, occasionally pointing at him and bidding his fellows throw water on him, for it seemed that he was catching fire; so flaming were his hair and freckled face. Then, descending from his perch into the ditch where Barney worked, the jester came close to him and obsequiously presented him with a ruddy apple, filched from the Intendant’s table.

“And mind you do not eat the note inside it,” he whispered, and then capered way.

When, at evening, at the Angelus, the workers threw down pick and spade, Barney had an opportunity to gratify the impatient curiosity that had plagued him. A segment had been neatly cut from the apple and a brief message was wedged in. That night, on the Charlesbourg highway, at a goodly distance from the city, Michael had appointed a meeting. There was a wayside shrine hard by a disused windmill that had ground corn in the days of the Intendant Hocquart, he who had first begun to build ships in New France. There, in a clump of alders, a few feet from the moonlit road, Barney O’Pray waited for his liege lord.

Maître Gabbon, on the Intendant’s order, had made with commendable promptness a great cloak of green and scarlet to shelter the King’s fool from the icy winds that grew in velocity and sharpness with the passing of the November days, and this cloak covered Michael from neck to heel as he strode along the highway, his shadow dancing huge and grotesque in the dust. Hearing Barney’s whistle like a peewit’s call, he forthwith leaped the ditch and presently master and man clasped hands and for a moment stood in silence more eloquent, more charged with emotion than any speech could have been.

“A sad disguise they have put on you, your honor,” muttered Barney. “I thought it was Old Nick himself when ye spoke my name in the cart. I had given ye up for dead, though, to be sure, I might have known that if such a storm and shipwreck was but a trifle to Barney O’Pray, ’twould be of no moment whatsoever to a Mohan of Morrah. But how, your honor, did ye transform yourself overnight, so to speak, from an Irish nobleman to the King’s fool? ’Tis the ‘good people,’ no doubt, who have done this to save ye. As Ould Meg told ye that day in the glen . . .”

“It may well have been the ‘good people,’ ” admitted Michael. “For never was such a stroke of luck, even to one of a race that has been cursed with luck from time without reckoning. ’Twas Monsieur Blorion—you recall the quiet man on the L’Aiglon, he who walked on his hands? Well, we two were adrift in the longboat. He put his greatcoat over me before he died. When I was picked up by the Lys d’Or’s men, I was wearing the coat. I was unconscious and they, finding Blorion’s papers in my pocket, concluded I was the exiled jester of Louis le Bien-Aimé. Nor was it hard for me, from long association with you, Barney, to act the part to a nicety. Now, behind this grinning masque, I walk secure among the Frenchies and within the week she is coming to Quebec.”

Barney O’Pray was charmed with the whole business, such wholesale deceiving of their enemies being to his highest liking.

“Myself, I rode ashore on a splinter, sure, your honor; on a spar which I hugged so close that I’ll swear I left my likeness imprinted upon it. And when those Frenchmen found me wanderin’ through the woods, lookin’ like Rory O’Cahan who was lost in the wilds of Connaught for ten years during which his family gave him up for lost entirely, the only way I could save my skin was to pretend I could neither speak nor hear. ’Twas a difficult thing, indeed, as your honor well may judge, for a man who loves a well-turned phrase as much as the next fellow, to keep mum as a clam. And now I stuff my ears during the day lest I betray myself. But ’tis a more difficult an’ painstakin’ disguise than your honor’s, beggin’ your honor’s pardon.”

“It has the marks of a miracle,” conceded Michael. “And a great penance it will be for you. Had one told me a fortnight ago that Barney O’Pray could hold his tongue for five minutes on end, I had given him the lie. But then, faix an’ troth, they have made a fool out of a Mohan, so what would you? Now, good friend, faithful Achates of my wanderings, I must return to the Intendant’s Palace. Do you wait until I have been lost from sight, then follow at your leisure; for no commerce must be suspected between us. This place, this clump of alders between the shrine of the Virgin and the windmill of Hocquart—such is it called—shall be our meeting-place. On such days as I shake my sceptre at you, come here and you will find me. Now, good night. It is good to be with you again, Barney O’Pray.”

“Thank you, your honor. ’Tis a happy man I am myself. You will be schemin’, no doubt, to carry off the young lady from under their noses?”

“Night and day I think of nothing else, save of the time when I shall see her. Soon now, very soon, less than a week unless the river turns to ice, then—”

“Sure, the ‘good people’ will not let it,” said Barney with conviction. “What do ye think I saw in a pasture down the road this very night under the moon?” His voice sank to a whisper. “A leprechaun, no less, and as I looked closer at him I saw ’twas a little wizened fellow named Con O’Ragan whom often I used to accost in the glen—he lived by the split oak near Corney’s forge—a good-hearted little man he is, too. He was hammerin’ away at a big boot, that is, big for the size of him; and so busy he was that I did not like to interrupt him. But, since we were old friends, I feared he might take offense were I to pass him by with never a word o’ greetin’. So I calls out to him, ‘Con O’Ragan, is it you, away out in this outlandish place? What do ye here?’ ‘Whist,’ says he, ‘Barney, avic, do ye not know they are all here, the whole pack o’ them? Sure, they had me hard at work the first minute I landed, makin’ heavy boots for them so they can go slidin’ on the river when it freezes. I have a thousand pairs to make and ten days to make them in. Ten days before this big river turns to ice. Then I have to fall to and make as many pairs o’ fine slippers. ‘What are they for?’ says I. ‘Sure, to dance at his honor’s weddin’, ye fool,’ says he. ‘Now be off wid ye, for can ye not see I’m a busy man?’ ”

Laughing, Michael took his leave; and Barney, fishing a bit of pipe from the gay suit the kindly habitants had given him, stuffed it with dry tobacco leaves and puffed away stolidly, watching Michael’s rapidly receding figure; and when he could see the long, flapping cloak no more, he trudged toward the city. As he passed the field where Con’s hammer still tapped merrily, he paused, opened his lips as if to speak, thought better of it and pursued his homeward way. They had given him a little room in the basement of a house down by the river and there he slept well.

Five days later, a stately man-of-war, the Prince Royale, dropped anchor before the citadel of Quebec, where the creamy flag with its fleur de lys flew stiffly now in the strong wind. A cannon boomed out in salute, the guns of the Prince Royale answered lustily, and the bells took up the sound and bandied it back and forth with echoing clamor. At the landing stage, banners and oriflammes blew in the breeze, and there were gathered the Governor, Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, the Intendant, the Sieur d’Anvers, the Sieur de Cadet and some half-dozen other dignitaries of the city. There in his gnomish cart was the King’s fool and in his heart, under the suit and cloak of motley, expectancy was highest, and under the painted, garish mask was a boyish face bright with the anticipation of such joy as none of these could know.

A pinnace, its oars rising and falling with clockwork precision, their blades flashing in the sun, left the lofty side of the Prince Royale and came swiftly shoreward. Michael’s questing eyes saw the blue of her cloak, saw the distant loveliness of her face . . . Diane, his—his—. There was a tumult in his breast, his heart seemed to leap, and it was all he could do to smother the cry of greeting that forced itself to his lips as the pinnace slid alongside the landing. From his cart, over the head of the patient François, he saw the Intendant assisting her ashore—small, defiant, adorable, her bright hair, a cluster of golden curls, peeping from under the brim of her hat.

“Quebec welcomes its most lovely visitor,” said Bigot smoothly.

Diane smiled at him, but for Gaston Crevier she had only a stiff courtesy and Michael was glad. She was surrounded now by the committee of welcome. A young man of distinguished bearing, of much assurance, stood by her side. Him they greeted as Comte Lucien de Mornay. He was Diane de Mervilles’ cousin and had performed distinguished services for his country. Michael liked his looks and it was apparent that she relied much on him, for her hand did not leave his arm and she looked up at him almost supplicatingly as they walked toward the waiting carriages. She passed the jester’s cart, she looked brightly up at the strange figure in motley, her eyes for a moment full upon Michael’s, a little frown puckering her brow.

“And this is Pepin Clopinard,” she said, “who loved, alas, not wisely but too well. Poor Pepin!”

The jester bowed low.

“ ’Tis good,” said he, “to be punished for a crime so sweet, milady.”

Again she looked at him wonderingly, almost dazedly; then she shook her head, laughed, and walked along by De Mornay’s side. What if his eyes were dark and in them a grave yet merry twinkle; what if his voice did have in it a caress?

“Where is Sir Michael Mohan?” she asked Gaston Crevier who was near her. “What have they done to him?”

“He did not reach Quebec,” said Crevier with ill-hidden pleasure. “L’Aiglon was wrecked in the great gulf, and all on board save yon poor fool in the crazy cart perished.”

“No, no! You lie to me!” she answered Crevier. She turned to the Intendant, the Governor, and read confirmation of his words in the hypocritical face of one, the sympathetic regard of the other. Something bright seemed to go out of her, then, though she said no more; only leaned heavily on De Mornay’s arm. The hope of seeing Michael Mohan even once more had helped and encouraged her on the long voyage. Dead—she could not believe he was dead; he was so young, so gallant. He dead, and this fool, this jester survived. What a mockery! She saw the fool’s cart ramble on ahead, jolting and swaying on its uneven wheels, and the droll charioteer clucking to his mule just as often she had witnessed him in Paris. She thought of grave, demure young Heloïse de Valois who had loved this fool; and envied her that he lived, even though they would never meet again, never find the fulfillment of the stolen vows they had spoken. Above her the rock of Quebec loomed vast, terrifying in its height and ruggedness. It was a hideous sight now, and yet from the high quarterdeck of the Prince Royale that morning she had seen and loved it because he was there, her lover.

“They lie to me,” she muttered with sudden fury. “I know they lie to me!”

But the afternoon brought conviction to Diane; conviction that if Michael was not dead he had never reached Quebec. The brightness of spirit that she had shown throughout the voyage left her now. She sat listlessly in her room, while Paulette, a dark-eyed little Fleming, the only attendant she had brought with her, busied herself with unpacking Diane’s boxes.

How long her stay in Quebec would be, she did not know, since her being sent there amounted virtually to exile. The Marquise Santoyard, of whose ogress presence Diane would have been almost glad right now, had flatly declined to leave France for a land where, with utter disregard to fauna, she affirmed there were deadly snakes, lions and tigers. She, it seemed, was content with Louvigny’s mythical mice, with which the Court of Versailles abounded and which fell ready victims to her feline skill.

Gaston Crevier, Sieur d’Anvers, had paid suit to Diane in France, with even less success than her other would-be lovers, Sir Peter De Launay and a number of others. She found no pleasure in renewing acquaintance with the shifty-eyed Gaston, and though she knew full well the scheming proclivities of La Pompadour, and François Bigot who was her tool, it did not occur to Diane that she had been brought to Quebec that Gaston Crevier might win her for wife and with her the monies and domains, not inconsiderable, of the De Mervilles. Diane had come gladly to Quebec where Michael Mohan was; Michael who, in bringing her love, had given her the first real happiness she had known, just as, when he was taken from her, she had found her first real sorrow. Young, impulsive, fully surrendered in spirit to his laughing ways and careless strength, she dreamed of him and regretted him with all the swift emotional intensity of youth. Something went out of the world with him, she knew; something she could not name but that she felt would never be recaptured.

Now, she did not care. She could see from her windows the same beautiful, colossal panorama which had delighted Michael; the hills, blue-hazed, softly undulating, the bold sweep of the river, the receding sails of the Prince Royale which, having disembarked its passengers, set out forthwith for France lest it be entrapped in the ice and held in the St. Lawrence until the following spring. With its going, its white canvas touched with the sunset’s golden magic, Diane’s loneliness grew, as if the last link connecting her with France, with her brief happiness there, had dissolved and vanished. This was a strange, a fearsome land. Paulette, from the servant’s quarters, had brought garbled stories of how the winds of winter were here so strong that they would lacerate the skin of one’s face; how the huge snowdrifts covered the chimney-pots and one must lay in sufficient food to last for months; how the river became solid ice and did not melt until late in the following year.

These fantastic stories interested but did not bother her. Nothing seemed to matter very much . . .

“And yet,” she mused, “I shall get over it in time, I suppose. For do they not say, those who are older than I and have known even greater sorrows, that time heals all wounds, whether we will it or not? Were I like the heroines of pretty romances I should enter the convent of the Ursulines yonder and let my story end there in holy and doubtless happy fashion. But I will not. He told me I was Irish like himself; that there was the blood of a great nation in my veins and its strength in my spirit. He told me that; told me so many things . . .”

She smiled wistfully, recalling his teasing, his moments of seriousness that were almost melancholy, his scorn of obstacles, and recklessness in the face of odds overwhelming. The last picture she had of him—his shoulders, his proud, dark head limned in the torches’ flickering glare against the open window of the chaise; the sword that flashed in his steel-strong, supple hand; the wild, barbaric cry of battle, joyous, challenging, with which he had greeted his foes; then, finally, her name spoken faintly, tenderly—Diane . . .

That night, in her honor and the Comte de Mornay’s, the Intendant had arranged a banquet in such style as would not be unbecoming to guests so distinguished nor would reflect anything but credit on dominions far more ancient than this. Though the habitants—robbed of their grain, of their fowl and cattle, for which the food was lacking—went hungry very often and were victimized in the name of loyalty to their sovereign, the tables of the Intendant groaned with the weight of fine capons, sucking pigs, prime beef, and all the fruits of the field. There the wine of Burgundy, both sparkling and still, flowed freely, and always there was mirth. “So few in this world can laugh and be gay,” said the Intendant, “that it were a pity to diminish the number by our noble company. Happiness is an art to be cultivated with wine, with beauty, with music and wit.”

All these genii of happiness waited upon Bigot’s table this night, when the flower of New France sat down to dine. There were no spectres at the feast, for Bigot took good care to exclude as far as possible from his jollifications such of the military who walked about with the shadow of war and possible conquest by the English upon their brow. His companions were young, for the most part, since he found youth plastic and swiftly amenable to his own easy philosophy of life—to take what one could get of wealth and pleasure, to let no law hinder.

The Intendant had the faculty of putting his guests at ease. There was no constraint in the great salle à manger, its long table adorned with snowy napery, with excellent plate and gleaming sconces in which colored tapers burned. A great fire of maple and birch sent a roaring torrent of flame up the great chimney and made its light flicker and dance over the walls, over smiling, animated faces.

Diane sat at the Intendant’s right hand, across from Lucien de Mornay, and it was Lucien who answered in his quick, witty way all their queries about what went on in France, of how this affair progressed and that, and how the arts flourished there under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour who sought by the stimulus given to literature and painting, philosophy and science, to atone for the political damage she had caused her kingly lover. Voltaire, Rousseau, Bouffon, Lavoisier were gaining immortality while France was losing a realm of untold wealth.

Lucien de Mornay’s keen, fearless gaze went from one to the other. While he talked laughingly of the peccadilloes of one courtier and the other, retailing such of the small talk of Paris as he thought would be of interest, his thoughts were often far away. In France he had heard many rumors of the maladministration of the colonies, of how those entrusted with the difficult task of governing and directing the destinies of New France sought only to amass great fortunes before the inevitable hour when the colony, weakened by the constant drain upon its people and resources, must fall to the first attacker. In France had the Comte de Mornay heard these rumors, and in the few hours he had been in Quebec he found many things to confirm them, to convince him that affairs were in a more deplorable state than even the most pessimistic of the king’s unheeded advisers imagined. He saw it in the faces, the wanton ways of these men about him—prodigals, spendthrifts, living only for the day. And he thought of other rulers, other governments, whose laughter had been echoed by Death.

The meal ended; some gathered around the fire until the dance should begin—the strings of a viol twanged mellowly; others went for a stroll and among these, Diane. She had found the atmosphere of the room stifling, unpleasant. Still less did she like the licentious speech and the double-entendres which seemed to be the company’s idea of wit. The King’s fool was not present, Bigot having learned to his sorrow in the few preceding days that, did he wish his own candlelight of wit to be seen, it were best to keep the fire of the jester’s quick tongue and nimble fancy out of sight. And the jester was thankful that he did not have to show himself there; for surely by word or sign, he felt, he would betray himself. From the door he watched her, following with avid eye each movement she made, each nuance of expression that lightened or darkened her piquant face. Once, someone spoke of L’Aiglon, of how only a miserable jester had survived, and Michael saw her eyes grow cold, her mouth sullen.

The Sieur d’Anvers, who was seated next to her at table, asked to be her escort during a stroll on the battlements. His small eyes, his peaked face, and hooked nose were unbeautiful; and it was folly, which evidently he could not appreciate, his seeking to offset them by forced suavity, by gorgeous clothes and jewels. They would never dazzle such eyes as Diane’s. She went with Gaston Crevier unwillingly. Lucien was deep in conversation with a smooth rascal, the Sieur Cadet, Bigot’s henchman and most pliant tool.

Diane was fond of Lucien. They had been children together, and there existed between them a friendship beautiful because founded upon mutual understanding of the worst and the best that was in them both. Lucien alone had understood her love for the young Irishman, and he assured her that, had he not been absent from Paris at the time she sought to run off with Michael, he would surely have aided them to get safely away. He knew what she did not; that the king’s apparent concession in sending Michael to Quebec was only a postponement of the Irishman’s execution. Lucien would never tell her that, but he was glad for Michael’s sake and mostly for Diane’s, that L’Aiglon had never reached New France.

The November night was bitingly chill, the stars etched cleanly on the deep blue of the sky, a sickle moon poised like a pale scimitar above the mighty sweep of the St. Lawrence. Lights gleamed from the houses below. From somewhere in the narrow lanes of the town a youthful voice, singing, was wafted to them.

The hills across the river loomed darkly against the bright sky and the river seemed to have voice—a mighty, silent voice that yet seemed to fill all the heavens with sound. From the chateau they heard the slow, stately strains of a minuet of Lully, snatches of loud talk and laughter. Crevier sought to speak again as the lover, to resume his wooing where it had abruptly broken off on his appointment to New France as secretary to the Intendant.

“Your coming, Diane,” he murmured, “brings light into a dark existence; and the long winter to which I looked forward with despair, now seems a pleasant prospect since you are here.”

“I fear you will not see a great deal of me, monsieur,” said Diane, angry at his assumption of the lover’s rôle and wishing she had stayed in the hall and not come here with him. His presence spoiled the cold, majestic beauty of the night, made for the vows of those who love from the heart. He did not love from the heart; in all things mercenary, he was doubly so in love. “I shall go shortly to my father’s house at Charlesbourg and spend the winter there. The seigneurie has been much neglected, I fear, since his death, and I shall occupy myself with its improvement.”

“But you realize, you must know, Diane de Merville, that I love you . . .”

“I do not want your love, monsieur, nor any man’s.”

“Still the cold, aloof Diane,” he said sneeringly. “The goddess to whom mere mortals may not attain. Yet even Diana cared for earthly lovers.”

“You know why I am in Quebec tonight, monsieur.”

Crevier stiffened. The Irishman then . . . she still thought of him; still, like a silly schoolgirl, fancied herself hurt beyond repair, with broken heart, with nothing more in life to claim her interest.

“Ah, you are not serious,” he said peevishly. “Would you have me think you still care for this pauper Irishman who was drowned in the wreck of L’Aiglon? Surely, you are not the sort to be fooled by a tongue skilled at easy compliments, which won its skill no doubt from long practice with other women.”

“There were no others . . . but I do not care to discuss my affairs with you. If you cannot refrain from boring me, then I shall thank you to take me back to the chateau.”

She held her dark cloak close about her throat, her face was averted, and he could see her profile, the nose slightly atilt as if with disdain, the small chin firm and stubborn. She angered him and he thought with relish of bending her to his will, of seeing her broken, afraid, before him. So she would be in due time. She was one alone there in Quebec, and Bigot whose ward she was, had ways, suave yet effective, of bringing even stubborn young ladies like her to their senses.

“Time will alter your sentiments, Diane,” he said with a shrug. “Perhaps I understand—”

“You understand nothing!” Her heel tapped sharply on the flagstones of the promenade. “Did I not tell you when you spoke of love to me in France that I did not care for you? Oh, you may tell me the King looks with favor on your suit and the King’s mistress and all who toady to her. I do not care. I hate them all for what they did to me.”

“Saved you from making a fool of yourself, from certain misery with this fortune-hunting Irishman.”

She laughed and turned swiftly upon him.

“You would have me, then, without a dowry? You are a presumptuous donkey, monsieur, not fit even to draw the jester’s tub; no more than to wipe the boots of him you call a pauper and fortune hunter. You insult me, you . . .”

Crevier gave back before her flaming anger which his own temper rose to meet.

“Your Irishman would have been hanging from the gallows the day you arrived, had he been spared for it. Yes, you may rage and rant, you little vixen, but that was what we would have done with him. That was why he was sent here . . . to appease some meddling fools who would have raised a fuss had he been executed in France.”

“He was sent here . . . for that!” There was horror in her wide eyes. “And you, who profess to love me, would have been the executioner of the man I loved better than life. You did well to tell me that. Are the others here of one mind with you? They seem your friends. A lot of precious rogues, I should say!”

“You are rash, Diane. You had best be careful of how you speak. It is a small community and words travel faster than in Paris. Only the King’s fool has license to call us a lot of precious rogues.”

“Then he speaks, not with the tongue of a fool but with that of a prophet.”

“Well said, milady! Well said! In faith, there are two wise heads in Quebec now, yours and mine!”

Diane and Gaston Crevier had been standing by a large piece of ordinance, one of Frontenac’s cannon with which he had bid defiance to the Huguenot Kirkes and sent them on their way. The jester had come quietly up behind them and had stood there they knew not how long.

Diane smiled and extended a small, white-gloved hand to him. He kissed it gently. Crevier scowled at him for a moment, then turned away.

“I shall leave you now, Diane,” he said. “The fool may amuse you more; you have had strange likes in the past.”

“Yes,” said Diane, “one fool may amuse me more than the other.”

Crevier’s lips tightened at the coolly voiced insult. His fingers moved convulsively and his small eyes glittered with rage. However, he laughed to turn the matter away. It was, after all, foolish to lose his temper in front of this clown-faced fool, with distorted mouth and red-circled eyes. Crevier took his leave with the best grace he could summon and strolled nonchalantly along the promenade, but he was angry, and it was far more from hatred than from love that he wanted Diane. Let her despise him . . .

“The strongest citadels must fall if the siege be long and clever,” he mused. “And the winter stretches before us with much time for love-making, for softening hearts as hard as hers seemingly is. She will give in.”

Indeed, he had no doubt that Diane must eventually surrender. His vanity was such that nothing under the sun could cause him to believe that she despised him as she said. That, he felt sure, was but a maid’s pretense who did not want to yield too easily. Presently she would forget this Irishman she pretended to grieve for, and with some deft pressure she would consent to marry him.

“Then . . .” His sharp face wore a smile of relish. He would not soon forgive her harsh treatment of him; for every word of scorn and derision she would pay at a high rate of interest. Crevier’s anger against her now was such that he would gladly have laid hands on her and chastised her as one does an insolent child.

The jester stood before her, his face ghastly in the moonlight, the painted smile wide and grotesque. He wore the great cape of motley over his jester’s suit, the little silver bells at the tips of his asses’ ears gleamed brightly. Diane looked at him steadily and did not laugh.

“Poor Clopin!” she said at length. “It is thus they punish thee for having dared to love.”

“They make a practice of punishing true lovers, milady,” said the jester softly, his eyes intent on hers. “Are you not here for having loved, even you?”

“You have said it. But, tell me, are you not eager to hear news of Heloïse? She pined for you, poor girl. I know that, for after you had gone they let her come from seclusion, and she was so sorrowful her eyes . . .”

“Ah, her lovely blue eyes!” sighed the jester.

Diane frowned and Michael, in his heart rejoicing, heard the familiar tap-tap of her shoe.

“Her eyes, Clopin, you must know . . . are brown!”

“Pardon, milady; I was thinking of another’s—”

“Another’s?”

“Yes, yes! I was confused. Of my sister’s I was thinking. She had blue eyes. But you, milady, would you not like to hear of the Irishman, your lover—he who sailed from Havre-de-Grace on that ill-stared voyage?”

“They told me he was dead,” she said very low. “What more is there to hear?”

“But he was a rogue, milady, that Michael Mohan . . .”

“How can you dare . . .”

“No, no! I mean not what you think! He was a pleasant rogue, always merry, always smiling. And he gave me a message for you which I have been very impatient to deliver. This morning when you came I could not deliver it, with all those fine scoundrels standing about; and all day I was consumed with a fever to see you and give you the Irishman’s message.”

“Quick, quick! Oh, why did you not come to me before! What is it?”

“Something tangible, milady, yet intangible. If you will but step over here into the embrasure . . .”

Eagerly she went with him. They stood in the shadow beyond the moonlit promenade.

“The message,” she urged. “Give it me!”

“Diane, Diane, here is the message.” His lips touched her hair, and his eyes, close to hers, were the eyes of Michael Mohan in the painted face of a clown. She swayed weakly against him.

“Michael!”

He held her close; her so small and yielding, so warm, so filled with life. Fool’s motley or king’s ermine, what matter?

“ ’Tis Michael Mohan himself, no less,” he whispered. “And unfortunate as ever, for devil a bit of him dares kiss your lips.”

“Then I . . .” She stood on tiptoe, reached up to him, and kissed him.

“Eh! What then! What the devil!” Comte Lucien de Mornay stood on the edge of the shadow, peering at them. “Mon dieu, what are you about, Diane! This jester is a very devil with the ladies. Exiled from France for stealing the love of one, now he bids fair to be exiled from his place of exile for . . .”

“Lucien!” Diane’s voice was an excited whisper. “Come here into the shadow. And do not speak so loud. You would awaken the dead. This is not Clopin the jester; it is . . . Michael . . .”

“How!” De Mornay joined them in the sheltering gloom. “How can this be?”

“So simple that it will make you laugh,” said Michael. He liked this fellow and did not fear betrayal. “When they found me, I was wearing the jester’s coat in which were his papers. Forthwith I became what you now behold—the King’s fool—and, by my faith, the happiest fool in Christendom.”

“You should be,” said Lucien gravely. “I am glad you have tricked them thus far, and count me on your side. I have heard so much of you from Louvigny de Dronsart that your being here in this character does not amaze me so much as it might. But, faith, you are a brave man and a cool one!”

The long winter set in. The fortress of Quebec and the little town clustering at its base were beleaguered by great snows, by the trapped river—a great plain of dazzling white. The nights were clear and cold, the days lighted by glorious sunshine which often, toward midday, made water drip from the eaves and thawed the snow sufficiently for the town urchins to pelt snowballs at each other. The coureurs des bois and travellers from Montreal, Three Rivers and other places along the river came on snowshoes or in gay little sleighs, their bells cheerfully a-jangle. Rich furs of beaver, raccoon, muskrat and seal covered the splendid laces and silks of the gentry; the habitants sported bright scarves and gnomish toques of blue, red and green. Barney O’Pray, with whom Michael held frequent converse, said that the “good people” found the winter severe but, with the toboggans and sleds they had made, were having a merry holiday and were seriously considering the founding of a colony of their own in New France.

Diane had gone to her father’s house at Charlesbourg, a large, comfortable old dwelling. There, with Paulette, with frequent visits from Lucien and Michael, she passed the time pleasantly enough, for with the severity of the winter the comforts of the fireside increased. Great stores of birch and rock maple had been cut and piled in the fall, and the fires in the great stone hearths never died. The farmers living on Diane’s estate were glad of her presence, for these were meagre times with them, the frugality of their humble tables caused directly by the opulence of the Intendant’s, whose levies upon their produce left them very little for themselves.

Tidings from France came seldom now, and always months late, brought by messengers who had journeyed hundreds of miles on snowshoes through the country wastes of Acadia. Those in Quebec were isolated from the rest of the world, but they knew well how to pass this season and the evenings were pleasantly filled with song and story; and since there was no danger of an enemy’s attack until the river should again be free of its ice, there was nothing much to worry about. Great quantities of rich furs were brought down from the North on dog-sleds and stored in the city until the time came for their export. When the weather was clement, men worked in the shipyard which the Intendant Hocquart had established on the River St. Charles, with a drydock on the opposite shore. But most of the time was spent in merrymaking and feasting, in singing the gay chansons brought from France, in dancing to the strains of the fiddle and telling quaint stories of native vintage.

The winter sped by, and with the premature thaws of February men began to speak cheerfully of the glories of spring, when the snow and ice would swiftly melt and the ice in the river crack and begin to move seaward with crashing, tumbling sounds. And Michael spoke with Diane of the day when they should make their escape—she from the unobtrusive yet strict surveillance put upon her by the Intendant, from the unpleasantly persistent attentions of Gaston Crevier, Michael from the fool’s garb and clown’s mask which were becoming odious to him, though in his character of jester he had endeared himself to the townsfolk and to the dwellers in Chateau St. Louis.

With Comte Lucien de Mornay, Michael had had much to do. Lucien had not come to Quebec for the sake of his health, nor yet for curiosity. He was one of a very few in France who had the destiny of their country at heart; who saw that in this colony of New France was a great source of strength, a mine from which future generations would draw riches, their value increasing with the years, an invaluable asset to his beloved land.

“Diane knows my purpose in coming here, Sir Michael,” said Lucien one night as the three sat, after dinner, in the great hall of the Charlesbourg manor, watching the arabesques among the glowing embers, the flames that roared and darted up the wide chimney, while outside was a howling wind and snow that blew in blinding clouds. “I do not see why you, too, should not share the knowledge, for, as I am ready to help you, the accepted lover of Diane and the friend of Louvigny de Dronsart, you may be able to assist me. I am one alone here, and the task I have set myself to perform is not an easy one.”

“It occurred to me,” confessed Michael, “that you were not here only for the sake of amusement. I shall be glad to assist you, and if anyone should require a sound knock on the head, Barney O’Pray—he they call Le Rouge—is my man and yours.”

“I have already heard,” smiled Lucien, “from those who interrupted your elopement with Diane that the two of you could withstand an army. But this does not call for force; rather diplomacy. Very simply, it is to take back with me to France evidence, sound and indisputable, that these men, Bigot, Cadet and Crevier, are not fit to hold positions of such responsibility; that they are somewhat less than thieves and robbers; and that, if the financial administration of the colony of New France be left much longer in their hands, we are bound to lose this great domain and see in after years some other nation have it for a strength and support.”

“Everyone here knows what is going on,” said Michael. “They cheat the people right and left. Hardly a sou is forthcoming for the defense of Quebec, and it seems to me that their sole object is to get what they can for themselves and devil take the hindmost; which in this case is their own country. New France rides directly for ruin, and only the swift coming of a strong government can save her. The English I have no cause to love, but you must realize the truth as I do: they are thorough and determined. They want this country and ’tis the height of folly to laugh and jest and quaff wine while they are sitting outside the gates. They are not to be treated thus, and strong as your city here is, they will take it. Sure they subdued Ireland, which no other nation could have done. So good luck to your mission, Comte de Mornay, and if it is in Michael Mohan’s power to assist you, say only the word.”

“I thank you,” said Lucien. “Frankly, I find that I am faced by walls of stone. As you say, everyone knows the chicanery that goes on here. Have the people not christened Bigot and his scoundrelly associates La friponne, ‘the Swindle’? And they steal in the name of their King, who, alas, is ruled by a woman and has no mind of his own. I shall not go back to France until I have proof that even he and his mistress cannot put aside with a laugh. But it must be more than word of mouth; it must be evidence real and tangible.”

“Such as my lord Bigot’s personal accounts,” suggested Michael. “The book in which he writes down what goes into his own pocket; that is what you want. And it may be that we shall find a means of procuring it and putting the scamp where he belongs. They say he has amassed a great fortune out of the monies which properly belong to France. I do not doubt it.”

“That is what I must lay hands on,” said Lucien eagerly; “his accounts. If I can take that book to France and lay it before the honest men about the King, then we can force him to recall these thieves even if they be the chosen favorites—as Bigot surely is—of La Pompadour. Soon the ice will go now and vessels will come from France. Soon it will be time for me to return, and I must not go—I will not—my mission unfulfilled. The destiny of the colony, perhaps of France itself, depends on the exposing of this evil swindle. Keep your eyes open, Sir Michael, and if you can aid me, I assure you it will be for your benefit.”

The hour was late. It was time for Michael to take his leave, and this he did, cordially of Lucien, whose honesty and high purpose he much admired; tenderly of Diane, for whom his love had grown as had hers for him.

“Not long now,” she whispered as he held her hand at parting. “Soon you and I shall go away from here. They talk of forcing me to wed Gaston Crevier; as if they could force one to love a toad when one loves a prince.”

“A sorry prince,” said Michael, indicating the fool’s garb. “Yet poor Pepin’s disguise has served me well, and his punishment which I have borne has proved a blessing, since it enables me to be near you.” His painted lips touched the softness of her hair in which the firelight made its magic.

“Have care of Monsieur le Diable,” warned Diane laughing. “He has haunted the Charlesbourg Road of late, and I trust you will not fall in with him, for there would doubtless then be one highwayman less in the world for folk to trouble about.”

“I think he would have naught to do with me,” said Michael. “But I should like to set eyes on him. ’Tis a very romantic figure he is in wine-red cloak and hood. But his pickings are lean this winter, I swear, what with the Intendant and those others. Good night, Diane.”

With a gentle pressure of her hand he was gone, his long cloak fluttering behind him. Now he rode in a little red sleigh drawn by his mule, François, with many chiming bells. They went at a brisk trot toward the city. On such a bitter, stormy night, thought Michael, no highwayman would be abroad, and he felt some slight disappointment because of that. Monsieur le Diable was the chief topic of conversation in the city—a mysterious, challenging, even terrifying figure, who haunted the Beauport and Charlesbourg roads and took tribute of such travellers as he encountered. The habitants had endowed him with supernatural qualities, such as the ability to appear from nowhere and likewise to vanish at will into nothingness. But Michael saw in the fanciful red cloak and monkish hood, the color of which the habitants associated with le diable, only the caprice of some youth driven by ill luck or evil times to get money by the easiest route. And he scanned the road before him, hoping for a glimpse of the crimson hood. But there was nothing.

With the days of April came the warmth of strong sunlight. The snow melted rapidly, and in the steep lanes of the city were torrents of water rushing and gurgling from the heights into the river, where the ice had begun to move. There were new calls of birds in the woods now, and the trees were turning green. Saucy robins hopped on the terraces of the city and the sky was softly blue, free of the sapphire chill of winter. The plowmen shouted to their horses in the fields and long furrows stretched across the brownish land. Work had been resumed on the fortifications of the city, for who could tell but that, with the going of the ice, an English fleet might appear before the rock? But the first vessel to arrive—welcome sight—was a French corvette, and all the tidings she brought was that the King had his hands full at home and the colony could hope for little assistance from him.

This news pleased the Intendant and his companions as much as it annoyed and discouraged the Governor and the few serious officers who clearly saw that the city was not prepared to stand a severe siege, and cursed their fate that they served a King too stupid or too indifferent to realize that he was letting slip from his fingers a rich prize that might never be regained. The corvette likewise brought letters for the colonists, and the Comte de Mornay received one that sent him promptly to find Michael, whom he at length located sitting on a bank idly casting pebbles at Le Rouge, who sweated mightily at the digging of a drain.

“Good news for you, Mohan,” said Lucien, when he and the jester strolled off together. “Louvigny is coming soon to Quebec. He has had much sorrow. The old Marquis de Dronsart is dead, and Guy, who was my dear friend, was killed in Spain. Louvigny is now the marquis and high in the favor of the Court; so much so that he comes with letters patent and full authority to investigate and report on conditions here. It behooves us now to lay hands on such papers as the Intendant will forthwith destroy when he learns of Louvigny’s coming. We must be prepared to lend good assistance to our friend. For you it will mean freedom to wed her you love, since Crevier will go down with the others. Oh, it means much, if this rotten business be ended. It is hideous to see these men play football with the destiny of such a land as this, such a glorious land. May matters be remedied before it is too late! It is to Beaumanoir, the Intendant’s favorite retreat, that we must go in search of his private accounts. Will you accompany me there by night? It is a rash thing and may well mean death, swift and sudden. But it must be done.”

“Gladly will I go with you,” said Michael. “When you say the word, De Mornay, I shall be ready. And all good luck attend you. I fever to be away from the city, to step out of the dead man’s motley and be again myself. But first I should like to upset this nest of scorpions. Bigot has insinuated to Diane that it were well for her to look with favor upon Crevier. There is a velvet paw hiding sharp claws and I would put nothing past them. To gain their ends they would murder and destroy, for they are deterred not by laws or private morals, which they seem to lack entirely. Let us at them, my friend. Too long have I made them laugh. I would fain see them show dismay.”

That night, early now in the month of May, Michael had rendezvous with that most eloquent of mutes, Barney O’Pray. This was at the windmill of Hocquart, and it was late when Michael, detained to amuse some visitors who had come on the corvette from France, arrived there. He whistled softly into the gloom of the clump of alders, but no answer came. Puzzled, he waited, peering about him, for the night was very dark and in the air was a quiet, vast and awesome.

Suddenly there stood beside him a figure in a long cloak, a pointed hood with slits for eyes covering the face, and Michael knew in an instant that he had come face to face, or better, mask to mask, with the highwayman, Monsieur le Diable. Only that evening had news come to Quebec that the outlaw had been pursued by the Governor’s men and, it was thought, wounded on this very Charlesbourg road.

They gazed at each other in silence for a moment; then it occurred to Michael that the highwayman had done away with Barney or at least caused him some injury, for Barney never failed to be at the rendezvous. Without preamble Michael leaped at the other and such was the force of his onslaught and the ruggedness of his body that Monsieur le Diable went head over heels, hood and high top-boots, into the alders; and at the same time there came from the throat of Monsieur le Diable such a yell as never issued from any lips but an Irishman’s, and from no Irishman other than the O’Pray.

Michael climbed off the masquerader’s prostrate body and rubbed his head, which had bumped Barney’s.

“Och, och!” gasped Barney. “Sure ’tis a cannon ball that hit me, your honor, and all the breath is out of my body and I’m knocked spachless.”

“The devil you are!” said Michael. “Why didn’t you speak?”

“Sure, it’s deaf and dumb I am this six months past. Anyway, your honor did not give me time. ’Tis a fine highwayman I am entirely.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you are the highwayman?”

“Faith, no, your honor. He’s the last person in the world I’d want to be at the moment. Sure, he’s six feet under ground and as dead as the Kilkenny tomcat which the hunter shot nine times.”

“Dead. Tell me now, and never mind tomcats and the like. What happened?”

“Well, your honor, ’twas like this. After I had finished work diggin’ those trenches—in which I hope a hundred blaggards will break their necks—I did not go to my lodgings, not feelin’ hungry on account of the excellent fowl your honor brought last night—”

“Barney O’Pray, for the love of Saints Patrick and Columkill get to your muttons and never mind the fowl.”

“As I was sayin’ when your honor interrupted me, I did not go to my lodgings but came directly here to the windmill to await your honor’s arrival. Ah, ’twas a grand sunset, and I set here quiet an’ peaceful smokin’ the pipe your honor just broke when ye pounced on me, and thinkin’ how queer it was entirely that Sir Michael Mohan an’ Barney O’Pray should be here among all these Frenchies, an’ the Frenchies never for a moment suspectin’ what distinguished visitors they had in their midst . . .”

Michael groaned, but knew it was hopeless to try to hasten him. So long had his loquacity been pent up that such an opportunity as this would have to be made the most of. The hood sat askew on Barney’s head and the red cloak draped about him like a toga, but in his animated recital of the minutest details the O’Pray cared not for incidental things like hoods and cloaks.

“Then suddenly, just as it came dusk, your honor, and the last bit of red faded from the sky, I hear comin’ from the old mill yonder such a moanin’ and keenin’ as never was heard since Paddy Doyle’s wake. Worse even it was than that; as if the banshees in Ireland were holdin’ assembly and each seekin’ to outscream the other. As ye may well judge, your honor, brave man as I am like all the O’Prays, me spine began to creep and me hair to stand up straight as the bristless on a dog’s back.

“ ‘Wirra, wirra!’ says I, ‘it bodes no good for his honor and meself at all.’ I listened for a while, thinkin’ it might be the banshee of the O’Prays; then it struck me ’twas the banshee of the O’Gorman’s, an’ divil a bit av me could figure out what it did here so far from Waterford—”

“And what was it, man?”

“ ’Twas the highwayman, your honor,” whispered Barney. “The Governor’s men unearthed him this afternoon and pursued him for miles, an’ he got a ball square in the back as neat as if a bull’s-eyes was painted there an’ the greatest marksman in Ireland, whose name modesty prevents me givin’ just now, had aimed at him. Well an’ good! His divilship had only a short while to live. He was a young sprout I had never set eyes on; said he came from Montreal, and none would miss him, for he was of no good to God or man. But neither did he want the sodgers to get his corpse and string it up in chains. He begged me to bury him and burn his hooded cloak and the rest, so that if ever he were found they would not know who he was. It was but a civil request to be sure, and when he had breathed his last I found a bit of an old spade in the windmill, tore up some boards, buried him as nate as Marty Walsh the sexton could have done, put the boards back, and thought to give your honor a bit of entertainment but received only a broken pipe and nearly a broken neck for me pains.”

“I thought the highwayman had done you hurt,” said Michael. “That was why—”

“Sure, I might have known it, your honor,” grinned Barney. “I’ll take care that none do me harm, for never would I want a man to get hit like that. Now what shall I do with these pink folderols, your honor?”

Michael considered. In the work he and Lucien de Mornay had to do, the highwayman’s disguise might come in handy.

“Suppose we hide them in the mill,” he said at length. “And if ever you see Monsieur le Diable again, Barney O’Pray, know that ’tis neither ghost nor highwayman but Michael Mohan who goes thus arrayed.”

The gaudy garments were hidden under a loose floor board in the mill, and master and man fell to discussing their future and their prospects of escape. Michael confided in Barney what Lucien had told him, and received a fresh declaration of the O’Pray’s allegiance, even if it came to a combat single-handed with all the officials and soldiers of New France. It was an enterprise much to Barney’s liking, and he volunteered forthwith to search Beaumanoir from cellar to ceiling and crack the skull of every man who opposed him.

Michael rejected this offer, but promised, if the O’Pray’s strength and cunning should be of use, as it surely would, to enlist his henchman’s aid in the business of getting access to the Intendant’s papers. It had to be done promptly, for the vessel bearing Louvigny de Dronsart would arrive at Quebec within the next few weeks. In his coming, both Michael and Barney visioned their release. No sterner penance could Barney have undergone than to keep his mouth shut all the livelong day. When he was with Michael he scarcely took time to draw breath, and thus he was still talking, very often, when it came time for Michael to return to the chateau.

A hue and cry had been raised after Monsieur le Diable, who, it turned out, had robbed a farmhouse and grievously wounded the master thereof, a habitant named Dionne, that very afternoon before the troopers saw him and gave chase. A reward had been posted by the Governor for such as should bring to Quebec, dead or alive, this dangerous outlaw. And Michael smiled, thinking of the garments hidden beneath the rotten flooring in the windmill of Hocquart; they that were the sole relics of Monsieur le Diable.

Vessels came in numbers now, bringing food and supplies which were promptly put away in the Intendant’s store-rooms and, though intended by the king for distribution among the people, were sold by the rascally Intendant at a good price, the money thus received going into his own private treasury. It was just such practices that Lucien de Mornay fought against, though never once by word or glance, by protest open or indirect, did he let it be known that he was in Quebec for aught but his own recreation. He was well liked, popular with all classes, though studiously he avoided the debaucheries and excesses to which Bigot and his friends abandoned themselves.

A saturnalia was being held at Beaumanoir the night Lucien selected for his descent upon the Intendant’s secret records.

“They will be too stupid with wine by now,” he told Michael, “to give us much trouble. Two days already the festivities have lasted. Night and day the shutters are closed there and the shades are drawn, and what goes on behind them no man may know; nor would any good man care to know. We shall put an end to that, mon ami, this very night. Conceal your jester’s motley which soon you will cast away for ever. Get a dark cloak.”

“Still better,” said Michael. “If you will meet me after nightfall at the windmill of Hocquart I shall be wearing the outlaw’s disguise, that of Monsieur le Diable.”

“The devil you say!”

“Precisely,” smiled Michael, and told Lucien of Barney O’Pray’s experience and how the highwayman’s properties had fallen into his hands. “It were best,” continued he, “to let them think Monsieur le Diable is at the bottom of this business, should they catch a glimpse of us.”

An excellent idea, Lucien agreed, and one which he would be glad to see put into practice. If Bigot suspected that he had undertaken the task of exposing and putting a finish to the friponne, he knew quite well he would not leave Quebec alive, for Lucien hoped to find evidence sufficient to hang the Intendant several times over.

The night was as dark as that on which Michael had assaulted Barney O’Pray when mistaking him for the highwayman, but it was ideally adapted for their purpose. Some two hours after nightfall Lucien arrived at the mill, himself enveloped in a black cloak such as the monks wear. Michael, in the scarlet trappings of the knight of the road, an awe-inspiring figure, awaited him and mounted the horse which he led.

“I seem fated,” said Michael laughing, “to walk in dead men’s shoes. First, I wear the motley of poor Jacques Blorion, and now the gaudy cloak and hood of this unfortunate robber, and in both disguises I stand under the penalty of the law, though now indeed my crimes grow worse and the punishment attached to them. ’Tis the gallows that waits for me now.”

“It is ill jesting,” called Lucien gaily. “For if you are taken, mon ami, ’tis the gallows they will promptly serve you with. So I trust the charm that has taken you through so many perils will not forsake you now.”

“Faith, and no man more than myself shares your trust,” said Michael, trotting his horse slowly along by the side of De Mornay’s.

“We must lie in wait,” said Lucien, “until the Intendant’s banquet is being held underneath the table. Judging from the way they imbibe their wine, it should not take very long, especially since they have been at it for days. Bigot’s private apartment, I have found out, is on the ground floor to the west of the chateau, and it should not be difficult for us to force our way in there. Any noise we make will be drowned by the revelry.”

Beaumanoir, as they approached it, seemed a house of darkness, but when, leaving their mounts conveniently in the deeper darkness cast by some great fir trees that stood near the gate, they came closer to the windows. They saw slits and pinpoints of light breaking through the drawn draperies and tightly closed shutters. There was no one on guard, for who in New France would dare to interfere with whatever François Bigot chose to do? They heard shouts and drunken laughter, the pounding of fists and silver tankards on the board as some bon mot or ribald song was applauded. Peering through the shutters they saw, even as Lucien had foretold, that while some ten of the revellers still sat at table, at least half that number found the floor much more to their liking and slept soddenly while above them the drinking bout was continued. Gaston Crevier, Sieur d’Anvers, his thin, crafty face inflamed with wine, sat next the Intendant and spoke tipsily with him. The table was in disarray. Spilled wineglasses made ruddy puddles on the white cloth; crockery was smashed and scattered about on the floor, on the vacant chairs.

“Truly,” muttered Lucien, “it would be difficult to find a more dissipated and helpless assembly. To think that France should have her destiny given into the hands of such as these! Bah! They are only drunken pigs. Come, Sir Michael Mohan, let us be about our business and get this precious book of accounts which must always be under the same roof as its owner; so fearful is he of losing it.”

To the window of the room that Bigot used as a study and counting room for his own ill-gotten monies, separate and distinct from his offices in the Chateau St. Louis, the conspirators went, finding that side of the house in utter darkness. It was to be supposed that where the masters were so far gone in wine, so would the men be also. The small poignard which Lucien carried he used for the work of prying open the shutter. The stout wood and iron fastenings resisted strongly, until Michael’s great strength was added, when, with a rending, splintering sound, the shutter swung open. Lucien, his fist covered by the folds of his cloak, smashed the glass, unfastened the window catch, and the two climbed into the room; stood silent, listening . . .

The noise of the revel was louder in their ears, for just beyond the door was the great hall of Beaumanoir, the scene of so many of the Intendant’s orgies. But it was most unlikely he would leave his guests to go into his study, or have any occasion to do so.

The darkness was a stumbling block, and the marauders were wary of making a light lest some guest who had staggered forth for the revivifying air should see it and raise the alarm. However, Michael pulled the shutter to and drew the heavy curtains across it. Then Lucien struck a light and applied the flame to one of the candles in their massive bronze holders that had the form of lions rampant. With this illumination they turned to the desk set in the alcove of the fireplace and went systematically about opening the drawers, of which there were four. The desk was a strong one, of heavy oak, and the locks were strongly made, offering much resistance to Lucien’s poignard. The first, when at last it was opened, yielded nothing beyond a number of letters bound with blue ribbon, doubtless billets doux, most prized of the many the philandering Intendant received. These Lucien dropped back into their place with impatient scorn.

“The first place in his desk would naturally be given to such rubbish,” he whispered. “We shall have to spend the night here unless I can work faster.”

The second drawer yielded even less, but in the third they found what they sought—a black-covered book of small dimensions in which, inscribed in Bigot’s handwriting, were the sums of money he had bled from the people in the course of his régime. There they were, names and dates—the record of a fortune stolen from the monarch he professed to serve.

“So far,” said Lucien triumphantly, “have the gods smiled on us. Listen! Methinks the drunken fools have all passed into slumber!”

There was a silence, ominous, intense, after the brawling hubbub of the banquet. Yet the revellers could not have gone; could not all have succumbed.

“Quick!” whispered Michael. “Let us get out of here. I feel they have heard something.” He snuffed the candle and they made for the window, De Mornay first, then Michael. Their cloaks hampered them, and Michael was barely clear of the sill when the door of the room crashed open and light flooded in, with shouts and curses and the voice of Bigot blaspheming above the rest.

A shot. The ball whizzed past Michael’s ear, humming like a great bee. He saw Lucien stop in full career, throw up his arms as he fell, heard the voice of Crevier, jubilant: “I winged him, messieurs!”

“I am finished, Mohan,” gasped De Mornay. “The book—for the love of heaven, take it and go! Avenge me, mon ami . . . adieu . . .”

Michael took the book from Lucien’s hand, from the hand of him who a few brief moments ago was quick and full of life, of a noble purpose which he would sacrifice anything to fulfill. Michael turned as if to face the slow pursuit that tumbled from the window; then he ran to where the horses were tethered, mounted and rode away.

“I will avenge you, De Mornay,” he muttered. “I am glad it is with him I have to settle.”

Through the darkness he galloped, hoof-beats ringing clear on the highway. He did not fear pursuit. The mount Lucien had given him was speedy and the pursuers were in no condition to give chase. Michael was going to Diane now. It would be hard to tell her of Lucien—so swiftly, so miserably put out of life. Michael’s body tensed with rage that a good man should have fallen at the hand of one who was no better than a beast of the lowest order. So many tales had Michael heard, from Crevier’s own foul lips and from the lips of others as foul, of the man’s treatment of the poor, the weak, of women . . .

Michael smiled, a smile of no mirth, as he spurred his horse along the Charlesbourg road. He had the book, the wretched confession that had cost Lucien his life. Simple folk believed that in this book was recorded François Bigot’s compact with the devil. At any rate, thought Michael, it contained enough to help wipe out the debt of vengeance he owed the Intendant and his coterie. He would place it in the hands of Louvigny, and in short order the infamies of Bigot would be known throughout France.

At the windmill of Hocquart, Michael doffed the costume of Monsieur le Diable and hid it beneath the boards. He had turned the horses loose and now he walked across the fields to Charlesbourg manor. He must talk with Diane. His heart was bursting with the warm affection he had held for Lucien, and it must be he and no other who should break the news to her; tell her why and how her cousin had died. Lucien had been as a brother to her, kind, protecting, understanding her caprices, her love for the mad Irishman which her guardians frowned upon and were at such pains to terminate, even though her own happiness should end with the loss of her lover. How many evenings had they sat, Diane, Lucien and Michael, beside the great hearth in the hall at Charlesbourg and shared their youthful dreams and ideals! But Lucien’s dream, his highest aim—to rid the colony of its destroyers—would be realized.

The manor was in darkness, but Michael possessed a key to a small door in the rear; a key which Diane had gaily told him was the key to her heart, and she had stamped her foot when he demurred about taking it.

“But you must!” she insisted. “You do not know when they will discover the truth about you and then you must come to me. At once, mind you, my Irishman. I will not let them touch you.”

He had laughed at her and teased her, but he was thankful now, that he had the key. Servants, even the best of them have a weakness for talking, and surely the arrival of the King’s fool in the dead of night would be a matter of much speculation and would surely reach the ears of the Intendant.

He felt his way through the dark halls, up the stairway to her room, and knocked softly. He opened the door and called:

“Diane! Diane!”

There was no answer. Shyly, as one who enters the holy of holies, with gladness and fear, he walked over to the high, canopied bed and touched the pillow. She was not there. Puzzled, undecided, he knew not which way to turn. What had become of her? He lighted a candle and looked about him, seeming to feel her presence, soft and warm as summer sunlight, in all the little, frivolous things that were scattered about the room. He bethought him of the book that had cost so dearly, and, casting about for a hiding-place, he lifted the cushioned seat of an old armchair and put the book down among the springs. Then he left the house and hastened back to Quebec, fearful that his long absence this night might be noticed. For a while at least he wanted freedom.

“A master stroke indeed,” muttered Michael, sitting up in bed and staring into the darkness of his room at the glimmering patch of grey that was the window. The bellman had just passed, and was climbing the hill now to startle the sleeping nuns in the Hôtel Dieu with his announcement, which was in effect that the Comte Lucien de Mornay was dead from a ball fired from the pistol of that notorious criminal and outlaw, Monsieur le Diable: that this deed had been done at Beaumanoir where De Mornay had gone to seek the Intendant; that, finally, the reward already offered for the apprehension of the highwayman was increased to one hundred pieces of gold, and that the good citizens of Quebec should be constantly on the qui vive and at once raise the alarm should the murderer’s wine-red cloak and diabolic hood be sighted.

Cleverly the Intendant had put the guilt on a man who could not defend himself, and not one among the dissipated crowd who had seen the shooting but who would swear that Lucien had died at the hand of Monsieur le Diable. They would find, too, ready credence of this story among the habitants, whose secret admiration for the highwayman had turned to anger when he attacked and robbed Luc Dionne, the farmer of Charlesbourg, a few days ago, and who would now rage like beasts, their Norman temper aroused, against him for having done to death a fine and generous young nobleman like the Comte de Mornay.

It was even so. The very next morning Quebec was agog with the news, and a great throng collected in the Place d’Armes where the notice of reward had been posted. Many had armed themselves with swords, poignards, clubs, muskets. A hue and cry was raised, and couriers went through the outlying villages of St. Charles and Montmorency to arouse the habitants and put them on the track of this cowardly murderer. Their stolid natures, once awakened, would not diminish in stubbornness until the murderer of De Mornay was brought to justice.

Maître Gabbon, a great advocate of the people’s rights and a staunch upholder of the law, had left his tailor’s bench for a horse trough, on which, legs astraddle over the bubbling water, he stood precariously and held forth in a shrill voice:

“Let us take this homicide, mes amis. Let him hang from the gibbet, at the Buttes à Nepveu, or even in the marketplace, that all men may see how we here in Quebec deal with these murderers. Arouse yourselves, excellent citizens. Let not the slaying of this good young gentleman go unavenged. The murderer may even now be in our midst. Who can tell? For without his devil’s disguise who shall be able to know him, even though the brand of Cain be upon his dark brow? Rest not, burghers of Quebec, until the halter is tight about the neck of the criminal and his tongue sticks out of his distorted mouth, and his face turns black, while the crows, magpies and ravens perch upon his shoulders and peck out his eyes as he swings in air . . .”

This stimulating oration, marked by much waving of the tailor’s skinny arms, came to an untimely end when Maître Gabbon’s foot slipped and he fell with a mighty splash into the horse trough, provoking not so much laughter as ordinarily such an event would have caused. The people were incensed, transformed from the quiet sheep they normally were to bloodthirsty tigers seeking to rend and destroy. Their rage boded ill for Monsieur le Diable should he chance to fall into their hands.

Michael, watching this scene of furious animation, smiled grimly. Just once more, he thought, would Monsieur le Diable ride the Charlesbourg highway and the ancient roads about Quebec; and, strangely enough, he would ride to avenge the very man he was supposed to have slain. In Monsieur le Diable would Gaston Crevier find his Nemesis and that very soon, for Michael burned to repay the foxy scamp in kind. In no cowardly fashion would he seek revenge. He would cross swords with Crevier, give him a chance for life, through Michael’s skill with the rapier was such that Crevier’s chances would be slim indeed.

Charleroi Fortin came and stood by the jester’s side, just as they were fishing Maître Gabbon, looking like a bedraggled scarecrow, so thin and spindly was he, from the trough. Michael had no great liking for Charleroi, whose ways were smooth and subtle and who had a trick of watching him and speculating upon his movements. Once, even, Charleroi had remarked the jester’s friendship for De Mornay and teased him for his adoration of Diane de Merville. It was of Diane that Charleroi wished now to speak.

“Dost know, fool, that she whose shrine you worship at is now worshipping at another shrine?” he asked insolently.

Michael turned swiftly upon him, and Charleroi’s keen eyes did not miss the unconscious dart of the jester’s hand to a place where no sword hung save a wooden one with which he amused the crowd.

“You are strangely ready with the rapier,” taunted Charleroi. “Can it be that fools carry swords in France?”

“Oh, there and here,” said Michael, restraining himself and indicating the light rapier that the youth carried.

“Your wit does not forsake you,” shrugged Charleroi, nettled at his inability to anger the jester. “But that is well. You may need it to explain some things which my lord the Intendant would doubtless question you upon—such as your late return to his place last night. A bad night to be abroad, last night was, Sir Fool.”

“Aye, ’twas dark,” admitted Michael. “And many ditches I tumbled into. But I have ready answer for my lord should he question me.”

“No doubt,” sneered Charleroi, whose suspicions of Michael the Intendant treated as absurd, “you had gone to Charlesbourg to pay your respects to the lovely Diane de Merville. Of a certainty, fool, you have a way with these women. They cannot see your fine face, so it must be your pretty wit they admire. Were you well received at Charlesbourg, then?”

“The lady was not at home,” said Michael, seeing that Charleroi sought to trap him. “You did as good as tell me that yourself in saying she worshipped at another shrine, did you not? What mean you by that, if not that she is otherwhere than at Charlesbourg?”

“Very simply,” said Charleroi with malice, “that she lodges with the Ursulines and is under their surveillance, which, I assure you, is thorough. This, because she is so foolish as to laugh at the Sieur d’Anvers’ proposal of marriage.”

“Ah, but the lady has a fine sense of humor!”

“Do you care to wager, fool? I will lay you five pieces of gold to your one that they are wed within three weeks at the most.”

“Are you then so sure of it?”

“The Intendant says so himself, and, in faith, ’tis easy to make even a mettlesome filly like her stand at the altar and do as one bids her. My lord is adept at such tricks.”

“Readily can I believe that,” assented Michael. “Yet I will not take your wager, nor do you act fairly in seeking to lay your money on what you know is a sure thing.”

“I offer because I think it seems otherwise to you,” said Charleroi. “But you will not let us know what goes on behind that painted face of the fool.”

“My true self is as well hidden as that of Monsieur le Diable,” said Michael coolly. “And you waste good time with me; mine and your own.”

He turned away and climbed the hill to the fort, pondering on what Charleroi had told him. So the Intendant was hastening the business a little. All the more reason, thought Michael, for a prompt settlement with Crevier; and he determined that this very night they should cross swords. Diane, were they to subject her to the worst torture, the lowest humiliation, would never consent to marry Gaston Crevier; but Michael knew well that many another maiden had been led most unwilling to the altar and the words of response put into her mouth.

Bigot and his satellites, after the fatal episode at Beaumanoir, had returned posthaste to Quebec and now held council in the Intendant’s Palace, that had once been the brewery of the Intendant Jean Talon and was now transformed into a place where roguery and injustice held sway. But now the rogues were in a sorry plight, Bigot most of all, for the book that held evidence enough to put a summary end to his evil career was no longer in his possession.

Like a madman he strode up and down the council chamber, his sang froid, his insolence, quite gone from him, a craven look in his eyes. Every now and then he turned to the two who were there with him, Cadet and Gaston Crevier, no whit less frightened than he; for if he went, they went too.

“Do something, you mummies!” Bigot snarled at them. “Do you not realize it is the Bastille for me, for us all, if that accursed book reaches my enemies in France?” He pounded the table, bit his lip in perplexity. “Enemies, mon dieu, I have many of them waiting, watching for just such an exposé as this would prove. Who is this accursed outlaw? Who is he? Can he not be found and flayed until he disgorges my property? Mon dieu! We are quite disarmed! We stand naked to the winds that blow, and there is not a thing, not a word, that can be said in our favor. It is the end unless we can take this man and destroy him. Even then, unless my accounts are restored or put beyond the reach of all men, we shall walk still in the shadow of the gallows. Think you there are still others conspiring against us?”

There was a knock at the massive oaken door of the council chamber. A messenger, just come from the river shore, was admitted. He handed Bigot a packet of letters and announced that the sloop of war Mirondel had just arrived from France. Impatiently, when the man was dismissed, the Intendant tore open the heavily sealed letters, and from the perusal of the first he raised a face in which consternation overclouded his former anger.

“Fresh trouble,” he announced, his voice trembling with the futility, the utter helplessness that almost drove him frantic. “Tomorrow a man-o’-war, La Reine Blanche, arrives from France, bearing a committee of investigation, so designated herein”—he tapped the letter with long-nailed index finger—“headed by the Marquis Louvigny de Dronsart, one of a house that has long been actively hostile to La Pompadour and to us. With him come the Baron St. Cloud, the Due d’Aiguillon, and several others who are not named, and they have full power to enquire into our administration and make such recommendations to His Majesty as they see fit. I understand now the presence of De Mornay in Quebec. A spy! A sneak set to watch us! And the book—they have it! It will be turned over to these others on their arrival and then—then, my useless friends, we go to France as prisoners, weighted with chains, who might otherwise have returned there in triumph, with plenty of gold to ensure an easy future.” He blasphemed hideously, cursing himself and his companions, for their inability to suggest any line of action: his ill luck; most of all, his enemies, even the dead.

At table that night was a silence ominous and profound. The jester respected it, for the Intendant’s scowling face forbade any display of the wit that usually delighted him. During the course of the meal, Crevier announced that he would go to Beaumanoir late that night, and gladness was in Michael Mohan’s heart. Some few hours after nightfall, Michael arrived at the windmill of Hocquart, pried up the loose floor boards lightly covered with old and moldy sacks, and donned the hooded cloak of Monsieur le Diable, planning to waylay Crevier when he was returning from Beaumanoir and have it out with him.

The book which he had hidden beneath the chair cushion in Diane’s room filled him with uneasiness. Suppose, during Diane’s absence, they should search the house—she had been De Mornay’s cousin—and find it, so carelessly hidden . . . All Lucien’s work, his life sacrificed, would go for naught, and Diane herself, though utterly innocent, would be dragged into the business.

Michael had plenty of time, and the night, favorably for him, was as black as the preceding one had been. He left the windmill and struck across the plowed land as before, to reach the manor of the De Mervilles at Charlesbourg.

Again he made use of the key Diane had entrusted him with and went to her room. No need now to knock, he thought with a feeling of loneliness. He opened the door softly lest he awaken the sleeping servants; he went in, struck a light and proceeded to lift the cushion . . .

A scream rang through the house, a cry for help. Michael dropped the cushion back in place, turned to the bed.

“Diane! Do not fear! It is I, Michael!”

She sat bolt upright in the tumbled bed, her hair in pretty disarray. She stared at him, wide-eyed, incredulous.

“Michael! Then—then you are not Lucien’s murderer. I see. It was a trick. But go, for the love of God, go before they take you. They are here, watching . . .”

There was a rush of footsteps, heavy on the stairs, and the doorway suddenly filled with men in the uniform of the guard. Muskets, bayonets fixed and gleaming in the candlelight, were levelled at Michael’s breast and one called sternly to him to surrender. Behind him was the window, a drop of some thirty feet to the paved courtyard. He turned, prepared to chance it, but they were upon him, forcing him down with the sheer weight of numbers. He heard Diane call to him, even as long ago, that night in Paris, he had called to her:

“Michael! Do not harm him.”

They held him pinioned to the floor, and one ripped the wine-red cloak and its hood away. In amazement, silent, incredulous, they stared down at him; at the grotesquely painted and fixedly grinning face of him they knew only as Pepin Clopinard, the King’s fool. Stout cords were brought, and they bound him, and without further ado, with silent, respectful attention to the injunctions of Diane de Merville, they seated him on a horse and pushed toward Quebec. It had been a clever trap; for Bigot, knowing Lucien’s intimacy with Diane, his cousin, had argued that his comrade must be known to her as well, and he was making every possible move to apprehend this man who held his destiny and even his life in the palm of a hand. Thus came the King’s fool back to Quebec. And now, in truth, Michael Mohan had need of all his quick wit, for never before had he been in so tight a corner. String him up by the neck they surely would, for no man likes to be fooled, and he had twice outwitted the Intendant.

“And with God’s good grace,” he said fiercely, “I will do it again.”

But the cords were strong with which they had bound his wrists, and the soldiers rode closely beside him. Along the highway they clattered through the velvet dark, humid with the bursting of spring; and into the city, to the Intendant’s Palace. Lights burned in the Intendant’s rooms; there would be no rest for François Bigot while the black-covered book was unaccounted for, while the consequences of his dishonesty, his robbing of the poor for his own enrichment, overshadowed him. The noise of the horses in the courtyard brought him to his window, and presently the five men he had sent to stand watch at Charlesbourg entered the palace, their prisoner in their midst.

The captain of the guard was one Léon Catudal, a lynx-eyed rogue who made it his business to know all that could be known about what went on in New France. He had, too, a taste for dramatics, and so had replaced the red cloak with its pointed hood, the better to mark the effect of the disclosure upon the Intendant.

“You have taken the rogue! You have him!” Bigot was beside himself with joy. They had the culprit; he would get back his book. The dark clouds that had hung over him were in part dispelled. He stepped close to Monsieur le Diable and bade them remove the gnomish disguise. Catudal obeyed with alacrity.

“Eh! Dieu du ciel! Le fou . . .!” Bigot stared into the mask beneath the mask. “You!” he said. “You, Clopinard! But it is impossible! Yet no, no; you are a rogue, fit tool for a spy. I never liked you, never trusted you, though I did not heed those who would have warned me. Too much cunning and a wit far too caustic. What now! Do you know that the gallows waits for you? Aye, twice over; for you have violated the King’s mandate in adopting this hooded cloak, and the people cry for a murderer’s blood.”

“The people are fooled, Monsieur Bigot,” said Michael, unflinching before the Intendant’s triumphant rage. “You know, as do many others, that it was not Monsieur le Diable who slew Lucien de Mornay but your own henchman.”

“Enough!” The Intendant’s hand slapped the painted mouth of the jester, which grew more crimson still with the blood that wet it.

“There is something, for gentlemen, that follows such a pretty gesture,” said Michael softly.

“For gentlemen!” Bigot laughed. “You are but a clown, a fool.”

“My lord.” The crafty Catudal motioned to the Intendant, and they walked away together. Rapid exclamations of surprise came from the startled Bigot.

“No!” he said. “It is out of the question. No man could fool the nobility, the entire populace of New France in such fashion. But you say she called him Michael and pleaded with you . . .”

He came back briskly, and stood, feet apart, in front of Michael, fixing him with fishlike eye, a terrible scowl furrowing his brow. His tone was more level, but even more menacing.

“Tell me,” he said, “since whatever you say now cannot harm you one way or another, are you the Irishman, Sir Michael Mohan, who was sent here under the Court’s displeasure for having tried to wed Diane de Merville? Are you he? Answer, or . . .!”

Michael feigned astonishment; though it was near the end of all deception.

“How can that be?” he said. “Why, this many months you have treated me as a fool; and now you would make, of all things, an Irishman out of me. Anyone but a fool would know the two are incompatible.”

“You stand confessed. Indeed, from your intimacy with her I might have guessed it. I have killed two birds, it would seem, with one stone. In faith, you are a man of many masks and great versatility. ’Tis but in reason that now should come the death mask. But first, I would have you restore what you took from my desk at Beaumanoir. Come, tell me where you have put it. Tell me at once; for tell me you will before you swing.”

“I will tell you nothing,” said Michael, “except that the day is very near when you and your precious friends will dance on air. As for me, I am a good dancer, but you have little grace, my friend.”

“Remove him,” ordered the Intendant. “There are ways of making talk such men as this. Tomorrow—”

“Aye, tomorrow,” called Michael over the heads of his guard, “comes the reckoning, for is it not then that the Marquis de Dronsart arrives from France?”

“Too late for you,” returned the Intendant, but, just the same, Michael’s shaft had gone home. Bigot knew it was the Marquis de Dronsart who had interceded for this Irishman, and the new marquis likewise was a warm friend of Sir Michael Mohan and a distant kinsman of the dead De Mornay.

“Not yet, by any means,” mused the Intendant, “are we out of danger. But with this man away, with Diane in safe custody, all should be well. Diane . . . . Crevier . . .” The Intendant clasped and unclasped his soft fingers. A crafty smile lighted his face. “Quick!” he called to the omnipresent Charleroi, “Get you to Beaumanoir and tell the Sieur d’Anvers to come here as quickly as horse can bring him.”

Bigot was a schemer born, and the turn of affairs was such, he quickly perceived, as he could readily put to his good use; could use to settle in nice diplomatic fashion an affair that had held forth far more difficulty than he had cared to admit. Now Diane, the independent, could be brought to her senses, and that with only an apparent concession. He gave orders then that she was to be kept in the seclusion of her room at Charlesbourg manor and allowed to have interview with no one.

Gaston Crevier came, a wolfish smile on his face, for Charleroi had told him of all that had befallen in his absence.

“Good, my lord,” he cried gleefully, rubbing his bony hands as was his habit when pleased. “We have him now and things have indeed fallen out well for us.”

“More especially for you,” said the Intendant. “It has been most fortunate for you, Gaston. You know, of course, that this man who for six long months has fooled us, in a double sense, is not Pepin Clopinard at all but the Irishman, Sir Michael Mohan?”

“I know it, and rejoice in it, my lord; for now we shall have the opportunity of doing what first we planned, of letting Diane be present to gaze his execution.”

“Very pleasant,” agreed the Intendant. “A very pretty idea for setting with this upstart and at the same time for humbling that spitfire. But first we shall use him as a lever to lift a very small and dainty but hitherto immovable body. The hour is very late, but I fancy there will be no closing of soft blue eyes at Charlesbourg manor this night. Come, we go to Diane.”

As they rode along, Bigot outlined his scheme; a simple, even an obvious one, but so certainly effective that Crevier marvelled and could not contain his admiration, so unbounded, for this great Intendant who combined the cunning of a Richelieu with the philosophy of a Machiavelli.

“See how quickly the pretty bird will rise from cover now, Gaston,” laughed the Intendant. “We needs must travel fast along the way we are going. Already it is known in the town that the highwayman has been taken, though I bade those fools hold their tongues about his real identity. However, be he prince or jester, they will clamor for his blood even as the Jewish rabble thirsted for the blood of the Nazarene. And,” he finished pensively, “meseems the analogy holds very good. I play the part of Pilate, inasmuch as I shall feign ignorance of who and what he is, and give him to the people for what they would have him. But ’tis passing strange that she who loved him should have played Iscariot, for it was she, albeit unwillingly, as you may well imagine, who betrayed him into our hands.”

As the Intendant had foreseen, Diane could find no rest that night. She sat for hours in tears and recriminations, in alternate fits of rage and depression, and her complex emotional nature, the Gallic and the Celtic, was racked and torn by the bitter knowledge that her cry had brought Michael to destruction. And she was helpless—until Louvigny should come. But she knew Bigot well enough to realize that Louvigny’s coming would be too late. She had been the cause of Michael’s capture; she had foolishly cried out his name in the hearing of the soldiers. What must he think of her, foolish girl? Ah, she knew what he thought of her! He loved her.

She herself came to open the door for the late visitors, and her surprise was exceeded by her anger when she saw who it was. To Crevier she would not address herself at all, but upon the Intendant’s devoted head she heaped a torrent of threats and reproaches, telling him that Michael had been Lucien’s friend, that to think he could have had a hand in the murder was preposterous, that summary and cruel vengeance would fall upon him if he did not postpone action until the arrival of Louvigny de Dronsart.

“If you harm him,” she said fiercely, “you will pay for it a thousand times over, for I will move heaven and earth to destroy you.”

“Gently, gently.” Bigot raised his hand in a gesture much like that with which one admonishes a child. “Diane, you are lovely when you rage. Your eyes have blue fire in them then, and it glints on the gold of your hair. Have you not remarked that, Gaston? Ah, I see you have. And who, more than you, should admire it?”

“ ’Tis an ill time for compliments,” said Diane coldly. “And they come unwelcomed from the lips that utter them. I want to know what you are going to do with him—with Michael?”

“Why, nothing,” said Bigot casually, elevating his black brows quizzically.

“Nothing!” Her eyes widened, her breath came faster. “You mean you will let him go, give him to me? No, no! You are not like that, you are but playing with me.”

“I am quite serious,” insisted the Intendant mockingly. “Your lover’s life I put in your hands, those small white hands that it would be a privilege to be strangled with. I give you his life to do with it what you will; to destroy it, to preserve it—on one condition.”

Diane stiffened, though she had been prepared for this, knowing well that Bigot would do nothing so generous as to pardon Michael.

“And that, monsieur?” she asked.

“Merely that you consent to marry this good man who stands so silently, so abashed by your beauty and bewitching temper, at my side. Is it not a pleasant way of saving your beloved?”

For a moment Diane was nonplussed, gazing with angry, clouded eyes, first at Crevier’s smiling visage, then at the ironical countenance of the Intendant.

“He would not purchase life at such a price,” she said stormily. “No, he would rather die than that I should go to a man who could abet such a bargain.”

“But you?” put in the Intendant shrewdly. “Would you rather see him die when you know that it is in your power to save him at no great sacrifice?”

“You call it no great sacrifice,” she retorted bitterly, “to have to marry a man you despise, one who wants only the paltry gold that goes with you and cares not a whit for you?”

“But I do care,” protested Crevier, looking more than ever like a famished wolf and thinking how much he would like to punish her, to see her cringe beneath his hand. “I love you, Diane.”

“It is a mockery,” she said. “Go from me. I will have none of it.”

The Intendant’s suavity deserted him. He turned angrily to her, and there was no trace of irony in his voice now.

“You do as I say or your lover will hang. Heed that, you saucy piece! You profess to love him; then prove your love. We shall leave you now to think it over at your leisure. Should you change your mind, as you will be well advised to do, you may send word to me by one of those I have appointed to watch over you. Mind you do not delay too long, for this man has aroused the rage of the people by his misdeeds and it will be most difficult for me to save him.”

So saying, Bigot left the room and Crevier followed him. If the Intendant’s extensive knowledge of women did not prove him false at this juncture, he felt sure that Diane would go to any lengths to save her lover. And she could not know the depths of the Intendant’s cunning and treachery nor realize that his promises all were lies.

In the dwelling of Bigot, the palace of the Intendant, were great underground vaults, built in the days of the Intendant Jean Talon, a wise and far-sighted administrator, who had never intended his structure to be put to the use it now served but had destined it for the wholesome function of a brewery. In one of these underground vaults was Michael Mohan confined; in a square, stone-walled room with a massive door and in it a small grill, only large enough to frame a man’s head. A solitary guard patrolled this corridor, and strictest orders were given by the Intendant that no one be allowed to hold interview with the prisoner.

On the morning following his capture there were new demonstrations in the town; the shouts of the indignant habitants, the hubbub of the crowd that quickly gathered outside the palace coming only faintly to the prisoner in the vault, such as deep in some cavern that opens on the sea one would hear the muted roar of the surf. There was a menacing timbre in those buzzing voices; the savage, unreasoning rage of the mob. They wanted his blood, wanted to see him die, and rejoice in his death. The masque, the wine-red cloak with its pointed hood, which he had been wearing when captured, furnished evidence enough for them, and they knew that, though a jester, a clown, he was a man whose deeds had brought him under the displeasure of the king himself. There was no inkling among the townsfolk that he whom they denounced and demanded as vociferously as the mob claimed the thief Barabbas was not the king’s fool but one who had long masqueraded as Pepin Clopinard to escape from a punishment more severe.

“ ’Tis high time,” thought Michael, who had long since exhausted the meagre possibilities of his cell, in which there was no more than a rude chair, a pallet of straw and a jug of water—“ ’tis high time I was hearing from that great support and standby of the Mohans, Barney O’Pray. The walls are thick, the door is solid timber, the grating is too small for a man’s shoulders; yet, knowing Barney as I do, I feel it in my heart he will come. Sure, if he does not, it is lost I am entirely, for they mean to hang me, and, one way or another, they can do it; if not for killing poor De Mornay, then for going abroad in other than the fool’s motley. They have me every way; but I am not dead yet.”

A face appeared at the grill, the key grated in the huge wards of the lock, and the door swung open to admit the Intendant and Gaston Crevier. The door was then shut behind them and the guard resumed his monotonous patrol. Bigot for a moment surveyed the prisoner in silence. Michael still wore the jester’s green-and-red, but the pigment had worn and been washed from his face, and it was not the fool but Michael Mohan who gave Bigot look for look and Crevier a glance of silent derision. And it was Michael who spoke first.

“You come then to put the real murderer in my stead?”

“You have no need to play the fool longer,” said the Intendant. “Tomorrow at sunrise, for ’twould be hard flying heavenward in the dark of night—tomorrow at sunrise you mount the gallows, my fool. Does not that sober you?”

“It may in the end. And sunrise is a splendid time, for if it were at night I might miss the pearly gates altogether and get to the wrong place, and there I should be waiting for you two fine gentlemen to join me.”

“Enough of this,” said Bigot. “We want the book you stole. You may as well give it to us, for when you are dead who then shall have it?”

“It will haunt you like my ghost, messieurs. I will not give it you. And had you the apparatus of the Holy Inquisition, your lives would be all too short to wring from me its place of concealment.”

“Ah, then you have not given it to some other!” The Intendant was jubilant. This, which Michael unwittingly had said, relieved him of a dread that the book was in the hands of someone who would use it against him.

“It will come to light,” promised Michael, “as the record of evil practices must. It will yet land you in the Bastille, where your betters have often languished.”

“Curb your insolent tongue, pig!” said Crevier. “You forget to whom you speak. There is something else that may give you food for thought—shall I tell him, my lord?”

“Yes, Gaston, tell him. It will make his execution much more interesting for the leading performer.”

“Well then,” said Crevier with a smirk that made Michael long to be at his throat, “you are to be hanged at sunrise, while I, my merry jester, am to be married at the identical time. A remarkable coincidence, is it not? Very kindly you helped me get what I have long waited for. Diane de Merville has promised to become my wife.”

Michael shook his head sadly and in a scornful tone. “Never did I think,” he said as if to himself, “that the throat of a human being could be so constructed as to let pass a lie as big as that.”

“What! You dare to—”

“You may understand me better if I call you a liar out and out.”

Crevier swallowed the insult but he thrust a slip of paper before the prisoner’s eyes—Diane’s crest, her writing, unmistakably hers.

“. . . you have promised that Sir Michael Mohan will live if I consent to this; so I will gladly die for him and with him; for it is death, no less, to my spirit, and I would it were so to my body, to give myself to a man I so thoroughly detest.”

“You told her that—that I could be saved through her doing this?” Michael, nimble-witted though he was, could not for a moment realize that his fellow men could stoop to such hideous trickery. “She must not!” he said. “God would not permit even men He must hold in the very lowest esteem to do a thing so unworthy, so pitifully base. You would promise her my life—”

“Quite so,” interrupted the Intendant. “We promised we would give you to her as a wedding-present if she married Gaston, and we always keep our promises. When she turns away from the altar of the chapel in the Hôtel Dieu up above the chateau, she has but to walk to the window, gaze out, and there you will be swinging gaily in the morning sunlight.”

Michael would have thrown himself upon them, but the points of their rapiers were at his throat. They left him to his thoughts, which were darker now than ever they had been before. Yes, Diane would do this for him, sacrifice her own happiness, her all, that he might live. And then to find that they had lied to her . . .

“They are not human,” he muttered. “Nor yet are they beasts, for such a deed is beyond the capacity of either. Faith, may the lucky star of the Irish beam bright this night and the fairies and witches and all the dead Mohans come to my aid, for ’tis sore beset I am and I was never the man to relish a hempen noose for breakfast.”

But the day dragged along and the shadows crept into his cell from the corridor outside the grating, down which and up the slow, steady tread of the sentry echoed and beat upon his brain with insistent steadiness like the ticking of a great clock bringing him nearer and nearer, nearer and nearer, to death. He heard the sound of a cannon firing a salute, and the glad thought came to him that the ship bearing Louvigny de Dronsart had reached Quebec; Louvigny who could put an end to all this and see justice done. Yes, Louvigny would gladly move the world to save him—but not to save Pepin Clopinard, the king’s fool, who had roamed abroad when forbidden to do so; not to save Monsieur le Diable, a wretched highwayman condemned to die for the murder of Lucien de Mornay, whom Louvigny loved even as he loved Michael. Thus, the disguise which had so long been Michael’s safeguard would now permit him to die before the eyes of one who would have saved him. And even as he mused on that, soldiers came and made him don once more the wine-red cloak and hood of Monsieur le Diable, having first thrust a gag in his mouth; and afterward they bound his wrists.

Presently he learned the reason for this. Louvigny’s face showed for a moment in the grating; Louvigny’s brown, questing eyes that saw only the murderer of his friend and had for that murderer only one word—maudît! Then he left the grating, and his footsteps reverberated for an instant, then died.

He heard the bells of the city now, chiming out the Angelus, their vibrant clamor echoing from hill to hill. Once more, at dawn, they would ring for him, and then no more . . .

He rose from his pallet of straw, stood, his body rigid, head held high, the thongs cutting into the flesh of his wrists. Strong as a great flame burned the will to live, the desire to throw off the fetters that held him, to break the net of circumstances that enmeshed him, to save her he loved, to humble them he hated; to gaze again on the blue sky, the grass, the river, the Glen of Morrah, where now the birds lilted gaily and the land was bright with the May.

“Not yet, O God!” he said. “Not yet!”

But darkness crept into the cell, and the maddening beat of the sentry’s feet dinned and dinned and pounded and pounded into his ears, and the moments seemed to speed, to retard, to speed more rapidly, bringing him nearer to a dawn that for him, at least, would be dark.

The arrival of the man-o’war Reine Blanche, bringing the Marquis de Dronsart, the Baron St. Cloud and the Duc d’Aiguillon, though expected, caused the Intendant some uneasiness, lest the prisoner should in some way communicate with de Dronsart or he with Diane de Merville, who, after she had given her consent to marry Gaston Crevier, had been taken to the Hôtel Dieu, where the ceremony would be performed the following morning. The Intendant, an adept at devising lies, thought it an excellent idea, should Louvigny ask after her, to say she was confined to her home with an illness but would doubtless be about on the morrow.

However, the news of Lucien de Mornay’s death drove all other thoughts from Louvigny’s mind. Not only had he loved de Mornay dearly, but also had he relied on the Comte’s assistance in the work he had to do. It was a shock, devastating, paralyzing, to the youthful marquis, who, despite many great responsibilities put upon him since his father’s death, had lost none of his insolent, cocksure ways. His flawless brown eyes and boyish face at first disarmed the Intendant, who had not expected to see one so young coming on this important mission, and so plumed himself that it would be easy to befool this boy and send him and his companions back to France in no way wiser than when they left it.

Louvigny gazed for only an instant on the condemned and cared not to see his face. “Were I to see it,” he said, “I should carry the hateful image forever after with me.” And Bigot was glad thereat. The grim irony of that moment tickled his fancy, and he thought with glee of the terrible emotions that must have shaken Michael Mohan as, unable to speak, to make a sign, he had to see his one hope of life, his best friend, turn away from him in silent loathing.

“Your excellency shall have the pleasure,” said Bigot smoothly, “of seeing the Comte de Mornay’s death avenged in fitting fashion. Tomorrow at sunrise his murderer mounts the gallows. Justice in Quebec is swift and sure, and descends invariably upon the right man.”

“Hm!” Louvigny, even on such short acquaintance with Bigot and Crevier, who was with them, felt not so sure of that. His searching, birdlike glance darted from the smiling, hypocritical face of the Intendant to Gaston Crevier’s sharp and sallow visage. A pair of precious rogues, he decided forthwith, who would slit one’s throat as readily as they shook one’s hand.

“This jester,” said Louvigny, after a somewhat awkward pause when they had come from visiting the condemned, “seemed a harmless fellow enough, though, of course, I knew very little about him in France. He rashly wooed one of our noble ladies and suffered the king’s displeasure on that account, even as other, greater men have done. I allude to my dear friend, Sir Michael Mohan, news of whose death reached me in France.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Bigot with a sly glance, that Louvigny did not miss, at Crevier. “A splendid young man, no doubt. But the storms and the seas respect not youth nor beauty nor brilliance. The young Irishman’s death grieved me too, for I had prepared a hearty welcome for him at Quebec, where His Gracious Majesty had generously sent him. Had I not, Gaston, a warm welcome ready for Sir Michael?”

“A fitting one, in very truth,” agreed Crevier with an appreciative smirk at the Intendant’s droll humor.

“The jester, you say,” went on Louvigny, “not satisfied with playing the fool, must needs be the highwayman too?”

“Monsieur le Diable, he was called,” said Bigot. “From the bizarre cloak and hood, so much like a monk’s, that he wore on all occasions, even as you just saw him and as the good citizens of Quebec shall for the last time gaze upon him. For nothing will satisfy the people but that he be executed in his cloak and peaked hood, which for so long terrified the good habitants of New France. I think it a fine thing, too, for it quite spoils one’s appetite for breakfast to gaze upon the face of a man just as he is being strangled.”

“Yes, it is well,” assented Louvigny absently.

The Intendant smiled and shot a crafty look at Gaston. It was solely Bigot’s idea that the scarlet hood should cover the face of the condemned, in which Louvigny would surely recognize his friend and at once use his authority to stay the execution, in which case all would be lost. The consequences for Bigot, should so much as a word pass between de Dronsart and Sir Michael Mohan, would be very unpleasant; so, lest the prisoner cry out to the marquis and make himself known, the gag would remain in his mouth until there was no longer need for it. Bigot, with great glee, thought of the moment when, the hood removed, the marquis would discover who it was that had been hanged in the guise of the highwayman. And Crevier, sharing this macabre anticipation, rubbed his hands with such a dry and disheartening sound that Louvigny stared at him as if he were mad.

The Intendant purposely kept the newcomers a long time at table, and now, at a late hour, Charleroi Fortin was charged with the task of watching outside the guests’ chamber doors to see that no message of any sort reached the Marquis de Dronsart; though there was small chance of anyone being able to communicate with him, the prisoner being safely confined in the vaults and Diane under strictest surveillance at the Hôtel Dieu. The Intendant had constructed a most complex web of intrigue, and he felt now like the king spider who has seen the various flies get snarled in his meshes and prepares to devour them at his good pleasure. Diane was in the meshes, securely; and the Irishman, Mohan. De Mornay had already perished, and still the web was strong. Nothing could break it now; all would go as he had planned.

In the market place the lofty gibbet had grown up in a few hours under the hammers and planes of willing carpenters, and now reared its head most awesomely. The town was tonight en fête, for now people might walk freely abroad and not be in terror of their lives and purses. The highwayman’s body, on being cut down from the gallows, would be placed in a cage made of barrel hoops and again suspended, this time at the four cross roads of Levis, for all men to look upon; that the good might draw therefrom assurance of the law’s kindly, severe protection; the evil take heed to the fate of Monsieur le Diable and henceforth mend their ways.

Thus, pleasantly, with a bottle of wine between him and Crevier, the expectant bridegroom, the Intendant awaited the dawn and the working out of his most satisfying scheme.

“In truth, my lord,” said his toady, “Richelieu is outdone by you. And this will teach the unwary that François Bigot makes a far better friend than he does an enemy. I, certainly, shall never forget what you have done for me.”

“Nor will Diane, I suspect,” laughed the Intendant. “Though she will remember it in a different fashion. Look well to it, Gaston, that you ascertain whether or not she knows of this book they stole from me. I think not, inasmuch as the night they came to Beaumanoir—de Mornay and this troublesome Irish fool—Diane was staying with the Ursulines. ’Tis my belief that Mohan did but hide the book somewhere and doubtless so carefully that there it will stay until Doomsday; though, for that matter, the day on which it were found would be Doomsday for François Bigot. You understand, mon ami, it would mean the Bastille, mayhap the gallows, for me whom you hail as friend and patron; and for you, no less, and for Cadet and the others. It is a simple matter to swindle kings, governments and peoples, but their revenge is great in proportion when once they find you out.”

“Even as our own upon the Irishman who fooled us so long. I shall take care, my lord, that Diane—my wife she will be then—shall come to the window in good time to see him leap from life into death. That will put fear into her; break her pride and show her we are not to be trifled with.”

“Quite,” agreed the Intendant, and then with fresh wine they drank toasts to all the pleasant things they could think of: to Crevier’s love, to Bigot’s loves, to the end of Sir Michael Mohan, to the success of all their future schemes. It was not until scarcely an hour remained before the dawn that would bring death that Crevier prepared to take his leave.

“First, your excellency,” he said thickly, “I would go make my farewells to my rival in the vaults below. No doubt, he is thinking of me and envying me.”

“He can make you no reply,” said Bigot. “For I gave orders at midnight that the gag be put in his mouth, the hooded disguise over him, and that no further speech be allowed him, for he has the devil’s wit and can do untold mischief with his tongue.”

“But he can hear what I have to say. And it will be the first time, I swear, within my knowledge, that he will fail of quick and biting retort. I shall not linger long with him, since I must bring a sober and smiling face to the marriage altar.”

Crevier descended the narrow stairs to the vaults unsteadily, gloating over the prospect of the cruel baiting he would give the prisoner. Even in death he would hate this man, for he knew that Diane would still love him. He wanted to taunt Michael, to wound him, to make death more hideous to him. And with this ugly purpose he came to the corridor of the vaults, along which the sentry paced.

“You may go,” he said to the guard. “I wish to hold private converse with the prisoner. I shall let you know when I am leaving.”

The sentry tendered him the keys, and Crevier took them. The soldier saluted and strolled out of doors. Like many of his fellows, he had no use for the Intendant and despised Crevier with all his heart. He suspected that Crevier’s purpose in coming at this eleventh hour was to make the condemned man’s lot more wretched still—something that nauseated him. He stopped for a moment at the low door of the vaults to look back. He saw the diabolic profile of Crevier peering in at the grill, and he spat contemptuously as he turned on his heel and walked about in the darkness of the courtyard.

Michael half sat, half lay on his pallet of straw, even as Louvigny had seen him that afternoon, the red hood covering his head, his eyes burning through the narrow slits. The gag cut his mouth cruelly. Thus had he sat for hours, watching hopefully the grey, glimmering square of the grill, waiting for he knew not what, yet hoping, praying, believing that help would come. He appreciated Bigot’s cleverness in putting the gag between his lips, the hood over his head; for, from the height of the gallows he would surely have called out to Louvigny, who would as certainly have recognized his face and his voice. Now there was no chance of that. To see Louvigny, to see life and freedom so near him as it had been, then snatched away without his being able to say a single word or to make a single sign to aid himself—that had been a torture, hellish, ghastly. The Intendant’s evil thoroughness had circumvented his hopes, in every way. But still there was Barney; Barney who had never failed him.

He heard the bellman distantly tell the hours. Only one more hour of life, and he tied, helpless. Crevier’s face, grinning and derisive, pressed against the grill, was a final mockery at his hopes, so poor, so uncertain.

“So the ready tongue is mute at last,” sneered Crevier. “It is well. It is a great pleasure to be able to talk to the witty fool without being interrupted by his sword-pointed tongue. I come to take my leave of you and to bid you, just before the trap is sprung, cast your eyes heavenward and you shall see your heaven; though by then it will be mine. Long ago, my fine Irishman, we planned just such a party for you, but cleverly you outwitted us, you fooled us. And it is one of Diane’s bitter reproaches that she was the unwitting instrument of your capture. However, my love for her is such that she will soon cease to reproach herself, even to think of you at all. Yours is the fate that all should meet who seek to rise above themselves.

“All goes harmoniously; and most harmonious is the fact that you shall die for the slaying of your fellow traitor, de Mornay, when it was I who put the ball in his back and then, seeing that he still lived, stuck him, for the pig he was, through the throat with my sword. Now, there is little more I can say, Sir Michael Mohan. I know you wish me all happiness, even as I wish you a swift and speedy journey to hell—”

Crevier’s speech ended in a choking gasp as two hairy, freckled paws closed about his windpipe with terrible, berserk strength. Michael saw his face vanish from the grill, apparently without reason. But in a few seconds the key turned in the lock, the door swung open, and into the vault, dragging the throttled Crevier after him like a sack of corn and depositing him unceremoniously on the floor, came the great O’Pray.

“Sure, the whole of this blessed afternoon and evenin’, your honor, have I spent in that stinkin’ wine-butt in the corner of the corridor. I sneaked in at noon when the sentry was chattin’ with his sweetheart, and divil a chance had I to crawl out and spring on the fellow’s back, for the butt was big as the one the English kings drowned each other in, and I would no sooner get me shoulders out than he’d finish his beat an’ turn around, facin’ me. An’ every time he passed the butt he had to spit, your honor. Then this blaggard came and . . .”

As Barney talked he unfastened Michael’s bonds, took the hood from his head, the gag from his mouth.

“Now, quick, your honor. Strip this blaggard we will, and dress him up for the gallows, safe, sound and silent. Slip into his clothes after gettin’ out of your own, be on your way then and I’ll drop back into the wine-butt, to emerge in time to witness this fine hangin’. And, sure, not until they take this extinguisher off him, will they know they’ve hanged the right man in mistake for the wrong one. The first time I set eyes on him I said to myself he was a gallows bird, and like all the O’Prays I have the gift of foreseein’ . . .”

Crevier recovered from the throttling Barney had given him in time to see Michael Mohan, wearing his clothes, leave the cell and lock the door behind him. Crevier was tightly bound and gagged, and the hood securely covered his terrified face. Swiftly the horror of his predicament dawned upon him; for if Michael Mohan could communicate with no one, ask aid of no one, neither now could he.

“Adieu, Monsieur Crevier,” called Michael softly. “May I wish you a pleasant good morning? And may you enjoy the sunrise!”

Awful sounds and mouthings came from the man in the wine-red cloak and the all-concealing hood. He ran about the cell, flung himself against the door, seeking some projection on which to tear the accursed disguise from him before—it was something he dared not think about—the dawn; the dawn at which he was to have taken unto himself a wife. Now another bride offered herself and would not take denial. This bride was Death.

With a wave of his hand, which wore Crevier’s gauntlet, Michael left the vaults, threw the keys to the guard, who still paced the courtyard, and strode through the gateway of the Intendant’s palace—a free man.

“Now God and the holy saints of Ireland be praised,” he muttered. “And all honor to the O’Prays of Waterford. Thanks that I have come through this greatest peril. The hanging will go on right merrily. ’Tis a fine appearing gallows they builded for me. But the wedding, for want of a bridegroom, will have to be postponed.”

He wanted to sing, to whistle and caper a jig; so vast, so utter was his relief. Barney O’Pray knew how to take care of himself. Anyway, now that Michael was free and Louvigny in the city, the Intendant’s high-handed actions must come to an end. The book, the record of his crooked administration, would bring Monsieur François promptly to his knees, and his associates, to save their own skins, would tell the truth about who had killed de Mornay.

People, to be early on hand for the execution, were hurrying through the streets now, their footsteps, their voices, loud in the great stillness that preludes the dawn. Michael, in Crevier’s long dark cloak and slouch hat, passed unnoticed; and, since none of these folk had ever seen beyond the painted face of the king’s fool, he mingled freely with them and had no fear. Only Maître Gabbon, the tailor from the Alley of the Pigeons; Charleroi Fortin and Ludovic Frinette, the perruquier, would be at all likely to recognize him. And these he would avoid, though it was most unlikely they would realize that the man supposed to be mounting the scaffold was standing by their side, assisting as a spectator at his own execution.

Now, from all quarters the habitants, the bourgeoisie, the military, the nobility, men and women, streamed into the market place, and thousands were assembled around the gallows when the sun poked its shining rim above the hilltops and the bells of the city pealed forth the angelus. The horses of the guard clattered over the stones. It would take place on time; even to the minute.

Never was such a hubbub. No greater excitement could the Québécois have displayed had a great fleet of the English appeared before the city, ready to bombard it. From the youngest to the oldest they had come in force, and all night long, from Les Trois Rivières, from Charlesbourg, Montmorency, and in canoes and bateaux from villages far down the river. Monsieur le Diable, in the short time he had galloped the highways around Quebec, had acquired a legendary character. Mothers silenced their noisy children by whispering his name at nightfall and bidding the young ones hark to the patter of the horse’s hoofs on the highroad. And that Monsieur le Diable should be no other than the painted jester at whom they laughed when he drove his droll cart through the city’s streets lent still more piquancy to his execution for the murder of the Comte de Mornay and for having disobeyed the king’s mandate in forsaking his motley.

Just as the sunlight grew to deeper gold, flooding the great rock of the city with its luminance, the prisoner was led forth, escorted by six of the guard, their bayonets glinting in the sun. The throng had expected to see the condemned march to his death unflinching, as a brave man should; not this craven, cowardly thing, who at times flung himself grovelling on the ground, seeking, it seemed, to grind his face into the cobbles; who mouthed and made bestial sounds at which some laughed and others shuddered, as he was forced along by his captors, now with the bayonet’s steely point, now by sheer force of the soldier’s hands upon his arms. Right to the topmost step of the scaffold it was necessary thus to drag and push him.

The mob hissed and groaned. Word went round that the condemned had gone mad in his cell an hour before dawn, and that his gaoler had been forced to knock him on the head to quiet him lest he dash his brains out on the floor.

“Poltron! Poltron! Lâche! Lâche!” roared the throng. “Coward! Craven! Is this the bold highwayman? The great marauder who terrorized us!”

The Intendant, mounted, with Louvigny de Dronsart on a white steed by his side, smiled with contented cynicism and turning to his young companion, said:

“Strange how this man’s stiffness and defiance have melted. Only a few moments ago I had given you my oath that not the gallows—no, not the knife nor the axe nor any other giver of death to felons—could have broken that proud spirit. Yet he must have been a craven at heart.”

“A sorry wretch indeed,” said Louvigny, pity mingled with contempt in his clear eyes. “Is this, then, the man who wooed the fair Heloïse de Valois, braved shipwreck and death? It seems incredible.”

Bigot laughed in his lace-fringed sleeve. How dearly he longed to tell this young jackanapes that the frightful thing he saw, flopping and grovelling, mouthing and moaning on the gallows as they slipped the noose about his neck, was no other than the Irishman, Mohan, whose bravery Louvigny had vaunted in his presence. But no. In a moment now, Bigot knew, his triumph would be complete. He could picture Louvigny’s revulsion of feeling, his horror and indignation; and the Intendant had prepared himself to deny stoutly, for the moment, that he knew the victim as anyone other than Pepin Clopinard, the king’s fool.

Mockingly, longing for sharper eyes, the Intendant glanced up the heights to the Hôtel Dieu, where, he thought, even now, Gaston Crevier, Sieur d’Anvers, was leading his bride from the altar in the little chapel. He saw a flutter of white at the window and blew a kiss from his lips with his right hand, while with his left he nonchalantly indicated to the black-hooded executioner that the trap be sprung.

In the silence of the crowd, the sound was startling, macabre; a sharp crack as of bones snapping and the grotesque crimson figure dangled limply in the air, head sunk on breast, arms loose like those of a crazy marionette, swaying, jerking. Then, a bell began to toll and a monk in the crowd intoned the De Profundis.

The Intendant, who, with lips parted, a glassy look in his eyes, had watched the execution, laughed when it was done; an ugly, grating laugh. Louvigny looked at him with eyes eloquent of the contempt he had quickly learned to feel for this smooth, unscrupulous scoundrel.

“Do you find it droll then?” asked Louvigny. “To me it is a sight revolting and pathetic in the extreme.”

Bigot stayed him with a curt gesture, and, leaning forward, bade the hangman remove the hood that covered the dead man’s face. The crowd, who had never seen the real face of the king’s fool, any more than that of Monsieur le Diable, watched with bated breath, their eyes intent on that absurdly dangling, lifeless thing at the end of the hempen cord. They had seen him go plunging to his death, but not yet was their morbid curiosity satiated; they longed to see the features behind the red hood—a handsome face, it had been said by Maître Gabbon and Ludovic Frinette, the wig-maker.

Now the hangman brought forth a little stairs and, climbing up on them, unfastened the cowl and with slowness, deliberate or due to clumsiness, drew it off, as one disclosing a miraculous sight does it with dramatic restraint. A wave of expectancy rippled over the crowd, necks craned. Bigot looked at the young marquis and was pleased to find him as intent as the rest. Then the hangman, with a cry that rang shrilly there, leaped from his stairs. The twisted, enpurpled visage of the dead man more hideous than any masque that man could fashion was revealed—the face of Gaston Crevier!

Dumbstricken, paralyzed, Bigot leaned forward, on the pommel of his saddle. The crowd that for an instant had kept astounded silence now burst forth with shouts and jeers more deafening than before. And mingled with their wonderment was a certain pleasure, for, next to the Intendant, no man in New France was hated more than this same Crevier, who had executed to the letter the Intendant’s infamous schemes, who had been thief, panderer and worse.

“Now God be my judge!” swore the Intendant. “This passeth all endurance, this—” Words choked him, so great was his fury. “Crevier! It is Gaston the fools have hanged and not the beast of an Irishman!”

“What say you of an Irishman?” demanded Louvigny sharply. “Yon dead rogue is your own associate, I see. But was it not Pepin Clopinard, the king’s fool, who was to ascend the steps there? Methinks, he had died a braver death.”

“I will not brook your meddling,” said the Intendant. “I see your hand in this, Monsieur le Marquis. You have outwitted me here by a trick that, without the devil’s aid, could never have succeeded.”

“Quite so,” answered Louvigny insolently, though he was quite as ignorant of what it was all about as the meanest one in the gabbling, seething crowd that waited for some word on this strange and unforeseen turn that events had taken.

“Then where is he? Where is the Irishman? I will have him shot down like a dog and his body hung up for the crows that wait for it.” Bigot was maudlin in his rage, too carried out of himself to see the look of delight that succeeded Louvigny’s first incredulity. The marquis’s quick mind pieced scattered clues together—the cynical smiles of the Intendant, his allusions to the Irishman, who could be no other than Michael. There was much that puzzled Louvigny, but he perceived he held the whip hand and he would not lose his advantage. The Intendant, however, chafing under his helplessness, rudely spurred away and rode through the crowd, that scattered pell-mell before his mad career.

“The man is possessed,” muttered Louvigny. “But can it be that Michael lives? Is here now?” Still in his heart was that boyish adoration for young Mohan.

A touch at his stirrup caused him to look down and into the eyes of Michael, which had a merry twinkle in their dark depths.

“A fine friend you are, Louvigny, assisting so blithely at my execution, coming to visit me in my cell—”

“The devil!” cried Louvigny. “Did that fiend—?”

“Oh, no; not the devil; only Michael Mohan, though devil or angel I might have been at this moment but for the good offices of Barney O’Pray, whom you may see yonder by the gallows, freshly crawled from an empty wine-butt and now gazing his fill of the corpse. The man has a mania for wakes and the like.”

“But you—how come you here, Michael? You were thought drowned in the sea.”

“Drowned in the sea, hanged by the neck, and here I am as hearty as ever, having walked in two sets of shoes belonging to dead men, having been made a fool of, which no Mohan ever was before; also taken for a robber and set down as a murderer. If you can think of anything more cheerful than that, Louvigny, I should like right well to hear it.”

“Quick! Get up behind me and we shall clear out of this mob. I take it you are very much in the Intendant’s bad books.”

“Sure, I have his bad book,” laughed Michael. “De Mornay and I stole his accounts the night poor Lucien was killed by the scamp you see in air yonder, cooling his heels by an elegant dispensation of divine Providence.”

“So that is it! And you have this book?”

“Hidden in an old chair in Diane’s room at Charlesbourg.”

Louvigny, baffled, shook his head.

“What a man, O Lord!” he muttered. “Sometimes I think you are mad, Sir Michael Mohan. Had we some few like you . . .”

Michael mounted behind him and they rode from the market place, not unperceived by the red-headed O’Pray, who doffed his hat in gleeful salute and followed at his leisure. To the Hôtel Dieu they went to find Diane, who, on seeing Michael and learning how he had escaped Bigot’s treachery, became the happiest of forsaken brides. Childlike, she clung to Michael, much to the horror of the bewildered nuns and the unused curé, who had waited in vain for the coming of Gaston Crevier, and now would forever wait in vain.

“Your would-be husband had an engagement with the hangman, Diane,” sympathized Michael. “At the last minute, he kindly volunteered to take my place.”

“Then why not, in return, volunteer to take his?” put in Louvigny. “The tapers burn, the priest waits. Come; or would you wait longer?”

“No longer,” whispered Diane.

From the chapel they went to Charlesbourg, where they breakfasted at leisure, and Louvigny heard as much of Michael’s vicissitudes as Michael was in condition to tell him, and was referred, for the complete and unabridged account to Barney O’Pray, who had arrived during the repast and was much disgruntled at not having been present at the wedding.

“It’s what I get for standin’ watchin’ corpses. Sure, your honors and milady—my dear mistress it now is, and a happy day too for me on which I say the words—me who was present when Ould Meg the Gipsy told Sir Michael that ’twas a daughter of Deirdre and none other he would take to wife, and who has lived to see the truth of her foretellin’—’tis a deaf mute have I been this six long months and more, compelled to hold me tongue and pretend to be stone deaf and unable to make so much as a scratch with a quill or read a word of print, and me as fine a scholar, by the same token, as could be found, and rarely at loss for a word—”

A commotion outside the manor interrupted Barney O’Pray’s peroration. A servant, with startled face, hurried into the room but before he could find words, François Bigot ungently pushed him aside and stood before the unabashed party at the breakfast table.

Louvigny and Sir Michael rose courteously. Barney strolled to the chimney-corner to be on hand for emergencies.

“Will you not be seated, monsieur?” invited Diane, unsmiling, her eyes defiant and her mouth scornful; for she knew the lie this man had told her. “It is a wedding breakfast, and though you come unbidden and unwelcome, we shall not be lacking in hospitality—”

“I come for that man! Your husband now, is it? No matter, he shall hang! He is twice a murderer, and apart from that he is under the king’s displeasure and has long since incurred the death-penalty—”

“Not so!” interrupted Louvigny. “His Gracious Majesty was pleased, at my father’s instance, to commute the sentence of death passed on Sir Michael Mohan and send him to New France—”

“For me to deal with.”

“Yes. Then, however, in a fit of generosity—when he thought it was too late to do any good—the king pardoned this wild Irishman. That pardon I bear with me. I kept it as a memento, little thinking that I would have the great pleasure of using it. As for the rest, you know, Monsieur l’Intendant, that the man who killed Lucien de Mornay died pitifully on the gallows this morning. And, finally, if you still object, there is in our possession a book in which you have deliberately inscribed your death-warrant—Ah, I see that has done it! Know you, sir, I have the power, I and my confrères, to send you to France in chains as a thief, a traitor, a pillager of the poor. Now, you mar the wedding-feast. Go, and take your men with you for they have naught to do here.”

No words remained for the Intendant. His last bit of bluster had failed. He foresaw the fate which must inevitably overtake him—disgrace, the Bastille, oblivion, or worse, an unpleasant name to all future generations of the colony he had plundered.

Now, unopposed and uninterrupted, the O’Pray regaled Louvigny with his master’s Odyssey. And neither the speaker, in the heights of his eloquence, nor the listener, in the effort it took to understand Barney’s quaint English, remarked the quiet exit from the old dining room of Charlesbourg manor of its mistress and its new master.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of The King’s Fool by Louis Arthur Cunningham]