The Snowball (2 page)

"I have dismissed him," he rejoined curtly. "I do not know where he
could now be found."

"That is a pity—he writes well," I answered, as if it were nothing
but a whim that led me to pursue the subject. "And good clerks are
scarce. What was his name?"

"Felix," he said reluctantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crowd of those who daily left the Arsenal before nightfall
happened to be augmented on this occasion by a troop of my clients
from Mantes; tenants on the lands of Rosny, who had lingered after the
hour of audience to see the courts and garden. By mingling with these
we had no difficulty in passing out unobserved; nor, once in the
streets, where a thaw had set in, that filled the kennel with water
and the pavement with slush, was La Font long in bringing me to the
house I sought. It stood on the outskirts of the St. Honoré Faubourg,
in a quarter sufficiently respectable, and a street marked neither by
extreme squalor nor extravagant ostentation—from one or other of
which all desperate enterprises, in my opinion, take their rise. The
house, which was high and narrow, presented only two windows to the
street, but the staircase was sweet and clean, and it was impossible
to cross the threshold without feeling a prepossession in Felix's
favor. Already I began to think I had come on a fool's errand.

"Which floor?" I asked La Font.

"The highest. Monsieur," he answered.

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

There was only one person in the room, a young woman with fair, waving
hair, a pale face, and blue eyes, who, seeing a cloaked stranger
instead of the friend or neighbor she anticipated, stared at me in the
utmost wonder and some alarm. The room, though poorly furnished, was
particularly neat and clean; which, taken with the woman's complexion,
left me in no doubt as to her native province. On the floor near the
fire stood a cradle; and in the window a cage with a singing bird
completed the homely and pleasant aspect of this interior, which was
such as, if I could, I would multiply by thousands in every town of
France.

A small lamp, which the woman was in the act of lighting, enabled me
to see those details, and also discovered me to her. I asked politely
if I spoke to Madame Felix, the wife of M. Felix of the Chamber of
Accounts.

"I am Madame Felix," she answered, advancing slowly toward me. "My
husband is late. Do you come from him? It is not bad news, Monsieur?"

The tone of anxiety in which she uttered her last question, and the
quickness with which she raised her lamp to scan my face, went to my
heart, already softened by this young mother in her home. I hastened
to answer that I had no bad news, and wished merely to see her husband
on business connected with his employment.

"He is very late," she said, a shade of perplexity crossing her face.
"I have never known him so late before. Monsieur is unfortunate."

I replied that with her leave I would wait; on which she very readily
placed a stool for me, and sat down herself by the cradle, I ventured
to remark that perhaps M. Nicholas had detained her husband: she
answered simply that it might be so, but that she had never known it
happen before.

"M. Felix has evening employment?" I asked after a moment's
reflection.

She looked at me in some wonder. "No," she said. "He spends his
evenings with me, Monsieur. It is not much, for he is at work all
day."

I bowed, and was preparing another question, when the sound of
footsteps ascending the stairs in haste reached my ears, and led me to
pause. Madame heard the noise at the same moment and rose. "It is my
husband," she said, looking toward the door with such a light in
her eyes as betrayed the sweetheart lingering in the wife. "I was
afraid—I do not know what I feared," she muttered to herself.

Proposing to myself the advantage of seeing Felix before he saw me, I
pushed back my stool into the shadow, contriving to do this so
discreetly that the young woman noticed nothing. A moment later it
appeared I might have spared my pains; for at sight of her husband, a
comely young man who came in with lack-lustre eye and drooping head,
she sprang forward with a cry of dismay, and, utterly forgetting my
presence, appealed to him to know what was the matter.

He threw himself on to a stool, the first he reached, and, leaning his
elbows on the table in an attitude of extreme dejection, covered his
face with his hands. "What is it?" he said in a hollow tone. "We are
ruined, Margot. I have no more work. I am dismissed."

"Dismissed?" she ejaculated.

He nodded. "Nicholas discharged me this morning," he said, almost in a
whisper. He dared not speak louder, for he could not command his
voice.

"Why?" she asked gently, as she leant over him. "What had you done?"

"Nothing!" he answered with bitterness. "He said clerks were
plentiful, and the King or I must starve."

Hitherto I had witnessed the scene in silence, a prey to emotions so
various I will not attempt to describe them. But hearing the King's
name thus prostituted and put to base uses, I started forward with a
violence which in a moment made my presence known. Felix, confounded
by the sight of a stranger at his elbow, rose hurriedly from his seat,
and retreating before me with vivid alarm painted on his countenance,
asked with a faltering tongue who I was.

I replied in as soothing a manner as possible, that I was a friend,
anxious to assist him. Nevertheless, seeing that I kept my cloak about
my face—for I was not willing to be recognized—he continued to look
at me with distrust and terror. "What do you want?" he said, raising
the lamp much as his wife had done, to see me the better.

"The answers to one or two questions," I replied firmly. "Answer them
truly, and I promise you your troubles are at an end." So saying, I
drew from my pouch the scrap of paper which had come to me so
strangely. "When did you write this, my friend?" I continued, placing
it before him.

He drew a deep breath at sight of it, and a look of comprehension and
dismay crossed his face. For a moment he hesitated. Then in a hurried
manner he said that he had never seen the paper.

"Come," I rejoined sternly, "look at it again. Let there be no
mistake. When did you write that, and why?"

But still he shook his head; and, though I pressed him hard, continued
so stubborn in his denial that, but for the look I had seen on his
face when I first produced the paper, and the strange coincidence of
his dismissal, I might have believed him. As it was, I saw nothing for
it but to have him arrested and brought to my house, where I did not
doubt he would tell the truth; and I was about to retire to give the
necessary orders, when something in the sidelong glance I saw him cast
at his wife caught my eye and furnished me with a new idea. Acting on
this, I affected to be satisfied. I apologized for my intrusion on the
ground of mistake, and gradually withdrawing to the door asked him at
the last moment to light me downstairs.

Complying with a shaking hand, he went out before me, and had nearly
reached the foot of the staircase when I touched him on the shoulder.

"Now," I said bluntly, fixing him with my eyes, "your wife is no
longer listening, and you can tell me the truth. Who employed you to
write these words?"

Trembling so violently he had to lean on the balustrade for support,
he answered me.

"Madame Nicholas," he whispered.

"What?" I cried, recoiling. I had no doubt he was telling me the truth
now.

"The secretary's wife, do you mean? Be careful, man."

He nodded.

"When?" I asked suspiciously.

"Yesterday," he answered. "She is an old cat!" he continued, almost
fiercely. "I hate her! But my wife is jealous."

"And did you throw it into my coach," I said, "on the Pont du Change,
to-day?"

"God forbid!" he replied, shrinking into himself again. "I wrote it
for her, and she took it away. She said it was a jest she was playing.
That is all I know."

I saw it was, and after a few more words was content to dismiss him,
bidding him keep silence on the matter, and remain at home in case I
needed him. At the last, he plucked up spirit to ask me who I was; but
preferring to keep that discovery for a day still to come, when I
might appear as the benefactor of this little family, I told him
sharply that I was one of the King's servants, and so left him.

It will be believed, however, that I found the information I had
received little to my mind. The longer I dwelt on it, the more serious
seemed the matter. While I could scarcely conceive any circumstances
in which a woman would be likely to inform against her husband without
cause, I could recall more than one dangerous conspiracy which had
been frustrated by informers of that class—sometimes out of regard
for the very persons against whom they informed. Viewed in this light
only, the warning seemed to my mind sufficiently alarming, but when I
came also to consider the secrecy with which Madame Nicholas had both
prepared it—so that her hand might not be known—and conveyed it to
me, the aspect of the case grew yet more formidable. In the result, I
had not passed through two streets before my mind was made up to lay
the case before the King, and the sagacity and penetration which were
never wanting to my gracious master.

An unexpected rencontre which awaited me on my return to the Arsenal
both confirmed me in this resolution and enabled me to carry it into
effect. We succeeded in slipping in without difficulty, and duly found
Maignan on guard at the door of my apartments. But a single glance at
his face sufficed to show that something was wrong; nor did it need
the look of penitence which he assumed on seeing us—a look so piteous
that at another time it must have diverted me—to convince me that he
had infringed my orders.

"How now, sirrah?" I said angrily, without waiting for him to speak.
"What have you been doing?"

"They would take no refusal, Monseigneur," he answered plaintively,
waving his hand toward the door.

"What!" I cried sternly, astonished; for this was an instance of such
direct disobedience as I could scarce understand. "Did I not give you
the strictest orders to deny me to everybody?"

"They would take no refusal, Monseigneur," he answered penitently,
edging away from me as he spoke.

"Who are they?" I asked sternly, leaving the question of his
punishment for another season. "Speak, rascal, though it shall not
save you."

"There are M. le Marquis de la Varenne, and M. de Vitry," he said
slowly, "and M. de Vic, and M. Erard, the engineer, and M. de
Fontange, and—"

"
Pardieu!
" I cried, cutting him short in a rage; for he was going on
counting on his fingers in a manner the most provoking. "Have you let
in all Paris, dolt? Grace! that I should be served by a fool! Open the
door, and let me see them!"

With that I was about to enter; when the door, which I had not
perceived to be ajar, was suddenly thrown open, and a laughing face
thrust out. It was the King's.

"Ha, ha! Grand-master!" he cried, vastly diverted by the success of
his jest and the abrupt change which doubtless came over my
countenance. "Never was such graceful hospitality, I'll be sworn! But
come, pardon this varlet. And now embrace me, and tell me where you
have been playing truant."