第76章 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER

I -THE PRINCE

THAT same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in distress of mind.Now he sat,now walked in a high apartment,full of draughts and shadows.A single candle made the darkness visible;and the light scarce sufficed to show upon the wall,where they had been recently and rudely nailed,a few miniatures and a copper medal of the young man's head.The same was being sold that year in London,to admiring thousands.The original was fair;he had beautiful brown eyes,a beautiful bright open face;a little feminine,a little hard,a little weak;still full of the light of youth,but already beginning to be vulgarised;a sordid bloom come upon it,the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness.

He was dressed,as for a gala,in peach-colour and silver;his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons;for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage incognito.Now he sat with a bowed head,now walked precipitately to and fro,now went and gazed from the uncurtained window,where the wind was still blowing,and the lights winked in the darkness.

The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing;and the high notes and the deep tossed and drowned,boomed suddenly near or were suddenly swallowed up,in the current of the mistral.Tears sprang in the pale blue eyes;the expression of his face was changed to that of a more active misery,it seemed as if the voices of the bells reached,and touched and pained him,in a waste of vacancy where even pain was welcome.Outside in the night they continued to sound on,swelling and fainting;and the listener heard in his memory,as it were their harmonies,joy-bells clashing in a northern city,and the acclamations of a multitude,the cries of battle,the gross voices of cannon,the stridor of an animated life.And then all died away,and he stood face to face with himself in the waste of vacancy,and a horror came upon his mind,and a faintness on his brain,such as seizes men upon the brink of cliffs.

On the table,by the side of the candle,stood a tray of glasses,a bottle,and a silver bell.He went thither swiftly,then his hand lowered first above the bell,then settled on the bottle.Slowly he filled a glass,slowly drank it out;and,as a tide of animal warmth recomforted the recesses of his nature,stood there smiling at himself.He remembered he was young;the funeral curtains rose,and he saw his life shine and broaden and flow out majestically,like a river sunward.The smile still on his lips,he lit a second candle and a third;a fire stood ready built in a chimney,he lit that also;and the fir-cones and the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle on the hearth,and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his hopes.To and fro,to and fro,he went,his hands lightly clasped,his breath deeply and pleasurably taken.

Victory walked with him;he marched to crowns and empires among shouting followers;glory was his dress.And presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary.Under the gilt of flame and candle-light,the stone walls of the apartment showed down bare and cold;behind the depicted triumph loomed up the actual failure:defeat,the long distress of the flight,exile,despair,broken followers,mourning faces,empty pockets,friends estranged.The memory of his father rose in his mind:he,too,estranged and defied;despair sharpened into wrath.There was one who had led armies in the field,who had staked his life upon the family enterprise,a man of action and experience,of the open air,the camp,the court,the council-room;and he was to accept direction from an old,pompous gentleman in a home in Italy,and buzzed about by priests?A pretty king,if he had not a martial son to lean upon!A king at all?

'There was a weaver (of all people)joined me at St.Ninians;he was more of a man than my papa!'he thought.'I saw him lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him -and he died for my papa!All died for him,or risked the dying,and I lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in heather like a fox;and now he writes me his advice!calls me Carluccio -me,the man of the house,the only king in that king's race.'He ground his teeth.'The only king in Europe!'Who else?Who has done and suffered except me?who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful subjects,like a second Bruce?Not my accursed cousin,Louis of France,at least,the lewd effeminate traitor!'And filling the glass to the brim,he drank a king's damnation.Ah,if he had the power of Louis,what a king were here!

The minutes followed each other into the past,and still he persevered in this debilitating cycle of emotions,still fed the fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine:a boy at odds with life,a boy with a spark of the heroic,which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary excess.

From two rooms beyond,the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted him.

'By ...'