But you
play nonsense games with Charles, hanging upon the skirts of the
unscrupulous woman who tutors him to revolt, or drink in taverns with a
scurrilous thief turned spy to save his neck from a deserved hanging.
Do you think you serve the King by philandering in a rose garden, or
playing at French and English in the Burnt Mill? Francois Villon!
Ursula de Vesc! Stephen, you make yourself too much one with them--an
unhung footpad who prostitutes the powers of mind God gave him to the
devil's use, and a woman----"

"Uncle, if even your father had spoken evil of Suzanne would you have
listened to him?"

"Suzanne? What has Suzanne in common with Ursula de Vesc?"

"Only that I love her as you loved Suzanne," answered La Mothe.

"Ursula de Vesc? Stephen, at the least she is the King's enemy."

"Yes, he told me so himself."

"And at the worst----"

"There is no worst," said La Mothe doggedly. "There is no plot against
the King, no plot at all."

"And your proof is that when a clever woman bade a boy control his
tongue he obeyed her! Will that convince Louis? Would it convince
yourself but for this calf-love of yours? Stephen, Stephen, you do not
know the gulf on which you stand. What answer am I to return to the
King?"

"Uncle, is it my fault that I am living a lie in Amboise?"

"Grey Roland changed all that for you ten days ago. There was the game
in your hands, and you threw it away! A touch of the heel, a single
twitch of the bridle--there, there, say nothing: perhaps at your age I
would have had the same scruples. But what answer am I to return to
the King?"

"That I will do all he bade me; do it with all my heart to the very
letter," answered La Mothe. And with that Commines had to be content.

"You go too slow," said Villon. "You go too fast," said Commines.
Between such cross fires what was a poor lover to do? There was once,
La Mothe remembered, a man who had an only son and an ass. But the
problem is older than the imagination of any fabulist, and as new as
the newest day in the world. "Thou shalt die," said the Lord God.
"Thou shalt not surely die," said the devil.

"I will take my own way," he said. "It is my life I have to live, not
theirs." And that afternoon came his opportunity to prove that a man
knows best how his own life should be shaped.

CHAPTER XVII

STEPHEN LA MOTHE ASKS THE WRONG QUESTION

Only the very foolish or the very weak man seeks to hide from his o