[CHAPTER XXX]
THE CROWNING OF ROGER HERRICK
The people loudly demanded the death of Count Felix, the nobles strongly advised it. Judgment by his peers would certainly have sealed the Count's fate. With the assembling of the nobles in Vayenne another demand had become insistent. There was peace upon the frontier, peace in the city; it was time that the coronation was completed, that the Duke should wear the iron crown in the Church of St. Etienne.
From the first Herrick had determined to save Felix if he could. Death had been busy since his coming to Vayenne, and although without his presence in the city civil war would undoubtedly have come, he could not feel that this fact shifted the responsibility from his shoulders. The death of Father Bertrand seemed to be the direct result of his own words. He had stood reproved, and he felt justly so, before the soldier who had repeated them. To cut down a villain who deliberately stabs a defenceless man was no crime, but this man had some reason to suppose that he was only fulfilling the Duke's wishes, so that even this act of ready justice troubled Herrick in some degree. There should be no more violent deaths if he could help it, and it was an accident that Jean's murderer, the man possibly who most merited death, was still alive and should be the one to receive mercy. Herrick shrank from condemning the Count. He found a hundred excuses for the man. Besides, he had made a promise to Christine.
Nor was Herrick surprised that his coronation in St. Etienne should be demanded. He had expected that when the nobles assembled in Vayenne; they would insist upon it. They had come to offer publicly the submission they had hitherto withheld, and Herrick's promise to appeal to the nation, and not to remain Duke unless three-fourths of his subjects should desire him to do so, was now a mere form. The whole state was with him, and it was at this moment that he put his hand to, perhaps, the most difficult task he had yet attempted. He began by using the approaching coronation as an excuse for putting off Count Felix's death. It was a ceremony that must not be stained with blood, he argued, even though that blood be a criminal's, and seeing in this argument a promise that justice should eventually be done, the people forgot the Count for a time. Then Herrick chose to be punctilious concerning the bargain he had made with the nobles. They had come loyally forward in answer to his appeal; they had fought, and some had fallen, in defence of their country, right well had they fulfilled their part; it remained for him to fulfil his. Therefore they should meet him in the great hall, and the day and hour he fixed coincided with the day and hour that Christine and Maurice would enter Vayenne.
On the day before, Herrick called into council a dozen of the oldest and most powerful nobles in Montvilliers, and this private meeting was of many hours' duration. Herrick believed that he had estimated to the full the difficulty of his task. He was wrong. For hours the council refused to support him in his scheme. It was not for the country's good, they said, it was not the will of the people. Very hardly, and by making many promises, Herrick persuaded them to uphold him; yet they did so with shaking of heads and loud words of regret. The grave faces of the councillors as they left the Duke's room caused excitement in the castle, and rumor flew about the city.
So it happened that there were few people in the streets at the lower end of the city when Christine returned with Maurice to Vayenne, but crowds had gathered in the neighborhood of the castle, and it was with difficulty that the cavalcade passed through.
In the court-yard Pierre Briant met them, and informed Maurice that he was to go at once to the Duke with Captain Lemasle, and then turning to Christine, he went on:
"Mademoiselle, I am to inform you that the Duke gives audience in an hour in the great hall. He desires your presence. A special place has been reserved for you. I am to await your pleasure and conduct you there."