assassinations--would wonder always in time to come, as the more
equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty
foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this
ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding
itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a
sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It
might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power,
thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our
actual misfortunes. However carefully the critical intelligence in
him might trim the balance, his imagination at all events would never
be clear of the more plausible construction of events. In spite of
efforts not to misjudge, in proportion to the clearness with which he
recalled the visible footsteps of the "accursed" Valois, he saw them,
irresistibly, in connexion with the end actually reached, moving to
the sounds of wedding music, through a world of dainty gestures, amid
sonnets and flowers, and perhaps the most refined art the world has
seen, to their surfeit of blood.

And if those "accursed" Valois might plead to be judged refinedly, so
would Gaston, had the opportunity come, have pleaded not to be
misunderstood. Of the actual event he was not a spectator, and his
sudden absence from Paris at that moment seemed to some of those he
left there only a cruelly characteristic incident in the great
treachery. Just before that delirious night set in, the news that
his old grandfather lay mortally sick at Deux-manoirs had snatched
him away to watch by the dying bed, amid the peaceful ministries of
the religion which was even then filling the houses of Paris with
blood. But the yellow-haired woman, light of soul, whose husband he
had become by dubious and [120] irregular Huguenot rites, the
religious sanction of which he hardly recognised--flying after his