Page:Weird Tales volume 02 number 03.djvu/68

Rh "Kill it," the Sire de Retz bade him.

"Kill it?" the young secretary stammered. "How—"

"Dolt!" de Retz stamped his foot impatiently, at the same time drawing back his lips like a snarling beast. "Slit its throat!"

Henriet carried out the fiendish order while the marshal stood by and gloated at sight of the little one's death agonies.

HEN began a life of crime unspeakable for Henriet. Child after child he bore to his master, always with the same fatal result. Sometimes de Retz himself inflicted the death stroke; more often he stood by, watching his servants performing the deed. Lucky was the child whose life ended with one quick blow from knife or axe. Torture, slow and horrible, was the lot of the great majority of the little victims.

When one of these massacres was finished, and the poor infant finally dead, the marshal was invariably filled with remorse for the deed. He would toss, weeping and praying, on the bed, or recite fervent litanies on his knees—while his servants washed up the floor and incinerated the little victims in the great fireplace. An insupportable odor filled the room where these slaughters invariably took place; but the marshal inhaled it with keenest delight.

Henriet acknowledged he had seen no less than forty children done to death in this manner, and so good a description was he able to give of several that it was possible to identify them as children whose parents had testified to their loss.

Relating the case of two lads named Hamelin, babes of three and four years, respectively, he told how the older boy waited his turn, weeping and praying, while his little brother was slowly tortured to death.

"But this is incredible," exclaimed Pierre de l'Hospital, whose eyes dilated at the horrors of Henriet's revelations. "Only some of the caesars of Rome have been charged with such detestable crimes!"

"Monsieur le juge," Henriet replied, "it was the acts of these very caesars my master desired to emulate. I used to read him the chronicles of Suronius and Tacitus. He never tired hearing them; but ever urged me to read more and more."

"How many children do you estimate the Sire de Retz and his servants killed?"

"The reckoning is long. I, for my own wretched part, confess to killing twelve with my own hand at my master's orders. And I have brought him more than three score, I know this devil's business had long gone on before I entered his service."

"Have you more to declare?" asked the president of the court, signing himself with the cross.

"Nay, mon juge, save to ask Pontou, my friend, to corroborate what I have said."

"Pontou," said Pierre de l'Hospital, turning his burning eyes on the other culprit, "I command you in the name of God and of justice to declare all you know."

The deep-graved lines about the older servant's mouth lengthened as his facial muscles tightened; but he kept silence.

"For those who will not speak there is the rack," the judge reminded him, signing to the torturers to make ready.

But Pontou, heartless murderer though he was, had still the virtue of loyalty to the hand that fed him. Not until the executioners had forced him on the rack, and the cold iron of the gyves bit into his wrists and ankles did he commence his confession. Then, as the head torturer laid his hand to the windlass which would tighten the ropes, dislocating the prisoner's knee and elbow joints, Pontou’s confession began.

If he had maintained a stubborn silence in the face of torture, his volubility was great enough now. All that Henriet had told and more, he related, heaping description of crime after revolting crime before the court till Pierre de l'Hospital would hear no more.

"Enough!" exclaimed the judge, cutting short the prisoner's abhorrent tale. "Were a thousand men on trial before us, thou hast told enough to convict them all!"

Next day Gilles de Laval stood once more before his judges.

"What answer make you to the charges?" asked Pierre de l'Hospital.

"I am chamberlain and marshal to his venerated majesty, the King of France—" began the prisoner arrogantly.

"This is no affair of the king of France," thundered the judge, incensed at the criminal's affrontery. "Confess, or by Our Lady and Saint Denys, you go to the rack!"

Cowed, his iron nerve broken by the threat of torture, Gilles de Laval told such a story as no court, before or since ever listened to.

Shortly before his voluntary retirement from the royal court he had chanced upon a Latin book detailing the lives of the caesars. Tales of revolting cruelty, which would have sickened an ordinary man, thrilled him with the greatest pleasure. He resolved to imitate or surpass these monsters of antiquity. That very night he carried his resolve into execution by running his sword through a luckless waif he came upon in the streets of Paris.

But Paris was a great city, under the ever-watchful eye of the king's officers. His plans could not be carried out there in safety. So, as soon as he could wind up his affairs, he renounced his promising career as a courtier and submerged himself at his principal country seat. From the day he settled at Marchecoul his depredations on the childhood of the diocese of Nantes began. In less than seven years he had committed, personally, or by agent, more than eight hundred child-murders.

The confession finished, Gilles de Laval looked expectantly at his judges. He was a very great, a very powerful nobleman, yet the president of the court had shown himself fearless and impartial throughout the trial. Would they order his lands confiscated? Would they dare imprison him, grand signeur and favorite of the king though he was?

Pierre de l'Hospital, president of the court, glanced from left to right, where his associate justices sat. Each way he looked, his colleagues met his eyes steadily and nodded briefly, significantly.

Pierre de l'Hospital looked down upon the prisoner as though some loathsome reptile were coiled upon the pavement before him.

"A mort!" he said shortly. And at the words a bell high up in the tower of the hall of justice began to toll.

ILLE DE LAVAL fell back a pace, his jaw relaxing as he looked upon the stern-faced man who had pronounced the sentence.

"A mort!—to death!"

Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz, chamberlain and councillor to the King, cousin ogof [sic] John V. Duke of Brittany and Marshal of France, had been sentenced to die like a common felon.

"A mort," he muttered, wonderingly, stunned by the two-word sentence. "To hang in shame between two criminals!"

"Our Lord so died, dear master," whispered Henriet, who, pale and tearful, had stood to receive his sentence.

The Sire de Retz turned on him with an animal snarl. His lips went back from his teeth and his beard showed blue in the half-light streaming through the court room windows.

"You—" he began, raising his clenched fists over his trembling servant."You traitor, you—"

Two agents d'armes laid hands on him and led him from the justice hall.

Every effort was made to stay execution. John V. Duke of Brittany, was