Now note two things.
I spoke in French; I was not conscious that I spoke in French.
Not until afterward, back in solitary, when I remembered what I am narrating, did I know that I had spoken in French—ay, and spoken well.
As for me, Darrell Standing, at present writing these lines in Murderers’ Row of Folsom Prison, why, I know only high school French sufficient to enable me to read the language.
As for my speaking it—impossible.
I can scarcely intelligibly pronounce my way through a menu.
But to return.
Pons was a little withered old man. He was born in our house—I know, for it chanced that mention was made of it this very day I am describing.
Pons was all of sixty years. He was mostly toothless, and, despite a pronounced limp that compelled him to go slippity-hop, he was very alert and spry in all his movements.
Also, he was impudently familiar.
This was because he had been in my house sixty years.
He had been my father’s servant before I could toddle, and after my father’s death (Pons and I talked of it this day) he became my servant.
The limp he had acquired on a stricken field in Italy, when the horsemen charged across.
He had just dragged my father clear of the hoofs when he was lanced through the thigh, overthrown, and trampled.
My father, conscious but helpless from his own wounds, witnessed it all.
And so, as I say, Pons had earned such a right to impudent familiarity that at least there was no gainsaying him by my father’s son.
Pons shook his head as I drained the huge draught.
“Did you hear it boil?” I laughed, as I handed back the empty tankard.
“Like your father,” he said hopelessly. “But your father lived to learn better, which I doubt you will do.”
“He got a stomach affliction,” I devilled, “so that one mouthful of spirits turned it outside in.
It were wisdom not to drink when one’s tank will not hold the drink.”
While we talked Pons was gathering to my bedside my clothes for the day.
“Drink on, my master,” he answered. “It won’t hurt you. You’ll die with a sound stomach.”
“You mean mine is an iron-lined stomach?” I wilfully misunderstood him.
“I mean—” he began with a quick peevishness, then broke off as he realized my teasing and with a pout of his withered lips draped my new sable cloak upon a chair-back. “Eight hundred ducats,” he sneered. “A thousand goats and a hundred fat oxen in a coat to keep you warm.
A score of farms on my gentleman’s fine back.”
“And in that a hundred fine farms, with a castle or two thrown in, to say nothing, perhaps, of a palace,” I said, reaching out my hand and touching the rapier which he was just in the act of depositing on the chair.
“So your father won with his good right arm,” Pons retorted. “But what your father won he held.”
Here Pons paused to hold up to scorn my new scarlet satin doublet—a wondrous thing of which I had been extravagant.
“Sixty ducats for that,” Pons indicted. “Your father’d have seen all the tailors and Jews of Christendom roasting in hell before he’d a-paid such a price.”
And while we dressed—that is, while Pons helped me to dress—I continued to quip with him.
“It is quite clear, Pons, that you have not heard the news,” I said slyly.
Whereat up pricked his ears like the old gossip he was.
“Late news?” he queried. “Mayhap from the English Court?”
“Nay,” I shook my head. “But news perhaps to you, but old news for all of that.
Have you not heard?
The philosophers of Greece were whispering it nigh two thousand years ago.
It is because of that news that I put twenty fat farms on my back, live at Court, and am become a dandy.
You see, Pons, the world is a most evil place, life is most sad, all men die, and, being dead . . . well, are dead. Wherefore, to escape the evil and the sadness, men in these days, like me, seek amazement, insensibility, and the madnesses of dalliance.”
“But the news, master?
What did the philosophers whisper about so long ago?”
“That God was dead, Pons,” I replied solemnly. “Didn’t you know that?
God is dead, and I soon shall be, and I wear twenty fat farms on my back.”
“God lives,” Pons asserted fervently. “God lives, and his kingdom is at hand.
I tell you, master, it is at hand.
It may be no later than to-morrow that the earth shall pass away.”
“So said they in old Rome, Pons, when Nero made torches of them to light his sports.”
Pons regarded me pityingly.
“Too much learning is a sickness,” he complained. “I was always opposed to it.
But you must have your will and drag my old body about with you—a-studying astronomy and numbers in Venice, poetry and all the Italian fol-de-rols in Florence, and astrology in Pisa, and God knows what in that madman country of Germany.