Upon leaving the Champs aux Capuchins, hawk-faced Monsieur Gaubert had run every foot of the way to the Sucking Calf, and he had arrived there within some five minutes, out of breath and wearing every appearance of distress—of a distress rather greater than his haste to find his friend should warrant.
At the door of the inn he found the carriage still waiting; the post-boy, however, was in the porch, leaning in talk with one of the drawers. The troopers sat their horses in stolid patience, keeping guard, and awaiting, as they had been bidden, the return of Monsieur de Garnache. Rabecque, very watchful, lounged in the doorway, betraying in his air none of the anxiety and impatience with which he looked for his master.
At sight of Monsieur Gaubert, running so breathlessly, he started forward, wondering and uneasy. Across the street, from the Palais Seneschal, came at that same moment Monsieur de Tressan with rolling gait. He reached the door of the inn together with Monsieur Gaubert.
Full of evil forebodings, Rabecque hailed the runner.
“What has happened?” he cried. “Where is Monsieur de Garnache?”
Gaubert came to a staggering halt; he groaned and wrung his hands.
“Killed!” he panted, rocking himself in a passion of distress. “He has been butchered! Oh! it was horrible!”
Rabecque gripped him by the shoulder, and steadied him with a hand that hurt. “What do you say?” he gasped, his face white to the lips.
Tressan halted, too, and turned upon Gaubert, a look of incredulity in his fat countenance. “Who has been killed?” he asked. “Not Monsieur de Garnache?”
“Helas! yes,” groaned the other. “It was a snare, a guet-apens to which they led us. Four of them set upon us in the Champs aux Capuchins. As long as he lived, I stood beside him. But seeing him fallen, I come for help.”
“My God!” sobbed Rabecque, and loosed his grasp of Monsieur Gaubert’s shoulder.
“Who did it?” inquired Tressan, and his voice rumbled fiercely.
“I know not who they were. The man who picked the quarrel with Monsieur de Garnache called himself Sanguinetti. There is a riot down there at present. There was a crowd to witness the combat, and they have fallen to fighting among themselves. Would to Heaven they had stirred in time to save that poor gentleman from being murdered.”
“A riot, did you say?” cried Tressan, the official seeming to awaken in him.
“Aye,” answered the other indifferently; “they are cutting one another’s throats.”
“But... But... Are you sure that he is dead, monsieur?” inquired Rabecque; and his tone was one that implored contradiction.
Gaubert looked and paused, seeming to give the matter a second’s thought. “I saw him fall,” said he. “It may be that he was no more than wounded.”
“And you left him there?” roared the servant. “You left him there?”
Gaubert shrugged his shoulders. “What could I do against four? Besides, the crowd was interfering already, and it seemed best to me to come for help. These soldiers, now—”
“Aye,” cut in Tressan, and he turned about and called the sergeant. “This becomes my affair.” And he announced his quality to Monsieur Gaubert. “I am the Lord Seneschal of Dauphiny.”
“I am fortunate in finding you,” returned Gaubert, and bowed. “I could place the matter in no better hand.”
But Tressan, without heeding him, was already ordering the sergeant to ride hard with his troopers for the Champs aux Capuchins. Rabecque, however, thrust himself suddenly forward.
“Not so, Monsieur le Seneschal,” he interposed in fresh alarm, and mindful of his charge. “These men are here to guard Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. Let them remain. I will go to Monsieur de Garnache.”
The Seneschal stared at him with contemptuously pouting underlip. “You will go?” said he. “And what can you do alone? Who are you?” he asked.
“I am Monsieur de Garnache’s servant.”
“A lackey? Ah!” And Tressan turned aside and resumed his orders as if Rabecque did not exist or had never spoken. “To the Champs aux Capuchins!” said he. “At the gallop, Pommier! I will send others after you.”
The sergeant rose in his stirrups and growled an order. The troopers wheeled about; another order, and they were off, their cantering hoofs thundering down the narrow street.
Rabecque clutched at the Lord Seneschal’s arm.
“Stop them, monsieur!” he almost screamed in his excitement. “Stop them! There is some snare, some trick in this.”
“Stop them?” quoth the Seneschal. “Are you mad?” He shook off Rabecque’s detaining hand, and left him, to cross the street again with ponderous and sluggish haste, no doubt to carry out his purpose of sending more troopers to the scene of the disturbance.
Rabecque swore angrily and bitterly, and his vexation had two entirely separate sources. On the one hand his anxiety and affection for his master urged him to run at once to his assistance, whilst Tressan’s removal of the troopers rendered it impossible for him to leave Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye unguarded—though what he should do with her if Garnache came not back at all, he did not at this stage pause to consider. On the other hand, an instinctive and growing suspicion of this Monsieur Gaubert—who was now entering the inn—inspired him with the opinion that the fat Seneschal had been duped by a wild tale to send the troopers from the spot where they might presently become very necessary.
Full of fears, anxiety, and mistrust, it was a very dispirited Rabecque that now slowly followed Monsieur Gaubert into the inn. But as he set his foot across the threshold of the common-room, a sight met his eyes that brought him to a momentary standstill, and turned to certainty all his rising suspicions. He found it tenanted by a half-dozen fellows of very rude aspect, all armed and bearing an odd resemblance in air and accoutrements to the braves he had seen at Condillac the day before. As to how they came there, he could only surmise that they had entered through the stable-yard, as otherwise he must have observed their approach. They were grouped now at the other end of the long, low chamber, by the door leading to the interior of the inn. A few paces distant the landlord watched them with uneasy eyes.
But what dismayed Garnache’s servant most of all was to see the man who called himself Gaubert standing in talk with a slender, handsome youth, magnificently arrayed, in whom he recognized Marius de Condillac.
Rabecque checked in his advance, and caught in that moment from Marius the words: “Let her be told that it is Monsieur de Garnache wishes her to descend.”
At that Rabecque stepped towards them, very purposeful of mien. Gaubert turned at his approach, and smiled. Marius looked up quickly; then made a sign to the men. Instantly two of them went out by the door they guarded, and ere it swung back again Rabecque saw that they were making for the stairs. The remaining four ranged themselves shoulder to shoulder across the doorway, plainly with intent to bar the way. Gaubert, followed immediately by Marius, stepped aside and approached the landlord with arms akimbo and a truculent smile on his pale hawk face. What he and Marius said, Rabecque could not make out, but he distinctly heard the landlord’s answer delivered with a respectful bow to Marius:
“Bien, Monsieur de Condillac. I would not interfere in your concerns—not for the world. I will be blind and deaf.”
Marius acknowledged the servile protestation by a sneer, and Rabecque, stirring at last, went forward boldly towards the doorway and its ugly, human barrier.
“By your leave, sirs,” said he—and he made to thrust one of them aside.
“You cannot pass this way, sir,” he was answered, respectfully but firmly.
Rabecque stood still, clenching and unclenching his hands and quivering with anger. It was in that moment that he most fervently cursed Tressan and his stupid meddling. Had the troopers still been there, they could have made short work of these tatter-demalions. As it was, and with Monsieur de Garnache dead, or at least absent, everything seemed at an end. He might have contended that, his master being slain, it was no great matter what he did, for in the end the Condillacs must surely have their way with Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. But he never paused to think of that just then. His sense of trust was strong; his duty to his master plain. He stepped back, and drew his sword.
“Let me pass!” he roared. But at the same instant there came the soft slither of another weapon drawn, and Rabecque was forced to turn to meet the onslaught of Monsieur Gaubert.
“You dirty traitor,” cried the angry lackey, and that was all they left him breath to say. Strong arms gripped him from behind. The sword was wrenched from his hand. He was flung down heavily, and pinned prone in a corner by one of those bullies who knelt on his spine. And then the door opened again, and poor Rabecque groaned in impotent anguish to behold Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye pause white-faced and wide-eyed on, the threshold at sight of Monsieur de Condillac bowing low before her.
She stood there a moment between the two ruffians who had been sent to fetch her, and her eyes travelling round that room discovered Rabecque in his undignified and half; strangled condition.
“Where... Where is Monsieur de Garnache?” she faltered.
“He is where all those who cross the will of Condillac must sooner or later find themselves,” said Marius airily. “He is... disposed of.”
“Do you mean that he is dead?” she cried.
“I think it very probable by now,” he smiled. “So you see, mademoiselle, since the guardian the Queen appointed you has... deserted you, you would do well to return to my mother’s roof. Let me assure you that we shall very gladly welcome your return. We blame none but Garnache for your departure, and he has paid for the brutality of his abduction of you.”
She turned in despair from that mocking gentleman, and attempted to make appeal to the landlord, as though he could help her who could not help himself.
“Monsieur l’Hote—” she began, but Marius cut in sharply.
“Take her out that way,” he said, and pointed back down the passage by the stairs. “To the coach. Make haste.”
She sought to resist them now; but they dragged her back, and there was a rush of the others following through the doorway, the rear being brought up by Gaubert.
“Follow presently,” was his parting command to the man who still knelt upon Rabecque, and with that he vanished too.
Their steps died away in the passage; a door banged in the distance. There followed a silence, disturbed only by the sound of Rabecque’s laboured breathing; then came a stir outside the door of the inn; some one shouted an order. There was a movement of hoofs, a creak and crunch of wheels, and presently the rumble of a heavy carriage being driven rapidly away. But too well did Rabecque surmise what had taken place.
The ruffian released him at last, and, leaping to his feet, was gone before Rabecque could rise. Once up, however, the lackey darted to the door. In the distance he saw his late assailant running hard; the coach had disappeared. He turned, and his smouldering eye fell upon the landlord.
“O pig!” he apostrophized him, snarling at him to vent some of his pent-up rage. “O cowardly pig.”
“What would you?” expostulated the frightened taverner. “They had cut my throat if I resisted them.”
Rabecque poured abuse upon him, until for very lack of words he was forced to cease, then, with a final bark of contempt, he went to recover his sword, which had been flung into a corner of the room. He was stooping in the act, when a quick step rang behind him on the threshold, an angry voice harsh and metallic pronounced his name:
“Rebecque!”
The sword clattered from Rabecque’s hand suddenly gone nerveless—nerveless with sheer joy, all else forgotten in the perception that there, safe and sound, stood his beloved master.
“Monsieur!” he cried, and the tears welled up to the rough servant’s eyes. “Monsieur!” he cried again, and then with the tears streaming down his cheeks, sallow and wrinkled as parchment, “Oh, thank God!” he blubbered. “Thank God!”
“For what?” asked Garnache, coming forward, a scowl like a thunder-cloud upon his brow. “Where is the coach, where the troopers? Where is mademoiselle? Answer me!”
He caught Rabecque’s wrist in a grip that threatened to snap it. His face was livid, his eyes aflame.
“They—they—” stammered Rabecque. He had not the courage to tell the thing that had happened. He feared Garnache would strike him dead.
And then out of his terror he gathered an odd daring. He spoke to Garnache as never he had dreamt to speak to him, and it may well be that by his tone and by what he said he saved his life just then.
“You fool,” he cried to him. “I told you to be on your guard. I warned you to go warily. But you would not heed me. You know better than Rabecque. You would have your way. You must go a-brawling. And they duped you, they fooled you to the very top of their bent, monsieur.”
Garnache dropped the servant’s hand and stood back a pace. That counter-blast of passion and that plain speaking from a quarter so unexpected served, in part at least, to sober him. He understood the thing that had happened, the thing that already he suspected must have happened; but he understood too that he alone was to blame for it—he and his cursed temper.
“Who—who fooled me?” he stammered.
“Gaubert—the fellow that calls himself Gaubert. He and his friends. They fooled you away. Then Gaubert returned with a tale that you had been killed and that there was a disturbance in the Champs aux Capuchins. Monsieur de Tressan was here, as ill-luck would have it, and Gaubert implored him to send soldiers thither to quell the riot. He dispatched the escort. I sought in vain to stay them. He would not listen to me. The troopers went, and then Monsieur Gaubert entered the inn, to join Monsieur de Condillac and six of his braves who were waiting there. They overpowered me, and carried mademoiselle off in the coach. I did what I could, but—”
“How long have they been gone?” Garnache interrupted him to inquire.
“But few minutes before you came.”
“It would be, then, the coach that passed me near the Porte de Savoie. We must go after them, Rabecque. I made a short cut across the graveyard of Saint Francis, or I must have met the escort. Oh, perdition!” he cried, smiting his clenched right hand into his open left. “To have so much good work undone by a moment’s unguardedness.” Then abruptly he turned on his heels. “I am going to Monsieur de Tressan,” said he over his shoulder, and went out.
As he reached the threshold of the porch, the escort rode up the street, returned at last. At sight of him the sergeant broke into a cry of surprise.
“At least you are safe, monsieur,” he said. “We had heard that you were dead, and I feared it must be so, for all that the rest of the story that was told us was clearly part of a very foolish jest.”
“Jest? It was no jest,Vertudieu!” said Garnache grimly. “You had best return to the Palais Seneschal. I have no further need of an escort,” he added bitterly. “I shall require a larger force.”
And he stepped out into the rain, which had begun again a few minutes earlier, and was now falling in a steady downpour.
Straight across to the Palais Seneschal went Garnache. And sorely though his temper might already have been tried that day, tempestuously though it had been vented, there were fresh trials in store for him, fresh storms for Tressan.
“May I ask, Monsieur le Seneschal,” he demanded arrogantly, “to what end it was that you permitted yourself to order from its post the escort you had placed under my command?”
“To what end?” returned the Seneschal, between sorrow and indignation. “Why, to the end that it might succour you if still in time. I had heard that if not dead already, you were in danger of your life.”
The answer was one that disarmed Garnache, in spite of his mistrust of Tressan, and followed as it now was by the Seneschal’s profuse expressions of joy at seeing Garnache safe and well, it left him clearly unable to pursue the subject of his grievance in this particular connection. Instead, he passed on to entertain Tressan with the recital of the thing that had been done; and in reciting it his anger revived again, nor did the outward signs of sympathetic perturbation which the Seneschal thought it judicious to display do aught to mollify his feelings.
“And now, monsieur,” he concluded, “there remains but one course to be pursued—to return in force, and compel them at the sword-point to surrender me mademoiselle. That accomplished, I shall arrest the Dowager and her son and every jackanapes within that castle. Her men can lie in Grenoble gaol to be dealt with by yourself for supporting her in an attempt to resist the Queen’s authority. Madame and her son shall go with me to Paris to answer there for their offence.”
The Seneschal looked grave. He thoughtfully combed his beard with his forefinger, and his little eyes peered a shade fearfully at Garnache through his horn-rimmed spectacles—Garnache had found him at his never-failing pretence of work.
“Why, yes,” he agreed, speaking slowly, “that way lies your duty.”
“I rejoice, monsieur, to hear you say so. For I shall need your aid.”
“My aid?” The Seneschal’s face assumed a startled look.
“I shall require of you the necessary force to reduce that garrison.”
The Seneschal blew out his cheeks almost to bursting point, then wagged his head and smiled wistfully.
“And where,” he asked, “am I to find such a force?”
“You have upwards of ten score men in quarters at Grenoble.”
“If I had those men—which I have not—what, think you, could they do against a fortress such as Condillac? Monsieur deludes himself. If they resist, you’ll need ten times that number to bring them to their senses. They are well victualled; they have an excellent water-supply. My friend, they would just draw up the bridge, and laugh at you and your soldiers from the ramparts.”
Garnache looked at him from under lowering brows. But for all his mistrust of the man—a mistrust most excellently founded—he was forced to confess that there was wisdom in what Tressan said.
“I’ll sit down and besiege them if need be,” he announced.
Again the Seneschal wagged his head. “You would have to be prepared to spend your winter there in that case, and it can be cold in the valley of Isere. Their garrison is small—some twenty men at most; but it is sufficient for their defence, and not too many mouths to feed. No, no, monsieur, if you would win your way by force you must count upon more than ten score men.”
And now a flash of inspiration helped Tressan. It was his aim, as we know, to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Break with Madame de Condillac his foolish hopeful heart would not permit him. Break with this man, who personified authority and the King, he dared not. He had sought—and it had given him much to do—to steer a middle course, serving the Dowager and appearing not to withstand the Parisian. Now it almost seemed to him as if he were come to an impasse beyond which he could no longer pursue that course, but must halt and declare his side. But the notion that now occurred to him helped him to win through this difficulty. For Madame de Condillac’s schemes he cared not a jot; whether they came safe to harbour or suffered shipwreck on the way was all one to him; whether Valerie de La Vauvraye married Marius de Condillac or the meanest cobbler in Grenoble was, similarly, a matter that never disturbed his mind. He would not even be concerned if he, himself, were to help the Dowager’s schemes to frustration, so long as she were to remain in ignorance of his defection, so long as outwardly he were to appear faithful to her interests.
“Monsieur,” said he gravely, “the only course that promises you success is to return to Paris, and, raising sufficient men, with guns and other modern siege appliances such as we possess not here, come back and batter down the walls of Condillac.”
There the Seneschal spoke good sense. Garnache realized it, so much so that he almost began to doubt whether he had not done the man an injustice in believing him allied to the other party. But, however fully he might perceive the wisdom of the advice, such a step was one that must wound his pride, must be an acknowledgment that his own resources, upon which the Queen had relied when she sent him single-handed to deal with this situation, had proved insufficient.
He took a turn in the apartment without answering, tugging at his mustachios and pondering the situation what time the Seneschal furtively watched him in the candle-light. At last he came abruptly to a standstill by the Seneschal’s writing-table, immediately opposite Tressan. His hand fell to his side, his eyes took on a look of determination.
“As a last resource your good advice may guide me, Monsieur le Seneschal,” said he. “But first I’ll see what can be done with such men as you have here.”
“But I have no men,” answered Tressan, dismayed to see the failure of his effort.
Garnache stared at him in an unbelief that was fast growing to suspicion. “No men?” he echoed dully. “No men?”
“I might muster a score—no more than that.”
“But, monsieur, it is within my knowledge that you have at least two hundred. I saw at least some fifty drawn up in the courtyard below here yesterday morning.”
“I had them, monsieur,” the Seneschal made haste to cry, his hands upheld, his body leaning forward over his table. “I had them. But, unfortunately, certain disturbances in the neighbourhood of Montelimar have forced me to part with them. They were on the point of setting out when you saw them.”
Garnache looked at him a moment without speaking. Then, sharply:
“They must be recalled, monsieur,” said he.
And now the Seneschal took refuge in a fine pretence of indignation.
“Recalled?” he cried, and besides indignation there was some horror in his voice. “Recalled? And for what? That they may assist you in obtaining charge of a wretched girl who is so headstrong as to wish to marry other than her guardians have determined. A pretty affair that, as God’s my life! And for the adjustment of such a family dispute as this, a whole province is to go to ruin, a conflagration of rebellion is to spread unquenched? On my soul, sir, I begin to think that this mission of yours has served to turn your head. You begin to see it out of all proportion to its size.”
“Monsieur, it may have turned my head, or it may not; but I shall not be amazed if in the end it be the means of losing you yours. Tell me now: What is the disturbance you speak of in Montelimar?” That was a question all Tressan’s ingenuity could not answer.
“What affair is it of yours?” he demanded. “Are you Seneschal of Dauphiny, or am I? If I tell you that there is a disturbance, let that suffice. In quelling it I do but attend to my own business. Do you attend to yours—which seems to be that of meddling in women’s matters.”
This was too much. There was such odious truth in it that the iron sank deep into Garnache’s soul. The very reflection that such a business should indeed be his, was of itself enough to put him in a rage, without having it cast in his teeth as Tressan had none too delicately done.
He stormed and raged; he waved his arms and thumped the table, and talked of cutting men to ribbons—among which men no doubt he counted my Lord the Seneschal of Dauphiny. But from the storm of fierce invective, of threats and promises with which he filled the air, the Seneschal gathered with satisfaction the one clear statement that he would take his advice.
“I’ll do as you say,” Garnache had ended. “I’ll get me back to Paris as fast as horse can carry me. When I return woe betide Condillac! And I shall send my emissaries into the district of Montelimar to inquire into these disturbances you tell of. Woe betide you if they find the country quiet. You shall pay a heavy price for having dispatched your soldiers thither to the end that they might not be here to further the Queen’s business.”
With that he caught up his rain-sodden hat, flung it on his head, and stalked out of the room, and, so, out of the Palace.
He left Grenoble next morning, and it was a very tame and crestfallen Garnache who quitted the Auberge du Veau qui Tete and rode out of the town to take the road to Paris. How they would laugh at him at the Luxembourg! Not even an affair of this kind was he fit to carry through; not even as a meddler in women’s matters as Tressan had called him—could he achieve success. Rabecque, reflecting his master’s mood—as becomes a good lackey—rode silent and gloomy a pace or two in the rear.
By noon they had reached Voiron, and here, at a quiet hostelry, they descended to pause awhile for rest and refreshment. It was a chill, blustering day, and although the rain held off, the heavens were black with the promise of more to come. There was a fire burning in the general-room of the hostelry, and Garnache went to warm him at its cheerful blaze. Moodily he stood there, one hand on the high mantel shelf, one foot upon an andiron, his eyes upon the flames.
He was disconsolately considering his position; considering how utterly, how irrevocably he had failed; pondering the gibes he would have to stomach on his return to Paris, the ridicule it would incumb him to live down. It had been a fine thing to breathe fire and blood and vengeance to Tressan yesterday, to tell him of the great deeds he would perform on his return. It was odds he never would return. They would send another in his place, if indeed they sent at all. For, after all, before he could reach Paris and the force required be in Dauphiny, a fortnight must elapse, let them travel never so quickly. By that time they must be singularly sluggish at Condillac if they did not so contrive that no aid that came should come in time for mademoiselle, now that they were warned that the Queen was stirring in the matter.
Oh! he had blundered it all most cursedly. Had he but kept his temper yesterday at Grenoble; had he but had the wit to thwart their plans, by preserving an unruffled front to insult, he might have won through and carried mademoiselle out of their hands. As it was—! he let his arms fall to his sides in his miserable despair.
“Your wine, monsieur,” said Rabecque at his elbow. He turned, and took the cup of mulled drink from his servant. The beverage warmed him in body; but it would need a butt of it to thaw the misery from his soul.
“Rabecque,” he said with a pathetic grimness, “I think I am the most cursed blunderer that ever was entrusted with an errand.”
The thing so obsessed his mind that he must speak of it, if it be only to his lackey. Rabecque’s sharp face assumed a chastened look. He sighed most dutifully. He sought for words of consolation. At last:
“At least, monsieur has made them fear him up there at Condillac,” said he.
“Fear me?” laughed Garnache. “Pish! Deride me, you would say.”
“Fear you, I repeat, monsieur. Else why are they at such pains to strengthen the garrison?”
“Eh?” he questioned. But his tone was not greatly interested. “Are they doing that? Are they strengthening it? How know you?”
“I had it from the ostler at the Veau qui Tete that a certain Captain Fortunio—an Italian soldier of fortune who commands the men at Condillac—was at the Auberge de France last night, offering wine to whomsoever would drink with him, and paying for it out of Madame la Marquise’s purse. To such as accepted his hospitality he talked of the glory of a military career, particularly a free-lance’s; and to those who showed interest in what he said he offered a pike in his company.”
“Enrolled he many, did you learn?”
“Not one, monsieur, the ostler told me; and it seems he spent the evening watching him weave his spider’s web. But the flies were over-wary. They knew whence he came; they knew the business for which he desired to enrol them—for a rumour had gone round that Condillac was in rebellion against the Queen’s commands—and there were none so desperate at the Auberge de France as to risk their necks by enlisting, no matter what the wage he offered.”
Garnache shrugged his shoulders. “No matter,” said he. “Get me another cup of wine.” But as Rabecque turned away to obey him there came a sudden gleam into the eye of Monsieur de Garnache which lightened the depression of his countenance.
In the great hall of the Chateau de Condillac sat the Dowager, her son, and the Lord Seneschal, in conference.
It was early in the afternoon of the last Thursday in October, exactly a week since Monsieur de Garnache all but broken-hearted at the failure of his mission—had departed from Grenoble. They had dined, and the table was still strewn with vessels and the fragments of their meal, for the cloth had not yet been raised. But the three of them had left the board—the Seneschal with all that reluctance with which he was wont to part company with the table, no matter how perturbed in spirit he might be—and they had come to group themselves about the great open fireplace.
A shaft of pale October sunshine entering through the gules of an escutcheon on the mullioned windows struck a scarlet light into silver and glass upon the forsaken board.
Madame was speaking. She was repeating words that she had uttered at least twenty times a day during the past week.
“It was a madness to let that fellow go. Had we but put him and his servant out of the way, we should be able now to sleep tranquil in our beds. I know their ways at Court. They might have marvelled a little at first that he should tarry so long upon his errand, that he should send them no word of its progress; but presently, seeing him no more, he would little by little have been forgotten, and with him the affair in which the Queen has been so cursedly ready to meddle.
“As it is, the fellow will go back hot with the outrage put upon him; there will be some fine talk of it in Paris; it will be spoken of as treason, as defiance of the King’s Majesty, as rebellion. The Parliament may be moved to make outlaws of us, and the end of it all—who shall foresee?”
“It is a long distance from Condillac to Paris, madame,” said her son, with a shrug.
“And you will find them none so ready to send soldiers all this way, Marquise,” the Seneschal comforted her.
“Bah! You make too sure of your security. You make too sure of what they will do, what leave undone. Time will show, my friends; and, mor-dieu! I am much at fault if you come not both to echo my regret that we did not dispose of Monsieur de Garnache and his lackey when we had them in our power.”
Her eye fell with sinister promise upon Tressan, who shivered slightly and spread his hands to the blaze, as though his shiver had been of cold. But Marius did not so readily grow afraid.
“Madame,” he said, “at the worst we can shut our gates and fling defiance at them. We are well-manned, and Fortunio is seeking fresh recruits.”
“Seeking them, yes,” she sneered. “For a week has the fellow been spending money like water, addling the brains of half Grenoble with the best wine at the Auberge de France, yet not a single recruit has come in, so far.”
Marius laughed. “Your pessimism leads you into rash conclusions,” he cried. “You are wrong. One recruit has come in.”
“One!” she echoed. “A thousand devils! A brave number that! A fine return for the river of wine with which we have washed the stomachs of Grenoble.”
“Still, it is a beginning,” ventured the Seneschal.
“Aye, and, no doubt, an ending,” she flashed back at him. “And what manner of fool may this one be, whose fortunes were so desperate that he could throw them in with ours?”
“He is an Italian—a Piedmontese who has tramped across Savoy and was on his way to Paris to make his fortune, when Fortunio caught him and made it clear to him that his fortune was made for him at Condillac. He is a lusty, stalwart fellow, speaking no word of French, who was drawn to Fortunio by discovering in him a fellow-countryman.”
Mockery flashed from the Dowager’s beautiful eyes.
“In that you have the reason of his enrolling himself. He knew no word of French, poor devil, so could not learn how rash his venture was. Could we find more such men as this one it might be well. But where shall we find them? Pish! my dear Marius, matters are little mended, nor ever will be, for the mistake we made in allowing Garnache to go his ways.”
“Madame;” again ventured Tressan, “I think that you want for hopefulness.”
“At least, I do not want for courage, Monsieur le Comte,” she answered him; “and I promise you that while I live—to handle a sword if need be—no Paris men shall set foot in Condillac.”
“Aye,” grumbled Marius, “you can contemplate that, and it is all you do contemplate. You will not see, madame that our position is far from desperate; that, after all, there may be no need to resist the King. It is three months since we had news of Florimond. Much may happen in three months when a man is warring. It may well be that he is dead.”
“I wish I knew he was—and damned,” she snapped, with a tightening of her scarlet lips.
“Yes,” agreed Marius, with a sigh, “that were an end to all our troubles.”
“I’m none so sure. There is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in your marrying this headstrong baggage.”
“That the step should be rendered impossible, you can but blame yourself,” Marius reminded her.
“How so?” she cried, turning sharply upon him.
“Had you kept friends with the Church, had you paid tithes and saved us from this cursed Interdict, we should have no difficulty in getting hither a priest, and settling the matter out of hand, be Valerie willing or not.”
She looked at him, scorn kindling in her glance. Then she swung round to appeal to Tressan.
“You hear him, Count,” said she. “There is a lover for you! He would wed his mistress whether she love him or not—and he has sworn to me that he loves the girl.”
“How else should the thing be done since she opposes it?” asked Marius, sulkily.
“How else? Do you ask me how else? God! Were I a man, and had I your shape and face, there is no woman in the world should withstand me if I set my heart on her. It is address you lack. You are clumsy as a lout where a woman is concerned. Were I in your place, I had taken her by storm three months ago, when first she came to us. I had carried her out of Condillac, out of France, over the border into Savoy, where there are no Interdicts to plague you, and there I would have married her.”
Marius frowned darkly, but before he could speak, Tressan was insinuating a compliment to the Marquise.
“True, Marius,” he said, with pursed lips. “Nature has been very good to you in that she has made you the very counterpart of your lady mother. You are as comely a gentleman as is to be found in France—or out of it.”
“Pish!” snapped Marius, too angered by the reflection cast upon his address, to be flattered by their praises of his beauty. “It is an easy thing to talk; an easy thing to set up arguments when we consider but the half of a question. You forget, madame, that Valerie is betrothed to Florimond and that she clings faithfully to her betrothal.”
“Vertudieu!” swore the Marquise, “and what is this betrothal, what this faithfulness? She has not seen her betrothed for three years. She was a child at the time of their fiancailles. Think you her faithfulness to him is the constancy of a woman to her lover? Go your ways, you foolish boy. It is but the constancy to a word, to the wishes of her father. Think you constancy that has no other base than that would stand between her and any man who—as you might do, had you the address—could make her love him?”
“I do say so,” answered Marius firmly.
She smiled the pitying smile of one equipped with superior knowledge when confronted with an obstinate, uninformed mind.
“There is a droll arrogance about you, Marius,” she told him, quietly. “You, a fledgling, would teach me, a woman, the ways of a woman’s heart! It is a thing you may live to regret.”
“As how?” he asked.
“Once already has mademoiselle contrived to corrupt one of our men, and send him to Paris with a letter. Out of that has sprung our present trouble. Another time she may do better. When she shall have bribed another to assist her to escape; when she, herself, shall have made off to the shelter of the Queen-mother, perhaps you will regret that my counsel should have fallen upon barren ground.”
“It is to prevent any such attempt that we have placed her under guard,” said he. “You are forgetting that.”
“Forgetting it? Not I. But what assurance have you that she will not bribe her guard?”
Marius laughed, rose, and pushed back his chair.
“Madame,” said he, “you are back at your contemplation of the worst side of this affair; you are persisting in considering only how we may be thwarted. But set your mind at rest. Gilles is her sentinel. Every night he sleeps in her anteroom. He is Fortunio’s most trusted man. She will not corrupt him.”
The Dowager smiled pensively, her eyes upon the fire. Suddenly she raised them to his face. “Berthaud was none the less trusted. Yet, with no more than a promise of reward at some future time should she succeed in escaping from us, did she bribe him to carry her letter to the Queen. What happened to Berthaud that may not happen to Gilles?”
“You might change her sentry nightly,” put in the Seneschal.
“Yes, if we knew whom we could trust; who would be above corruption. As it is”—she shrugged her shoulders “that would be but to afford her opportunities to bribe them one by one until they were all ready to act in concert.”
“Why need she any sentinel at all?” asked Tressan, with some show of sense.
“To ward off possible traitors,” she told him, and Marius smiled and wagged his head.
“Madame is never done foreseeing the worst, monsieur.”
“Which shows my wisdom. The men in our garrison are mercenaries, all attached to us only because we pay them. They all know who she is and what her wealth.”
“Pity you have not a man who is deaf and dumb,” said Tressan, half in jest. But Marius looked up suddenly, his eyes serious.
“We have as good,” said he. “There is the Italian knave Fortunio enrolled yesterday, as I have told you. He knows neither her wealth nor her identity; nor if he did could he enter into traffic with her, for he knows no French, and she no Italian.”
The Dowager clapped her hands. “The very man!” she cried.
But Marius, either from sheer perverseness, or because he did not share her enthusiasm, made answer: “I have faith in Gilles.”
“Yes,” she mocked him, “and you had faith in Berthaud. Oh, if you have faith in Gilles, let him remain; let no more be said.”
The obstinate boy took her advice, and shifted the subject, speaking to Tressan of some trivial business connected with the Seneschalship.
But madame, woman-like, returned to the matter whose abandoning she had herself suggested. Marius, for all his affected disdain of it, viewed it with a certain respect. And so in the end they sent for the recruit.
Fortunio—who was no other than the man Garnache had known as “Sanguinetti”—brought him, still clad in the clothes in which he had come. He was a tall, limber fellow, with a very swarthy skin and black, oily-looking hair that fell in short ringlets about his ears and neck, and a black, drooping mustache which gave him a rather hang-dog look. There was a thick stubble of beard of several days’ growth about his chin and face; his eyes were furtive in their glances, but of a deep blue that contrasted oddly with his blackness when he momentarily raised them.
He wore a tattered jerkin, and his legs, in default of stockings, were swathed in soiled bandages and cross-gartered from ankle to knee. He stood in a pair of wooden shoes, from one of which peeped forth some wisps of straw, introduced, no doubt, to make the footgear fit. He slouched and shuffled in his walk, and he was unspeakably dirty. Nevertheless, he was girt with a sword in a ragged scabbard hanging from a frayed and shabby belt of leather.
Madame scanned him with interest. The fastidious Marius eyed him with disgust. The Seneschal peered at him curiously through shortsighted eyes.
“I do not think I have ever seen a dirtier ruffian,” said he.
“I like his nose,” said madame quietly. “It is the nose of an intrepid man.”
“It reminds me of Garnache’s,” laughed the Seneschal.
“You flatter the Parisian,” commented Marius.
The mercenary, meanwhile, stood blandly smiling at the party, showing at least a fine array of teeth, and wearing the patient, attentive air of one who realizes himself to be under discussion, yet does not understand what is being said.
“A countryman of yours, Fortunio?” sneered Marius.
The captain, whose open, ingenuous countenance dissembled as villainous a heart as ever beat in the breast of any man, disowned the compatriotism with a smile.
“Hardly, monsieur,” said he. “‘Battista’ is a Piedmontese.” Fortunio himself was a Venetian.
“Is he to be relied upon, think you?” asked madame. Fortunio shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. It was not his habit to trust any man inordinately.
“He is an old soldier,” said he. “He has trailed a pike in the Neapolitan wars. I have cross-questioned him, and found his answers bore out the truth of what he said.”
“And what brings him to France?” asked Tressan. The captain smiled again, and there came again that expressive shrug of his. “A little over-ready with the steel,” said he.
They told Fortunio that they proposed to place him sentry over mademoiselle instead of Gilles, as the Italian’s absolute lack of French would ensure against corruption. The captain readily agreed with them. It would be a wise step. The Italian fingered his tattered hat, his eyes on the ground.
Suddenly madame spoke to him. She asked him for some account of himself and whence he came, using the Italian tongue, of which she had a passing knowledge. He followed her questions very attentively, at times with apparent difficulty, his eyes on her face, his head craned a little forward.
Now and then Fortunio had to intervene, to make plainer to this ignorant Piedmontese mind the Marquise’s questions. His answers came in a deep, hoarse voice, slurred by the accent of Piedmont, and madame—her knowledge of Italian being imperfect—had frequently to have recourse to Fortunio to discover the meaning of what he said.
At last she dismissed the pair of them, bidding the captain see that he was washed and more fittingly clothed.
An hour later, after the Seneschal had taken his departure to ride home to Grenoble, it was madame herself, accompanied by Marius and Fortunio, who conducted Battista—such was the name the Italian had given—to the apartments above, where mademoiselle was now confined practically a prisoner.