CHAPTER III. THE DOWAGER’S
COMPLIANCE
Promptly at noon on the morrow Monsieur de
Garnache presented himself once more at the Seneschal’s palace, and with him
went Rabecque, his body-servant, a lean, swarthy, sharp-faced man, a trifle
younger than his master.
Anselme, the obese master of the household,
received them with profound respect, and at once conducted Garnache to Monsieur
de Tressan’s presence.
On the stairs they met Captain d’Aubran, who was
descending. The captain was not in the best of humours. For four-and-twenty
hours he had kept two hundred of his men under arms, ready to march as soon as
he should receive his orders from the Lord Seneschal, yet those instructions
were not forthcoming. He had been to seek them again that morning, only to be
again put off.
Monsieur de Garnache had considerable doubt, born
of his yesterday’s interview with the Seneschal, that Mademoiselle de La
Vauvraye would be delivered into his charge as he had stipulated. His relief
was, therefore, considerable, upon being ushered into Tressan’s presence, to
find a lady in cloak and hat, dressed as for a journey, seated in a chair by
the great fireplace.
Tressan advanced to meet him, a smile of cordial
welcome on his lips, and they bowed to each other in formal greeting.
“You see, monsieur,” said the Seneschal, waving a
plump hand in the direction of the lady, “that you have been obeyed. Here is
your charge.”
Then to the lady: “This is Monsieur de Garnache,”
he announced, “of whom I have already told you, who is to conduct you to Paris
by order of Her Majesty.
“And now, my good friends, however great the
pleasure I derive from your company, I care not how soon you set out, for I
have some prodigious arrears of work upon my hands.”
Garnache bowed to the lady, who returned his
greeting by an inclination of the head, and his keen eyes played briskly over
her. She was a plump-faced, insipid child, with fair hair and pale blue eyes,
stolid and bovine in their expressionlessness.
“I am quite ready, monsieur,” said she, rising as
she spoke, and gathering her cloak about her; and Garnache remarked that her
voice had the southern drawl, her words the faintest suggestion of a patois. It
was amazing how a lady born and bred could degenerate in the rusticity of
Dauphiny. Pigs and cows, he made no doubt, had been her chief objectives. Yet,
even so, he thought he might have expected that she would have had more to say
to him than just those five words expressing her readiness to depart. He had
looked for some acknowledgment of satisfaction at his presence, some utterances
of gratitude either to himself or to the Queen-Regent for the promptness with
which she had been succoured. He was disappointed, but he showed nothing of it,
as with a simple inclination of the head—
“Good!” said he. “Since you are ready and Monsieur
le Seneschal is anxious to be rid of us, let us by all means be moving. You
have a long and tedious journey before you, mademoiselle.”
“I—I am prepared for that,” she faltered.
He stood aside, and bending from the waist he made
a sweeping gesture towards the door with the hand that held his hat. To the
invitation to precede him she readily responded, and, with a bow to the
Seneschal, she began to walk across the apartment.
Garnache’s eyes, narrowing slightly, followed her,
like points of steel. Suddenly he shot a disturbing glance at Tressan’s face,
and the corner of his wild-cat mustachios twitched. He stood erect, and called
her very sharply.
“Mademoiselle!”
She stopped, and turned to face him, an incredible
shyness seeming to cause her to avoid his gaze.
“You have, no doubt, Monsieur le Seneschal’s word
for my identity. But I think it is as well that you should satisfy yourself.
Before placing yourself entirely in my care, as you are about to do, you would
be well advised to assure yourself, that I am indeed Her Majesty’s emissary.
Will you be good enough to glance at this?”
He drew forth as he spoke the letter in the
queen’s own hand, turned it upside down, and so presented it to her. The Seneschal
looked on stolidly, a few paces distant.
“But certainly, mademoiselle, assure yourself that
this gentleman is no other than I have told you.”
Thus enjoined, she took the letter; for a second
her eyes met Garnache’s glittering gaze, and she shivered. Then she bent her
glance to the writing, and studied it a moment, what time the man from Paris
watched her closely.
Presently she handed it back to him.
“Thank you, monsieur,” was all she said.
“You are satisfied that it is in order,
mademoiselle?” he inquired, and a note of mockery too subtle for her or the
Seneschal ran through his question.
“I am quite satisfied.”
Garnache turned to Tressan. His eyes were smiling,
but unpleasantly, and in his voice when he spoke there was something akin to
the distant rumble that heralds an approaching storm.
“Mademoiselle,” said he, “has received an
eccentric education.”
“Eh?” quoth Tressan, perplexed.
“I have heard tell, monsieur, of a people
somewhere in the East who read and write from right to left; but never yet have
I heard tell of any—particularly in France—so oddly schooled as to do their
reading upside down.”
Tressan caught the drift of the other’s meaning.
He paled a little, and sucked his lip, his eyes wandering to the girl, who
stood in stolid inapprehension of what was being said.
“Did she do that?” said he, and he scarcely knew
what he was saying; all that he realized was that it urged him to explain this
thing. “Mademoiselle’s education has been neglected—a by no means uncommon
happening in these parts. She is sensitive of it; she seeks to hide the fact.”
Then the storm broke about their heads. And it
crashed and thundered awfully in the next few minutes.
“O liar! O damned, audacious liar,” roared
Garnache uncompromisingly, advancing a step upon the Seneschal, and shaking the
parchment threateningly in his very face, as though it were become a weapon of
offence. “Was it to hide the fact that she had not been taught to write that
she sent the Queen a letter pages-long? Who is this woman?” And the finger he
pointed at the girl quivered with the rage that filled him at this trick they
had thought to put upon him.
Tressan sought refuge in offended dignity. He drew
himself up, threw back his head, and looked the Parisian fiercely in the eye.
“Since you take this tone with me, monsieur—”
“I take with you—as with any man—the tone that to
me seems best. You miserable fool! As sure as you’re a rogue this affair shall
cost you your position. You have waxed fat and sleek in your seneschalship;
this easy life in Dauphiny appears to have been well suited to your health. But
as your paunch has grown, so, of a truth, have your brains dwindled, else had
you never thought to cheat me quite so easily.
“Am I some lout who has spent his days herding
swine, think you, that you could trick me into believing this creature to be
Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye—this creature with the mien of a peasant, with a
breath reeking of garlic like a third-rate eating-house, and the walk of a
woman who has never known footgear until this moment? Tell me, sir, for what
manner of fool did you take me?”
The Seneschal stood with blanched face and gaping
mouth, his fire all turned to ashes before the passion of this gaunt man.
Garnache paid no heed to him. He stepped to the
girl, and roughly raised her chin with his hand so that she was forced to look
him in the face.
“What is your name, wench?” he asked her.
“Margot,” she blubbered, bursting into tears.
He dropped her chin, and turned away with a
gesture of disgust.
“Get you gone,” he bade her harshly. “Get you back
to the kitchen or the onion-field from which they took you.”
And the girl, scarce believing her good fortune,
departed with a speed that bordered on the ludicrous. Tressan had naught to
say, no word to stay her with; pretence, he realized, was vain.
“Now, my Lord Seneschal,” quoth Garnache, arms
akimbo, feet planted wide, and eyes upon the wretched man’s countenance, “what
may you have to say to me?”
Tressan shifted his position; he avoided the
other’s glance; he was visibly trembling, and when presently he spoke it was in
faltering accents.
“It—it—seems, monsieur, that—ah—that I have been
the victim of some imposture.”
“It had rather seemed to me that the victim chosen
was myself.”
“Clearly we were both victims,” the Seneschal
rejoined. Then he proceeded to explain. “I went to Condillac yesterday as you
desired me, and after a stormy interview with the Marquise I obtained from
her—as I believed—the person of Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. You see I was not
myself acquainted with the lady.”
Garnache looked at him. He did not believe him. He
regretted almost that he had not further questioned the girl. But, after all,
perhaps it might be easier and more expedient if he were to appear to accept
the Seneschal’s statement. But he must provide against further fraud.
“Monsieur le Seneschal,” said he in calmer tones,
putting his anger from him, “at the best you are a blunderer and an ass, at the
worst a traitor. I will inquire no further at present; I’ll not seek to
discriminate too finely.”
“Monsieur, these insults—” began the Seneschal,
summoning dignity to his aid. But Garnache broke in:
“La, la! I speak in the Queen’s name. If you have
thought to aid the Dowager of Condillac in this resistance of Her Majesty’s
mandate, let me enjoin you, as you value your seneschalship—as you value your
very neck—to harbour that thought no longer.
“It seems that, after all, I must deal myself with
the situation. I must go myself to Condillac. If they should resist me, I shall
look to you for the necessary means to overcome that resistance.
“And bear you this in mind: I have chosen to leave
it an open question whether you were a party to the trick it has been sought to
put upon the Queen, through me, her representative. But it is a question that I
have it in my power to resolve at any moment—to resolve as I choose. Unless,
monsieur, I find you hereafter—as I trust—actuated by the most unswerving
loyalty, I shall resolve that question by proclaiming you a traitor; and as a
traitor I shall arrest you and carry you to Paris. Monsieur le Seneschal, I
have the honour to give you good-day!”
When he was gone, Monsieur de Tressan flung off
his wig, and mopped the perspiration from his brow. He went white as snow and
red as fire by turns, as he paced the apartment in a frenzy. Never in the
fifteen years that were sped since he had been raised to the governorship of
the province had any man taken such a tone with him and harangued him in such
terms.
A liar and a traitor had he been called that morning,
a knave and a fool; he had been browbeaten and threatened; and he had swallowed
it all, and almost turned to lick the hand that administered the dose. Dame!
What manner of cur was he become? And the man who had done all this—a vulgar
upstart out of Paris, reeking of leather and the barrack-room still lived!
Bloodshed was in his mind; murder beckoned him
alluringly to take her as his ally. But he put the thought from him, frenzied
though he might be. He must fight this knave with other weapons; frustrate his
mission, and send him back to Paris and the Queen’s scorn, beaten and
empty-handed.
“Babylas!” he shouted.
Immediately the secretary appeared.
“Have you given thought to the matter of Captain
d’Aubran?” he asked, his voice an impatient snarl.
“Yes, monsieur, I have pondered it all morning.”
“Well? And what have you concluded?”
“Helas! monsieur, nothing.”
Tressan smote the table before him a blow that
shook some of the dust out of the papers that cumbered it. “Ventregris! How am
I served? For what do I pay you, and feed you, and house you, good-for-naught,
if you are to fail me whenever I need the things you call your brains? Have you
no intelligence, no thought, no imagination? Can you invent no plausible
business, no likely rising, no possible disturbances that shall justify my
sending Aubran and his men to Montelimar—to the very devil, if need be.”
The secretary trembled in his every limb; his eyes
shunned his master’s as his master’s had shunned Garnache’s awhile ago. The
Seneschal was enjoying himself. If he had been bullied and browbeaten, here, at
least, was one upon whom he, in his turn, might taste the joys of bullying and
browbeating.
“You lazy, miserable calf,” he stormed, “I might
be better served by a wooden image. Go! It seems I must rely upon myself. It is
always so. Wait!” he thundered; for the secretary, only too glad to obey his
last order, had already reached the door. “Tell Anselme to bid the Captain
attend me here at once.”
Babylas’s bowed and went his errand.
A certain amount of his ill-humour vented, Tressan
made an effort to regain his self-control. He passed his handkerchief for the
last time over face and head, and resumed his wig.
When d’Aubran entered, the Seneschal was composed
and in his wonted habit of ponderous dignity. “Ah, d’Aubran,” said he, “your
men are ready?”
“They have been ready these four-and-twenty hours,
monsieur.”
“Good. You are a brisk soldier, d’Aubran. You are
a man to be relied upon.”
D’Aubran bowed. He was a tall, active young fellow
with a pleasant face and a pair of fine black eyes.
“Monsieur le Seneschal is very good.”
With a wave of the hand the Seneschal belittled
his own goodness.
“You will march out of Grenoble within the hour,
Captain, and you will lead your men to Montelimar. There you will quarter them,
and await my further orders. Babylas will give you a letter to the authorities,
charging them to find you suitable quarters. While there, d’Aubran, and until
my further orders reach you, you will employ your time in probing the feeling
in the hill district. You understand?”
“Imperfectly,” d’Aubran confessed.
“You will understand better when you have been in
Montelimar a week or so. It may, of course, be a false alarm. Still, we must
safeguard the King’s interests and be prepared. Perhaps we may afterwards be
charged with starting at shadows; but it is better to be on the alert from the
moment the shadow is perceived than to wait until the substance itself has
overwhelmed us.”
It sounded so very much as if the Seneschal’s
words really had some hidden meaning, that d’Aubran, if not content with going
upon an errand of which he knew so little, was, at least, reconciled to obey
the orders he received. He uttered words that conveyed some such idea to
Tressan’s mind, and within a half-hour he was marching out of Grenoble with
beating drums, on his two days’ journey to Montelimar.
CHAPTER IV. THE CHATEAU DE
CONDILLAC
As Captain d’Aubran and his troop were speeding
westwards from Grenoble, Monsieur de Garnache, ever attended by his man, rode
briskly in the opposite direction, towards the grey towers of Condillac, that
reared themselves towards the greyer sky above the valley of the Isere. It was
a chill, dull, autumnal day, with a raw wind blowing from the Alps; its breath
was damp, and foretold of the rain that was likely to come anon, the rain with
which the clouds hanging low about the distant hills were pregnant.
But Monsieur de Garnache was totally insensible to
his surroundings; his mind was very busy with the interview from which he had
come, and the interview to which he was speeding. Once he permitted himself a
digression, that he might point a moral for the benefit of his servant.
“You see, Rebecque, what a plague it is to have to
do with women. Are you sufficiently grateful to me for having quelled your
matrimonial ardour of two months ago? No, you are not. Grateful you may be;
sufficiently grateful, never; it would be impossible. No gratitude could be
commensurate with the benefit I conferred upon you. Yet if you had married, and
discovered for yourself the troubles that come from too close an association
with that sex which some wag of old ironically called the weaker, and of which
contemporary fools with no sense of irony continue so to speak in good faith,
you could have blamed only yourself. You would have shrugged your shoulders and
made the best of it, realizing that no other man had put this wrong upon you.
But with me—thousand devils!—it is very different. I am a man who, in one
particular at least, has chosen his way of life with care; I have seen to it
that I should walk a road unencumbered by any petticoat. What happens? What
comes of all my careful plans?
“Fate sends an infernal cut-throat to murder our
good king—whose soul God rest eternally! And since his son is of an age too
tender to wield the sceptre, the boy’s mother does it in his name. Thus, I, a
soldier, being subject to the head of the State, find myself, by no devising of
my own, subject to a woman.
“In itself that is bad enough. Too bad,
indeed—Ventregris!—too bad. Yet Fate is not content. It must occur to this
woman to select me—me of all men—to journey into Dauphiny, and release another
woman from the clutches of yet a third. And to what shifts are we not put, to
what discomforts not subjected? You know them, Rabecque, for you have shared
them with me. But it begins to break upon my mind that what we have endured may
be as nothing to what may lie before us. It is an ill thing to have to do with
women. Yet you, Rabecque, would have deserted me for one of them!”
Rabecque was silent. Maybe he was ashamed of
himself; or maybe that, not agreeing with his master, he had yet sufficient
appreciation of his position to be discreetly silent where his opinions might
be at variance. Thus Garnache was encouraged to continue.
“And what is all this trouble about, which they
have sent me to set right? About a marriage. There is a girl wants to marry one
man, and a woman who wants to marry her to another. Ponder the possibilities of
tragedy in such a situation. Half this world’s upheavals have had their source
in less. Yet you, Rabecque, would have married!”
Necessity at last turned his discourse to other
matters.
“Tell me, now,” said he abruptly, in a different
tone, “is there hereabouts a ford?”
“There is a bridge up yonder, monsieur,” returned
the servant, thankful to have the conversation changed.
They rode towards it in silence, Garnache’s eyes
set now upon the grey pile that crowned the hillock, a half-mile away, on the
opposite bank of the stream. They crossed the bridge and rode up the gently
rising, bare, and rugged ground towards Condillac. The place wore an entirely
peaceful air, strong and massive though it appeared. It was encircled by a
ditch, but the drawbridge was down, and the rust on its chains argued that long
had it been so.
None coming to challenge them, the pair rode
across the planks, and the dull thud of their hooves started into activity some
one in the gatehouse.
A fellow rudely clad—a hybrid between man-at-arms
and lackey—lounged on a musket to confront them in the gateway. Monsieur de
Garnache announced his name, adding that he came to crave an audience of Madame
la Marquise, and the man stood aside to admit him. Thus he and Rabecque rode
forward into the roughly paved courtyard.
From several doorways other men emerged, some of
martial bearing, showing that the place was garrisoned to some extent. Garnache
took little heed of them. He flung his reins to the man whom he had first
addressed—the fellow had kept pace beside him—and leapt nimbly to the ground,
bidding Rabecque await him there.
The soldier lackey resigned the reins to Rabecque,
and requested Monsieur de Garnache to follow him. He led the way through a door
on the left, down a passage and across an anteroom, and ushered the visitor
finally into a spacious, gloomy hall, panelled in black oak and lighted as much
by the piled-up fire that flared on the noble hearth as by the grey daylight
that filtered through the tall mullioned windows.
As they entered, a liver-coloured hound that lay
stretched before the fire growled lazily, and showed the whites of his eyes.
Paying little attention to the dog, Garnache looked about him. The apartment
was handsome beyond praise, in a sombre, noble fashion. It was hung with
pictures of departed Condillacs—some of them rudely wrought enough—with
trophies of ancient armour, and with implements of the chase. In the centre
stood an oblong table of black oak, very richly carved about its massive legs,
and in a china bowl, on this, an armful of late roses filled the room with
their sweet fragrance.
Then Garnache espied a page on the window-seat,
industriously burnishing a cuirass. He pursued his task, indifferent to the
newcomer’s advent, until the knave who had conducted thither the Parisian
called the boy and bade him go tell the Marquise that a Monsieur de Garnache,
with a message from the Queen-Regent, begged an audience.
The boy rose, and simultaneously, out of a great
chair by the hearth, whose tall back had hitherto concealed him, there rose
another figure. This was a stripling of some twenty summers—twenty-one, in
fact—of a pale, beautifully featured face, black hair and fine black eyes, and
very sumptuously clad in a suit of shimmering silk whose colour shifted from
green to purple as he moved.
Monsieur de Garnache assumed that he was in the
presence of Marius de Condillac. He bowed a trifle stiffly, and was surprised
to have his bow returned with a graciousness that amounted almost to
cordiality.
“You are from Paris, monsieur?” said the young man,
in a gentle, pleasant voice. “I fear you have had indifferent weather for your
journey.”
Garnache thought of other things besides the
weather that he had found indifferent, and he felt warmed almost to the point
of anger at the very recollection. But he bowed again, and answered amiably
enough.
The young man offered him a seat, assuring him
that his mother would not keep him waiting long. The page had already gone upon
his errand.
Garnache took the proffered chair, and sank down
with creak and jingle to warm himself at the fire.
“From what you have said, I gather that you are
Monsieur Marius de Condillac,” said he. “I, as you may have heard me announced
by your servant, am Martin Marie Rigobert de Garnache—at your service.”
“We have heard of you, Monsieur de Garnache,” said
the youth as he crossed his shapely legs of silken violet, and fingered the
great pearl that depended from his ear. “But we had thought that by now you
would be on your way to Paris.”
“No doubt—with Margot,” was the grim rejoinder.
But Marius either gathered no suggestion from its
grimness, or did not know the name Garnache uttered, for he continued:
“We understood that you were to escort
Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to Paris, to place her under the tutelage of the
Queen-Regent. I will not conceal from you that we were chagrined at the
reflection cast upon Condillac; nevertheless, Her Majesty’s word is law in
Dauphiny as much as it is in Paris.”
“Quite as much, and I am relieved to hear you
confess it,” said Garnache drily, and he scanned more closely the face of this
young man. He found cause to modify the excellent impression he had received at
first. Marius’s eyebrows were finely pencilled, but they arched a shade too
much, and his eyes were set a trifle too closely; the mouth, which had seemed
beautiful at first, looked, in addition, on this closer inspection, weak,
sensual, and cruel.
There fell upon the momentary silence the sound of
an opening door, and both men rose simultaneously to their feet.
In the splendid woman that entered, Monsieur de
Garnache saw a wonderful likeness to the boy who stood beside him. She received
the emissary very graciously. Marius set a chair for her between the two they
had been occupying, and thus interchanging phrases of agreeable greeting the
three sat down about the hearth with every show of the greatest amity.
A younger man might have been put out of
countenance; the woman’s surpassing beauty, her charm of manner, her melodious
voice, falling on the ear soft and gentle as a caress, might have turned a man
of less firmness a little from his purpose, a little perhaps from his loyalty
and the duty that had brought him all the way from Paris. But Monsieur de
Garnache was to her thousand graces as insensible as a man of stone. And he
came to business briskly. He had no mind to spend the day at her fireside in
pleasant, meaningless talk.
“Madame,” said he, “monsieur your son informs me
that you have heard of me and of the business that brings me into Dauphiny. I
had not looked for the honour of journeying quite so far as Condillac; but
since Monsieur de Tressan, whom I made my ambassador, appears to have failed so
signally, I am constrained to inflict my presence upon you.”
“Inflict?” quoth she, with a pretty look of
make-believe dismay. “How harsh a word, monsieur!”
The smoothness of the implied compliment annoyed
him.
“I will use any word you think more adequate,
madame, if you will suggest it,” he answered tartly.
“There are a dozen I might suggest that would
better fit the case—and with more justice to yourself,” she answered, with a
smile that revealed a gleam of white teeth behind her scarlet lips. “Marcus,
bid Benoit bring wine. Monsieur de Garnache will no doubt be thirsting after
his ride.”
Garnache said nothing. Acknowledge the courtesy he
would not; refuse it he could not. So he sat, and waited for her to speak, his
eyes upon the fire.
Madame had already set herself a course. Keener
witted than her son, she had readily understood, upon Garnache’s being
announced to her, that his visit meant the failure of the imposture by which
she had sought to be rid of him.
“I think, monsieur,” she said presently, watching
him from under her lids, “that we have, all of us who are concerned in
Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye’s affairs, been at cross-purposes. She is an
impetuous, impulsive child, and it happened that some little time ago we had
words—such things will happen in the most united families. Whilst the heat of
her foolish anger was upon her, she wrote a letter to the Queen, in which she desired
to be removed from my tutelage. Since then, monsieur, she has come to repent
her of it. You, who no doubt understand a woman’s mind—”
“Set out upon no such presumption, madame,” he
interrupted. “I know as little of a woman’s mind as any man who thinks he knows
a deal—and that is nothing.”
She laughed as at an excellent jest, and Marius,
overhearing Garnache’s retort as he was returning to resume his seat, joined in
her laugh.
“Paris is a fine whetstone for a man’s wits,” said
he.
Garnache shrugged his shoulders.
“I take it, madame, that you wish me to understand
that Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye, repenting of her letter, desires no longer to
repair to Paris; desires, in fact, to remain here at Condillac in your
excellent care.”
“You apprehend the position exactly, monsieur.”
“To my mind,” said he, “it presents few features
difficult of apprehension.”
Marius’s eyes flashed his mother a look of relief;
but the Marquise, who had an ear more finely trained, caught the vibration of a
second meaning in the emissary’s words.
“All being as you say, madame,” he continued,
“will you tell me why, instead of some message to this purport, you sent
Monsieur de Tressan back to me with a girl taken from some kitchen or barnyard,
whom it was sought to pass off upon me as Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye?”
The Marquise laughed, and her son, who had shown
signs of perturbation, taking his cue from her, laughed too.
“It was a jest, monsieur”—she told him, miserably
conscious that the explanation could sound no lamer.
“My compliments, madame, upon the humour that
prevails in Dauphiny. But your jest failed of its purpose. It did not amuse me,
nor, so far as I could discern, was Monsieur de Tressan greatly taken with it.
But all this is of little moment, madame,” he continued. “Since you tell me
that Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye is content to remain here, I am satisfied that
it is so.”
They were the very words that she desired to hear
from him; yet his manner of uttering them gave her little reassurance. The
smile on her lips was forced; her watchful eyes smiled not at all.
“Still,” he continued, “you will be so good as to
remember that I am not my own master in this affair. Were that so, I should not
fail to relieve you at once of my unbidden presence.”
“Oh, monsieur—”
“But, being the Queen’s emissary, I have her
orders to obey, and those orders are to convey Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to
Paris. They make no allowance for any change that may have occurred in
mademoiselle’s inclinations. If the journey is now distasteful to her, she has
but her own rashness to blame in having sought it herself. What imports is that
she is bidden by the Queen to repair to Paris; as a loyal subject she must obey
the Queen’s commands; you, as a loyal subject, must see to it that she obeys them.
So, madame, I count upon your influence with mademoiselle to see that she is
ready to set out by noon to-morrow. One day already has been wasted me by
your—ah—jest, madame. The Queen likes her ambassadors to be brisk.”
The Dowager reclined in her chair, and bit her
lip. This man was too keen for her. She had no illusions. He had seen through
her as if she had been made of glass; he had penetrated her artifices and
detected her falsehoods. Yet feigning to believe her and them, he had first
neutralized her only weapons—other than offensive—then used them for her own
defeat. Marius it was who took up the conversation.
“Monsieur,” he cried—and there was a frown drawing
together his fine brows—“what you suggest amounts to a tyranny on the Queen’s
part.”
Garnache was on his feet, his chair grating the
polished floor.
“Monsieur says?” quoth he, his glittering eye
challenging the rash boy to repeat his words.
But the Dowager intervened with a little trill of
laughter.
“Bon Dieu! Marius, what are you saying? Foolish
boy! And you, Monsieur de Garnache, do not heed him, I beg you. We are so far
from Court in this little corner of Dauphiny, and my son has been reared in so
free an atmosphere that he is sometimes betrayed into expressions whose
impropriety he does not realize.”
Garnache bowed in token of his perfect
satisfaction, and at that moment two servants entered bearing flagons and
beakers, fruits and sweetmeats, which they placed upon the table. The Dowager
rose, and went to do the honours of the board. The servants withdrew.
“You will taste our wine of Condillac, monsieur?”
He acquiesced, expressing thanks, and watched her
fill a beaker for him, one for herself, and another for her son. She brought
him the cup in her hands. He took it with a grave inclination of the head. Then
she proffered him the sweetmeats. To take one, he set down the cup on the
table, by which he had also come to stand. His left hand was gloved and held
his beaver and whip.
She nibbled, herself, at one of the comfits, and
he followed her example. The boy, a trifle sullen since the last words, stood
on the hearth with his back to the fire, his hands clasped behind him.
“Monsieur,” she said, “do you think it would
enable you to comply with what I have signified to be not only our own wishes,
but those of Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye herself, if she were to state them to
you?”
He looked up sharply, his lips parting in a smile
that revealed his strong white teeth.
“Are you proposing another of your jests, madame?”
She laughed outright. A wonderful assurance was
hers, thought Monsieur de Garnache. “Mon Dieu! no, monsieur,” she cried. “If
you will, you may see the lady herself.”
He took a turn in the apartment, idly, as does a
man in thought.
“Very well,” said he, at last. “I do not say that
it will alter my determination. But perhaps—yes, I should be glad of an
opportunity of the honour of making Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye’s acquaintance.
But no impersonations, I beg, madame!” He said it half-laughingly, taking his
cue from her.
“You need have no fear of any.”
She walked to the door, opened it, and called
“Gaston!” In answer came the page whom Garnache had found in the room when he
was admitted.
“Desire Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to come to us
here at once,” she bade the boy, and closed the door.
Garnache had been all eyes for some furtive sign,
some whispered word; but he had surprised neither.
His pacing had brought him to the opposite end of
the board, where stood the cup of wine madame had poured for Marius. His own,
Garnache had left untouched. As if abstractedly, he now took up the beaker,
pledged madame with his glance, and drank. She watched him, and suddenly a
suspicion darted through her mind—a suspicion that he suspected them.
Dieu! What a man was this! He took no chances.
Madame reflected that this augured ill for the success of the last resource
upon which, should all else fail, she was counting to keep mademoiselle at
Condillac. It seemed incredible that one so wary and watchful should have
committed the rashness of venturing alone into Condillac without taking his
precautions to ensure his ability to retreat.
In her heart she felt daunted by him. But in the
matter of that wine—the faintest of smiles hovered on her lips, her eyebrows
went up a shade. Then she took up the cup that had been poured for the
Parisian, and bore it to her son.
“Marius, you are not drinking,” said she. And
seeing a command in her eyes; he took the beaker from her hand and bore it to
his lips, emptying the half of it, whilst with the faintest smile of scorn the
Dowager swept Garnache a glance of protest, as of one repudiating an unworthy
challenge.
Then the door opened, and the eyes of all three
were centred upon the girl that entered.
