A Gentleman of France: Being the Memoirs of Gaston de Bonne Sieur de Marsac, - [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud .txt] 📗

you Solomon de Bethune?’ the man cried incredulously. Incredulously, but his countenance fell, and his voice was full of chagrin and disappointment,

‘Who else, sir?’ M. de Rosny replied haughtily. ‘I am, and, as far as I know, I have as much right on this side of the Loire as any other man.’

‘A thousand pardons.’

‘If you are not satisfied—’

‘Nay, M. de Rosny, I am perfectly satisfied.’

The stranger repented this with a very crestfallen air, adding, ‘A thousand pardons’; and fell to making other apologies, doffing his hat with great respect. ‘I took you, if you will pardon me saying so, for your Huguenot brother, M. Maximilian,’ he explained. ‘The saying goes that he is at Rosny.’

‘I can answer for that being false,’ M. de Rosny answered peremptorily, ‘for I have just come from there, and I will answer for it he is not within ten leagues of the place. And now, sir, as we desire to enter before the gates shut, perhaps you will excuse us.’ With which he bowed, and I bowed, and they bowed, and we separated. They gave us the road, which M. de Rosny took with a great air, and we trotted to the gate, and passed through it without misadventure.

The first street we entered was a wide one, and my companion took advantage of this to ride up abreast of me. ‘That is the kind of adventure our little prince is fond of,’ he muttered. ‘But for my part, M. de Marsac, the sweat is running down my forehead. I have played the trick more than once before, for my brother and I are as like as two peas. And yet it would have gone ill with us if the fool had been one of his friends.’

‘All’s well that ends well,’ I answered in a low voice, thinking it an ill time for compliments. As it was, the remark was unfortunate, for M. de Rosny was still in the act of reining back when Maignan called out to us to say we were being followed.

I looked behind, but could see nothing except gloom and rain and overhanging eaves and a few figures cowering in doorways. The servants, however, continued to maintain that it was so, and we held, without actually stopping, a council of war. If detected, we were caught in a trap, without hope of escape; and for the moment I am sure M. do Rosny regretted that he had chosen this route by Blois—that he had thrust himself, in his haste and his desire to take with him the latest news, into a snare so patent. The castle—huge, dark, and grim—loomed before us at the end of the street in which we were, and, chilled as I was myself by the sight, I could imagine how much more appalling it must appear to him, the chosen counsellor of his master, and the steadfast opponent of all which it represented.

Our consultation came to nothing, for no better course suggested itself than to go as we had intended to the lodging commonly used by my companion. We did so, looking behind us often, and saying more than once that Maignan must be mistaken. As soon as we had dismounted, however, and gone in, he showed us from the window a man loitering near; and this confirmation of our alarm sending us to our expedients again, while Maignan remained watching in a room without a light, I suggested that I might pass myself off, though ten years older, for my companion.

‘Alas!’ he said, drumming with his fingers on the table ‘there are too many here who know me to make that possible. I thank you all the same.’

‘Could you escape on foot? Or pass the wall anywhere, or slip through the gates early?’ I suggested.

‘They might tell us at the Bleeding Heart,’ he answered. But I doubt it. I was a fool, sir, to put my neck into Mendoza’s halter, and that is a fact. But here is Maignan. What is it, man?’ he continued eagerly.

‘The watcher is gone, my lord,’ the equerry answered.

‘And has left no one?’

‘No one that I can see.’

We both went into the next room and looked from the windows. The man was certainly not where we had seen him before. But the rain was falling heavily, the eaves were dripping, the street was a dark cavern with only here and there a spark of light, and the fellow might be lurking elsewhere. Maignan, being questioned, however, believed he had gone off of set purpose.

‘Which may be read half a dozen ways,’ I remarked.

‘At any rate, we are fasting,’ M. de Rosny answered. Give me a full man in a fight. Let us sit down and eat. It is no good jumping in the dark, or meeting troubles half way.’

We were not through our meal, however, Simon Fleix waiting on us with a pale face, when Maignan came in again from the dark room. ‘My lord,’ he said quietly, ‘three men have appeared. Two of them remain twenty paces away. The third has come to the door.’ As he spoke we heard a cautious summons below, Maignan was for going down, but his master bade him stand. Let the woman of the house go,’ he said.

I remarked and long remembered M. de Rosny’s SANG-FROID on this occasion. His pistols he had already laid on a chair beside him throwing his cloak over them; and now, while we waited, listening in breathless silence, I saw him hand a large slice of bread-and-meat to his equerry, who, standing behind his chair, began eating it with the same coolness. Simon Fleix, on the other hand, stood gazing at the door, trembling in every limb, and with so much of excitement and surprise in his attitude that I took the precaution of bidding him, in a low voice, do nothing without orders. At the same moment it occurred to me to extinguish two of the four candles which had been lighted; and I did so, M. de Rosny nodding assent, just as the muttered conversation which was being carried on below ceased, and a man’s tread sounded on the stairs.

It was followed immediately by a knock on the outside of our door. Obeying my companion’s look, I cried, ‘Enter!’

A slender man of middle height, booted and wrapped up, with his face almost entirely hidden by a fold of his cloak, came in quickly, and closing the door behind him, advanced towards the table. ‘Which is M. de Rosny?’ he said.

Rosny had carefully turned his face from the light, but at the sound of the other’s voice he sprang up with a cry of relief. He was about to speak, when the newcomer, raising his hand peremptorily, continued, ‘No names, I beg. Yours, I suppose, is known here. Mine is not, nor do I desire it should be. I want speech of you, that is all.’

‘I am greatly honoured,’ M. de Rosny replied, gazing at him eagerly. ‘Yet, who told you I was here?’

‘I saw you pass under a lamp in the street,’ the stranger answered. ‘I knew your horse first, and you afterwards, and bade a groom follow you. Believe me,’ he added, with a gesture of the hand, ‘you have nothing to fear from me.’

‘I accept the assurance in