He drank this wine, and here was a spell of silence till Marius, grown impatient, brutally put the thing for which the Marquise sought delicate words.
"We have sent for you, Fortunio," said he, in a blustering tone, "to inquire of you what price you'd ask to cut the throat of my brother, the Marquis de Condillac."
The Seneschal sank back in his chair with a gasp. The captain, a frown between his frank-seeming, wide-set eyes, started round to look at the boy. The business was by no means too strong for the ruffler's stomach, but the words in which it was conveyed to him most emphatically were.
"Monsieur de Condillac," said he, with an odd assumption of dignity, "I think you have mistaken your man. I am a soldier, not a cut-throat."
"But yes," the Marquise soothed him, throwing herself instantly into the breach, and laying a long, slender hand upon the frayed green velvet of the captain's sleeve. "What my son means and what he says are vastly different things."
"It will sorely tax your wits, madame," laughed Marius brutally, "to make clear that difference."
And then the Seneschal nervously cleared his throat and muttering that it waxed late and he must be riding home, made shift to rise. Him, too, the Marquise at once subdued. She was not minded that he should go just yet. It might be useful to her hereafter to have had him present at this conference, into which she meant to draw him until she should have made him one with them, a party to their guilt. For the task she needed not over many words: just one or two and a melting glance or so, and the rebellion in his bosom was quelled at once.
But with the captain her wiles were not so readily successful. He had no hopes of winning her to wife—haply no desire, since he was not a man of very great ambitions. On the other hand, he had against him the very worst record in France, and for all that he might embark upon this business under the auspices of the Lord Seneschal himself, he knew not how far the Lord Seneschal might dare to go thereafter to save him from a hanging, should it come to that.
He said as much in words. In a business of this kind, he knew from experience, the more difficulties he advanced, the better a bargain he drove in the end; and if he was to be persuaded to risk his neck in this, he should want good payment. But even for good payment on this occasion he was none too sure as yet that he would let himself be persuaded.
"Monsieur Fortunio," the Marquise said, very softly, "heed not Monsieur Marius's words. Attend to me. The Marquis de Condillac, as no doubt you will have learned for yourself, is lying at La Rochette. Now it happens that he is noxious to us—let the reasons be what they may. We need a friend to put him out of our way. Will you be that friend?"
"You will observe," sneered Marius, "how wide a difference there is between what the Marquise suggests and my own frank question of what price you would take to cut my brother's throat."
"I observe no difference, which is what you would say," Fortunio answered truculently, his head well back, his brown eyes resentful of offence—for none can be so resentful of imputed villainy as your villain who is thorough-paced. "And," he concluded, "I return you the same answer, madame—that I am no cut-throat."
She repressed her anger at Marius's sneering interference, and made a little gesture of dismay with her eloquent white hands.
"But we do not ask you to cut a throat."
"I have heard amiss, then," said he, his insolence abating nothing.
"You have heard aright, but you have understood amiss. There are other ways of doing these things. If it were but the cutting of a throat, should we have sent for you? There are a dozen in the garrison would have sufficed for our purpose."
"What is it, then, you need?" quoth he.
"We want an affair contrived with all decency. The Marquis is at the Sanglier Noir at La Rochette. You can have no difficulty in finding him, and having found him, less difficulty still in giving or provoking insult."
"Excellent," murmured Marius from the background. "It is such an enterprise as should please a ready swordsman of your calibre, Fortunio."
"A duel?" quoth the fellow, and his insolence went out of him, thrust out by sheer dismay; his mouth fell open. A duel was another affair altogether. "But, Sangdieu! what if he should slay me? Have you thought of that?"
"Slay you?" cried the Marquise, her eyes resting on his face with an expression as of wonder at such a question. "You jest, Fortunio."
"And he with the fever," put in Marius, sneering.
"Ah!" muttered Fortunio. "He has the fever? The fever is something. But—but—accidents will happen."
"Florimond was ever an indifferent swordsman," murmured Marius dreamily, as if communing with himself.
The captain wheeled upon him once more.
"Why, then, Monsieur Marius," said he, "since that is so and you are skilled—as skilled as am I, or more—and he has a fever, where is the need to hire me to the task?"
"Where?" echoed Marius. "What affair may that be of yours? We ask you to name a price on which you will do this thing. Have done with counter-questions."
Marius was skilled with the foils, as Fortunio said, but he cared not for unbaited steel, and he was conscious of it, so that the captain's half-sneer had touched him on the raw. But he was foolish to take that tone in answer. There was a truculent, Southern pride in the ruffler which sprang immediately into life and which naught that they could say thereafter would stamp out.
"Must I say again that you mistake your man?" was his retort, and as he spoke he rose, as though to signify that the subject wearied him and that his remaining to pursue it must be idle. "I am not of those to whom you can say: `I need such an one killed, name me the price at which you'll be his butcher."'
The Marquise wrung her hands in pretty mimicry of despair, and poured out soothing words, as one might pour oil upon stormy waters. The Seneschal sat in stolid silence, a half-scared spectator of this odd scene, what time the Marquise talked and talked until she had brought Fortunio back to some measure of subjection.
Such reasoning as she made use of she climaxed by an offer of no less a sum than a hundred pistoles. The captain licked his lips and pulled at his mustachios. For all his vaunted scorn of being a butcher at a price, now that he heard the price he seemed not half so scornful.
"Tell me again the thing that you need doing and the manner of it," said he, as one who was moved to reconsider. She told him, and when she had done he made a compromise.
"If I go upon this business, madame, I go not alone."
"Oh, as for that," said Marius, "it shall be as you will. Take what men you want with you."
"And hang with them afterwards, maybe," he sneered, his insolence returning. "The hundred pistoles would avail me little then. Look you, Monsieur de Condillac, and you, madame, if I go, I'll need to take with me a better hostage than the whole garrison of this place. I'll need for shield some one who will see to it that he is not hurt himself, just as I shall see to it that he is hurt before I am."
"What do you mean? Speak out, Fortunio," the Marquise bade him.
"I mean, madame, that I will go, not to do this thing, but to stand by and render help if help be needed. Let Monsieur de Condillac go, and I will go with him, and I will undertake to see to it that he returns unhurt and that we leave the other stark."
Both started, and the Seneschal leaned heavily upon the table. He was not, with all his faults, a man of blood, and this talk of butchery turned him sick and faint.
Vainly now did the Marquise seek to alter the captain's resolution; but in this she received a sudden check from Marius himself. He cut in upon her arguments to ask the captain:
"How can you promise so much? Do you mean that you and I must fall upon him? You forget that he will have men about him. A duel is one thing, a rough-and-tumble another, and we shall fare none so well in this, I'm thinking."
The captain closed one eye, and a leer of subtle cunning overspread his face.
"I've thought of that," said he. "Neither a duel nor a rough-and-tumble do I propose, but something bet
ween the two; something that shall seem a duel yet be a rough-and-tumble."
"Explain yourself."
"What further explanation does it ask? We come upon Monsieur le Marquis where his men are not. We penetrate, let us say, into his chamber. I turn the key in the door. We are alone with him and you provoke him. He is angry, and must fight you there and then. I am your friend; I must fill the office of second for both sides. You engage, and I stand aside and let you fight it out. You say he is indifferently skilled with the sword, and, in addition, that he has a fever. Thus you should contrive to put your steel through him, and a duel it will have been. But if by luck or skill he should have you in danger, I shall be at hand to flick in my sword at the right moment and make an opening through which you may send yours home."
"Believe me it were better—" began the Dowager. But Marius, who of a sudden was much taken with the notion, again broke in.
"Are you to be depended upon to make no mistake, Fortunio?"
"Per Bacco!" swore the ruffler. "A mistake must cost me a hundred pistoles. I think you may depend upon me there. If I err at all, it will be on the side of eagerness to see you make short work of him. You have my answer now, monsieur. If we talk all night, you shall not move me further. But if my proposal suits you, I am your man."
"And I yours, Fortunio," answered Marius, and there was a ring almost of exultation in his voice.
The Dowager looked from one to the other, as if she were weighing the men and satisfying herself that Marius ran no risk. She put a question or two to her son, another to the captain; then, seeming satisfied with what had been agreed, she nodded her head and told them they had best be stirring with the dawn.
"You will have light enough by half-past six. Do not delay later in taking the road. And see that you are back here by nightfall; I shall be anxious till you are returned."
She poured wine again for the captain, and Marius coming up to the table filled himself a glass, which he tossed off. The Marquise was speaking to Tressan.
"Will you not drink to the success of the venture?" she asked him, in a coaxing tone, her eyes upon his own. "I think we are like to see the end of our troubles now, monsieur, and Marius shall be lord both of Condillac and La Vauvraye."
And the gross, foolish Seneschal, under the spell of her magnificent eyes, slowly raised his cup to his lips and drank to the success of that murderous business. Marius stood still, a frown between his eyes haled thither by the mention of La Vauvraye. He might be winning it, as his mother said, but he would have preferred to have won it differently. Then the frown was smoothed away; a sardonic smile replaced it; another cup of wine he poured himself. Then, without word to any there, he turned on his heel and went from the room, a trifle unsteady in his gait, yet with such lines of purposefulness in the way he bore himself that the three of them stared after him in dull surprise.
CHAPTER XVI. THE UNEXPECTED
In her apartments in the Northern Tower Valerie had supped, and—to spare Monsieur de Garnache the full indignity of that part of the offices he was charged with—she had herself removed the cloth and set the things in the guard-room, where they might lie till morning. When that was done—and despite her protests, Garnache had insisted upon lending a hand the Parisian reminded her that it was already after nine, and urged her to make such preparations as incumbed her for their journey.
"My preparations are soon made," she assured him with a smile. "I need but what I may carry in a cloak."
They fell to talking of their impending flight, and they laughed together at the discomfiture that would be the Dowager's and her son's when, in the morning, they came to discover the empty cage. From that they passed on to talk of Valerie herself, of her earlier life at La Vauvraye, and later the conversation shifted to Garnache, and she questioned him touching the warring he had seen in early youth, and afterwards asked him for particulars of Paris—that wonderful city which to her mind was the only earthly parallel of Paradise—and of the life at Court.
Thus in intimate talk did they while away the time of waiting, and in the hour that sped they came, perhaps, to know more of each other than they had done hitherto. Intimate, indeed, had they unconsciously become already. Their singular position, locked together in that tower—a position utterly impossible under any but the conditions that attended it—had conduced to that good-fellowship, whilst the girl's trust and dependence upon the man, the man's observance of that trust, and his determination to show her that it had not been misplaced, had done the rest.
But to-night they seemed to have drawn nearer in spirit to each other, and that, maybe, it was that prompted Valerie to sigh, and in her sweet, unthinking innocence to say again:
"I am truly sorry, Monsieur de Garnache, that our sojourn here is coming to an end."
He was no coxcomb, and he set no false value on the words. He laughed for answer, as he rejoined:
"Not so am I, mademoiselle. Nor shall I know peace of mind again until this ill-omened chateau is a good three leagues or so behind us. Sh! What was that?"
He came instantly to his feet, his face intent and serious. He had been sitting at his ease in an armchair, over the back of which he had tossed the baldric from which his sword depended. The clang of the heavy door below, striking the wall as it was pushed open, had reached his ears.
"Can it be time already?" asked mademoiselle; yet a panic took her, and she blenched a little.
He shook his head.
"Impossible," said he; "it is not more than ten o'clock. Unless that fool Arsenio has blundered—" He stopped. "Sh!" he whispered. "Some one is coming here."
And suddenly he realized the peril that might lie in being found thus in her company. It alarmed him more than did the visit itself, so unusual at this hour. He saw that he had not time to reach the guard-room; he would be caught in the act of coming forth, and that might be interpreted by the Dowager or her son—if it should happen to be one or the other of them—as a hurried act of flight such as guilt might prompt. Perhaps he exaggerated the risk; but their fortunes at Condillac had reached a point where they must not be jeopardized by any chance however slight.
"To your chamber, mademoiselle," he whispered fearfully, and he pointed to the door of the inner room. "Lock yourself in. Quick! Sh!" And he signed frantically to her to go silently.
Swift and quietly as a mouse she glided from the room and softly closed the door of her chamber and turned the key in a lock, which Garnache had had the foresight to keep well oiled. He breathed more freely when it was done.
A step sounded in the guard-room. He sank without a rustle into the chair from which he had risen, rested his head against the back of it, closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and dissembled sleep.
The steps came swiftly across the guard-room floor, soft, as of one lightly shod; and Garnache wondered was it the mother or the son, just as he wondered what this ill-come visitor might be seeking.
The door of the antechamber was pushed gently open it had stood ajar—and under the lintel appeared the slender figure of Marius, still in his brown velvet suit as Garnache last had seen him. He paused a moment to peer into the chamber. Then he stepped forward, frowning to behold "Battista" so cosily ensconced.
"Ola there!" he cried, and kicked the sentry's outstretched legs, the more speedily to wake him. "Is this the watch you keep?"
Garnache opened his eyes and stared a second dully at the disturber of his feigned slumbers. Then, as if being more fully awakened he recognized his master, he heaved himself suddenly to his feet and bowed.
"Is this the watch you keep?" quoth Marius again, and Garnache, scanning the youth's face with foolishly smiling eyes, noted the flush on his cheek, the odd glitter in his handsome eyes, and even caught a whiff of wine upon his breath. Alarm grew in Garnache's mind, but his face maintained its foolish vacancy, its inane smile. He bowed again and, with a wave of the hands towards the inner chamber,
"La damigella a la," said he.
For all that Marius had no Ital
ian he understood the drift of the words, assisted as they were by the man's expressive gesture. He sneered cruelly.
"It would be an ugly thing for you, my ugly friend, if she were not," he answered. "Away with you. I shall call you when I need you." And he pointed to the door.
Garnache experienced some dismay, some fear even. He plied his wits, and he determined that he had best seem to apprehend from his gestures Marius's meaning; but apprehend it in part only, and go no further than the other side of that door.
He bowed, therefore, for the third time, and with another of his foolish grins he shuffled out of the chamber, pulling the door after him, so that Marius should not see how near at hand he stayed.
Marius, without further heeding him, stepped to mademoiselle's door and rapped on a panel with brisk knuckles.
"Who is there?" she inquired from within.
"It is I—Marius. Open, I have something I must say to you."
"Will it not keep till morning?"
"I shall be gone by then," he answered impatiently, "and much depends upon my seeing you ere I go. So open. Come!"
There followed a pause, and Garnache in the outer room set his teeth and prayed she might not anger Marius. He must be handled skillfully, lest their flight should be frustrated at the last moment. He prayed, too, that there might be no need for his intervention. That would indeed be the end of all—a shipwreck within sight of harbour. He promised himself that he would not lightly intervene. For the rest this news of Marius's intended departure filled him with a desire to know something of the journey on which he was bound:
Slowly mademoiselle's door opened. White and timid she appeared.
"What do you want, Marius?"
"Now and always and above all things the sight of you, Valerie," said he, and the flushed cheek, the glittering eye, and wine-laden breath were as plain to her as they had been to Garnache, and they filled her with a deeper terror. Nevertheless she came forth at his bidding.
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