Chapter 10

"You may be very sure of one thing, my friend," the duke observed. "I shall never give Lorance de Montluc to a white-livered flincher."

"The Duke of St. Quentin is not immortal," Lucas repeated. "I have missed him once, but I shall get him in spite of all."

"I am not sure about Lorance even then," said Mayenne, reflectively. "François de Brie is agitating himself about that young mistress. And he has not made any failures--as yet."

Lucas sprang to his feet.

"You swore to me I should have her."

"Permit me to remind you again that you have not brought me the price."

"I will bring you the price."

"E'en then," spoke Mayenne, with the smile of the cat standing over the mouse--"e'en then I might change my mind."

"Then," said Lucas, roundly, "there will be more than one dead duke in France."

Mayenne looked up at him as unmoved as if it were not in the power of mortal man to make him lose his temper. In stirring him to draw dagger, Lucas had achieved an extraordinary triumph. Yet I somehow thought that the man who had shown hot anger was the real man; the man who sat there quiet was the party leader.

He said now, evenly:

"That is a silly way to talk to me, Paul."

"It is the truth for once," Lucas made sullen answer.

So long as he could prick and irritate Mayenne he preserved an air of unshakable composure; but when Mayenne recovered patience and himself began to prick, Lucas's guard broke down. His voice rose a key, as it had done when I called him fool; and he burst out violently:

"Mort de dieu! monsieur, what am I doing your dirty work for? For love of my affectionate uncle?"

"It might well be for that. I have been your affectionate uncle, as you say."

"My affectionate uncle, you say? My hirer, my suborner! I was a Protestant; I was bred up by the Huguenot Lucases when my father cast off my mother and me to starve. I had no love for the League or the Lorraines. I was fighting in Navarre's ranks when I was made prisoner at Ivry."

"You were spying for Navarre. It was before the fight we caught you. You had been hanged and quartered in that gray dawn had I not recognized you, after twelve years, as my brother's son. I cut the rope from you and embraced you for your father's sake. You rode forth a cornet in my army, instead of dying like a felon on the gallows."

"You had your ends to serve," Lucas muttered.

"I took you into my household," Mayenne went on. "I let you wear the name of Lorraine. I did not deny you the hand of my cousin and ward, Lorance de Montluc."

"Deny me! No, you did not. Neither did you grant it me, but put me off with lying promises. You thought then you could win back the faltering house of St. Quentin by a marriage between your cousin and the Comte de Mar. Afterward, when my brother Charles dashed into Paris, and the people clamoured for his marriage with the Infanta, you conceived the scheme of forcing Lorance on him. But it would not do, and again you promised her to me if I could get you certain information from the royalist army. I returned in the guise of an escaped prisoner to Henry's camp to steal you secrets; and the moment my back was turned you listened to proposals from Mar again."

"Mar is not in the race now. You need not speak of him, nor of your brother Charles, either."

"No; I can well understand that my brother's is not a pleasant name in your ears," Lucas agreed. "You acknowledged one King Charles X; you would like well to see another Charles X, but it is not Charles of Guise you mean."

"I have no desire to be King of France," Mayenne began angrily.

"Have you not? That is well, for you will never feel the crown on your brows, good uncle! You are ground between the Spanish hammer and the Béarnais anvil; there will soon be nothing left of you but powder."

"Nom de dieu, Paul--" Mayenne cried, half rising; but Lucas, leaning forward on the table, riveting him with his keen eyes, went on:

"Do not mistake me, monsieur uncle. I think you in bad case, but I am ready to sink or swim with you. So long as the hand of Lorance is in your bestowing I am your faithful servant. I have not hesitated to risk the gallows to serve you. Last March I made my way here, disguised, to tell you of the king's coming change of faith and of St. Quentin's certain defection. I demanded then my price, my marriage with mademoiselle. But you put me off again. You sent me back to Mantes to kill you St. Quentin."

"Aye. And you have been about it these four months, and you have not killed him."

Lucas reddened with ire.

"I am no Jacques Clément to stab and be massacred. You cannot buy such a service of me, M. de Mayenne. If I do bravo's work for you I choose my own time and way. I brought the duke to Paris, delivered him up to you to deal with as it liked you. But you with your army at your back were afraid to kill him. You flinched and waited. You dared not shoulder the onus of his death. Then I, to help you out of your strait, planned to make his own son's the hand that should do the deed; to kill the duke and ruin his heir; to put not only St. Quentin but Mar out of your way--"

"Let us be accurate, Paul," Mayenne said. "Mar was not in my way; he was of no consequence to me. You mean, put him out of your way."

"He was in your way, too. Since he would not join the Cause he was a hindrance to it. You had as much to gain as I by his ruin."

"Something--not as much. I did not want him killed--I preferred him to Valère."

"Nor did I want him killed; so our views jibed well."

"Why not, then? Did you prefer him as your wife's lover to some other who might appear?"

"I do not intend that my wife shall have lovers," Lucas answered.

Mayenne broke into laughter.

"Nom d'un chien, where will you keep her? In the Bastille? Lorance and no lovers! Ho, ho!"

"I mean none whom she favours."

"Then why do you leave Mar alive? She adores the fellow," Mayenne said. I had no idea whether he really thought it or only said it to annoy Lucas. At any rate it had its effect. Lucas's brows were knotted; he spoke with an effort, like a man under stress of physical pain.

"I know she loves him now, and she would love him dead; but she would not love him a parricide."

"Is that your creed? Pardieu! you don't know women. The blacker the villain the more they adore him."

"I know it is true, monsieur," Lucas said smoothly, "that you have had successes."

Mayenne started forward with half an oath, changing to a laugh.

"So it is not enough for you to possess the fair body of Lorance; you must also have her love?"

"She will love me," Lucas answered uneasily. "She must."

"It is not worth your fret," Mayenne declared. "If she did, how long would it last? _Souvent femme varie_--that is the only fixed fact about her. If Lorance loves Mar to-day, she will love some one else to-morrow, and some one else still the day after to-morrow. It is not worth while disturbing yourself about it."

"She will not love any one else," Lucas said hoarsely.

Mayenne laughed.

"You are very young, Paul."

"She shall not love any one else! By the throne of heaven, she shall not!"

Mayenne went on laughing. If Lucas had for the moment teased him out of his equanimity, the duke had paid back the score a hundredfold. Lucas's face was seared with his passions as with the torture-iron; he clinched his hands together, breathing hard. On my side of the door I heard a sharp little sound in the darkness; mademoiselle had gritted her teeth.

"It is a little early to sweat over the matter," Mayenne said, "since mademoiselle is not your wife nor ever likely to become so."

"You refuse her to me?" Lucas cried, livid. I thought he would leap over the table at one bound on Mayenne. It occurred to the duke to take up his dagger.

"I promise her to you when you kill me St. Quentin. And you have not killed me St. Quentin but instead come airily to tell me the scheme--my scheme--is wrecked. Pardieu! it was never my scheme. I never advocated stolen pistoles and suborned witnesses and angered nephews and deceived sons and the rest of your cumbrous machinery. I would have had you stab him as he bent over his papers, and walk out of the house before they discovered him. But you had not the pluck for that; you must needs plot and replot to make some one else do your work. Now, after months of intriguing and waiting, you come to me to tell me you have failed. Morbleu! is there any reason why I should not have you kicked into the gutter, as no true son of the valourous Le Balafré?"

Lucas's hand went to his belt again; he made one step as if to come around the table. Mayenne's angry eye was on him but he did not move; and Lucas made no more steps. Controlling himself with an effort, he said:

"It was not my fault, monsieur. No man could have laboured harder or planned better than I. I have been diligent, I have been clever. I have made my worst enemy my willing tool--I have made Monsieur's own son my cat's-paw. I have left no end loose, no contingency unprovided for--and I am ruined by a freak of fate."

"I never knew a failure yet but what the fault was fate's," Mayenne returned.

"Call it accident, then, call it the devil, call it what you like!" Lucas cried. "I still maintain it was not my fault. Listen, monsieur."

He sat down again and began his story, striving as he talked to reconquer something of his old coolness.

"The thing was ruined by the advent of this boy, Mar's lackey I spoke of. You said he had not been here?"

"You may go to Lorance with that question," Mayenne answered; "I have something else to attend to than the intrigues of my wife's maids."

"He started hither; I thought some one would have the sense to keep him. Mordieu! I will find from Lorance whether she saw him."

He fell silent, gnawing his lip; I could see that his thought had travelled away from the plot to the sore subject of mademoiselle's affections.

"Well," said Mayenne, sharply, "what about your boy?"

It was a moment before Lucas answered. When he did he spoke low and hurriedly, so that I could scarce catch the words. I knew it was no fear of listeners that kept his voice down--they had shouted at each other as if there was no one within a mile. I guessed that Lucas, for all his bravado, took little pride in his tale, nor felt happy about its reception. I could catch names now and then, Monsieur's, M. Étienne's, Grammont's, but the hero of the tale was myself.

"You let him to the duke?" Mayenne cried presently.

At the harsh censure of his voice, Lucas's rang out with the old defiance:

"With Vigo at his back I did. Sangdieu! you have yet to make the acquaintance of St. Quentin's equery. A regiment of your lansquenets couldn't keep him out."

"Does he never take wine?" Mayenne asked, lifting his hand with shut fingers over the table and then opening them.

"That is easy to say, monsieur, sitting here in your own hôtel stuffed with your soldiers. But it was not so easy to do, alone in my enemy's house, when at the least suspicion of me they had broken me on the wheel."

"That is the rub!" Mayenne cried violently. "That is the trouble with all of you. You think more of the safety of your own skins than of accomplishing your work. Mordieu! where should I be to-day--where would the Cause be--if my first care was my own peril?"

"Then that is where we differ, uncle," Lucas answered with a cold sneer. "You are, it is well known, a patriot, toiling for the Church and the King of Spain, with never a thought for the welfare of Charles of Lorraine, Lord of Mayenne. But I, Paul of Lorraine, your humble nephew, lord of my brain and hands, freely admit that I am toiling for no one but the aforesaid Paul of Lorraine. I should find it most inconvenient to get on without a head on my shoulders, and I shall do my best to keep it there."

"You need not tell me that; I know it well enough," Mayenne answered. "You are each for himself, none for me. At the same time, Paul, you will do well to remember that your interest is to forward my interest."

"To the full, monsieur. And I shall kill you St. Quentin yet. You need not call me coward; I am working for a dearer stake than any man in your ranks."

"Well," Mayenne rejoined, "get on with your tale."

Lucas went on, Mayenne listening quietly, with no further word of blame. He moved not so much as an eyelid till Lucas told of M. le Duc's departure, when he flung himself forward in his chair with a sharp oath.

"What! by daylight?"

"Aye. He was afraid, after this discovery, of being set on at night."

"He went out in broad day?"

"So Vigo said. I saw him not," Lucas answered with something of his old nonchalance.

"Mille tonnerres du diable!" Mayenne shouted. "If this is true, if he got out in broad day, I'll have the head of the traitor that let him. I'll nail it over his own gate."

"It is not worth your fret, monsieur," Lucas said lightly. "If you did, how long would it avail? _Souvent homme trahie_; that is the only fixed fact about him. If they pass St. Quentin to-day, they will pass some one else to-morrow, and some one else still the day after."

Mayenne looked at him, half angry, half startled into some deeper emotion at this deft twisting of his own words.

"Souvent homme trahie, Mal habile qui s'y fie,"

he repeated musingly. He might have been saying over the motto of the house of Lorraine. For the Guises believed in no man's good faith, as no man believed in theirs.

"_Souvent homme trahie_," Mayenne said again, as if in the words he recognized a bitter verity. "And that is as true as King Francis's version. I suppose you will be the next, Paul."

"When I give up hope of Lorance," Lucas said bluntly.

I caught myself suddenly pitying the two of them: Mayenne, because, for all his power and splendour and rank next to a king's and ability second to none, he dared trust no man--not the son of his body, not his brother. He had made his own hell and dwelt in it, and there was no need to wish him any ill. And Lucas, perjured traitor, was farther from the goal of his desire than if we had slain him in the Rue Coupejarrets.

"What next? It appears you escaped the redoubted Vigo," Mayenne went on in his every-day tone; and the vision faded, and I saw him once more as the greatest noble and greatest scoundrel in France, and feared and hated him, and Lucas too, as the betrayer of my dear lord Étienne.

"Trust me for that."

"Then came you here?"

"Not at once. I tracked Mar and this Broux to Mar's old lodgings at the Three Lanterns. When I had dogged them to the door I came here and worked upon Lorance to write Mar a letter commanding his presence. For I thought that the night was yet young and to-morrow he might be out of my reach. Well, it appears he had not the courage to come but he sent the boy. I was not sorry. I thought I could settle him more quietly at the inn. The boy went back once and almost ran into me in the court, but he did not see me. I entered and asked for lodgings; but the fat old fool of a host put me through the catechism like an inquisitor, and finally declared the inn was full. I said I would take a garret; but it was no use. Out I must trudge. I did, and paid two men to get into a brawl in front of the house, that the inn people might run out to look. But instead they locked the gate and put up the shutters in the cabaret."

Mayenne burst out laughing.

"It was not your night, Paul."

"No," said Lucas, shortly.

"And what then? It did not take you till three o'clock to be put out of the inn."

"No," Lucas answered; "I spoke to you of the varlet Pontou with whom Grammont had quarrelled. He had shut him up in a closet of the house in the Rue Coupejarrets. After the fight in the court we all went our ways, forgetting him. So I paid the house a visit; I was afraid some one else might find him and he might tell tales."

"And will he tell tales?"

"No," said Lucas, "he will tell no tales."

"How about your spy in the Hôtel St. Quentin?"

"Martin, the clerk? Oh, I warned him off before I left," Lucas said easily. "He will lie perdu till we want him again. And Grammont, you see, is dead too. There is no direct witness to the thing but the boy Broux."

"That's as good as to say there is none," Mayenne answered; "for I have the boy."

XVI

_Mayenne's ward._

Lucas sprang up.

"You have him? Where?"

"Yes, I have him," Mayenne answered with his tantalizing slowness.

"Alive?"

"I suppose so. He had his flogging but I told them I was not done with him. I thought we might have a use for him. He is in the oratory there."

"Diable! Listening?" cried Lucas, as if a quick doubt of Mayenne's good faith to him struck his mind.

"Certainly not," Mayenne answered. "The door is bolted; he might be in the street for all he can hear. The wall was built for that."

"What will you do with him, monsieur?"

"We'll have him out," said Mayenne. Lucas, needing no second bidding, hastened down the room.

All this while mademoiselle, on the floor at my feet, had neither stirred nor whispered, as rigid as the statued Virgin herself. But now she rose and for one moment laid her hand on my shoulder with an encouraging pat; the next she flung the door wide just as Lucas reached the threshold.

He recoiled as from a ghost.

"Lorance!" he gasped, "Lorance!"

"Nom de dieu!" came Mayenne's shout from the back of the room. "What! Lorance!"

He caught up the candelabrum and strode over to us.

Mademoiselle stepped out into the council-room, I hanging back on the other side of the sill. She was as white as linen, but she lifted her head proudly. She had not the courage that knows no fear, but she had the courage that rises to the need. Crouching on the oratory floor she had been in a panic lest they find her. But in the moment of discovery she faced them unflinching.

"You spying here, Lorance!" Mayenne stormed at her.

"I did not come here to spy, monsieur," she answered. "I was here first, as you see. Your presence was as unlooked for by me as mine by you."

His next accusation brought the blood in scarlet flags to her pale cheeks; she made him no answer but burned him with her indignant eyes.

"Mordieu, monsieur!" Lucas cried. "This is Mlle. de Montluc."

"Then why did you come?" demanded Mayenne.

"Because I had done harm to the lad and was sorry," she said. "You defend me now, Paul, but you did not hesitate to make a tool of me in your cowardly schemes."

"It was kindly meant, mademoiselle," Lucas retorted. "Since I shall kill M. le Comte de Mar in any case, I thought it would pleasure you to have a word with him first."

I think it did not need the look she gave him to make him regret the speech. This Lucas was an extraordinary compound of shrewdness and recklessness, one separating from the other like oil and vinegar in a sloven's salad. He could plan and toil and wait, to an end, with skill and fortitude and patience; but he could not govern his own gusty tempers.

"You have been crying, Lorance," Mayenne said in a softer tone.

"For my sins, monsieur," she answered quickly. "I am grieved most bitterly to have been the means of bringing this lad into danger. Since Paul cozened me into doing what I did not understand, and since this is not the man you wanted but only his servant, will you not let him go free?"

"Why, my pretty Lorance, I did not mean to harm him," Mayenne protested, smiling. "I had him flogged for his insolence to you; I thought you would thank me for it."

"I am never glad over a flogging, monsieur."

"Then why not speak? A word from you and it had stopped."

She flushed red for very shame.

"I was afraid--I knew you vexed with me," she faltered. "Oh, I have done ill!" She turned to me, silently imploring forgiveness. There was no need to ask.

"Then you will let him go, monsieur? Alack that I did not speak before! Thank you, my cousin!"

"Of what did you suspect me? The boy was whipped for a bit of impertinence to you; I had no cause against him."

My heart leaped up; at the same time I scorned myself for a craven that I had been overcome by groundless terror.

"Then I have been a goose so to disturb myself," mademoiselle laughed out in relief. "You do well to rebuke me, cousin. I shall never meddle in your affairs again."

"That will be wise of you," Mayenne returned. "For I did mean to let the boy go. But since you have opened his door and let him hear what he should not, I have no choice but to silence him."

"Monsieur!" she gasped, cowering as from a blow.

"Aye," he said quietly. "I would have let him go. But you have made it impossible."

Never have I seen so piteous a sight as her face of misery. Had my hands been free, Mayenne had been startled to find a knife in his heart.

"Never mind, mademoiselle," I cried to her. "You came and wept over me, and that is worth dying for."

"Monsieur," she cried, recovering herself after the first instant of consternation, "you are degrading the greatest noble in the land! You, the head of the house of Lorraine, the chief of the League, the commander of the allied armies, debase yourself in stooping to take vengeance on a stable-boy."

"It is no question of vengeance; it is a question of safety," he answered impatiently. Yet I marvelled that he answered at all, since absolute power is not obliged to give an account of itself.

"Is your estate then so tottering that a stable-boy can overturn it? In that case be advised. Go hang yourself, monsieur, while there is yet time."

He flushed with anger, and this time he offered no justification. He advanced on the girl with outstretched hand.

"Mademoiselle, it is not my habit to take advice from the damsels of my household. Nor do I admit them to my council-room. Permit me then to conduct you to the staircase."

She retreated toward the threshold where I stood, still covering me as with a shield.

"Monsieur, you are very cruel to me."

"Your hand, mademoiselle."

She did not yield it to him but held out both hands, clasped in appeal.

"Monsieur, you have always been my loving kinsman. I have always tried to do your pleasure. I thought you meant harm to the boy because he was a servant to M. de Mar, and I knew that M. de St. Quentin, at least, had gone over to the other side. I did not know what you would do with him, and I could not rest in my bed because it was through me he came here. Monsieur, if I was foolish and frightened and indiscreet, do not punish the lad for my wrong-doing."

Mayenne was still holding out his hand for her.

"I wish you sweet dreams, my cousin Lorance."

"Monsieur," she cried, shrinking back till she stood against the door-jamb, "will you not let the boy go?"

"How will you look to-morrow," he said with his unchanged smile, "if you lose all your sleep to-night, my pretty Lorance?"

"A reproach to you," she answered quickly. "You will mark my white cheeks and my red eyes, and you will say, 'Now, there is my little cousin Lorance, my good ally Montluc's daughter, and I have made her cry her eyes blind over my cruelty. Her father, dying, gave her to me to guard and cherish, and I have made her miserable. I am sorry. I wish I had not done it.'"

"Mademoiselle," the duke repeated, "will you get to your bed?"

She did not stir, but, fixing him with her brilliant eyes, went on as if thinking aloud.

"I remember when I was a tiny maid of five or six, and you and your brother Guise (whom God rest!) would come to our house. You would ask my father to send for me as you sat over your wine, and I would run in to kiss you and be fed comfits from your pockets. I thought you the handsomest and gallantest gentleman in France, as indeed you were."

"You were the prettiest little creature ever was," Mayenne said abruptly.