I went in in amazement, and stopped in confusion. Before me, alone, just risen from a chair, with her face one moment pale, the next red with blushes, stood Mademoiselle de Cocheforêt. I cried out her name.
"M. de Berault!" she said, visibly trembling. "You did not expect to see me?"
"I expected to see no one so little, Mademoiselle," I answered, striving to recover my composure.
"Yet you might have thought that we should not utterly desert you," she replied, with a reproachful humility which went to my heart. "We should have been base indeed, if we had not made some attempt to save you. I thank Heaven that it has so far succeeded that that strange man has promised me your life. You have seen him?" she continued eagerly, and in another tone, while her eyes grew suddenly large with fear.
"Yes, Mademoiselle, I have seen him," I said. "And he has given me my life."
"And?"
"And sent me to imprisonment."
"For how long?" she whispered.
"I do not know," I answered. "I expect, during the King's pleasure."
She shuddered. "I may have done more harm than good," she murmured, looking at me piteously. "But I did it for the best. I told him all, and-yes, perhaps I did harm."
But to hear her accuse herself thus, when she had made this long and lonely journey to save me; when she had forced herself into her enemy's presence, and had, as I was sure she had, abased herself for me, was more than I could bear. "Hush, Mademoiselle, hush!" I said, almost roughly. "You hurt me. You have made me happy: and yet I wish that you were not here, where I fear you have few friends, but back at Cocheforêt. You have done more than I expected, and a hundred times more than I deserved. But I was a ruined man before this happened. I am no more now, but I am still that; and I would not have your name pinned to mine on Paris lips. Therefore, good-bye. God forbid I should say more to you, or let you stay where foul tongues would soon malign you."
She looked at me in a kind of wonder; then with a growing smile, "It is too late," she said gently.
"Too late?" I exclaimed. "How, Mademoiselle?"
"Because-do you remember, M. de Berault, what you told me of your love story, by Agen? That it could have no happy ending? For the same reason I was not ashamed to tell mine to the Cardinal. By this time it is common property."
I looked at her as she stood facing me. Her eyes shone, but they were downcast. Her figure drooped, and yet a smile trembled on her lips. "What did you tell him, Mademoiselle?" I whispered, my breath coming quickly.
"That I loved," she answered boldly, raising her clear eyes to mine. "And therefore that I was not ashamed to beg, even on my knees. Nor ashamed to be with my lover, even in prison."
I fell on my knees, and caught her hand before the last word passed her lips. For the moment I forgot King and Cardinal, prison and the future, all-all except that this woman, so pure and so beautiful, so far above me in all things, loved me. For the moment, I say. Then I remembered myself. I stood up and thrust her from me, in a sudden revulsion of feeling. "You do not know me," I said. "You do not know me. You do not know what I have done."
"That is what I do know," she answered, looking at me with a wondrous smile.
"Ah, but you do not," I cried. "And besides, there is this-this between us." And I picked up the Cardinal's letter. It had fallen on the floor.
She turned a shade paler. Then she said, "Open it! Open it! It is not sealed, nor closed."
I obeyed mechanically, dreading what I might see. Even when I had it open I looked at the finely scrawled characters with eyes askance. But at last I made it out. It ran thus: -
"The King's pleasure is, that M. de Berault, having mixed himself up with affairs of state, retire forthwith to the manor of Cocheforêt, and confine himself within its limits, until the King's pleasure be further known.
On the next day we were married. The same evening we left Paris, and I retraced, in her company, the road which I had twice traversed alone and in heaviness.
A fortnight later we were at Cocheforêt, in the brown woods under the southern mountains; and the great Cardinal, once more triumphant over his enemies, saw, with cold, smiling eyes, the world pass through his chamber. The flood-tide, which then set in, lasted thirteen years; in brief, until his death. For the world had learned its lesson, and was not to be deceived a second time. To this hour they call that day, which saw me stand for all his friends, "The day of Dupes."
COUNT HANNIBAL
CHAPTER I
CRIMSON FAVOURS
M. de Tavannes smiled. Mademoiselle averted her eyes, and shivered; as if the air, even of that close summer night, entering by the door at her elbow, chilled her. And then came a welcome interruption.
"Tavannes!"
"Sire!"
Count Hannibal rose slowly. The King had called, and he had no choice but to obey and go. Yet he hung a last moment over his companion, his hateful breath stirring her hair. "Our pleasure is cut short too soon, Mademoiselle," he said, in the tone and with the look she loathed. "But for a few hours only. We shall meet to-morrow. Or, it may be-earlier."
She did not answer, and "Tavannes!" the King repeated with violence. "Tavannes! Mordieu!" his Majesty continued, looking round furiously. "Will no one fetch him? Sacré nom, am I King, or a dog of a-"
"I come, sire!" Count Hannibal cried in haste. For Charles, King of France, Ninth of the name, was none of the most patient; and scarce another in the Court would have ventured to keep him waiting so long. "I come, sire; I come!" Tavannes repeated, as he moved from her side.
He shouldered his way through the circle of courtiers, who barred the road to the presence, and in part hid Mademoiselle from observation. He pushed past the table at which Charles and the Comte de Rochefoucauld had been playing primero, and at which the latter still sat, trifling idly with the cards. Three more paces, and he reached the King, who stood in the ruelle with Rambouillet and the Italian Marshal. It was the latter who, a moment before, had summoned his Majesty from his game.
Mademoiselle, watching him go, saw so much; so much, and the King's roving eyes and haggard face, and the four figures, posed apart in the fuller light of the upper half of the Chamber. Then the circle of courtiers came together before her, and she sat back on her stool. A fluttering, long-drawn sigh escaped her. Now, if she could slip out and make her escape! Now-she looked round. She was not far from the door; to withdraw seemed easy. But a staring, whispering knot of gentlemen and pages blocked the way; and the girl, ignorant of the etiquette of the Court and with no more than a week's experience of Paris, had not the courage to rise and pass alone through the group.
She had come to the Louvre this Saturday evening under the wing of Madame d'Yverne, her fiancé's cousin. By ill hap Madame had been summoned to the Princess Dowager's closet, and perforce had left her. Still, Mademoiselle had her betrothed, and in his charge had sat herself down to wait, nothing loth, in the great gallery, where all was bustle and gaiety and entertainment. For this, the seventh day of the fêtes, held to celebrate the marriage of the King of Navarre and Charles's sister-a marriage which was to reconcile the two factions of the Huguenots and the Catholics, so long at war-saw the Louvre as gay, as full, and as lively as the first of the fête days had found it; and in the humours of the throng, in the ceaseless passage of masks and maids of honour, guards and bishops, Swiss in the black, white and green of Anjou, and Huguenot nobles in more sombre habits, the country-bred girl had found recreation and to spare. Until gradually the evening had worn away and she had begun to feel nervous; and M. de Tignonville, her betrothed, placing her in the embrasure of a window, had gone to seek Madame.
She had waited for a time without much misgiving; expecting each moment to see him return. He would be back before she could count a hundred; he would be back before