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