"No. 101"

Monsieur Martin

A Romance Of The Great Swedish War

Crown octavo. (By mail, $1.35.) _Net_, $1.20

“No. 101”

Illustrated. Crown octavo. $1.50.

[Illustration]

G. P. Putnam’s Sons _New York_ _London_

[Illustration: “The Vicomte henceforth cannot without harming himself visit publicly a _bourgeoise_ grisette.”

(_See page 158._)]

“No. 101”

BY Wymond Carey Author of “Monsieur Martin,” “For the White Rose,” etc.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1905

Copyright, 1905 By G. P. Putnam’S Sons

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To My Mother

“But still, Beloved, the best of all my bringings Belongs to you.”

Note

THERE was a real “No. 101.” Unpublished MS. despatches now in the Record Office of the British Museum reveal the interesting fact that on more than one occasion the British Government obtained important French state secrets through an agent known to the British ministers as “No. 101.” Who this mysterious agent was, whether it was a man or a woman, why and how he or she so successfully played the part of a traitor, have not, so far as is known to the present writer, been discovered by historians or archivists. The references in the confidential correspondences supply no answer to such questions. If the British ministers knew all the truth, they kept it to themselves, and it perished with them. Doubtless there were good reasons for strict secrecy. But it is more than possible that they themselves did not know, that throughout they simply dealt with a cipher whose secret they never penetrated. It is, however, clear that “No. 101” was in a position to discover some of the most intricate designs in the policy of the French Court, and that the British Government, through its agents, was satisfied of the genuineness of the secrets for which it paid handsomely.

On the undoubted existence of this mysterious cipher, and the riddles that that existence suggests, the writer has based his historical romance.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. “No. 101” 1

II. One-Fourth Of A Secret And Three-Fourths Of A Mystery 12

III. A Fair Huntress And The Girl With The Spotted Cow 26

IV. A Lover’S Trick 39

V. The Presumption Of A Beardless Chevalier 53

VI. The Wise Woman Of “The Cock With The Spurs Of Gold” 66

VII. The King’S Handkerchief 78

VIII. The VivandièRe Of Fontenoy 95

IX. At The Charcoal-Burner’S Cabin In The Woods 109

X. Fontenoy 121

XI. In The Salon De La Paix At Versailles 137

XII. A Royal Grisette 149

XIII. What The Vicomte De NéRac Saw In The Secret Passage 160

XIV. Two Pages In The Book Of Life 171

XV. André Is Thrice Surprised 182

XVI. The Fountain Of Neptune 196

XVII. Denise’S Answer 207

XVIII. The Heart Of The Pompadour 220

XIX. The Flower Girl Of “The Gallows And The Three Crows” 231

XX. At Home With A Cipher 244

XXI. The King’S Commission 253

XXII. On Secret Service 264

XXIII. The King Faints 274

XXIV. A Wished-For Miracle 285

XXV. The Fall Of The Dice 297

XXVI. The Thief Of The Secret Despatch 308

XXVII. The Chevalier Makes His Last Appearance 319

XXVIII. The Carrefour De St. Antoine No. 3 330

XXIX. André Fails To Decide 339

XXX. Denise Has To Decide For The Last Time 354

XXXI. Fortune’S Banter 366

Illustrations

Page

“THE VICOMTE HENCEFORTH CANNOT WITHOUT HARMING HIMSELF VISIT PUBLICLY A _BOURGEOISE_ GRISETTE” _Frontispiece_

Statham Sat Pondering, His Eyes Riveted On The Crossed Daggers 6

“IS THAT LETTER TO THE COMTESSE DES FORGES, ONE OF MY FRIENDS--MY FRIENDS, _MON DIEU!_--YOURS, OR IS IT NOT?” 48

“Fair Archeress,” He Said, “Surely The Shafts You Loose Are Mortal” 88

YES, THAT IS MONSEIGNEUR LE MARÉCHAL DE SAXE, CARRIED IN A WICKER LITTER, FOR HE CANNOT SIT HIS HORSE 124

Madame De Pompadour 188

The Curtain Was Sharply Flung Aside, And He Saw Denise 204

YVONNE VERY MODESTLY DISENGAGED THE ARM WHICH FOR THE FIRST TIME HE HAD SLIPPED ABOUT HER SUPPLE WAIST 234

YVONNE WITH A FINGER TO HER LIPS, HOLDING HER PETTICOATS OFF THE FLOOR, STOLE IN, AND BEHIND HER A STRANGER 268

The Candle Fell From Her Hand. “Gone!” She Muttered Feebly, “Gone!” 320

“YVONNE, OF COURSE; YVONNE OF THE SPOTLESS ANKLES,” SHE LIFTED HER DRESS A FEW INCHES 350

No. 101.

No. 101

Chapter I

“No. 101”

ONE evening in the January of 1745, the critical year of Fontenoy and of the great Jacobite rising, a middle-aged gentleman, the private secretary of a Secretary of State, was working as usual in the room of a house in Cleveland Row. The table at which he sat was littered with papers, but at this precise moment he had leaned back in his chair with a puzzled expression and his left hand in perplexity pushed his wig awry.

“Extraordinary,” he muttered, “most extraordinary.” The remark was apparently caused by an official letter in his other hand--a letter marked “Most Private,” which came from The Hague, and the passage which he had just read ran:

“_I have the honour to submit to you the following important communication in cipher, received, through our agent at Paris, from ‘No. 101,’_” etc.

On the table lay the cipher communication together with a decoded version which the secretary now studied for the third time. In explicit language the despatch supplied detailed information as to certain recent highly confidential negotiations between the Jacobite party in Paris and the French King, Louis XV., a revelation in short of the most weighty state secrets of the French Government.

“‘No. 101,’” the secretary murmured, scratching his head, “always ‘No. 101.’ It is marvellous, incredible. How the devil can it be done?”

But there was no answer to this question, save the fact which provoked it--that closely ciphered paper with its disquieting information so curiously and mysteriously obtained.

“Ah.” He jumped up and hurriedly straightened his wig. “Good-evening to you.”

The new-comer was a man of about five-and-thirty, tall, finely built, and of a muscular physique, with a face of considerable power. Most noticeable, perhaps, in his appearance was his air of disciplined reserve, emphasised in his strong mouth and chin, but almost belied by the glow in his large, dark eyes, which looked you through and through with a strangely watchful innocence.

“There is work to be done, sir?” he asked as he took the chair offered.

“Exactly. To-day we have received most gratifying and surprising information from our friend ‘No. 101’--and we have the promise of more.”

“Yes.” The brief monosyllable was spoken almost softly, but the dark eyes gleamed, as they roamed over the room.

“The communications from ‘No. 101’ have begun again,” the secretary pursued; “that in itself is interesting. The Secretary of State therefore desired me to send at once for you, the most trustworthy secret agent we have. In a very few minutes Captain Statham of the First Foot Guards will be here--”

“Sent, I think, from the Low Countries at the request of our agents at The Hague?”

“Ah, I see you are as well informed as usual. You are quite right. Are you,” he laughed, “ever wrong?”

The spy paused. “The communications then from ‘No. 101’ concern the military operations?” was all he said.

“Not yet. But,” he almost laughed, “we have a promise they will. You know the situation. This will be a critical year in Flanders. Great Britain and her allies propose to make a great, an unprecedented effort; his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland will have the supreme command. Unhappily the French under the Maréchal de Saxe apparently propose to make even greater efforts. With such a general as the Maréchal against us we cannot afford to neglect any means, fair or foul, by which his Royal Highness can defeat the enemy.”

“Then you wish me to assist ‘No. 101’ in betraying the French plans to our army under the Duke of Cumberland?”

“Not quite,” the other replied; “we cannot spare you as yet. But you have had dealings with this mysterious cipher, and we ask you to place all your experience at the disposal of Captain Statham.”

“I agree most willingly,” was the prompt answer.

“This curious ‘No. 101,’” continued the secretary slowly, “you do not know personally, I believe?”

The other was looking at him carefully but with a puzzled air.

“I ask because--because I am deeply curious.”

“I am as curious as yourself, sir. ‘No. 101’ is to me simply a cipher number,--nothing more, nothing less.”

“I feared so,” said the secretary. “But is it not incredible? The information sent always proves to be accurate, but there is never a trace of how, why, or by whom it is obtained.”

“That is so. Secrecy is the condition on which alone we get it. We pay handsomely--we obtain the truth--and we are left in the dark.”

“Shall we ever discover the secret, think you?”

“I am sure not.” The tone was conviction itself.

At this moment Captain Statham was ushered in, a typical English gentleman and officer, ruddy of countenance, blue-eyed, frankness and courage in every line of his handsome face and of his athletic figure.

“Captain Statham--Mr. George Onslow of the Secret Service--” the secretary began promptly, adding with a laugh as the two shook hands: “Ah, I see you have met before. I am not surprised. Mr. Onslow knows everybody and everything worth knowing.” He gathered up a bundle of papers. “That is the communication from ‘No. 101’ and the covering letter. And now, gentlemen, I will leave you to your business.” He bowed and left the room.

Onslow took the chair he had vacated and for a quarter of an hour Captain Statham and he chatted earnestly on the position of affairs in the Low Countries, and the war then raging from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, on the vast efforts being made by the French for a great campaign in the coming spring, the military genius of the famous Maréchal de Saxe, the Austrian and Dutch allies of Great Britain, and the new English royal commander-in-chief who was shortly to leave to take over the work of saving Flanders from the arms of Louis XV. Onslow then briefly explained what the Secret Service agents of the Duke of Cumberland were to expect and why.

“Communications,” he wound up, “from this mysterious spy and traitor, ‘No. 101,’ invariably come like bolts from the blue. They are, of course, always in cipher and they will reach you by the most innocent hands--a peasant, a lackey, a tavern wench--sometimes you will simply find them, say, under your pillow, or in your boots. No one can tell how they get there. But never neglect them, however strange or unusual their contents may be, for they are never wrong--never! The genuine ones you will recognise by this mark--” he took up the ciphered paper and put his fingers on a sign--“two crossed daggers and the figures 101 written in blood--you see--so”:

[Illustration]

Captain Statham stared at the sign, entranced.

“A soldier,” Onslow remarked with his slow smile, “can always distinguish blood from red ink--is it not so?” Statham nodded. “Remember, then, those crossed daggers with the figures in blood are the only genuine mark. All others are forgeries--reject them unhesitatingly. Let me show it you again.” He produced from his pocket-book a paper with the design in the corner, which, when compared with the one on the table, corresponded exactly.

“I warn you,” Onslow added, “because the existence of this ‘No. 101’ is becoming known to the French--they suspect treachery--their Secret Service is clever and they may attempt to deceive you. As they do not know the countersign, though they may have guessed at the treachery of ‘No. 101’ they cannot really hoodwink you. Cipher papers which come in the name of ‘101’ without that remarkable signature are simply a _nom de guerre_, of politics, of love, of anything you like, but they are either a forgery or a trap; so put them in the fire.”

[Illustration: Statham sat pondering, his eyes riveted on the crossed daggers.]

Statham sat pondering, his eyes riveted on the crossed daggers. “You, sir,” he began, “have had dealings with this mysterious person. Is it a man or a woman?”

“Ah!” Onslow laughed gently. “Every one asks that, every man at least. I cannot answer; no one, indeed, can. My opinion? Well, I change it every month. But these are the facts: It is absolutely certain that the traitor insists on high, very high pay; absolutely certain that he or she has access to the very best society in Paris and at the Court, and is at home in the most confidential circles of the King and his ministers. We have even had documents from the private cabinet of Louis XV. Furthermore, the traitor can convey the information in such a way as to baffle detection. If it is a woman she is a very remarkable one; if it be a man he is one who controls important women. Perhaps it is both. Such knowledge, so peculiar, so accurate, so extensive, such skill and such ingenuity scarcely seem to be within the powers of any individual man or woman.”

“Every word you say sharpens my surprise and my curiosity.”

“Yes, and every transaction you will have with the cipher will sharpen it more and more. I have been fifteen years in the Secret Service, but this business is to-day as much a puzzle as it ever was, for ‘No. 101’ has taught me a very important secret, one unknown even to the French King’s ministers, which, so jealously guarded as it is, may never be discovered in the King’s lifetime or at all. Can you really believe that Louis, while professing to act through his ministers, has stealthily built up a little secret service of his own whose work is to spy on those ministers, on his ambassadors, generals, and their agents, to receive privately instructions wholly different from what the King has officially sanctioned, and frequently directly to thwart, check, annul, and defeat by intrigue and diplomacy the official policy of their sovereign?”

“Is it possible?”

“It is a fact,” Onslow said, emphatically. “But the King, ‘No. 101,’ you and I and one or two others alone know it. Let me give you a proof. To-day officially Louis through his ministers has disavowed the Jacobites. The ministers believe their master is sincere; many of them regret it, but their instructions are explicit. In truth, through those private agents I spoke of, the King is encouraging the Jacobites in every way and is actually thwarting the steps and the policy which he has officially and publicly commanded.”

“And the ministers are ignorant of this?”

“Absolutely. But mark you, unless the King is very careful, some day there will come an awkward crisis. His Majesty will be threatened with the disclosure of this secret policy which has his royal authority, but which gives the lie to his public policy, equally authentic. And unless he can suppress the first he must be shown to be doubly a royal liar--not to dwell on the consequences to France.”

“What a curious king!” Statham ejaculated.

“Curious!” Onslow laughed softly; “more than curious, because no one knows the real Louis. The world says he is an ignorant, superstitious, indolent, extravagant, heartless dullard in a crown who has only two passions--hunting and women. It is true; he is the prince of hunters and the emperor of rakes. But he is also a worker, cunning, impenetrable, obstinate, remorseless.”

“But why does he play such a dangerous game?”

“God knows. The real Louis no man has discovered, or woman either; he is known only to the Almighty or the devil. But you observe what chances this double life gives to our friend ‘No. 101.’”

Statham began to pace up and down. “What are the traitor’s motives?” he demanded, abruptly.

“Ah, there you beat me.” Onslow rose and confronted him. “My dear sir, a traitor’s motives may be gold, or madness, ambition, love, jealousy, revenge, singly or together, but above all love and revenge.”

Statham made an impatient gesture. “I would give my commission,” he exclaimed, “to know the meaning of this mystery.”

A sympathetic gleam lingered in Onslow’s eyes as he calmly scrutinised the young officer. “Ah,” he said, almost pityingly, “you begin to feel the spell of this mystery wrapped in a number, the spell of ‘No. 101,’ the fatal spell.”

“Fatal?” Statham took him up sharply.

“Yes. I must warn you. Every single person who, in his dealings with this cipher, has got near to the heart of the truth has so far met with a violent end. It is not pleasant, but it is a fact. And the explanation is easy. Those who might betray the truth are removed by accident or design, some by this method, some by that. They pass into the silence of the grave, perhaps just when they could have revealed what they had discovered.” He paused, for Statham was visibly impressed. “Really there is no danger,” he added; “but I say as earnestly as I can, because you are young, and life is sweet for the young, for God’s sake stifle your curiosity, resist the spell--that fatal spell. Take the information as it comes, and ask no questions, push no inquiries, however tempting and easy the path to success seems, or, as sure as I stand here, His Majesty King George the Second will lose a promising and gallant officer.”

Statham walked away and resumed his seat. “And you, Mr. Onslow?” he demanded, looking up with the profoundest interest.

“Do I practise what I preach? Well, I am a spy by profession: to some men such a life is everything--it is, at least, to me. But I do not conceal from myself that if my curiosity overpowers me my hour for silence, too, will come--the silence of the unknown grave in an unknown land.”

“Then is no one ever to know?” Statham muttered with childish petulance.

“Probably not. A hundred years hence the secret that baffles you and me will baffle our successors.”

Statham’s heels tapped on the floor. “Perhaps,” he pronounced, slowly, “perhaps the truth is well worth the price that is paid for it--death and the silence of the grave.”

Onslow stared at him. His eyes gleamed curiously as if they were fixed on visions known only to the inner mind. “Perhaps,” he repeated gravely. “But really,” he added, with a sudden lightness, “there is no one to persuade us it is so. Come, Captain Statham, you have not forgotten supper, I hope, and that I propose to introduce you to-night to the most seductive enchantress in London?”

“No, indeed. All day I have been hungering for that supper. In the Low Countries we do not get suppers presided over by ladies such as you have described to me.”

“In the French army they have both the ladies and the suppers,” Onslow replied, laughing. “And, my dear Captain, to the victors of the spring will fall the spoils. To-night shall be a foretaste, and if my enchantress does not make you forget ‘No. 101,’ I despair of the gallantry of British officers.”

He locked up the papers, chatting all the time, and then the two gentlemen went out together.

Chapter II

One-Fourth Of A Secret And Three-Fourths Of A Mystery

FOR some minutes the pair walked in silence, as if each was still brooding on the mysterious cipher whose treachery to France had brought them together. But presently Statham touched Onslow on the arm. “Tell me,” he said, “something of this enchantress. I am equally curious about her.”

“And I know very little,” Onslow replied. “Her mother, if you believe scandal, was a famous Paris flower girl, who was mistress in turn to half the young rakes of the _noblesse_; her father is supposed to have been an English gentleman. Your eyes will tell you she is gifted with a singular beauty, which is her only dowry. Gossip says that she makes that dowry go a long way, for she has two passions, flowers and jewels.”

“And she resides in London?”

“She resides nowhere,” Onslow answered with his slow smile; “she is here to-day and away to-morrow. I have met her in Paris, in Brussels, Vienna, Rome. She talks French as easily as she talks English, and wherever she is her apartments are always haunted by the men of pleasure, and by the _grand monde_. Women you never meet there, for she is not a favourite with her own sex, which is not surprising.”

“Pardon,” Statham asked, “but is she--is she, too, in the Secret Service?”

“God bless my soul! No; we don’t employ ladies with a passion for jewels. It would expose them and us to too many temptations. And, besides, politics are the one thing this goddess abhors. Eating, drinking, the pleasures of the body, poetry, philosophy, romance, the arts, and the pleasures of the mind she adores; luxury and jewels she covets, but politics, no! They are a forbidden topic. For me her friendship is convenient, for the politicians are always in her company. When will statesmen learn,” he added, “that making love to a lady such as she is is more powerful in unlocking the heart and unsealing the lips than wine?” “And her name?”

“She has not got one. ‘Princess’ we call her and she deserves it, for she is fit to adorn the Palace of Versailles.”

“Perhaps,” said Statham, “she will some day.”

“Not a doubt of it--if Louis will only pay enough.”

They had reached the house. Statham noticed that Onslow neither gave his own nor asked for his hostess’s name. He showed the footman a card, which was returned, and immediately they were ushered into two handsome apartments with doors leading the one into the other, and in the inner of the two they found some half-dozen gentlemen talking. Three of them wore stars and ribbons, but all unmistakably belonged to that _grand monde_ of which Onslow had spoken. From behind the group the lady quietly walked forward and curtsied deferentially to Statham, who felt her eyes resting on his with no small interest as his companion kissed her hand. The secret agent had not exaggerated. This woman was indeed strikingly impressive. About the middle height, with a slight but exquisitely shaped figure, at first sight she seemed to flash on you a vision composed of dark masses of black hair, large and liquid blue eyes, and a dazzling skin, cream-tinted. Dressed in a flowing robe of dark red, she wore in her hair blood-red roses, while blood-red roses twined along her corsage, which was cut, not without justification, daringly open. Her bare arms, her theatrical manner, and the profusion of jewels which glittered in the candle-light suggested a curious vulgarity, which was emphasised by her speech, for her English, spoken with the ease of a native, betrayed in its accent rather than its words evidence of low birth. Yet all this was forgotten in the mysterious charm which clung about her like a subtle and intoxicating perfume, and as Statham in turn kissed her jewelled hand, a fleeting something in her eyes, at once pathetic and vindictive, shot with a thrill through him.

“An English officer and a friend of Mr. Onslow,” she remarked, “is always amongst my most welcome guests,” and then she turned to the elderly fop in the star and ribbon and resumed her conversation.

Statham studied her carefully. Superb health, a superb body, and a reckless disregard of convention she certainly had, but the more he observed her the more certain he felt that that wonderful skin as well as those lustrous blue eyes and alluring eyebrows owed more to art than to nature. In fact every pose of her head, every line in her figure, the scandalous freedom of her attire were obviously intended to puzzle as much as to attract--and they succeeded. She was the incarnation of a fascination and of a puzzle.

Two more gentlemen had arrived, and Statham was an interested spectator of what followed.

“Princess,” the new-comer said, “I present to you my very good friend the Vicomte de Nérac.”

The lady turned sharply. Was it the visitor’s name or face which for the moment disturbed her equanimity?--yet apparently neither the Vicomte nor she had met before.

“Welcome, Vicomte,” she said, so swiftly recovering herself that Statham alone noticed her surprise, if it was surprise. “And may I ask how a Capitaine-Lieutenant of the Chevau-légers de la Garde de la Maison du Roi happens to be in England when his country is at war?”

“You know me, Madame!” the Vicomte stammered, looking at her in a confusion he could not conceal.

The lady laughed. “Every one who has been in Paris,” she retorted, “knows the Chevau-légers de la Garde, and the most famous of their officers is Monsieur the Vicomte de Nérac, famous, I would have these gentlemen be aware, for his swordsmanship, for his gallantries--and for his military exploits which won him the Croix de St. Louis.”

“You do me too much honour, Madame,” the Vicomte replied.

“As a woman I fear you, as a lover of gallant deeds and as a fencer myself I adore you, as do all the ladies whether at Versailles or in Les Halles,” she laughed again. “But you have not answered my question. Why are you in England, Monsieur le Vicomte?”

“Nine months ago I had the misfortune to be taken prisoner, Madame, but in three weeks I return to my duty as a soldier and a noble of France.” He bowed to the company with that incomparable air of self-confidence tempered by the dulcet courtesy which was the pride of Versailles and the despair of the rest of the world.

“And here,” the lady answered, “is another gentleman who also shortly returns to his duty. Captain Statham of the First Foot Guards, Monsieur le Vicomte de Nérac of the Chevau-légers de la Garde. Perhaps before long you will meet again, and this time not in a woman’s salon.”

“When Captain Statham is taken prisoner,” the Vicomte remarked, smiling, “I can assure him Paris is not less pleasant than London, but till then he and I must agree to cross swords in a friendly manner for the favours of yourself, Princess.”

“And you think you will win, Vicomte?”

“It is impossible we can lose,” the Vicomte replied. “Not even the gallantry of the First Foot Guards can save the allies from the genius of Monseigneur the Maréchal de Saxe.”

“We will see,” Statham responded gruffly.

“Without a doubt, sir.” The Vicomte bowed.

Statham stared at him stolidly. He could hardly have guessed that this exquisitely dressed gentleman with the slight figure and the innocently grand air was really a soldier, and above all an officer in perhaps the most famous cavalry regiment of all Europe, every trooper in which, like the Vicomte himself, was a noble of at least a hundred years’ standing, but he was reluctantly compelled to confess that the stranger was undeniably handsome, and his manner spoke of an ease and a distinction beyond criticism. His smile, too, was singularly seductive in its sweetness and strength, and his brown eyes could glitter with marvellous and unspeakable thoughts. From that minute he seemed to imagine that his hostess belonged to him: he placed himself next her at supper, he absorbed her conversation, and, still more annoying, she willingly consented. Statham in high dudgeon had to listen to the polite small talk of his English neighbour, conscious all the while that at his elbow the Vicomte was chattering away to “the princess” in the gayest French. And after supper he along with the others was driven off to play cards while the pair sat in the other room alone and babbled ceaselessly in that infernal foreign tongue.

“The Vicomte,” Onslow said coolly, “has made another conquest.”

“It is true, then, that he is a fine swordsman as well as a rake?”

“Quite true. His victims amongst the ladies are as numerous as his victims of the sword. It is almost as great an honour for a man to be run through by André de Nérac as it is for a woman to succumb to his wooing. Do not forget he is a Chevau-léger de la Garde and a Croix de St. Louis.”

Statham grunted.

“It is not fair,” Onslow pursued, throwing down the dice-box. “You are not enjoying yourself,” and he rose and went into the other room. “Gentlemen,” he said, on his return, “I have persuaded our princess to add to our pleasure by dancing. In ten minutes she will be at your service.”

The cards were instantly abandoned and while they waited the Vicomte strolled in and walked up to Onslow.

“That is a strange lady,” he remarked, “a very strange lady. She knows Paris and all my friends as well as I do; yet I have never so much as seen her there.”

“Yes,” Onslow answered, looking him all over, “she is very strange.”

“And the English of Madame is, I think, not the English of the quality?” Onslow nodded. “That, too, is curious, for her French is our French, the French of the _noblesse_. She says her father was an English gentleman, and her mother a Paris flower girl, which is still more curious, for the flower girls of Paris do not talk as we talk on the staircase Des Ambassadeurs at Versailles, or as my mother and the women of my race talk. Mon Dieu!” he broke off suddenly, for the princess had tripped into the room, turning it by the magic of her saucy costume into a flower booth in the market of Paris, and without ado she began to sing a gay _chansonnette_, waving gently to and fro her basket of flowers:

“Quand on a su toucher Le cœur d’une bergère On peut bien s’assurer Du plaisir de lui faire. Et zon, zon, zon, Lisette, ma Lisette; Et zon, zon, zon, Lisette, ma Lisou.”

And the dance into which without a word of warning she broke was something to stir the blood of both English and French by its invincible mixture of coquetry, lithe grace, and audacious abandon, its swift transitions from a mocking stateliness and a tempting reserve to its intoxicating, almost devilish revelation of uncontrolled passion; and all the while that heartless, airy song twined itself into every pirouette, every pose, and was translated into the wickedest provocation by the twinkling flutter of her short skirt and the flashes of the jewelled buckles in her saucy shoes. To Statham as to André de Nérac the princess had vanished, and all that remained was a witch in woman’s form, a witch with black hair crowned with crimson roses and a cream-tinted skin gleaming white against those roses at her breast.

“To the victor,” she cried, picking a nosegay from her basket, and kissing it, “to the victor of the spring!” and André and Statham found themselves hit in the face by the flowers. The salon rang with “Bravos” and “Huzzas” until every one woke to the discovery that the dancer had disappeared.

When she returned she was once more in her splendid robes and frigidly cynical as before.

“I am tired, gentlemen,” she said; “I must beg you to say good-night.” She held out her hand to the Vicomte. “_Au revoir!_” she said, permitting her eyes to study his olive-tinted cheeks and the homage of his gaze.

“Your prisoner, Madame,” he said, “your prisoner for always!”

“Or I yours?” she flashed back, swiftly.

And now she was speaking to Statham. “We shall meet again,” she said. “Yes, we shall meet again, Captain.”

“Not in London, Madame,” he answered.

“Oh, no! But I trust our meeting will be as pleasant for you as to-night has been for me.”

“It cannot fail to be.”

“Ah, you never know. Women are ever fickle and cruel,” she answered, and once again as he kissed the jewelled fingers Statham was conscious of that pathetic, pantherish light in her great eyes, which made him at once joyous, sad, and fearful.

When they had all gone the woman stood gazing at her bare shoulders in the long mirror. “_Fi, donc!_” she muttered with a shrug of disgust, and she tore in two one of the cards with which the gamblers had been playing, allowing the fragments to trickle carelessly down as though the gust of passion which had moved her was already spent. Then she drew the curtains across the door between the two rooms, and remained staring into space. “André Pierre Auguste Marie, Vicomte de Nérac,” she murmured, “Seigneur des Fleurs de Lys, Vicomte de--” she smelled one of her roses, the fingers of her other hand tapping contemplatively on her breast. A faint sigh crept into the stillness of the empty, glittering room.

Then she flung herself on the low divan, put her arms behind her head, and lay gazing in front of her. The door was opening gently, but she did not stir. A man walked in noiselessly, halted on the threshold, and looked at her for fully two minutes. She never moved. It was George Onslow. He walked forward and stood beside her. She let her eyes rest on him with absolute indifference.

“There is your pass,” he said, in a low voice in which emotion vibrated.

“I thank you.” She made no effort to take it, but simply turned her head as if to see him the better.

“Is that all my reward?” he demanded. “It was not easy to get that pass.”

“No?” She pulled a rose from her breast and sniffed it. “I believe you. I can only thank you again.”

He dropped the paper into her lap, where she let it lie.

“By God!” he broke out, “I wish I knew whether you are more adorable as you are now on that sofa, or as you were dancing in that flower girl’s costume.”

“Most men in London prefer the short petticoats,” she remarked, moving the diamond buckle on her shoe into the light, “but in Paris they have better taste, for only a real woman can make herself adorable in this”--she gave a little kick to indicate the long, full robe. “Think about it, _mon ami_, and let me know to-morrow which you really like the better.”

“And to-night?”

She stooped forward to adjust her slipper. “To-night,” she repeated, “I must decide whether I dislike you more as the lover of this afternoon, the man of pleasure of this evening, or the spy of to-morrow.”

He put a strong hand on her shoulder. In an instant she had sprung to her feet.

“No!” she cried, imperiously, “I have had enough for one day of men who would storm a citadel by insolence. Leave me!”

“You are expecting some one?”

“And if I am?”

“Don’t torture me. Tell me who it is.”

“Perhaps you will have to wait till dawn or longer before you see him.”

“I will kill him, that is all,--kill him when he leaves this house.”

“I have no objection to that,” was the smiling answer. “One rake less in the world is a blessing for all women, honest or--” she fingered her rose caressingly.

“Is it one of those who were here to-night!” he demanded. “Perhaps that infernal libertine of a Vicomte de----”

“Pray, what have my secrets to do with you?” She faced him scornfully.

“This.” He came close to her. “You flatter yourself, _ma mignonne_, that you guard your secrets very well. So you do from all men but me. But I take leave to tell you that three-fourths of those secrets are already mine.” She sniffed at the rose in the most provoking way. “Yes, I have discovered three-fourths, and----”

“The one-fourth that remains you will never discover until I choose.”

“Do not be too sure.”

“And then----?”

“You, _ma mignonne_, you the guest of many men, will be in my power, and you will be glad to do what I wish. Oh, I will not be your cur, your lackey, then, but you will----”

She dropped him a curtsey, and walked away to an escritoire, from a drawer in which she took out a piece of paper.

“The one-fourth that remains,” she said, holding it up, and offering it to him, “I give it to you, my cur and lackey.”

She watched him take it, unfold it, read it. His hand shook, the paper dropped from his fingers, and while he passed his handkerchief over his forehead she put the fragment in the fire.

They faced each other in dead silence. She was perfectly calm, but his mouth twitched and his eyes gleamed with an unhallowed fire and with fear.

“Are you mad?” he asked at last, “that you confess such a thing to me--_me?_”

“Better to you,” she retorted, “than to that infernal libertine, the Vicomte de Nérac, or that infernal simpleton, Captain Statham, eh? No, _mon ami_, my reason is this: Now, you, George Onslow, who profess to love me, who would make me your slave, are in my power, and the proof is that I order you to leave this room at once.”

“I shall return.”

“Then you certainly will be mad.”

“Ah!” He sprang forward. “Can you not believe that I love you more than ever? I----”

“Pshaw!”

The door had slammed. Onslow was alone.

For a minute he stood, clenching his hands, frustrated passion glowing in his eyes. “Ah!” he exclaimed in a cry of pent-up anguish, and then the door slammed again as he strode out.

Chapter III

A Fair Huntress And The Girl With The Spotted Cow

TWO months later André, Vicomte de Nérac, was riding in the woods around Versailles, and, poverty-stricken, debt-loaded noble as he might be, his heart was gay, for was he not a Capitaine-Lieutenant in the Chevau-légers de la Garde, and a Croix de St. Louis; was he not presently about to fight again for honour and France, and was he not once more a free man and in his native land with Paris at his back? The leafless trees were just beginning to bud, though winter was still here, but the breath of spring was in the air and the gladness of summer shone in the March sun. Yes, the world bid fair to be kind and good, and André’s heart beat responsive to its call. Love and honour and France were his, and what more could a noble wish?

He let the reins drop and breathed with contentment the bracing breeze, while his eyes roamed to and fro. Clearly he was waiting for some one who, his anxious gaze up the road showed, might be expected to come from that quarter--the quarter of the Palace of Versailles.

Along the path walked a peasant girl driving a splendid spotted cow. The bell at its fat throat tinkled merrily, the sun gleamed on its glossy spotted hide. The girl dropped a curtsey to the noble gentleman sitting there on his fine horse and himself so handsome a cavalier, and André nodded a smiling reply. She was not pretty, this peasant wench, with her shock of tumbled flaxen hair tossed over her smutty face, and her bodice and short skirt were soiled and tattered, but André, to whom all young women were interesting, in the sheer gaiety of his heart tossed her a coin and smiled again his captivating smile.

“May Monseigneur le Duc be happy in his love!” the wench said, as she bit the coin before she placed it in her bodice, and André remarked with approval the whiteness of her teeth. If her face was not pretty her body was both trim and sturdy, and she walked with the easy swing of perfect health. He could have kissed her smutty face then just because the world was so fair and he was free.

“You have a magnificent cow, my dear,” he remarked.

“But certainly,” she answered and her white teeth sparkled through her happy laugh, “better a fat cow for a wench than a lean husband. She carries me, does my spotted cow, which no husband would do,” and she scrambled on to the glossy back and laughed again, throwing back her shock of flaxen hair. André observed, heedful by long experience of such trifles, that not even her clumsy sabots could spoil the dainty neatness of her feet.

“And what may your name be?” he demanded.

“Yvonne, Monsieur le Duc; they call me Yvonne of the Spotted Cow, and some,” she dimpled into a chuckle, “Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles. I am not pretty, _moi_, but that matters not. My fat cow or my ankles will get me a husband some day, and till then, like Monseigneur, I keep a gay heart.”

Whereupon she drove her heels into the cow’s flanks and the two slowly passed out of sight, though the merry tinkling of the bell continued to jingle through the leafless trees long after she had disappeared.

André waited patiently. An hour went by, still he waited. Twice he trotted up the road and peered this way and that, but there was not a soul to be seen, and with a muttered exclamation of disgust he was about to spur away when the notes of a hunting horn caused him to gather up the reins sharply. And now eager expectation was written on every line of his face.

A young lady in a beautiful riding dress of hunting green, and attended by a single lackey on horseback, came galloping down the forest track. At sight of him by the roadside she pulled up her horse in great astonishment.

“André--you--you are back?” she said, and the colour flooded into her cheeks.

“Thank God, yes.”

“And well?”

“Perfectly. My wounds are healed. I am a prisoner no longer, and in a fortnight I return to the Low Countries to seek revenge from my enemies and yours, Denise, the English.”

Her grey eyes flashed, then dropped modestly. “You will find revenge, little doubt,” she said, “the Maison du Roi are soldiers worthy of the _noblesse_ and of France. But do you not come to Versailles first?”

“No. My company is not on duty this month at the Palace and in April we shall all be with His Majesty in Flanders.”

“Yes,” she answered, “I forgot.”

She began to stroke her horse’s neck in some embarrassment. André gazed at her with the hungry eyes of a starved lover, and indeed this girl was worthy of a soldier’s homage. Neither a brunette nor a blonde, for her eyes were grey and their lashes almost black, though her hair was fair and the tint of her cheeks in the morning air delicate as the tint of a tender rose. Beautiful, yes! but something much more than beautiful. A great noble this lady surely, one who saw in kings and queens no more than an equal, and in palaces the only fit home of beauty nobly born, one to whom centuries of command had bequeathed a tone and quality which men and women can inherit but not acquire.

“And when I return,” André said at last, “shall I find at Versailles what I desire more than revenge?”

“What is that?” she asked innocently.

“Can you not guess? Have you forgotten? Ah, Denise, twelve months ago you promised----”

“No, no,” she broke in, eagerly, “I said I would reflect.”

“There is only one thing that a poor Vicomte and a soldier of France can desire--your heart, Denise; your love, Denise; the heart and the love of the most beautiful and loyal woman in France, the heart of the Marquise de Beau Séjour. And André de Nérac loves the Marquise as he loves France. Can he say more?”

“I think not,” she said, averting her eyes, “and the Marquise de Beau Séjour thanks the Vicomte de Nérac for his words and his homage--to France.”

“I do not desire thanks--I----”

“Then go and do your duty as a noble and a soldier, and when peace and victory are ours perhaps I----”

“I cannot wait till then. Have pity, Denise, have pity on the man who was your playmate, who loved you then and who loves you now. Remember, remember, I beg you, that over there in England the one thought that consoled my prisoner’s lot was the hope that when I returned to you--you would----”

“But, André, I cannot give you an answer, here, now----”

“Give it me then before I return to the war, that I may know whether I am to live in hope, or to die sword in hand and in despair.”

“There is more than one marquise in the world,” she said, quietly.

“Not for me.”

Denise looked at him, and he dropped his eyes, for he understood the calm reproach.

“Very well,” she said, with decision. “I go to my home to-morrow. You shall have my answer in four days at the Château de Beau Séjour if you care enough to come and hear it.”

“If--” he broke off. “Ah, Denise--!” he stretched out a passionate hand.

“Hush! There is some one coming.”

A young man was galloping towards them, a boy he seemed, saucy, insolent, handsome, fair, with great blue eyes sparkling with the gayest, wickedest, most careless joy of living. Removing his plumed hat with an airy sweep he kissed the lady’s fingers, bowed low in the saddle, and looked into her face:

“Marquise,” were his words, “the company and His Majesty await you.” His dare-devil eyes roved on to André’s face with a studied insouciance, but André gave him back the look, and more.

Denise made haste to present the young man. “Monsieur le Chevalier de St. Amant, secretary of the King’s Cabinet,” she said and her eyes pleaded for politeness from both.

“Monsieur le Vicomte goes to the war?” the Chevalier asked, carelessly.

“As all true subjects of His Majesty ought to do,” André retorted.

“Except,” said the Chevalier, bowing to Denise, “those who find more pleasant pastime here at home.”

“It is curious,” André remarked, as if he had not heard, “that I who have known Versailles for ten years learn to-day for the first time of St. Amant. Where is St. Amant?”

“Ah,” answered the Chevalier, laughing, “in this life, Vicomte, we are always learning what is disagreeable. The dull philosophers of whom we hear so much in Paris at present say soldiers learn more than others--or ought to? Perhaps you differ from them?”

“_Ma foi!_ no. For when it is necessary the soldiers teach what they have learned to the young men and the schoolboys, which is very good for the schoolboys. But perhaps you, sir, do not like lessons?”

“No, oh, no! my only regret at present is that I cannot stay now and have one at once. But Mademoiselle la Marquise will take your place and I can learn, as we ride together, something that she alone can teach. Monsieur le Vicomte, I have the honour to wish you good-morning and good-bye.” He raised his plumed hat and galloped away with Denise.

The flush in André’s cheek did not die out for some minutes. “Upstart! Puppy!” he continued to mutter while his eyes glittered and his fingers twitched involuntarily on the handle of his sword. But his wrath and his scowls were suddenly dispelled in the most unexpected and agreeable way. A crisp tinkle of bells, the crack of a whip, and down the road came driving an ethereal phaeton, azure blue in colour, and in it sat an enchantress most bewitchingly clad in rose pink.

She too appeared to be waiting for somebody or something, for she pulled up ten yards off and gazed in the direction of the hunting horns which could be heard distinctly in the depths of the wood. To André she was most annoyingly indifferent, but the more he looked at her and marked her exquisite dress, her wonderful complexion, her seductive figure, and her entrancing equipage, the keener was his chagrin. Who was this airy sylph of the royal forest, this divinity floating in the rose of the queen of flowers through a leafless world as Venus might have floated on the sun-kissed foam at dawn? Gods! What a taste in dress, what a bust, and what amorous, saucy charm in her eye!

André fell back behind the trees and watched; nor did he have to wait long. In five minutes the royal hunting train swept by. The rose-pink lady curtsied to her sovereign. A cry of distress! Her hat caught by a sudden gust--surely it was very loosely set on that dainty head--flew off and fell almost under the hoofs of the horse of the King of France. Majesty looked up, coldly, caught her appealing eye, looked down at the hat, and galloped on as if he had seen neither the hat nor its owner. The royal party behaved exactly as did their master, and the rose-pink goddess was left with disgust and indignation in her face and a tear trickling down her cheek.

André moved his horse forward, whereupon she threw a glance over her shoulder almost comic in its pathos and its amusement, as if she did not know whether to laugh or to cry; a glance which convinced his susceptible heart that she had been perfectly well aware of his presence all the while and now invited him to take what she had always intended he should have. In a second he was off his horse and was handing her the hat. Her bow and her smile were more than a reward, for if the rose-pink divinity was alluring seen from behind, she was positively bewitching at a distance of four feet in front. What wonderful eyes! They spoke at once of everything that could stir a soldier’s soul, and her blush was the blush of Aurora.

With the prettiest hesitation she inquired his name, which he only gave on condition that she should also tell hers. But this she laughingly refused. “My name is nothing,” she remarked, “for I am nobody. If you knew it you would despise yourself for having been polite to a _bourgeoise_.”

“Impossible!” André cried.

“But it is so,” she persisted, gravely, a challenge stealing from under her demure eyelashes.

“I shall find out,” André said, “I shall not rest till I find out.”

“Then inquire,” she retorted gaily, “Rue Croix des Petits Champs--perhaps you will succeed,” and without more ado she flashed him a look of defiant modesty, whipped up her ponies, and the azure phaeton vanished as rapidly as it had appeared.

André stroked his chin meditatively. What did it mean? Who was the unknown and why did she come to the woods in that enchanting guise? A _bourgeoise_! Pah! it would be well if all the women of the _bourgeoisie_ and some of the _noblesse_ possessed but one of the secrets of her irresistible womanhood. But find out he must, and André, hot on this new quest, began to trot away. He was in a rare humour now, for he had noticed with unbounded satisfaction that, while Denise had been of the royal party, that boyish Chevalier had not.

But he had not ridden far when he was amazed to discover by the roadside Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles weeping as if her heart would break.

“What is the matter?” he demanded.

“Monseigneur--ah! it is the good Monseigneur--” she fell to crying again. “They have stolen my spotted cow,” she sobbed, “robbers have stolen my spotted cow.”

“Robbers?”

“But yes, three great robbers, and they have beaten me and taken Monseigneur’s piece too. My cow, my spotted cow!”

“See, Yvonne,” he said soothingly, “I am no monseigneur, I am only a poor vicomte, but you shall have another cow, a spotted cow, too.”

But she would not believe it, whereupon he took all the money in his purse, four gold pieces and three silver ones, and thrust them into her hand.

She stared at the money incredulously.

“There, girl,” he urged, for a woman’s distress, even though she were only a peasant, hurt him, “be happy and buy a fat and spotted cow.”

She kneeled to kiss his hand. “Monseigneur,” she sobbed, “is kind to a poor wench. Surely the good God has sent him to me,” and she poured her hot tears of gratitude on the ruffles of his sleeve.

“I am happy again,” she murmured. “Yes, I will buy a cow and be happy,” and she began to sing, flinging the coarse matted hair out of her eyes.

André watched her contentedly; it was pleasant to see her joy.

“Monseigneur is not happy,” she surprised him by saying shyly.

“Can the poor be happy?” he asked, absently, for he was thinking of the goddess in pink.

“No,” she muttered, “not while there are robbers in the land, and the poor are taxed till they starve. Monseigneur is in love. Did I not see him talk with the great lady in green?” she added suddenly. “Ah, if Monseigneur would listen to a poor girl he too could be happy.”

“Peace!” he commanded, but he was much amused.

“I too was in love,” she answered, “and women stole my lover from me as the robbers stole my cow, and I was sick. I wasted away, but the good God who sent me Monseigneur put it into my heart to go to the wise woman who lives at ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold’----”

“The Cock----?”

“’Tis a new tavern in the woods by the village yonder,” she replied earnestly, “and a wise woman lives there. For one piece of silver she brought me back my lover. They say she is a witch, but she is no witch, for with the help of the good God she cured my sickness and changed my lover’s heart so that once again he was as he had been.”

“Tush!” André interrupted, impatiently.

“But it is true,” she persisted. “And if Monseigneur is in distress, he, too, should go to the wise woman, and she will make him happy. It is so, it is so.”

“Adieu, my child, adieu!”

“Monseigneur will not forget. ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,’ in the woods----”

He gave her matted head a pat. It was a pity she was not pretty, this wench, for she had a buxom figure. “A soldier,” he said lightly, “does not love wise women, Yvonne, he loves only the young and the fair and he wins them not by sorcery, but by his sword.”

“Monseigneur is a soldier?” she asked with grave interest.

“Yes, a soldier of France.”

“My lover too is a soldier, but not as Monseigneur. Ah!” she whispered, “if all the nobles of France were as Monseigneur there would be no unhappy women, no robbers, and no poor.”

André left her there. His heart was gay again though his purse was empty, for he had made a woman happy. And as he rode through the woods he could hear her singing as she had sung when he had seen her first on the sleek back of her spotted cow. And all the way to Paris that song of a peasant wench softly caressed his spirit, for it clinked gaily to the echoes of the soul as might have clinked the golden spurs of the cock in the woods of Versailles, and it was fresh with the eternal freshness of spring and the immortal dreams of youth.

Chapter IV

A Lover’S Trick

THE March sun was setting on the hamlet of La Rivière, in the pleasant land of Touraine--Touraine the fit home of so many noble châteaux, the cradle of so many of the proudest traditions and the most inspiring memories of the romance of love and chivalry in the history of France.

André was standing in the churchyard of the hamlet, but it was not at the landscape that he knew so well that he was looking, nor even up the slope beyond, where the great Château de Beau Séjour shot its towers and pointed turrets through its encircling domain of wood. Ten leagues away in the dim distance lay Nérac, the poverty-stricken home from which he took his title, and whose meagre patrimony encumbered with the debts of his ancestors and his own barely sufficed to provide a living for the widowed mother to whom that morning he had said good-bye and whom the English in the Low Countries might decide he should never see again.

Yet it was not of his mother that he was thinking, still less of the enchantress of the forest whose identity he had discovered--one Mademoiselle d’Étiolles she had proved to be, “La Petite d’Étiolles,” as that gay Lothario the Duc de Richelieu called her, the daughter of a Farmer-General, a _bourgeoisie_ notorious for her beauty, her wit, and her friendship with the wits. Indeed he had forgotten the rose-pink divinity in the azure phaeton entirely. No, he was striving to pluck up courage to face Denise and receive her answer. For if that answer was not what he desired it would be better to ride straight down into the Loire and let the last male of the House of Nérac put an end to it for ever.

Twinkling lights began to shine in the great château; its towers and gables insolent in the majesty of their beauty, strong in the might of their antiquity, challenged and defied him in the dusk. That was the château of his Denise, the Marquise de Beau Séjour whom he, gallant fool, rich only in his noble pedigree, dared to love and hoped to win, Denise the richest heiress in France. Yet it had not been hers so long; its broad seignories were a thing of yesterday for her. Fifteen years ago she, as he, had been only the child of a vicomte as poor if as noble as himself. And Beau Séjour lay not here, but ten leagues away, a mile from Nérac, where that church spire hung its cross above the horizon.

The soft gloom of the growing dusk imaged for André at that moment the sombre pall of tragedy which twelve years ago had fallen on the great château. An ancient house, a venerated name had been its owner’s; were not their achievements written in the chronicles of France? was not their origin lost in the twilight of dim ages far, so far away? Capets and Valois and Bourbons that house had seen coming and going on the throne, honour and fame and wealth and high endeavour had been theirs, and then shame and doom, swift, unexpected, irreversible. The story of their downfall had been his first lesson learned in budding manhood of the harshness of the world and the mystery of fate. Such a simple story, too. The wife of the Marquis had run away with a lover, a baseborn stranger gossip called him. The lover had deserted her, why and where no one knew, and disowned by her husband she had died miserably. Her husband, a soldier and ambassador of the great Louis Quatorze, had in despair or madness plunged into treason, and had paid the traitor’s penalty on the scaffold. His only son and heir, from remorse or consciousness of guilt, had perished by his own hand in Poland, whither he had gone to fight in the war. And here to-day at his feet a rough and stained tombstone marked the neglected grave of the only daughter who had remained. Had she lived she would to-night have been just two years older than Denise; had there been no treason, she and not Denise would have been mistress of that château now called De Beau Séjour.

Denise’s father for service to the state had been awarded the lands of the traitor; the old name for centuries noted in this soil had been annulled in infamy; its blood was corrupted by the decree of the law, and by the King’s will the new Marquis had carried to his new possessions the title of his old, that Beau Séjour yonder so near to his own Nérac. The law and the King so far as in them lay had determined that the very name and memory of the ancient house should be blotted out for ever. But blot out the château they could not. There it stood haughty as of old, to tell to all what had once been, and the curious could still read here and there in its storied walls the arms and emblems, the scutcheons and shields of a family which had given nine Marshals to France, and in whose veins royal blood had flowed. What did that matter now? To-day it belonged to Denise, once poor as he was, and destined to be his bride before this sudden swoop upward on the ruins of another to the high places of France.

As André paced to and fro in the dusk the ghostly memories thickened. Twenty years ago as a boy he had ridden with his father to that château. He remembered but two things, but he remembered them as vividly as yesterday. Over the chief gateway a splendid coat of arms had caught his boyish fancy and he had asked what the motto “_Dieu Le Vengeur_” might mean. “Why, father, there it is again,” he had cried, for in the noble hall, above the famous sculptured chimney-piece, the first thing that caught the boy’s eye was the scroll with those three words “_Dieu Le Vengeur_.” And the second memory was of a little girl playing with a huge wolf-hound in the dancing firelight under that motto, a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair, innocent of the evil to come, playing in her hall which had seen kings and queens for guests. “_Dieu Le Vengeur_” she had repeated--“God will protect me,” and they had all laughed. But had God protected her? Here was her grave at his feet. André now recalled his dying father’s remark five years later, when he had heard how his neighbour the Comte de Beau Séjour had been rewarded with the treason-tainted marquisate. “That would have been yours, André, my son,” he had said. And no one had understood, and he had died before he could explain, if explain he could. That, too, had been another bitter lesson in the cruelty of fate, in the bleak, bitter tragedy of baffled and unfulfilled ambitions.

Smitten with a sudden pity, a sharp anguish, André kneeled in the damp, tangled grass and peered at the tombstone which marked the humble resting-place of the dead, worse than dead, dishonoured and infamous. “Marie Angélique Jeanne Gabrielle ...” the rest was eaten away. But in the church close by lay the coffins of her ancestors, the crusaders and nobles, and Marshals of France. The names had been obliterated. But not even a wronged king had dared to remove the tombs with which that church was eloquent of the glories that had once been theirs. Yes, they lay there of right, but she, little Marie, cradled in splendour, who had prattled of “_Dieu Le Vengeur_,” she, the daughter of a wanton and a traitor, lay here in the rain, and the sheep and the goats browsed over her, and the sabots of those once her serfs and tenants made an insulting path over her grave. And up there another reigned in her place.

A traitor! Yes, his daughter deserved her fate. There should be no mercy for traitors.

“What seek you, Monsieur le Vicomte?”

He started at the question. It was the Chevalier de St. Amant, boyish, insolent, though his tone was strangely soft.

“I was finding a lesson,” André replied quietly.

“In a tombstone?”

André explained. The Chevalier seemed impressed, for he went down on his knees and peered for some minutes at the weather-beaten stone.

“Poor child!” he muttered. “Poor child!”

André was thinking the Chevalier was better than he had supposed, but his next action jarred harshly. Standing carelessly on the stone he gathered his cloak about him. “Ah, well,” he remarked, with his dare-devil lightness, “it is perhaps more fortunate for you or me that little Marie is where she is.”

“For you or me?” André questioned, peering into his young face.

“The Marquise awaits you, Vicomte,” he twitched his thumb towards the château, “perhaps you will understand better when you have seen her,” and with a careless tip of his saucy hat he strode away.

For one minute André burned to seize that cloak and speak to him very straightly. “Pah!” he muttered, “it will do later. Perhaps it will not be necessary at all.”

But it was with increased misgiving that he rode up to the château.

Denise received him in the great hall, unconsciously reproducing the picture which was burnt into André’s memory, for she stood with a certain sweet stateliness by the sculptured chimney-piece and a huge hound lay at her feet. Above her head the emblazoned scutcheon of the old house still adorned the noble carving--indeed you could not have destroyed the one without destroying the other--and the glad firelight which threw such subtly entrancing shadows on the dress and girlish figure of the young Marquise seemed to point with tongues of flame to that sublime motto, “_Dieu Le Vengeur!_” above her head.

André bowed and halted. Ambition, passion, and hope conspired to choke him for the moment. How fair and noble she was! yes, surpassingly fair and noble.

Denise said nothing. She stared at the buckle of her slipper.

“I have come for my answer,” he said, in a low voice.

She met his pleading eyes fearlessly. “The answer is, ‘No,’” she replied, and her voice, too, was low, as if she could not trust it.

“No?” he repeated, half stunned.

She simply bowed her head.

“You mean it? Oh, Denise, you cannot mean it?”

“I have reflected and I mean it.”

“For always?”

“Yes.”

André stepped nearer. “I do not remind you, Denise,” he said, speaking with a composure won by a mighty mastery of himself, “that I love you, that I have loved you since I could love any woman. If you would not believe it before I was taken prisoner, when I spoke in the woods of Versailles, you would not believe it now. Nor do I remind you that twelve months ago you spoke very differently. A lover and a gentleman does not speak of these things when the answer has been ‘No.’ But I do ask you, before you say ‘No,’ always to remember that it was the wish of your dead father and of mine that the answer should be ‘Yes.’”

“My father died five years ago, yours even longer,” she answered.

“Do the years alter their wish?” he asked, with a touch of passion, “do they make a promise, good faith, honour, less a promise, less----”

“There was no promise,” she interrupted.

He bowed calmly. The gesture was better than speech.

“And your reason, Denise?”

“I said I would give you an answer, I did not undertake to give reasons.”

“Certainly. May I plead, however, that perhaps, remembering the past, what you and I have been to each other since childhood, I have some right to ask?”

She placed her fan on the shelf of the chimney with sharp decision. The firelight flashed in her grey eyes. “I refuse,” she said, very distinctly, “to marry a man who does not love me.”

“Then you do not believe my words?” he questioned quickly.

“You are a noble, André,” she answered; “the courtesy of a noble and a gentleman requires that when he demands a woman’s hand in marriage he should profess to love her. For the honour you have done me I thank you, but a woman finds the proof not in words but in deeds. You are a brave soldier, but you do not love me. That is enough.”

“No, it is not enough for me,” he answered.

“Very well.” She took a step forward. “I had no desire to discuss things not fit for a girl to speak of to a man who has done her the honour to ask her hand in marriage, and I would have spared both myself and you unnecessary pain. Plainly then and briefly, when I take a husband I do not choose to share what he professes is his love with any other woman. That is my reason and my answer in one.”

A flush darkened his sallow cheek. “It is not true,” he protested passionately, “it is not true.”

“You would deny it?” she cried, passion too leaping into her voice. “Is that letter to the Comtesse des Forges, one of my friends--my friends, _mon Dieu!_--yours, or is it not?” She handed it to him with hot scorn.

“It was written twelve months ago,” he said, somewhat lamely.

“And the duel which it caused is twelve months ago, too, I suppose? The right arm of her husband the Comte des Forges is healed, but the wound--my God! the wound in his heart and mine, that you can never heal. And she is not alone. Does not Paris ring with the gallantries of the Vicomte de Nérac? For aught I know there may be a dozen husbands in England who have lost their sword arm because André de Nérac professed to love their wives.” She checked herself and was calm again. “I thank you for the honour you have done me, but--” she offered him the stateliest, coldest curtsey, “Vicomte, I am your servant.”

She would have escaped by the door behind her, but André intercepted her. “No,” he said, “you do not leave me yet. I, too, have something to say and you, Marquise, will be pleased to hear it.”

Their eyes met and then Denise walked back to her place by the fireplace. She was trembling now, and she no longer looked him in the face.

[Illustration: “Is that letter to the Comtesse des Forges, one of my friends--my friends, _Mon Dieu!_--yours, or is it not?”]

“As to the past,” he said in a low voice, “I say nothing, for I deserve your reproaches. I have been foolish, wicked, unworthy of you. But there is no noble to-day at Versailles of whom the same could not be said. Men are men, and I have never concealed from you what I have been. But such things do not destroy love. They cannot and they never will, and every woman knows it. My past, I assert, is not your reason.”

“What then is?” she asked proudly.

“I am poor, you are rich, but that is not the reason, either. Do not think I would dishonour you by supposing that I believed that, though some whom you call your friends say it is. No, the reason is that while I have been away, a prisoner, defenceless, silent, some one--” he paused, “some one has been poisoning your mind, some one who hopes to take the place----”

“Take care----” she interrupted.

“You speak of the gossip of Paris. I will not tell you what the gossip of Paris and Versailles says, for you will hear it and more fitly from other lips than mine. But I say, that poisoner will answer to me.”

She was about to speak, but checked herself.

“And I will tell you why. First because I love you and I love no one else. You do not believe it. You ask for deeds, not words. In the future you shall have them. And second, because you, Denise, love me, yes, love me.”

“Have done, have done with this mockery!” she cried.

“Tell me,” was his answer, “on your word of honour, that it is not so, tell me that you do not love me and never will, tell me that you love another and on my word as a gentleman I will never speak of love to you again.”

Dead silence. André waited quietly.

“I refuse,” she said, slowly, picking the words, “to be questioned in this manner. But as you insist, I repeat--I do not love you.”

André bowed. “One word more, Denise, if you please,” he said, “one word and I leave your presence for ever.”

She drew herself up. “Yes,” she said, “leave me for ever.” But for all that she, as he, seemed spellbound to the spot.

André deliberately drew from his pocket the letter that she had thrown in his teeth and faced her. “Thank you,” he said, very calmly. “Now that I know you mean what you said, I, too, know what I must do.” He walked away.

“Give me that letter,” she said with a swift flash of command. “It belongs to me.”

“Pardon,” he answered, quietly, “yesterday the Comte des Forges was killed by a friend of his whose honour he had betrayed. The letter belongs to the lady to whom it was written, the lady who will be the Vicomtesse de Nérac.”

A faint cry escaped from Denise’s lips. For the moment she leaned faint against the chimney-piece, white and sick.

André looked at her, but he made no effort to offer her either sympathy or help. Then he walked back, Denise watching him, and flung the letter into the fire. Denise started, but she said nothing, though her great grey eyes were eloquent with half a dozen questions.

“The letter has served its purpose,” André said. “Adieu, Marquise!”

“What does this--this trickery mean?” she demanded, hotly.

“You must forgive one who loves you,” was the calm reply, “for love laughs at tricks. The Comte des Forges is alive and well: he has a wound in his shoulder which is only a scratch, for the poor Comte is always believing that some one is betraying his honour and Madame the Comtesse has a fickle heart. Yesterday I was his second, so I know.”

“Then--then--” she cried and stopped.

André bowed most courteously. “You refused to believe me, Mademoiselle: I returned the compliment and refused to believe you--and I proved it by a lover’s trick, if you choose to call it such. That is all, but it is enough.”

“Ah!” She crumpled up the fan in speechless indignation.

“No, Denise,” he said softly. “I shall not trouble you now or soon, but--” he had caught her hand--“you shall yet be mine, I swear it. You think you do not love me, but you shall be convinced--you shall.”

He kissed her fingers with a tender reverence. “Adieu, Marquise! I go to my duty and revenge,” he said, and he left her there under the spell of his mastery, with her boar-hound at her feet, and the flames of fire pointing to the motto “_Dieu Le Vengeur!_”

Chapter V

The Presumption Of A Beardless Chevalier

ANDRÉ rode at a walking pace down the slope to the village, for he wanted to think. He had always prided himself on his knowledge of women; he had imagined he knew Denise as well as himself. She was of his class, lovely, high-spirited, proud, patriotic, and best of all a true woman. Hence it was a sore and surprising blow to his pride to discover that she should reject his love because he had lived the life of his and her class. He had gone to the château to confess everything, to swear that from this day onwards no other woman, be she beautiful as the dawn, as enchanting as Circe, could ever occupy five minutes of his thoughts. And he meant it. Those others, the shattered idols of a vanished past, had simply satisfied vanity, ambition, a physical craving. But Denise he really loved. She inspired a devotion, a passion which gripped and satisfied body, soul, and spirit; she was that without which life seemed unmeaning, empty, poor, despicable. But why could not she see this--the difference between a fleeting desire and the sincere homage of manhood to an ideal, between the gallant and the lover? What more had a wife a right to expect than the love of a husband, brave, loyal, faithful? It was unreasonable, for men were men and women were women. Yet here was a woman who did.

But he would--must--win her. That was the adamantine resolution in his breast, all the stronger because she had scorned and defied him. Yet he would win her in his way, not hers. Yes, he would conquer her against herself. For him life now meant simply Denise--the heart and the soul and the spirit of Denise--the conquest of a woman’s will. The hot pulses of health and strength, of manhood, his noble blood and ambition throbbed responsive to the resolution. He thanked God that he was young and a soldier, that there was war and a prize to be won. Yet he also felt that this love meant something new, that it had transformed him into something that he had never dreamed of as possible. And victory would complete the change. So as he rode the fierce thoughts tumbled over each other in a foam of passion, in the sublime intoxication of a vision of a new heaven and a new earth--from which he was rudely awakened.

He had halted for the moment at the door of the village inn. In the dingy parlour sat the Chevalier, one leg thrown over the table, a beaker in his hand resting on his thigh, while his other hand was stroking the chin of the waiting wench, a strapping, tawdry slut.

André kicked the door open. “Am I disturbing you?” he said, pitching his hat off as if the parlour were his own.

“Not in the least,” the Chevalier replied without stirring, though the girl began to giggle with an affectation of alarmed modesty. “My wine is just done”; he drained off the glass. “I will leave Toinette to you, Vicomte, for,” he put on his hat, “it is time I returned to the château.”

This studied insolence was exactly what André required. “I thank you,” he said, freezingly, “but before I take your place, you and I, Monsieur le Chevalier, will have a word first.”

“As you please, my dear Vicomte,” said the young man, swinging comfortably on to the table and peering at him from under his saucy plumes. “You will have much to say, I doubt not, for you must have said so little at the château. Run away, my child,” he added to the wench, who was now staring at them both with genuine alarm in her coarse eyes, “run away.”

André closed the door. “You will not return to the château,” he said quietly.

“My dear Vicomte, you suffer from the strangest hallucinations, stupid phantoms of the mind, if you----”

“Perhaps,” was the cold reply, “but the point of a sword is a reality which exorcises any and every phantom.”

The Chevalier laughed softly.

“Yes,” André continued, “I say it with infinite regret, because you are young, you will not return to the château, for I am going to kill you, unless----”

“Unless?” The Chevalier slowly swung off the table.

“Unless you will give me your word of honour now that you will leave France to-morrow and never return.”

The young man reflectively put back one of his dainty love curls. “Ah, my dear Vicomte,” he answered, “I say it too with infinite regret, but that I cannot promise. So you must kill me I fear. Alas!” he added with dilatory derision, “alas! what have I done?”

“Very good”--André fastened his cloak--“in three days we will meet in Paris.”

“In Paris? Why not kill me here?”

“Here?” André stared at him in astonishment.

“Here and at once.” He walked to the door. “Two torches,” he called, “two torches.”

When he had lit them the Chevalier marched out. “This way,” he said politely; “permit me to show you, with infinite regret, where you can kill me.”

Half expecting a trick or foul play André followed him cautiously until he stopped in a deserted stable yard, paved and clean, and completely shut in by high walls. The young man gravely placed one torch in a ring on the north wall and the other on the wall opposite.

“That,” he said, in the pleasantest manner possible, “will make the lights fair. You”--he pointed to the west--“will stand there, or here, if you prefer, to the east. You will agree, doubtless, that to a man who is to be killed it is a trifle where he stands.”

The torches flared smokily in the April dusk. He was mad, this boyish fool, stark, raving mad. But how prettily and elegantly he played the part.

“See,” the Chevalier said lightly, “there is no one to interrupt--the murder. Toinette knows neither my name nor yours; she will hold her tongue for money and in half an hour you will be gone--and I”--he shrugged his shoulders--“well, it is clean lying here, cleaner, anyway, than under the grass in that dirty churchyard.”

“You mean it?” André asked slowly.

The Chevalier took off his saucy hat and fine coat, hung them upon one of the rusty rings in the wall, and turned back his lace ruffles. A flash--his sword had cut a rainbow through the dusk across the yellow flare of the torches. “I am at your service, Vicomte,” he said with a low bow. “And I shall return to the château when and how I please, and I shall be welcome, eh?”

“By God!” André ripped out. “By God! I will kill you.”

He too had flung off his coat and cloak and took the position by the east wall. A strange duel this, assuredly not the first in which the Vicomte de Nérac had fought for a woman’s sake, but the strangest, maddest that man’s wit or a boy’s folly could have devised. André was as cold as ice now, and he calmly surveyed his opponent as he tried the steel of his blade. How young and supple and insolently gay the beardless popinjay was; but he had the fencer’s figure, and the handling of his weapon revealed to the trained eye that this would be no affair of six passes and a _coup de maître_. Yet never did André feel so calmly confident of his own famed skill and rich experience. No, he would not kill him, but he would teach him a lesson that he would not forget.

For a brief minute both scanned the ground carefully, testing it with their feet, and marking the falling of the lights from those smoking torches, the flickering of the shadows in the raw chill of eve. All around was deathly still. Not so much as the cluck of a hen to break the misty silence.

“On guard!”

The Chevalier was about eight paces off. He now came slowly forward, eagerly watching for the right moment to engage. A swift movement as of a strong spring unbound--a flash--and steel clashed on steel. Yes, the young man could fence. The true swordsman’s wrist could be felt in his blade, the swordsman’s eye in his point, and his passes came with the ease of that mastery of style, swiftness, and precision that the fencer can feel but not describe. For a couple of minutes both played with the greatest caution, for they were both in the deadliest earnest. True, this was idle flummery at present; each had still to know the ground, to learn the secrets of those cruelly baffling lights, to get the measure of the other’s powers. A false step, a misjudged lunge, a gust of wind, a foolish contempt might mean death. And for one, at least, the issue was Denise.

So André, who had always relied on his fire and quickness to disconcert, flurry, and tempt, kept himself sternly in hand, offering no openings and disregarding all. The moment would come presently, the divine moment, and then!

They were both shifting ground slowly, and in their caution they gradually edged and wheeled until the Chevalier almost stood where André had started.

“Bah!” the young man cried, “this is tedious,” and he suddenly changed his tactics. He was now attacking with a fiery swiftness which made André’s blood warm, and stirred his admiration, but he noted with joy how reckless his opponent was growing. Twice the lad only saved himself by the most dexterous reversing of his lunges.

“Fool!” André muttered to himself, “that is not the game to play with me; in three minutes he will be mine,” and he, too, began to press his attack. Ah!--ah!--only by the swiftest convolutions of that supple body had the Chevalier saved himself. André began to nerve himself for a final assault. Should he give him the point in his sword arm--his shoulder, or his lungs? And then the torch light flared right into his face.

In a second he saw what it all meant. By those superb reversed lunges he had been lured on till he had been manœuvred into a place where both torches fell in his eyes and that young devil had the lights behind him. He--he, André de Nérac, had been outplayed by this beardless youth! And now he was in a corner of this damned court-yard with the cursed flicker from the walls making lightning on the crossed steel. “_Diable!_” he growled, “you would!” and he flung himself on his opponent in the madness of despair and wrath. It was now almost a _mêlée corps à corps_, but the Chevalier would not give way. He had penned André to the place he desired and he meant to keep him there.

“_Holà! Je touche!_” he cried.

How had it happened? One of the torches had gone out in a puff of air, André’s sword was on the stones and the Chevalier had his foot on it. By an infernal Italian trick he had dropped on one knee, the lunge that should have gone through his heart had passed over his head and by some superhuman secret he had twisted the weapon from his opponent’s grasp. Yes, André had lost Denise and death was upon him.

With a quick gesture the Chevalier pitched the sword over the wall and stood sword in hand facing the defenceless André. The breeze stirred his dainty love locks.

“Monsieur le Vicomte,” he said cheerfully, “will perhaps permit me now to return to the château. I have had my lesson.” André clenched his fists sullenly. “Toinette,” the young man called, dropping his point, “Toinette, bring another torch, and assist Monsieur le Vicomte with his coat. You are a good wench, Toinette, and a discreet, is it not so?”

“Curse your Italian tricks,” André growled, “curse you and your Italian tricks.”

“Yes, it was a trick, learned in Italy from a great master in the art. But all is fair in war--and in love! I did not wish to be killed and you are too good a swordsman for any one to beat in half an hour, and that is all I had. Come, Vicomte, we have had our little encounter. Can we not be friends?” He offered his hand.

André stared sulkily, yet feeling somewhat ashamed.

“I am not going to the château,” the Chevalier added quietly. “I, too, am going to the war with my master and yours, the King. If it will satisfy you, I will promise not to speak to Mademoiselle the Marquise de Beau Séjour until we both return.”

“You can do as you please with regard to Mademoiselle la Marquise,” André said sharply.

“And will you do me a favour?” the young man pleaded. “I beg you that for the future you will not speak of our meeting here to any one.”

“Why?”

“Simply because I regret now that I prevented myself from being killed by a low trick. Life to the young is sweet--it is my sole excuse to a better swordsman than myself.”

“Very well,” André answered, touched to the quick by the faultless delicacy with which the compliment was paid.

“I thank you. Perhaps now you will give me your hand?”

“With the greatest pleasure.”

The Chevalier had for the moment stormed his heart with the same superb grace that he had robbed him of his sword.

“Adieu!”

And then in the sorest dudgeon André strode out in search of his sword. To his surprise the wall of the court where they had fought backed on to the churchyard, and a few minutes’ groping revealed his sword by the strangest accident lying in the damp, matted grass that sprawled over the tombstone of the little Marquise Marie. Yes, at that bitter moment he could have shed tears of shame as he recalled the defeat and the humiliation inflicted on him by that beardless boy, on him, a Capitaine-Lieutenant of the Chevau-légers de la Garde, on him who had never been vanquished yet. And he had sworn to win Denise! Why was he not lying under the sod, forgotten and dead to the pain of the world, like little Marie?

A figure was creeping past him in the dark--a woman!

“Who is that?” he cried sharply, plucking at her hood.

“Monseigneur, it is me--me, Monseigneur.”

“Yvonne!” He let the hood go as if he had been stabbed.

“But yes, Monseigneur, Yvonne of the Spotted Cow.” She kissed his hand, humbly.

“Yvonne,” he gasped. “What do you here?”

“I was born in this village,” she answered, “my mother, she lives here. She is old, my mother.”

“You--born here?”

“Surely, Monseigneur. It is the truth.”

André shivered. Half an hour ago how near his mother, who was old too, had been to praying for the soul of her only son. And she had been spared that pain by the courtesy of a beardless chevalier.

“And what do you now in the churchyard?” he asked.

“I come to say my prayers for the little Marquise Marie. She is in the bosom of the good God, is our little Marquise, but I say a prayer for her soul when I am happy.”

“And why do you pray for the Marquise Marie?” he asked.

“Because surely she is our Marquise. That other”--she waved a hand at the twinkling lights of the noble château--“the King gave to us, but there is only one Marquise for us here, the little lady Marie, who is dead. _Dieu Le Vengeur! Dieu Le Vengeur!_” she whispered softly below her breath.

“Peace, girl, peace,” he said, half sadly, half angrily.

“Monseigneur,” Yvonne whispered, “Monseigneur loves the Marquise Denise----”

“Who told you that?” he demanded so fiercely that Yvonne shrank back.

“It was the wise woman,” she answered, “the wise woman of ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,’ who knows everything. Ah! if Monseigneur would go to the wise woman she would tell him how he might win the Marquise Denise. Did she not give me back my lover, did she not tell me where to find again my spotted cow, did she not tell me that Monseigneur would be here to-day?”

“She told you that?” he gasped.

“Yes, Monseigneur.”

André sat down on the tombstone in the supremest amazement and confusion. What did it, could it mean?

“I will pray,” Yvonne went on in her innocent, soft voice, “to our little Marquise that Monseigneur may marry the Marquise Denise.”

“Why?” André asked.

“Because then Monseigneur will be our lord and we will be his serfs.”

“You would like to be my serf, Yvonne?” he demanded, putting his hand on her shoulder, and he could feel her tremble.

“Surely, surely,” she answered.

“Then you shall--some day you shall, I swear it.”

A gust of hot passion swept over him. She was not pretty, this peasant wench, but she had a noble figure, and the comfort of a woman’s caress in that hour of abasement appealed with an irresistible sweetness to his wounded spirit. Something, however, checked his arm that was about to slip round her--as if Yvonne herself by a mysterious power paralysed his passion. Yet she made no effort to escape, and under his hand on her plump shoulder he could feel that she, too, was in the grip of strong emotion.

His arm dropped to his side.

“Monseigneur will go to the wise soothsayer,” she said very quietly, “for she can help him better than any peasant wench.”

And then André laughed. The gaiety of yesterday had suddenly remastered him. He forgot the shamed sword, the Chevalier, and that infernal court with its smoking torches. Denise should yet be his, and this strange girl his serf.

“Why, then, I will seek this wise woman,” he answered lightly, “before I go to the war. I promise, Yvonne.”

And so he left her to her prayers at the tomb of the child who should have been her lord. But she did not pray very long. Indeed, had André cared he might have seen her wrapped in her coarse cloak walking swiftly towards the twinkling lights of the great château, and she sang as she had sung on the back of her spotted cow.

Chapter VI

The Wise Woman Of “The Cock With The Spurs Of Gold”

IT was a strangely superstitious age this age of Louis XV., strangely superstitious and strangely enlightened. On the one side the illuminated philosophers of the rising school of Voltaire, on the other a society ready to be gulled by every charlatan, quack, or sorceress clever enough to exploit the depths of human credulity. You shall read in the fascinating memoirs of that century how the male and female adventurers tricked to their immense profit that polished, gallant, cynical, and light-hearted _noblesse_ which made the glory of the Court. And André was a true child of his age. Yvonne’s mystifying remarks had stirred all the superstition and awe lurking behind his hollow homage to the established religion, and human curiosity whetted this stimulus of superstition. He scented, in fact, an agreeable adventure in a visit to this mysterious witch.

But first he consulted his friend Henri, Comte de St. Benôit, like himself a Chevau-léger de la Garde, and like himself notorious for his skill with the sword and for his countless gallantries. Was it not St. Benôit who had taken his place in rousing the jealousy of the Comte des Forges and who had also been obliged to give the hot-headed husband the quietus of a flesh-wound?

Henri of course knew all about the wise woman. Was she not the talk of the _bel monde_?

“She won’t see you,” he said. “She only prophesies to women, and very few of them. I tried to bring her to book, but her girl, a devilish saucy grisette with a roving eye and a skittish pout, shut the door in my face, by Madame’s orders, if you please.”

“And you went away?”

“No, indeed, I put my knee against the door and said that as I couldn’t pay Madame I must pay her. Not the first time the hussy has been kissed, and it won’t be the last. You, too, will discover the jade hasn’t the dislike to men that her mistress has.”

“What will you wager she will not see me--the mistress?”

“A kiss from my Diane of the ballet. I’ll bet, too, Madame is not at home at all, for she comes and goes like a will-o’-the-wisp. But if you do see her she’ll tell you something cursedly disagreeable. She frightened the poor Des Forges, your Comtesse and mine, into hysterics, and,” his voice dropped, “she warned the Duchesse de Châteauroux she had only three weeks to live--and it was all the poor thing had. Don’t go to her, my dear André; she’ll see you in her crystal globe, face upwards in a heap of dead with an English sword in your guts.”

Needless to say, perhaps, that afternoon saw André at the tavern called “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” which, save for a brand-new sign-board, had all the appearance of a farmhouse hastily turned into an inn. Buried in the woods between Paris and Versailles it was exactly suited for a rendezvous to which all might repair without the world being any the wiser. André had carefully disguised himself, and as he rapped on the door his appearance suggested rather the comfortable _bourgeois_ than the noble Capitaine-Lieutenant des Chevau-légers de la Garde. To his surprise he won his wager with greater ease than he had dreamed.

The saucy grisette, whose demure demeanour could not conceal the shifty falseness of her roving eyes, took to her mistress the name he gave, the “Sieur de Coutances,” and then, to his joy, speedily ushered him with no little ogling into an empty, low-beamed parlour, which was simply the apartment of a woman who could indulge her love of luxury. Of the sorceress trade there were no traces unless you counted for such an enormous black cat with the most ferocious whiskers, who arched his back on André’s entrance and glared at him with diabolical yellow eyes--a cat to make the flesh creep and bristle as did his whiskers.

“Welcome, Vicomte, welcome!”

André found himself staring in the dim light with intense surprise, not at a wizened hag, but at a young woman scarcely more than five-and-twenty, dressed in flowing coal-black draperies which made her wealth of fair hair, blue eyes, and dazzling skin all the more startling. Her dress was wide open at the throat and on her breast flashed an exquisite diamond cross. And what a figure! Those flowing draperies, that step forward revealed a woman perfectly shaped in every limb. It was therefore a shame that above her upper lip there was the suggestion of a dark moustache, though it added in the most extraordinary way to the weird effect of her appearance.

“Welcome, Vicomte, welcome!” she repeated, but she offered him no salute save a wave of her finely shaped hand towards a chair.

“I am not a vicomte,” André answered doggedly.

“Then when did the Vicomte de Nérac lose his rank?” she asked quickly, and laughed at his obvious embarrassment. “Ah, Vicomte, if I were not able to divine who my visitors were I should not have a trinket like this--” she patted her diamond cross, stooped and lifted the huge cat and stroked it gently with her chin.

“And what can I do for you?” she demanded, coming closer.

“My faith, but I do not know,” he answered. The faint perfume of her person was puzzling him sorely. But in truth he was familiar with the perfume of so many women that it was hopeless to expect an answer to the question.

“Nor do I,” the woman answered, still laughing, and her laugh was like the purr of her cat. “In any case, Monsieur le Vicomte must wait. A lady is already here to see me. No, it is not necessary to retire. In spite of that I have said, you doubt my powers; therefore you shall listen while she and I talk.”

She pointed to a large screen and André, now burning with curiosity, gladly seated himself behind it. The woman with the cat still in her arms promptly flung herself on to a long sofa and rang her hand-bell.

“Introduce Madame,” she said to the girl, “Madame’s _fille de chambre_ must wait without.”

The visitor, André decided, was young. Her trim figure, the coquettish pose of her head, the graceful dignity of her carriage filled him with the liveliest regret that he could not see her face, which was thickly veiled. She came to an abrupt halt in the centre of the room--for the woman on the sofa never stirred. Clearly she, too, had expected something very different.

“Your name, Madame?” asked the sorceress abruptly.

“Mademoiselle, if it please you,” the visitor corrected, “Mademoiselle Lucie Marie Villefranche.”

André was listening now with all his ears. Where before had he heard that crisp, alluring voice?

“_Bien_, Madame.”

“Mademoiselle--” persisted the visitor, nettled.

“Then why does Mademoiselle wear a wedding-ring?”

The visitor made an impatient movement, bit her lip, and petulantly drew off her glove. On the hand she triumphantly held out there was no sign of a wedding-ring.

“It is in Madame’s pocket,” the sorceress said calmly. “But it is of as little importance as is Madame’s husband to her.”

The visitor checked an indignant reply and simply glared through her veil.

Excellent fun, thought André, when you set one woman against another--and such women!

“Give me your hand,” the sorceress proceeded, and she inspected it with the greatest care, the owner watching her with ill-concealed anxiety. “I see a crown in the palm which I cannot understand,” she said slowly, “a crown reversed. A beautiful hand,” she murmured, “beautiful and strong. The hand of a _morceau de roi_.”

Madame Villefranche uttered a sharp cry, almost of triumph. “_Morceau de roi_,” she repeated. “_Morceau de roi_. That is strange. You have heard perhaps that long ago another soothsayer also said the same.”

“I must consult the orb,” the other replied as if she did not hear, and she gazed long and silently at the crystal circle which she produced from its resting-place beside the diamond cross. “Yes, it is quite clear now.”

“What do you see?” was the eager question.

“A great gallery--it is I think the Salon d’Hercule at Versailles--there are many men and women in it, finely dressed--I see a lady in a rose-coloured satin in their centre--it is her favourite colour--they pay court to her----”

“Ah!” Madame Villefranche had stood up. Her hand went involuntarily to her heart.

“One enters with his hat on”--the sorceress jerked out slowly--“he keeps it on--he advances as they bow--he takes his hat off--it is the King--he kisses the hand of the woman in rose-coloured satin--she salutes----”

“_Mon Dieu!_” Madame Villefranche suddenly kneeled beside her. André, as excited as she was, crawled forward so as not to lose a word.

“I see her again”--the woman proceeded after a pause--“she gives orders to ministers--she makes generals--she tramples on all who oppose her--the King is her slave--ah! the crystal is disturbed--no--no--there is much unhappiness--the land is poor--there are jealousies, strifes, quarrels, wars--starving men and women cry out against the King and his mistress--but the woman in the rose-coloured satin still wears her jewels--she does not hear them. What is this?--yes, it is--a hearse leaving Versailles for Paris--the King looks out of the window above on to the Place d’Armes--he shrugs his shoulders--I do not see the woman in the rose-coloured satin any more--I think surely she is dead and no one cares--ah! the crystal has become dim.” She put it down and closed her eyes.

Dead silence, but André could hear the deep-drawn breaths of Madame Villefranche. Her hands were twisted in supreme emotion.

“And the face--the face of the woman, did you see that?” she asked with dry lips.

The sorceress opened her eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said slowly. “It is the face of Madame d’Étiolles, born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson--your face, Madame,” she added as she flung her visitor’s veil swiftly back. The cat leaped from her arms. Madame Villefranche sprang to her feet; the two women were confronting each other, each drawn to her full height.

André too had risen. Ha! At last he understood. The visitor was no other than the fair huntress of the woods who had driven to see the King, in an azure phaeton, herself clad in rose-coloured satin.

“Ah!” exclaimed Madame d’Étiolles, stretching her arms. “Ah!” Then she turned on the sorceress furiously. “My woman has betrayed me,” she cried.

“Oh, no, Madame”--she curtsied as to a queen--“not your woman but the crystal and yourself.”

The other threw up her head incredulously. “If you reveal,” she said harshly, “that I have visited you----”

“I never reveal who my visitors are,” was the quiet answer, “they always reveal themselves.” She sat down indolently, but there was almost insolent provocation in the simple grace of the movement.

Madame d’Étiolles turned away. “And your pay?” she demanded sharply.

“As Madame pleases,” came the indifferent answer from the sofa.

The visitor placed five pieces on the table, replaced her veil, and walked towards the door. “Adieu!” she said over her shoulder, but André could see she stepped as one intoxicated by a sublime vision.

“And will Madame remember the wise woman,” the sorceress pleaded in her soft voice, “if the crystal be found to speak the truth?”

“Yes”; she had wheeled sharply, a merciless freezing vengeance glistened in her eyes and steeled her voice. “I will have you burned for an insolent witch. I promise not to forget.”

“My thanks, Madame.” She rang the hand-bell, and Madame was unceremoniously ushered out. The sorceress sat reflecting and then placed the crystal in her bosom and took away the screen.

“It is the turn of Monsieur le Vicomte,” she remarked pleasantly. “It is a pity I did not ask the lady to stay and hear.”

“No, I thank you,” André answered. “I am satisfied, and so was she.”

“Monsieur is not as Madame,” the sorceress said, fixing a penetrating gaze on him, “he fears his fate.”

“Oh, no,” was the quick reply. “My fate lies in my sword and my head. I am ready to face it without fear or reproach when and as it comes. But I will not know beforehand, not even for a crown reversed.”

For a brief second her eyes rested on him with approval, and indeed he looked very handsome and noble at that moment.

“But Monsieur will permit me,” she said gently, and before he could refuse she had taken his hand, “I will not speak unless he wishes.”

While she studied it he studied her. What a subtle pathos seemed to lie in those blue eyes, those smiling lips, that dainty head almost touching him, a pathos like her perfume ascending into the brain. And how enchanting was that diamond cross rising and falling on that dazzling breast.

“What is it?” he asked, for she had dropped his hand with a faint sigh, and sat staring mysteriously at something far away.

“I am forbidden to speak,” she answered, averting her eyes, and she picked up her cat, and walked away.

“You _shall_ tell me,” André said impetuously.

But she only laughed over the cat’s body, stroking it softly with her chin till its purr echoed through the room.

“Confess, confess,” he said, “I _will_ know.”

“The hand of Monsieur le Vicomte,” she answered, smiling mischievously, “is full of interesting revelations--dreams which come and go--but there is one dream that is always there--the dream of love. Women,” she added, “women, women everywhere in Monsieur’s life; as in the years that were past, so in the years to come. Let the Vicomte de Nérac be on his guard against all women--and against one woman in particular----”

André failed to suppress an exclamation. Had this beautiful witch divined that secret too?

“Her name,” she paused to bury her face in the cat’s fur, “is--Yvonne--Yvonne,” she repeated, “of the Spotless Ankles.”

“Yvonne!” he laughed heartily.

“Yes, Yvonne. Sometimes there is more in a peasant girl to tempt and ruin than in a Comtesse des Forges, or a marquise--” it was her turn to laugh. “Ah! the Vicomte is a gallant and reckless lover. He thinks as the _noblesse_ think, that women are necessary to him. But it is not so. It is he who is necessary to them.”

“And your fee for the advice, mistress?”

She flung the five gold pieces of Madame d’Étiolles into a drawer. “Madame has paid for both,” she said. “But if the Vicomte de Nérac will offer something of his own, I will accept--a kiss,” and she looked him daringly in the face.

The hall of the Château de Beau Séjour swept in a vision before him. _Dieu Le Vengeur_ seemed to be written in a scroll of fire round the cat’s ruff.

“I understand,” she added with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders, “though I am not a marquise or a comtesse.”

“You shall have it,” he blurted out with husky petulance.

She put her hand to her diamond cross--they looked at each other--the woman melted into a defiant reverence.

“The horse of Monsieur le Vicomte,” she commanded quickly to the girl who had appeared as if by magic. “Good-day, sir. You can pay the fee to--Yvonne.”

And here he was alone with the shifty-eyed _fille de chambre_, who plainly gave him an invitation to mistake her for Yvonne.

“Confound you, what do you wait for?” André said irritably. “Fetch the horse at once if you don’t want to taste a rogue’s fare with your mistress in prison.”

And as he rode through the woods it was little comfort to remember that he had won his wager with Henri, Comte de St. Benôit.

Chapter VII

The King’S Handkerchief

IN December the Duchesse de Châteauroux, the _maîtresse en titre_ of the King of France, had died, some said of poison, some of a broken heart at her treatment at Metz when she had been driven by her enemies from the sick King’s bedside and from the Court, a few because she had caught a chill and even _maîtresses en titre_ were mortal. Would Louis select another lady to take her place? Who would she be? That was the question. France was at war--that dreary war called in the books the “War of the Austrian Succession”--and this spring--1745--under the Maréchal de Saxe, (the son of a king and Aurora von Konigsmarck, himself the idol of women of quality as he had been the idol of Adrienne Lecouvreur) great efforts were to be made to drive from the Low Countries the red-coated English and white-coated Austrians, to win for the Fleurs-de-Lis the boundaries that, since the days of Henri IV., God, nature, and French genius had destined to be French. Was not Louis, _Le Bien Aimé_, himself going to the campaign with the flower of his nobility and with his son and heir? Yes, surely great things would be accomplished before the September winds shook the apples off the trees in the orchards of Normandy or they trod the wine-vats on the sun-clad slopes of Gascony. Paris was in a fever of excitement; the Court was still _en fête_ for the marriage of Monsieur le Dauphin to a Saxon princess. But would there be a successor to the hapless Duchesse de Châteauroux? That was the only question about which the Paris that counted really cared.

André of course went to tell St. Benôit how he had won his bet, and he found him gossiping in the salon of the Comtesse des Forges.

“The King has already chosen,” Madame remarked, fanning herself placidly. “But Monseigneur the Archbishop and the royal confessor are still able to work on his remorse, so for the present His Majesty affects to play at being a _dévot_.”

“I don’t believe it,” St. Benôit retorted. “The King will be a _dévot_ for one day in the week and a lover for the other six, as all kings of France and their subjects, too, ought to be. Naturally he does not wish to shock Madame la Dauphine, but wait till the campaign is over; Mars will give way to Venus, and then we shall have one of the De Nesles back again.”

Whereat Madame lifted her heavy-lidded eyes, of which she was so proud, and said contemptuously, “Pooh!”

“I have won the wager,” André interposed, “and I will undertake to win another. I will bet that it will not be a De Nesles, but a _bourgeoise_ that the King will select.”

“Impossible!” both St. Benôit and Madame cried, genuinely shocked. “A _bourgeoise_ at Versailles! It would be a scandal, unheard of, monstrous, not to be tolerated.”

But André only smiled, and press him as they might he refused to say more.

“Well,” said the Comtesse, “if you will go to-night, my dear De Nérac, to the ball at the Hôtel-de-Ville you will learn whether I am not right.” And after André had taken his leave she turned to St. Benôit, with genuine concern. “England,” she said, “has demoralised our dear friend. The English have made him incredibly vulgar. As if the King of France would so far forget himself or be so impertinent to us as to introduce into our Versailles a _bourgeoise_. There would be a revolution.”

“I can see you, Madame,” he answered, “giving the lady her footstool.” He kneeled mockingly at her feet. “God bless my soul! you might as well expect me to kiss the hand of your _fille de chambre_. André was joking; he knows if the King were to bring her to Court she would not stay a week.”

“A week!” Madame threw up her noble head. “Not twenty-four hours.”

But André, who had heard the crystal’s story, had his good reasons. Already fertile schemes were fermenting in his brain; his ambition, too, was daily soaring upwards, and he dimly guessed that in this strange circling of Fortune’s wheel the opportunity for which he thirsted would at last come. And so like the rest of the gay world he went that night to the grand ball given by the municipality of Paris at the Hôtel-de-Ville in honour of the marriage of the Dauphin; for the King had promised to be present, and it was to be one of those rare occasions when the _noblesse_ had consented to rub shoulders with the middle class in doing honour to the royal bride and bridegroom. Coming events were in the air. André felt, though why he could not say, that to-night would somehow prove a decisive turning-point in the history of himself and of France.

For the purpose of dancing, the court of the Hôtel-de-Ville had been converted into a ballroom, superbly festooned and illuminated, and the crowd that had gathered was immense. Nobles of the realm, great ladies, peers, peeresses, and the Court here jostled in the wildest confusion with the gentlemen of the robe, with aldermen, shopkeepers, and even flower girls and the _danseuses_ of the royal ballet. The company was supposed to be masked, but many had already discarded the flimsy covering; and for all who still wore it the disguise was the merest affectation. Most of the ladies of the middle class had donned fancy attire, but the _noblesse_ for the most part showed their quality by refusing to imitate the _canaille_. André of course was content with his uniform of the Chevau-légers de la Garde, that beautiful and famous livery of scarlet with white facings, silver buttons, spurs of gold, and hat with white plumes which in itself conferred an enviable distinction, and about his neck, more proudly still, he carried that Croix de St. Louis, whose possession sufficed to make any soldier happy.

For a few minutes he stood gazing at the brilliant spectacle presented by the moving throng,--one vast arena of human beings in which the uniforms, the stars and ribbons, the jewels, the bright eyes, and the fair shoulders were blended into a magic and inspiring panorama, over which floated the tender music of harp, violin, and flute. And as he moved slowly forward kissing noble hands, receiving gentle congratulations, or looking into eyes to which in past days he had whispered devotion in the Œil de Bœuf or beneath the balmy fragrance of a _fête champêtre_ at Rambouillet his ambition soared still higher. But dance he would not; he had come to watch, to teach, and to learn. The Chevalier to his joy was not here; he had been despatched, André discovered with grim satisfaction, on special business of the King. But yonder was Denise, holding a miniature court. As André edged his way towards her, her glance fell on the familiar uniform, and it plainly said: “Here at least let us forget the past--I have forgiven you--come let us be friends as we were before.” And André replied to her graceful reverence with his stiffest bow, as he had deliberately come to do, and then moved slowly off, but not before he had marked with a lover’s joy the pained surprise in Denise’s eyes, the angry flush that coloured her cheek. But the lesson must be completed. A partner must be found and at once. He paused--looked about him--started.

“You, Madame!” he ejaculated, checking his astonishment, for Denise was watching him.

“I, Monsieur le Vicomte,” was the serene reply. “This is more fun than spelling the truth from a crystal,” and she laughed wickedly.

Yes, it was indeed the wise woman from “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” wearing her diamond cross and dressed in adorably pale blue satin, just such a colour as her eyes covered by the pale blue mask. Strangest of all, André felt at that moment there was not a woman in all this throng who carried herself with more of the true air of the _noblesse_ than did this young sorceress, who plied a charlatan’s trade for hire.

“The Vicomte looks to-night as the Vicomte de Nérac should,” she remarked quietly. “But is it my presence here or is it my perfume that perplexes you?”

And André started again at her unerring divination.

“Surely it is very simple,” she proceeded. “Recall, if you please, a supper party in London--the perfume was there then--now it is here. That is all.”

“What?” He stopped in sheer amazement. “You are that--that woman?”

“Certainly. The same, only a trifle disguised. In London I was dark, in Paris I am fair, because,” she shrugged her shoulders, “I love change and I hate being recognised unless I choose. You will not betray my secret, will you?”

“No. But why are you in Paris?”

“Women like myself,” she answered cynically, “are always dying of _ennui_, and I was born a Parisienne. Can a Parisienne live without Paris? Well, I cannot. London, _mon Dieu!_ Those suffocating English! They make love as they eat beef and drink beer. Their women are prudes, their men heavy as bull-dogs made of lead. London is a _ville de province_--no wit, no ideas, no life. Here,” she pointed with her fan, “it is far different. Where will you find the like of that for gaiety of heart, and sparkle of the soul? It is the city of breeding, of philosophers, of poets, of chivalry, and of lovers. Why, that grisette over there can be more _spirituelle_ than an Englishman of genius. And when even the lovers who make love with ardour and in couplets that sing of themselves become annoying I go elsewhere.”

André listened with a puzzled delight. It was not the perfume--it was the mystery that enveloped her which kept him silent. Something in her voice, her manner, reminded him in the most tantalising way of somebody else and for the life of him he could not think who that somebody was.

“No,” she replied to his invitation, “I will not disgrace you by dancing--you the Vicomte de Nérac and I--” she smiled. “Besides you have seen me dance in the only kind of dancing that I care about. But see,” she added, dropping her voice, “do you not recognise a friend, perhaps a partner? Is she not charming--conquering and to conquer?”

“Name of a dog!” he ejaculated.

Away at the other end of the ballroom was a raised dais on which was gathered a bevy of the fairest of the _bourgeoisie_. One of them, escorted by three or four gentlemen, was descending the stairs into the throng--a woman in the guise of Diana, clad in the airiest, gauziest, purest white, with a silver bow in her hand and a quiver on her shoulder and a jewelled half-moon in her powdered hair. It was--yes, it was--the fair huntress of the woods of Versailles, to-night a matchless spectacle of majestic beauty which rippled over into the gayest, most provocative coquetry imaginable--Juno and Venus and Diana in one and defying you to say which was the more divine. And that cunningly arranged robe of glittering white, with its artful jewels to suggest every curve and line, was just what witchery would have chosen to be the foil to the laughter of her eyes and the subtle sheen of her skin. What other woman could have worn it? But for the one who dared, it was the homage of a woman’s art to the triumph of nature’s womanhood.

André watched her with absorbing interest. Fate had ordained that this woman’s ambitions should be bound up with his. But how? how?

“She has a mind,” his companion was saying, “as well as incomparable beauty. That Abbé at her elbow is Monsieur de Bernis, a poverty-stricken poet who writes her love-letters for her, whom she will make great some day, perhaps, and if Monsieur de Voltaire cared as much for balls as for the muses, he, too, would be snarling his honeyed venom in her ear. She can act and dance and sing. She will not always be Madame d’Étiolles.”

The plans of years were sweeping through André’s brain. What if the crystal--the thought was cut short by a stately flourish of trumpets and the loud hum of applause.

“See,” the sorceress whispered, “the King has arrived.”

Men and women pressed to the entrance and then fell back--on all sides the lowliest reverences. The King, the master of France, had entered and was facing the crowd. And a truly royal figure he made in his splendid dress, for Louis XV. knew how to present himself as a worthy grandson of the Sun God who had created Versailles and made monarchy in Europe sublime: the pose of his handsome head, the dignity of his carriage, the matchless air of command that conveyed an air of majesty such as could only belong to one whose wish since boyhood was law, whose words were orders, whose will was the inspiration of a nation. And when you marked that faint mysterious smile, those blue eyes delicately dull, was he not just like his grandfather, indefinable and impenetrable? What was the real man concealed behind that regal presence? What were the real thoughts masked by that gaze, slightly bored yet caressing and sweet?

“You do not like the King?” André asked quickly, for he had caught behind the pale blue mask a swift glance which sent a shiver down his spine.

“I love him,” she answered, “as all we women do. But I was thinking of the day when I am to be burnt for a witch.”

It was not the truth and André knew it. A woman’s jealousy, he thought--but that, too, he knew it was not.

“My friend,” she said, “go you and salute Madame d’Étiolles. Perhaps you will see something later on to amuse you,” and as if to assist him she glided from him and was lost in the crowd.

She had divined his mind again. To speak with the fair huntress was the resolve that had mastered him. And to his satisfaction Madame no sooner recognised him than she beckoned with her fan, smiling a shy and intoxicating welcome.

André kissed her hand, looking into her eyes, imperial eyes in which slumbered imperial ambitions, such wonderful eyes, now blue, now grey, now softly dark as the violet, now glittering with the lightest mockery. “_Un morceau de roi_,” he muttered. “Yes, by God! a _morceau de roi!_”

“Conduct me to yonder pillar,” she said presently, “we can talk better there.”

But that was not her reason, for to reach the pillar they must pass near the King. Clearly Madame d’Étiolles was bent on playing to-night the game of the woods at closer quarters. André as he escorted her now felt that all eyes, including Denise’s, were on him, but he enjoyed it, walking slowly on the giddiest tiptoes of bravado. In front of Louis, he paused to make his reverence. Madame paused too, and as she unslung her quiver to curtsey with more graceful ease André could feel her tremble. The King’s roaming gaze rested on them both. André’s salute he acknowledged with a smile, a word or two of kind greeting, but it was on the jewels on the breast of the huntress that his bored eyes lingered.

“Fair archeress,” he said, “surely the shafts you loose are mortal.”

Madame d’Étiolles flushed with pleasure, curtsied again, and promptly passed on, without attempting to reply.

“_Mon Dieu!_ what a figure! Who the devil is she?” André heard one of the gentlemen of the Chamber mutter.

“You did that to perfection,” his partner whispered by the pillar. “You are a man who understands women, and they are so rare. And now we will dance if you please.”

The sorceress was right. Madame d’Étiolles danced divinely. She had been taught by the best masters, but it was only art that she owed to their science. The rest was her own.

[Illustration: “Fair archeress,” he said, “surely the shafts you loose are mortal.”]

“Will you please do what I tell you?” she whispered as the violins tripped out a stately minuet. “And trust me.”

“Rely on me, Madame,” he answered.

Imperceptibly Madame d’Étiolles in her minuet drew nearer and nearer to the King, who began to observe them closely. A gleam of animation crept into his face and the courtiers parted a little to permit His Majesty a better view of this dainty dancer. Covert whispers, knowing looks, commenced to run through the group. Yes, the King was distinctly interested. But the fair Diana paid no heed. She had only eyes for the superb officer in the scarlet and white of the Chevau-légers de la Garde, who was dancing as he had never danced before.

“Throw your handkerchief,” came the soft command.

Completely puzzled André obeyed as in a dream. His partner caught the handkerchief dexterously on her fan and was rewarded by a ripple of delighted laughter from the spectators.

“A forfeit, Vicomte,” she said loud enough for all to hear, “I give you tit for tat,” and she pressed her own to her lips, and tossed it back to him.

But it was not intended to reach him. The huntress had calculated carefully and the handkerchief lightly hit the King.

A flush shot into Louis’s face; Madame coloured over neck and shoulders, she dropped her eyes, after one swift glance at His Majesty. Silence, save for the dying lullaby of the music. André’s heart beat fast, but not so fast surely as was beating that ambitious heart of the huntress prisoned in its jewels and white satin.

What would the King do? Would he resent or accept the challenge?

Gentlemen and ladies, nobles and _bourgeois_ alike, drew a deep breath. Ah! the King had picked up the handkerchief--a second’s pause, the pause in which a nation’s destiny may be decided--and then the King smilingly threw the handkerchief back, fair and true, at the audacious dancer.

A pent-up cry arose, hands were clapped. “The King has thrown the handkerchief, the King has thrown the handkerchief,” was the ringing sentence on the lips of all.

Madame caught the royal gift and melted into an enchanting reverence. One alluring side-glance under demure eyelashes, a glance of challenge and of submission, and she had taken André’s arm and glided swiftly back to the dais.

“The King has thrown the handkerchief” still rang round the crowded room. But where was the dancer? She was gone--yes, actually gone without waiting to follow up her victory. And of the expectant, excited throng André alone recognised how unerring was her tact. The huntress had accomplished her object. Henceforward it would not be she who must hunt, for defiance to royal hunters can be more triumphant than obedience.

André went over to Madame des Forges and St. Benôit. “You have lost again,” he said, “and you will confess it now.”

“It is infamous,” replied the Comtesse, with fierce indignation. “Infamous! But that grisette has not won yet; the road from the Hôtel-de-Ville to Versailles is long and difficult!”

“Ah, no,” André answered; “not when you can travel in a royal carriage. You will see what you will see when the campaign is over. The _bourgeoise_ before long will have the heel of her slipper on all our necks.”

“And you believe,” said the Comtesse, “that we will permit her to be forced on us. You are as mad as she is.”

She promptly took St. Benôit’s arm to mark her anger at the part André had played. But he only shrugged his shoulders in infinite amusement. A week ago, true enough, he had scorned to lend himself to such tactics, but to-night he was insensible to the reproach that his noble blood should have felt. For he, too, was under the spell of fate and of a witchery far more potent than the drug of any magician. It was not in mortal man to resist the sorcery of that fair huntress who played on human and royal passion as a musician on a stringed instrument. But there was more than mere passion in that dainty wimple of cambric and lace: “_La Petite d’Étiolles_” was gambling for a great stake. What if she were to be his ally in his great game? Before André there unrolled a wonderful vision of the future. He was necessary to these women. _Bien!_ They should be necessary to him, and bitter as was the contempt in Denise’s pure eyes it only steeled his determination remorselessly to tread the path he had planned towards his goal--Denise.

The King had lost his interest and left the ball. He had entered it a free man; he left it in thraldom. And all Paris knew now that for good or evil the reversed crown of the Duchesse de Châteauroux lay in the lap of another. How long would she be permitted to wear it?

As André hastened to leave, a touch was laid on his arm. “Do you believe in the crystal now?” asked a gently derisive voice.

Ah! the sorceress! he had forgotten her. “You are a true witch,” he said, “you will certainly be burnt. But I thank you.”

“I understand,” she replied and she took the arm he offered. They walked in silence in search of her carriage.

“Why do you hate politics?” André demanded suddenly.

“Because,” she answered slowly, “it is the women to whom politics are a passion who ruin kingdoms.” The vehemence of the reply was as surprising as its nature. “Women,” she added, “governed the great Louis Quatorze, they corrupted the Regent, they will bring our sovereign and his kingdom to be the scorn of the world. Better a hundred witches, a hundred wantons, than one woman whose passion it is to govern a kingdom through its King. That is the woman who should be burnt.”

It was a new idea to André: it would have been a new idea to the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain, to the galleries of Versailles.

“Yes,” she continued, “when a woman is not content to be a wife and a mother she deserves to be treated only as the idol of an hour, the pastime of a fleeting passion.”

“O Madame!”

“O Monsieur!” she retorted. “Believe me, it is pleasanter for the women in the end and better for the men that such women should be denied everything except that for which they live--pleasure.”

They had reached the carriage.

“Do you remember the pay for which you asked?” he questioned, taking her hand.

“Yes, I can never forget it.”

“Then----”

She stepped serenely into the carriage. “Then,” she whispered, “I shall get it, I suppose, when I really want it,” and she swiftly shut the door in his face. “Drive to the hotel of the Duc de Pontchartrain,” was her order.

André swore softly. The Duke was his friend and also perhaps the greatest libertine in Paris. She should not escape him. In a quarter of an hour he was supping with the Duke and his merry crew; women there were in plenty, but this sorceress, the daughter of a Paris flower girl, had neither been invited nor had so much as exchanged a word with his grace. And when André, weary of lansquenet, ribald songs, and copious toasts, slunk to bed with the rising sun he was strangely glad that she had tricked him. But if she was not what she so cynically professed to be what did it mean? And why in her presence did he always have that irritating feeling that somewhere and somehow he had met her before?

Chapter VIII

The VivandièRe Of Fontenoy

THE sun of spring had set on May 10, 1745, the eve of a day memorable in the military annals of the British and French nations. Behind a camp-fire in the entrenchments of Fontenoy André warmed himself, one of the many camp-fires which flared into the dusk on that plain which for two centuries has been the cock-pit of Europe; and as he stared out absently into the swiftly falling night an answering gleam scarcely a mile and a half away yonder to the south-east at Maubray told him that there lay the headquarters of the allied forces of the foe, English, Dutch, and Austrians, commanded by an English prince of the blood-royal, the Duke of Cumberland.

There had been some warm skirmishing to-day. The British and the Austrians by sheer weight of numbers had tumbled out of the enclosures and copses the Pandours and Grassins thrown out as irregular out-posts from the French army; and since then André and St. Benôit with many others had watched the allied generals and their staff reconnoitring at a safe distance the masterly position drawn along the slopes of Fontenoy by Monseigneur le Maréchal de Saxe. A hard nut to crack, gentlemen, these lines, study them through your spy-glasses as you will. Nor will you find it easy to detect the place to push through. Yes; you may attack any time now night or day, for Tournay to our rear is hard pressed and unless relieved will fall into the hands of our master, Louis XV. Well and good; what better could a Chevau-léger de la Garde desire than that the pot-bellied Dutch traders, the Austrian hounds, and the British dogs should dash themselves to pieces on our lines. Mark you how the trenches run from the forest of Barry covering our left away in the north, winding in a gentle semicircle along the rim of the curving slope two miles and more down to the spot where the Château of Anthoin guards the passage of the sluggish Scheldt. And meanwhile we lie here snug and safe behind our redoubts bristling with guns, with logs cut from the forest piled breast-high to aid the advantage our general has given us, and with the flower of the French army crouched and ready to roll you up when you come. See how open the plain in front is, sloping gradually away from us; we can hammer you in the most murderous fashion from under cover if you are mad enough to dream that any troops can drive from its lair a French army that remembers Dettingen and will have Tournay or perish. Our Maréchal de Saxe, who knows something of the art of war, has pronounced it impossible, and God have mercy on your silly, reckless souls if you try, for the French guards are here and the Maison du Roi, and our King’s eye is on us to see that we do our duty!

Yes, His Majesty is here and with him Monsieur le Dauphin, and not a few ladies greatly daring, and the royal household, chamberlains and equerries, serving-men and serving-women, the bluest blood of France, and the wenches of the commissariat, and the actors and actresses of the Théâtre Français. Was there ever such a medley--soldiers, courtesans, and sutlers, thieves, marauders, sluts and wantons, and the gilded coaches and footmen of the beauty and birth that have the right to throng the Staircase des Ambassadeurs at Versailles and have the _entrée_ to the Grand Lever of the King of France?

The camp-fires smoke into the chill dusk; the lights twinkle in the packed villages where battalions of foot bivouac with squadrons of horse. In front smoulders and glares the hamlet of Bourgeon fired by our Grassins when they were driven out this morning. Everywhere the confused turmoil of a great camp, the sharp blare of fitful trumpets, the dull throb of drums, a feverish shot from yonder where skirmishing is still going on, the neighing of horses, the rumble of waggons. Hard by André here the men are taking their evening meal, chattering, laughing, singing, dancing. Such women as can live in camps are drinking too, singing when they cannot thieve. There are wounded to be cared for, or robbed; throats there are beyond the lines to be cut, purses and gold lace to be won from the fallen. Make love while you can. To-morrow’s eve may never come. Have your season of pleasure, Messieurs; to-morrow the wench whom you kiss to-night will strip you in the dusk of the victory and leave you to the mercy of the dogs, the spring frosts, and of God--the God of battles.

Yes, to-morrow there will surely be a great battle. Have not the actors promised it? “To-morrow no performance! The day after to-morrow a play in honour of the victory of Monseigneur le Maréchal de Saxe!” And before long there will be a _Te Deum_ in the glorious aisles of the captured cathedral of Tournay.

André on his straw heap curled in his cloak dreamed of Denise, of the pleasant Loire, and of the Château de Beau Séjour when it should be his. Pest on the _canaille_ and their trulls singing that lampoon at his elbow:

“Une petite bourgeoise, Élevée à la grivoise Mesurant tout à la toise, Fait de la cour un taudis, dis, dis.”

They were singing of no less a lady than the fair huntress and the King, the heroine of the crystal and the King’s handkerchief, “_La Petite d’Étiolles_,” who was now the heroine and jape of the streets of Paris. Strange, so strange. And he, too, had played his part in the drama of royal love:

“Louis, malgré son scrupule, Froidement pour elle brûle, Et son amour ridicule, A fait rire tout Paris, ris, ris.”

His friend! And he would find her at Versailles no doubt when the campaign was over. How long would she stay there, this ambitious _bourgeoise_?

“Monsieur le Lieutenant is sad.” Some one had touched his arm. Ah! only a little _vivandière_ whom he did not recognise. “Monsieur le Vicomte has left his mistress behind and he is sad,” she protested, kneeling beside him and peering with bright eyes into his ruffled visage.

“Run away, my dear,” André replied sleepily. “I am poor, tired, and in a sad temper.”

“And I am poor, fresh, and in a charming temper,” she retorted. “If Monsieur le Vicomte has left his mistress behind there are still many women in the world. Here is one!” She began to hum the refrain of the song with the archest drollery: “A fait rire tout Paris, ris, ris.”

André sat up. An appetising little _vivandière_ this, name of a dog! Plump and most bravely tricked out in a military coat and short skirt which revealed what would have made two dancers’ fortunes.

“If I give you a kiss will you go?” he said good-humouredly.

“Oh, no. The kisses of Monsieur le Vicomte are no better than those of most men, I suppose.”

“Then stay without them.” He closed his eyes and lay down again.

“My thanks,” she nodded, gaily throwing back her short cloak so as to reveal that her blue coat was open at the throat and suggested a chemisette strangely fine for a _vivandière_. Then she bent over him. “Would you do a service for Mademoiselle the Marquise de Beau Séjour?” André sat up, sharply. “Would you do the King a service?” she whispered. “_Mon Dieu!_ how those women bleat! Come this way, Vicomte, I have something to say to you--a secret.” She blew him a kiss from saucy finger-tips.

André, now wide-awake, his blood tingling, followed her till she stopped in the shadow of an outhouse. “You will do the King a service?” she asked gravely enough. “Answer in my ear; we must not be heard. Yes?”

“Tell me,” he said, quickly, “what the service is?”

“The Vicomte can talk English?”

“How the dev----?”

“It matters not how I know it. Do not contradict. Time is precious. To-night”--she was speaking earnestly into his ear--“the friends of the King have learned that the secrets of the Maréchal will be betrayed to the English.”

“Good God!” He gripped her arm.

“Hush!” She raised a warning finger. “It is so. To the charcoal-burner’s hut two miles from here will come at midnight two English officers. The plans of the camp--this camp, Vicomte--will be given them; to-night the English will know where to attack to-morrow and then--” she made a significant gesture.

“But----”

“No one can say how those plans have been stolen. But stolen they have been, and it is too late to alter the entrenchments now. They are made--you understand--and to-morrow is here in ten hours. Worse, worse, the traitor is already at the cottage with the paper.” André sweated hot and cold, for terror rang in her pleading voice. “It is infamous, terrible. But one hope remains. We must find an officer who can speak English, who will pretend to be those English officers and get the plans before they are handed to the enemy. The Vicomte understands?”

“Yes, yes, I see. I will go.” He buttoned up his cloak with peremptory decision.

“Oh!” She sobbed with joy. She could not thank him in words.

“And who are you?” André asked.

“Hush! hush! The army must not know of the danger. If you must know, I am an actress, the friend of Monseigneur le Maréchal. I alone have discovered this, and I am come to you, for I, too, love France.”

The blood swirled for a minute in his temples. Ha! when Denise heard how he, André de Nérac, alone had saved France, the army, and the King, would she not be proud? Perhaps they would give him the Cordon Bleu.

“What am I to do?” he asked quietly. “I am ready.”

She described at length where the charcoal-burner’s hut lay and how it could be reached. “When you are there, rap twice on the door,” she proceeded, “and then say in English to whoever comes, ‘I am from “No. 101” to “No. 101.”’”

“What does that mean?”

“The Vicomte knows what a cipher is? That is the traitor’s cipher--and the traitor’s name. It is all we have discovered.”

“A man, this traitor?”

“No one knows. I swear it. But it must be a man, so say those words in English; speak in English, always--always. Remember you are an officer of the First Foot Guards of the English King; you have come for the papers because ‘No. 101’ has bidden you. You will get them if you are clever and God wills. Then fly--fly for your life, and France is saved.”

“I will not fly till I have killed that traitor.”

“Yes, kill him if you can. But it is the papers you must have or we are all ruined. The papers,” she repeated in a dull agony.

André meditated. Then he took the _vivandière_ by both arms, “Will you swear by the name of the Holy Virgin that this is no trap?” he asked solemnly.

She turned her hooded face up to his and took his Croix de St Louis. “Before God and on this cross,” she answered very slowly, “it is no trap. It is the truth.”

Conviction rang in her low tones and she was trembling with emotion.

“Very well. I am ready. But my uniform?” he asked sharply. “I shall be recognised.”

“I have thought of that,” she said. “See, my room is in the village, a stone’s throw hence. A cloak, a hat, and boots of the English Guard are there, stripped from a dead officer. They will cover your uniform. But you must keep the cloak buttoned, for frock and tunic I have not got, alas! I have, too, my actress’s box of colours. I will disguise you perfectly. Come at once, there is no time to waste.”

And so by two flickering candles her deft fingers transformed him swiftly into the image of a ruddy, beef-fed English officer of the English Guard, and when her work was done she accompanied him to the edge of the lines, where they paused.

“For God’s sake be careful,” she urged. “The Pandours, the Grassins, the marauders, are prowling everywhere. Maybe, too, ‘No. 101’ may have varlets on the look-out. I would not frighten you, but you should know that the man or woman who has hunted ‘No. 101’--and several have tried--has so far met with death.”

But André only smiled grimly.

“Yes,” she repeated, “all who have seen that traitor face to face have died. It is horrible, but the truth. Get the papers, that is all we need. Pry no farther, I beseech you. Ah, sir, a woman, even an actress, would not have on her soul the blood of a gallant gentleman who at her bidding risked all for France.”

“Death can come but once,” he answered, “and in no nobler way than in the service of France and the King.”

“That is true, but you must live. For the King will be grateful, and I--I, too, will not forget.”

André smilingly put his hand on her shoulder. “And is that all?” he asked lightly, “all my reward, Mademoiselle?”

“Come back,” she whispered, “come back and you will see whether it is all. Meanwhile, adieu and _au revoir_.”

She had slipped from his grasp and vanished as mysteriously as she had come. Who was she? Bah! it did not matter now. The night and its work lay before him. But to-morrow--to-morrow!

He mounted, gave the password, and rode into the night.

Behind him lay the sleeping camp ignorant of its peril, in front the strangest, weirdest, most dangerous task he had ever embarked on; yet André felt no fear. His only thought as he trotted down the slope was a vivid reminiscence of the words of the crystal-gazer. Women everywhere in his life--always women at every turn--the princess in London--Yvonne--“_La Petite d’Étiolles_”--the crystal-gazer, and now the charming little _vivandière_--but they were all so many instruments to help him to win the fairest of them all--Denise. It was clear as noonday now. His task was to master the strand of the web in which these women, by design or accident, enwrapped him, and to make them serve his purpose while he seemed to serve theirs. It was an idea which grew in power and fascination every day. Women appealed to him by nature; before the charm of mind and body in women he was defenceless, but it was his love for Denise that had inspired the conception of yoking the pleasure of life to the attainment of a glorious ambition. To-night was a matchless opportunity--and others would follow.

But his mind while it revolved was fully alert. He believed in himself and his sword. His faith in his star grew stronger each day. But fate and God helped those who would best help themselves. To-night he must not fail on this difficult task because he neglected anything that caution could suggest.

From time to time he halted. The night was dark, that was good, and a raw mist steamed out of the sodden earth. He had taken the precaution to bind his horse’s hoofs in soft cloth, and she, a powerful English thoroughbred, his favourite mare, knew her master’s will by instinct. The road, too, was easy to find. No one crossed his path. And here at last was the little wood of which he had been told. Half a mile away gleamed dully a fire, probably an English picket. He dismounted and listened intently. Not a sound. And now very warily he plunged forward into the bowels of this grisly little wood, leading his horse, his pistols cocked and sword ready. Presently he stumbled; only a fallen log; he stumbled again; another? No. This time it was a dead man. André dragged him out and let the rays of his masked lantern fall cautiously on his face. Poor wretch! half-naked too--a common gallows bird of a marauder, stripped by the thieves and with a knife-thrust in his throat, a common enough spectacle to those who had played at war before, mere carrion in the daylight, but causing the flesh to creep in the raw chills of this infernal hiding-place of treachery. Let him lie. And now forward again. Pah! another corpse! A woman, and young, too, that rascal’s companion no doubt, and stripped as he was. He bent over her. Ha! what was that? One hand gone? There had been a quarrel, the robbers had killed her and her mate, and to save time had simply chopped off her fingers to get the booty she had gripped so tightly. Let her lie beside him there and forward again, for such is war.

Halt! Here is the charcoal-burner’s cabin. He could just make out its black outlines in a clearing of the trees. André muffled his mare’s head and tied her to a branch, and then with naked sword crawled forward on hand and knees. Round the hut like a sleuth-hound he wormed his way, learning the ground, making absolutely sure no one lurked in this damp stillness. Positively not a soul, not a whisper. But the horror of the dead man and woman and this awful stillness had mastered him, and ten yards from the door he lay for some minutes watching, thinking. The hut showed no signs of life. What if “No. 101” were not there? What if the English officers had forestalled him and the papers were already gone? What if an ambuscade were concealed in that ramshackle cabin?

Still he lay thinking, shivering, to start swiftly. The shutter in the cabin wall was being slowly pushed open. There was no glass in the window; a gleam of red light; some one was stealthily looking out into the night. André crawled on his stomach across the clearing and lay flat down with a sharp gasp.

By the living God, it was a woman! A woman!

Two drops of icy sweat dripped from his forehead on to the damp ground. A woman! Yes, he could see the silhouette of her hooded head and bust etched against the dull red light behind and the inky frame-work of the window, and she was thinking too, resting her elbow placidly on the sill. A woman! It was terrible, for she was a traitor and he must kill her, here in this cursed cabin, in this damned wood. She moved her head and listened intently. Yes, she was expecting some one. Ha! He was not too late.

The shutter was stealthily closed, but crouching beneath it André heard the faint sigh as of a weary heart. He sprang up, rapped twice on the door.

Steps within, the bolts were being drawn back. At last a masked woman with a lantern in her hand stood in the doorway, and he and she faced each other in silence.

“Who is that?” she asked in a clear voice.

“I am from ‘No. 101’ to ‘No. 101,’” André answered firmly, but inwardly he trembled and his sword was ready to leap out.

She raised the lantern quietly and let the light travel from his hat to his boots.

“Good,” she said. “Enter, sir.”

André paused. Could he dare? No--yes--no? For two slow minutes the thoughts battled within him as he strove to penetrate the secret of that mask and the hood covering her head. She was young--quite young. That faint sigh as of a weary heart seemed to echo through the misty silence of the wood.

Then he stepped inside, and she quietly closed the door.

Chapter IX

At The Charcoal-Burner’S Cabin In The Woods

THE woman led the way into the kitchen which opened off the tiny passage and André followed her. The two faced each other in silence. Presently she placed the lantern on the rough table in the centre of the room and once again looked at him thoughtfully through her mask. The only other light there was came from the dying embers of a fire, whose murky shadows flickered on the walls and on the low roof.

André with his fingers on his sword-hilt returned her studied gaze. He could make out that her hair under her hood was fair; her voice, her step, were those of a girl, and what he could see of her figure shrouded in its long cloak bid well to be shapely. Yes, she was young, this woman, but a pest on that mask!

“You are not the officer I expected,” she remarked at last.

“He was wounded; he could not come, so they sent me in his place,” André answered at once.

“I understand,” she replied with a quiet nod, “but they said two would be sent.”

“My companion is outside guarding the horses.” Whereupon she lifted the lantern and inspected him closely. André, ready for anything, stood quite still. “If you doubt my word,” he added carelessly, “I will take you to him now.”

“No,” she answered, replacing the lantern on the table, “your word is enough; the word of an English officer,” and she turned to cross the kitchen.

André’s face was calmness itself, but his blood was tingling with fear, curiosity, revenge. Never in his adventurous life had he been so thrilled as at this moment in this dim, silent kitchen, alone with this cold-blooded traitress in a mask. But, mastered as he was by an overpowering desire to probe her secret to the bottom, he was also carefully studying every nook and cranny. There was only one way out of the room--by the door, which was half-open. He carefully moved so that he might face it, and if a swift rush were necessary not have the table between him and the road to escape.

“There are the papers,” she said in her passionless tones. She had taken them from a cupboard in the wall.

He betrayed no eagerness, but his fingers trembled and his heart thumped wildly as he looked them through by the dim light of the lantern, one eye all the time watching the masked girl, who quietly kneeled down by the fire with her back to him and began to blow on the embers with a bellows.

“They are what you want, are they not?” she remarked over her shoulder.

“I believe so,” he answered as carelessly.

Yes, the _vivandière_ was right. The paper was a complete plan of the French encampment, marking accurately the positions of each battalion and each battery, and in the corner was drawn in blood a curious sign--two crossed daggers with 101 inserted in the gaps:

[Illustration]

It sent an icy shiver through him, this countermark of the traitor’s success and good faith. God! they were betrayed indeed to those damned Austrian hounds and English dogs. But he, André de Nérac, had saved the King and the army of France!

“I thank you,” he said, folding the paper up and putting it deliberately within his cloak.

“I do not desire your thanks,” she replied as she blew away some ashes.

André stared in dumb bewilderment at her on her knees there in front of the fire. Should he run her through at once or strangle her for an execrable traitress? The woman betrayed neither fear nor interest. She seemed to have forgotten his presence.

“Are you ‘No. 101’?” he asked at last.

“Oh, no.” She was laughing softly. “I am only her--agent.”

“Then the trait--then she is a woman?”

“Yes.” She stood up and shook some cinders from her cloak. “Yes, she is a woman.” And André knew she was lying. The fingers on his sword relaxed. Kill her he could not--yet. Depart he could not--yet. For he was in the grip of a weird fascination--of a secret whose mystery numbed his senses.

“It is marvellous,” he muttered, “but the English army thanks ‘No. 101’ and you.”

“Yes,” she answered indifferently, “it is marvellous, but the English army is nothing to her nor to me. For myself I detest the English officers, but like you, sir, I simply do as I am bid. Give me the gold and I will wish you good-night.”

The gold; English gold! Pest on it! The _vivandière_ and he had thought of everything but that. The perspiration swelled on to his forehead. He grasped his sword and took a step towards the doorway.

“I was given no gold,” he said brusquely and waited with drawn breath.

“No?” She shrugged her shoulders and astonished him by kneeling down and taking up the bellows. “It is like English officers to buy secrets and not pay for them.”

“You are unjust to the English,” he protested. Ah! that surely was a stroke of genius.

“I know them, the English,” she said without looking round.

Dead silence broken only by the wheezy puffs of the bellows. Pity, fear, astonishment, and a burning curiosity wrestled in André’s breast. Was this masked girl flesh and blood or a devil in human form?

“Do you want the papers back?” he demanded.

“They are not mine to ask. I was told to give them to you; keep them.”

The icy contempt in her voice stung him. If it had not been for France he would have flung them at her and then strangled her on the spot.

“Before I wish you good-night,” he said after a pause, “will you do me the honour to remove your mask?”

“Why?” She wheeled slowly, still on her knees.

“Why does even an English officer ask a woman to do such a thing?”

She rose and came close to him. “I will take off my mask with pleasure,” she said, “if you, sir, will do me the honour to take off your cloak and share my supper.”

André could not check a start. Had she guessed the truth or was this diabolical coquetry?

“Permit me,” she said softly, a