St. Martin's Summer Part 19

"Madame," said he, "you are back at your contemplation of the worst side of this affair; you are persisting in considering only how we may be thwarted. But set your mind at rest. Gilles is her sentinel. Every night he sleeps in her anteroom. He is Fortunio's most trusted man. She will not corrupt him."

The Dowager smiled pensively, her eyes upon the fire. Suddenly she raised them to his face. "Berthaud was none the less trusted. Yet, with no more than a promise of reward at some future time should she succeed in escaping from us, did she bribe him to carry her letter to the Queen.

What happened to Berthaud that may not happen to Gilles?"

"You might change her sentry nightly," put in the Seneschal.

"Yes, if we knew whom we could trust; who would be above corruption.

As it is"--she shrugged her shoulders "that would be but to afford her opportunities to bribe them one by one until they were all ready to act in concert."

"Why need she any sentinel at all?" asked Tressan, with some show of sense.

"To ward off possible traitors," she told him, and Marius smiled and wagged his head.

"Madame is never done foreseeing the worst, monsieur."

"Which shows my wisdom. The men in our garrison are mercenaries, all attached to us only because we pay them. They all know who she is and what her wealth."

"Pity you have not a man who is deaf and dumb," said Tressan, half in jest. But Marius looked up suddenly, his eyes serious.

"We have as good," said he. "There is the Italian knave Fortunio enrolled yesterday, as I have told you. He knows neither her wealth nor her ident.i.ty; nor if he did could he enter into traffic with her, for he knows no French, and she no Italian."

The Dowager clapped her hands. "The very man!" she cried.

But Marius, either from sheer perverseness, or because he did not share her enthusiasm, made answer: "I have faith in Gilles."

"Yes," she mocked him, "and you had faith in Berthaud. Oh, if you have faith in Gilles, let him remain; let no more be said."

The obstinate boy took her advice, and shifted the subject, speaking to Tressan of some trivial business connected with the Seneschalship.

But madame, woman-like, returned to the matter whose abandoning she had herself suggested. Marius, for all his affected disdain of it, viewed it with a certain respect. And so in the end they sent for the recruit.

Fortunio--who was no other than the man Garnache had known as "Sanguinetti"--brought him, still clad in the clothes in which he had come. He was a tall, limber fellow, with a very swarthy skin and black, oily-looking hair that fell in short ringlets about his ears and neck, and a black, drooping mustache which gave him a rather hang-dog look.

There was a thick stubble of beard of several days' growth about his chin and face; his eyes were furtive in their glances, but of a deep blue that contrasted oddly with his blackness when he momentarily raised them.

He wore a tattered jerkin, and his legs, in default of stockings, were swathed in soiled bandages and cross-gartered from ankle to knee. He stood in a pair of wooden shoes, from one of which peeped forth some wisps of straw, introduced, no doubt, to make the footgear fit. He slouched and shuffled in his walk, and he was unspeakably dirty.

Nevertheless, he was girt with a sword in a ragged scabbard hanging from a frayed and shabby belt of leather.

Madame scanned him with interest. The fastidious Marius eyed him with disgust. The Seneschal peered at him curiously through shortsighted eyes.

"I do not think I have ever seen a dirtier ruffian," said he.

"I like his nose," said madame quietly. "It is the nose of an intrepid man."

"It reminds me of Garnache's," laughed the Seneschal.

"You flatter the Parisian," commented Marius.

The mercenary, meanwhile, stood blandly smiling at the party, showing at least a fine array of teeth, and wearing the patient, attentive air of one who realizes himself to be under discussion, yet does not understand what is being said.

"A countryman of yours, Fortunio?" sneered Marius.

The captain, whose open, ingenuous countenance dissembled as villainous a heart as ever beat in the breast of any man, disowned the compatriotism with a smile.

"Hardly, monsieur," said he. "'Battista' is a Piedmontese." Fortunio himself was a Venetian.

"Is he to be relied upon, think you?" asked madame. Fortunio shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. It was not his habit to trust any man inordinately.

"He is an old soldier," said he. "He has trailed a pike in the Neapolitan wars. I have cross-questioned him, and found his answers bore out the truth of what he said."

"And what brings him to France?" asked Tressan. The captain smiled again, and there came again that expressive shrug of his. "A little over-ready with the steel," said he.

They told Fortunio that they proposed to place him sentry over mademoiselle instead of Gilles, as the Italian's absolute lack of French would ensure against corruption. The captain readily agreed with them.

It would be a wise step. The Italian fingered his tattered hat, his eyes on the ground.

Suddenly madame spoke to him. She asked him for some account of himself and whence he came, using the Italian tongue, of which she had a pa.s.sing knowledge. He followed her questions very attentively, at times with apparent difficulty, his eyes on her face, his head craned a little forward.

Now and then Fortunio had to intervene, to make plainer to this ignorant Piedmontese mind the Marquise's questions. His answers came in a deep, hoa.r.s.e voice, slurred by the accent of Piedmont, and madame--her knowledge of Italian being imperfect--had frequently to have recourse to Fortunio to discover the meaning of what he said.

At last she dismissed the pair of them, bidding the captain see that he was washed and more fittingly clothed.

An hour later, after the Seneschal had taken his departure to ride home to Gren.o.ble, it was madame herself, accompanied by Marius and Fortunio, who conducted Battista--such was the name the Italian had given--to the apartments above, where mademoiselle was now confined practically a prisoner.

CHAPTER XI. VALERIE'S GAOLER

My child, said the Dowager, and her eyes dwelt on Valerie with a look of studied gentleness, "why will you not be reasonable?"

The constant reflection that Garnache was at large, making his way back to Paris to stir up vengeance for the outrage put upon him, was not without a certain chastening effect upon the Dowager. She had a way of saying that she had as good a stomach for a fight as any man in France, and a fight there should be if it came to it and Garnache should return to a.s.sail Condillac. Yet a certain pondering of the consequences, a certain counting of the cost--ordinarily unusual to her nature led her to have recourse to persuasion and to a gentleness no less unusual.

Valerie's eyes were raised to hers with a look that held more scorn than wonder. They were standing in the antechamber of Valerie's room. Yonder at his post lounged the recruit "Battista," looking a trifle cleaner than when first he had been presented to the Marquise, but still not clean enough for a lady's antechamber. He was leaning stolidly against the sill of the window, his eyes on the distant waters of the Isere, which shone a dull copper colour in the afterglow of the October sunset.

His face was vacant, his eyes pensive, as he stood there undisturbed by the flow of a language he did not understand.

Fortunio and Marius had departed, and the Marquise--played upon by her unusual tremors--had remained behind for a last word with the obstinate girl.

"In what, madame," asked Valerie, "does my conduct fall short of reasonableness?"

The Dowager made a movement of impatience. If at every step she were to be confronted by these questions, which had in them a savour of challenge, she was wasting time in remaining.

"You are unreasonable, in this foolish clinging to a promise given for you."

"Given by me, madame," the girl amended, knowing well to what promise the Dowager referred.

"Given by you, then; but given at an age when you could not understand the nature of it. They had no right to bind you so."

"If it is for any to question that right, it is for me," Valerie made answer, her eyes ever meeting the Dowager's unflinchingly. "And I am content to leave that right unquestioned. I am content to fill the promise given. In honour I could not do less."