St. Martin's Summer Part 6

"Good. You are a brisk soldier, d'Aubran. You are a man to be relied upon."

D'Aubran bowed. He was a tall, active young fellow with a pleasant face and a pair of fine black eyes.

"Monsieur le Seneschal is very good."

With a wave of the hand the Seneschal belittled his own goodness.

"You will march out of Gren.o.ble within the hour, Captain, and you will lead your men to Montelimar. There you will quarter them, and await my further orders. Babylas will give you a letter to the authorities, charging them to find you suitable quarters. While there, d'Aubran, and until my further orders reach you, you will employ your time in probing the feeling in the hill district. You understand?"

"Imperfectly," d'Aubran confessed.

"You will understand better when you have been in Montelimar a week or so. It may, of course, be a false alarm. Still, we must safeguard the King's interests and be prepared. Perhaps we may afterwards be charged with starting at shadows; but it is better to be on the alert from the moment the shadow is perceived than to wait until the substance itself has overwhelmed us."

It sounded so very much as if the Seneschal's words really had some hidden meaning, that d'Aubran, if not content with going upon an errand of which he knew so little, was, at least, reconciled to obey the orders he received. He uttered words that conveyed some such idea to Tressan's mind, and within a half-hour he was marching out of Gren.o.ble with beating drums, on his two days' journey to Montelimar.

CHAPTER IV. THE CHATEAU DE CONDILLAC

As Captain d'Aubran and his troop were speeding westwards from Gren.o.ble, Monsieur de Garnache, ever attended by his man, rode briskly in the opposite direction, towards the grey towers of Condillac, that reared themselves towards the greyer sky above the valley of the Isere. It was a chill, dull, autumnal day, with a raw wind blowing from the Alps; its breath was damp, and foretold of the rain that was likely to come anon, the rain with which the clouds hanging low about the distant hills were pregnant.

But Monsieur de Garnache was totally insensible to his surroundings; his mind was very busy with the interview from which he had come, and the interview to which he was speeding. Once he permitted himself a digression, that he might point a moral for the benefit of his servant.

"You see, Rebecque, what a plague it is to have to do with women. Are you sufficiently grateful to me for having quelled your matrimonial ardour of two months ago? No, you are not. Grateful you may be; sufficiently grateful, never; it would be impossible. No grat.i.tude could be commensurate with the benefit I conferred upon you. Yet if you had married, and discovered for yourself the troubles that come from too close an a.s.sociation with that s.e.x which some wag of old ironically called the weaker, and of which contemporary fools with no sense of irony continue so to speak in good faith, you could have blamed only yourself. You would have shrugged your shoulders and made the best of it, realizing that no other man had put this wrong upon you. But with me--thousand devils!--it is very different. I am a man who, in one particular at least, has chosen his way of life with care; I have seen to it that I should walk a road unenc.u.mbered by any petticoat. What happens? What comes of all my careful plans?

"Fate sends an infernal cut-throat to murder our good king--whose soul G.o.d rest eternally! And since his son is of an age too tender to wield the sceptre, the boy's mother does it in his name. Thus, I, a soldier, being subject to the head of the State, find myself, by no devising of my own, subject to a woman.

"In itself that is bad enough. Too bad, indeed--Ventregris!--too bad.

Yet Fate is not content. It must occur to this woman to select me--me of all men--to journey into Dauphiny, and release another woman from the clutches of yet a third. And to what shifts are we not put, to what discomforts not subjected? You know them, Rabecque, for you have shared them with me. But it begins to break upon my mind that what we have endured may be as nothing to what may lie before us. It is an ill thing to have to do with women. Yet you, Rabecque, would have deserted me for one of them!"

Rabecque was silent. Maybe he was ashamed of himself; or maybe that, not agreeing with his master, he had yet sufficient appreciation of his position to be discreetly silent where his opinions might be at variance. Thus Garnache was encouraged to continue.

"And what is all this trouble about, which they have sent me to set right? About a marriage. There is a girl wants to marry one man, and a woman who wants to marry her to another. Ponder the possibilities of tragedy in such a situation. Half this world's upheavals have had their source in less. Yet you, Rabecque, would have married!"

Necessity at last turned his discourse to other matters.

"Tell me, now," said he abruptly, in a different tone, "is there hereabouts a ford?"

"There is a bridge up yonder, monsieur," returned the servant, thankful to have the conversation changed.

They rode towards it in silence, Garnache's eyes set now upon the grey pile that crowned the hillock, a half-mile away, on the opposite bank of the stream. They crossed the bridge and rode up the gently rising, bare, and rugged ground towards Condillac. The place wore an entirely peaceful air, strong and ma.s.sive though it appeared. It was encircled by a ditch, but the drawbridge was down, and the rust on its chains argued that long had it been so.

None coming to challenge them, the pair rode across the planks, and the dull thud of their hooves started into activity some one in the gatehouse.

A fellow rudely clad--a hybrid between man-at-arms and lackey--lounged on a musket to confront them in the gateway. Monsieur de Garnache announced his name, adding that he came to crave an audience of Madame la Marquise, and the man stood aside to admit him. Thus he and Rabecque rode forward into the roughly paved courtyard.

From several doorways other men emerged, some of martial bearing, showing that the place was garrisoned to some extent. Garnache took little heed of them. He flung his reins to the man whom he had first addressed--the fellow had kept pace beside him--and leapt nimbly to the ground, bidding Rabecque await him there.

The soldier lackey resigned the reins to Rabecque, and requested Monsieur de Garnache to follow him. He led the way through a door on the left, down a pa.s.sage and across an anteroom, and ushered the visitor finally into a s.p.a.cious, gloomy hall, panelled in black oak and lighted as much by the piled-up fire that flared on the n.o.ble hearth as by the grey daylight that filtered through the tall mullioned windows.

As they entered, a liver-coloured hound that lay stretched before the fire growled lazily, and showed the whites of his eyes. Paying little attention to the dog, Garnache looked about him. The apartment was handsome beyond praise, in a sombre, n.o.ble fashion. It was hung with pictures of departed Condillacs--some of them rudely wrought enough--with trophies of ancient armour, and with implements of the chase. In the centre stood an oblong table of black oak, very richly carved about its ma.s.sive legs, and in a china bowl, on this, an armful of late roses filled the room with their sweet fragrance.

Then Garnache espied a page on the window-seat, industriously burnishing a cuira.s.s. He pursued his task, indifferent to the newcomer's advent, until the knave who had conducted thither the Parisian called the boy and bade him go tell the Marquise that a Monsieur de Garnache, with a message from the Queen-Regent, begged an audience.

The boy rose, and simultaneously, out of a great chair by the hearth, whose tall back had hitherto concealed him, there rose another figure.

This was a stripling of some twenty summers--twenty-one, in fact--of a pale, beautifully featured face, black hair and fine black eyes, and very sumptuously clad in a suit of shimmering silk whose colour shifted from green to purple as he moved.

Monsieur de Garnache a.s.sumed that he was in the presence of Marius de Condillac. He bowed a trifle stiffly, and was surprised to have his bow returned with a graciousness that amounted almost to cordiality.

"You are from Paris, monsieur?" said the young man, in a gentle, pleasant voice. "I fear you have had indifferent weather for your journey."

Garnache thought of other things besides the weather that he had found indifferent, and he felt warmed almost to the point of anger at the very recollection. But he bowed again, and answered amiably enough.

The young man offered him a seat, a.s.suring him that his mother would not keep him waiting long. The page had already gone upon his errand.

Garnache took the proffered chair, and sank down with creak and jingle to warm himself at the fire.

"From what you have said, I gather that you are Monsieur Marius de Condillac," said he. "I, as you may have heard me announced by your servant, am Martin Marie Rigobert de Garnache--at your service."

"We have heard of you, Monsieur de Garnache," said the youth as he crossed his shapely legs of silken violet, and fingered the great pearl that depended from his ear. "But we had thought that by now you would be on your way to Paris."

"No doubt--with Margot," was the grim rejoinder.

But Marius either gathered no suggestion from its grimness, or did not know the name Garnache uttered, for he continued:

"We understood that you were to escort Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye to Paris, to place her under the tutelage of the Queen-Regent. I will not conceal from you that we were chagrined at the reflection cast upon Condillac; nevertheless, Her Majesty's word is law in Dauphiny as much as it is in Paris."

"Quite as much, and I am relieved to hear you confess it," said Garnache drily, and he scanned more closely the face of this young man. He found cause to modify the excellent impression he had received at first.

Marius's eyebrows were finely pencilled, but they arched a shade too much, and his eyes were set a trifle too closely; the mouth, which had seemed beautiful at first, looked, in addition, on this closer inspection, weak, sensual, and cruel.

There fell upon the momentary silence the sound of an opening door, and both men rose simultaneously to their feet.

In the splendid woman that entered, Monsieur de Garnache saw a wonderful likeness to the boy who stood beside him. She received the emissary very graciously. Marius set a chair for her between the two they had been occupying, and thus interchanging phrases of agreeable greeting the three sat down about the hearth with every show of the greatest amity.

A younger man might have been put out of countenance; the woman's surpa.s.sing beauty, her charm of manner, her melodious voice, falling on the ear soft and gentle as a caress, might have turned a man of less firmness a little from his purpose, a little perhaps from his loyalty and the duty that had brought him all the way from Paris. But Monsieur de Garnache was to her thousand graces as insensible as a man of stone.

And he came to business briskly. He had no mind to spend the day at her fireside in pleasant, meaningless talk.

"Madame," said he, "monsieur your son informs me that you have heard of me and of the business that brings me into Dauphiny. I had not looked for the honour of journeying quite so far as Condillac; but since Monsieur de Tressan, whom I made my amba.s.sador, appears to have failed so signally, I am constrained to inflict my presence upon you."

"Inflict?" quoth she, with a pretty look of make-believe dismay. "How harsh a word, monsieur!"

The smoothness of the implied compliment annoyed him.

"I will use any word you think more adequate, madame, if you will suggest it," he answered tartly.

"There are a dozen I might suggest that would better fit the case--and with more justice to yourself," she answered, with a smile that revealed a gleam of white teeth behind her scarlet lips. "Marcus, bid Benoit bring wine. Monsieur de Garnache will no doubt be thirsting after his ride."