It required no great sagacity to foresee the next move; and I was not surprised when, about an hour later, I heard a clatter of hoofs outside, and a voice inquiring hurriedly for the Marquis de Rosny. One of my people announced M. de Perrot, and I bade them admit him. In a twinkling he came up, pale with heat, and covered with dust, his eyes almost starting from his head and his cheeks trembling with agitation.
Almost before the door was shut, he cried out that we were undone.
I was willing to divert myself with him for a time, and I pretended to know nothing. "What?" I said, rising. "Has the King met with an accident?"
"Worse! worse!" he cried, waving his hat with a gesture of despair.
"My son--you saw my son yesterday?"
"Yes," I said.
"He overheard us!"
"Not us," I said drily. "You. But what then, M. de Perrot? You are master in your own house."
"But he is not in my house," he wailed. "He has gone! Fled! Decamped!
I had words with him this morning, you understand."
"About your niece?"
M. de Perrot"s face took a delicate shade of red, and he nodded; he could not speak. He seemed for an instant in danger of some kind of fit. Then he found his voice again. "The fool prated of love! Of love!" he said with such a look--like that of a dying fowl--that I could have laughed aloud. "And when I bade him remember his duty he threatened me. He, that unnatural boy, threatened to betray me, to ruin me, to go to Madame de Beaufort and tell her all--all, you understand. And I doing so much, and making such sacrifices for him!"
"Yes," I said, "I see that. And what did you do?"
"I broke my cane on his back," M. de Perrot answered with unction, "and locked him in his room. But what is the use? The boy has no natural feelings!"
"He got out through the window?"
Perrot nodded; and being at leisure, now that he had explained his woes, to feel their full depth, shed actual tears of rage and terror; now moaning that Madame would never forgive him, and that if he escaped the Bastille he would lose all his employments and be the laughing-stock of the Court; and now striving to show that his peril was mine, and that it was to my interest to help him.
I allowed him to go on in this strain for some time, and then, having sufficiently diverted myself with his forebodings, I bade him in an altered voice to take courage. "For I think I know," I said, "where your son is."
"At Madame"s?" he groaned.
"No; here," I said.
"MON DIEU! Where?" he cried. And he sprang up, startled out of his lamentations.
"Here; in my lodging," I answered.
"My son is here?" he said.
"In the next room," I replied, smiling indulgently at his astonishment, which was only less amusing than his terror. "I have but to touch this bell, and Maignan will bring him to you."
Full of wonder and admiration, he implored me to ring and have him brought immediately; since until he had set eyes on him he could not feel safe. Accordingly I rang my hand-bell, and Maignan opened the door. "The clockmaker," I said nodding.
He looked at me stupidly. "The clock-maker, your excellency?"
"Yes; bring him in," I said.
"But--he has gone!" he exclaimed.
"Gone?" I cried, scarcely able to believe my ears. "Gone, sirrah! and I told you to detain him!"
"Until he had mended the clock, my lord," Maignan stammered, quite out of countenance. "But he set it going half-an-hour ago; and I let him go, according to your order."
It is in the face of such CONTRETEMPS as these that the low-bred man betrays himself. Yet such was my chagrin on this occasion, and so sudden the shock, that it was all I could do to maintain my SANGFROID, and, dismissing Maignan with a look, be content to punish M. de Perrot with a sneer. "I did not know that your son was a tradesman," I said.
He wrung his hands. "He has low tastes," he cried. "He always had.
He has amused himself that way, And now by this time he is with Madame de Beaufort and we are undone!"
"Not we," I answered curtly; "speak for yourself, M. de Perrot."
But though, having no mind to appear in his eyes dependent on Madame"s favour or caprice, I thus checked his familiarity, I am free to confess that my calmness was partly a.s.sumed; and that, though I knew my position to be una.s.sailable--based as it was on solid services rendered to the King, my master, and on the familiar affection with which he honoured me through so many years--I could not view the prospect of a fresh collision with Madame without some misgiving. Having gained the mastery in the two quarrels we had had, I was the less inclined to excite her to fresh intrigues; and as unwilling to give the King reason to think that we could not live at peace. Accordingly, after a moment"s consideration, I told Perrot that, rather than he should suffer, I would go to Madame de Beaufort myself, and give such explanations as would place another complexion on the matter.
He overwhelmed me with thanks, and, besides, to show his grat.i.tude--for he was still on thorns, picturing her wrath and resentment he insisted on accompanying me to the Cloitre de St. Germain, where Madame had her apartment. By the way, he asked me what I should say to her.
"Whatever will get you out of the sc.r.a.pe," I answered curtly.
"Then anything!" he cried with fervour. "Anything, my dear friend.
Oh, that unnatural boy!"
"I suppose that the girl is as big a fool?" I said.
"Bigger! bigger!" he answered. "I don"t know where she learned such things!"
"She prated of love, too, then?"
"To be sure," he groaned, "and without a sou of DOT!"
"Well, well," I said, "here we are. I will do what I can."
Fortunately the King was not there, and Madame would receive me. I thought, indeed, that her doors flew open with suspicious speed, and that way was made for me more easily than usual; and I soon found that I was not wrong in the inference I drew from these facts. For when I entered her chamber that remarkable woman, who, whatever her enemies may say, combined with her beauty a very uncommon degree of sense and discretion, met me with a low courtesy and a smile of derision. "So,"
she said, "M. de Rosny, not satisfied with furnishing me with evidence, gives me proof."
"How, Madame?" I said; though I well understood.
"By his presence here," she answered. "An hour ago," she continued, "the King was with me. I had not then the slightest ground to expect this honour, or I am sure that his Majesty would have stayed to share it. But I have since seen reason to expect it, and you observe that I am not unprepared."
She spoke with a sparkling eye, and an expression of the most lively resentment; so that, had M. de Perrot been in my place I think that he would have shed more tears. I was myself somewhat dashed, though I knew the prudence that governed her in her most impetuous sallies; still, to avoid the risk of hearing things which we might both afterwards wish unsaid, I came to the point. "I fear that I have timed my visit ill, Madame," I said. "You have some complaint against me."
"Only that you are like the others," she answered with a fine contempt.
"You profess one thing and do another."
"As for example?"
"For example!" she replied, with a scornful laugh. "How many times have you told me that you left women, and intrigues in which women had part, on one side?"
I bowed.
"And now I find you--you and that Perrot, that creature!--intriguing against me; intriguing with some country chit to--"