"You leave me little alternative--alas!" sighed she. "Had you been more adroit you had been wed by now, Marius, and the future would give us no concern. As it is, Florimond comes home, and we--" She spread her hands and thrust out her nether lip in a grimace that was almost ugly. Then: "Come," she said briskly. "Supper is laid, and my Lord Seneschal will be awaiting us."
And before he could reply she had swept past him and taken her way below. He followed gloomily, and in gloom sat he at table, never heeding the reckless gaiety of the Seneschal and the forced mirth of the Marquise. He well understood the sort of tacit bargain that his mother had made with him. She had seen her advantage in his loathing of the proposed union with Tressan, and she had used it to the full. Either he must compel Valerie to wed him this side of Sat.u.r.day or resign himself to see his mother--his beautiful, peerless mother--married to this skin of lard that called itself a man.
Living, he had never entertained for his father a son"s respect, nor, dead, did he now reverence his memory as becomes a son. But in that hour, as he sat at table, facing this gross wooer of his mother"s, his eyes were raised to the portrait of the florid-visaged haughty Marquis de Condillac, where it looked down upon them from the panelled wall, and from his soul he offered up to that portrait of his dead sire an apology for the successor whom his widow destined him.
He ate little, but drank great draughts, as men will when their mood is sullen and dejected, and the heat of the wine, warming his veins and lifting from him some of the gloom that had settled over him, lent him anon a certain recklessness very different from the manner of his sober moments.
Chancing suddenly to raise his eyes from the cup into which he had been gazing, absorbed as gazes a seer into his crystal, he caught on the Seneschal"s lips so odious a smile, in the man"s eyes so greedy, hateful a leer as he bent them on the Marquise, that he had much ado not to alter the expression of that flabby face by hurling at it the cup he held.
He curbed himself; he smiled sardonically upon the pair; and in that moment he swore that be the cost what it might, he would frustrate the union of those two. His thoughts flew to Valerie, and the road they took was fouled with the mud of ugly deeds. A despair, grim at first, then mocking, took possession of him. He loved Valerie to distraction. Loved her for herself, apart from all worldly advantages that must accrue to him from an alliance with her. His mother saw in that projected marriage no more than the acquisition of the lands of La Vauvraye, and she may even have thought that he himself saw no more. In that she was wrong; but because of it she may have been justified of her impatience with him at the tardiness, the very clumsiness with which he urged his suit. How was she to know that it was just the sincerity of his pa.s.sion made him clumsy? For like many another, normally glib, self-a.s.sured, and graceful, Marius grew halting, shy, and clumsy only where he loved.
But in the despair that took him now the quality of his pa.s.sion seemed to change. Partly it was the wine, partly the sight of this other lover--of whom there must be an end--whose very glance seemed to him an insult to his mother. His imagination had taken fire that night, and it had ripened him for any villainy. The Seneschal and the wine, between them, had opened the floodgates of all that was evil in his nature, and that evil thundered out in a great torrent that bid fair to sweep all before it.
And suddenly, unexpectedly for the others, who were by now resigned to his moody silence, the evil found expression. The Marquise had spoken of something--something of slight importance--that must be done before Florimond returned. Abruptly Marius swung round in his seat to face his mother. "Must this Florimond return?" he asked, and for all that he uttered no more words, so ample in their expression were those four that he had uttered and the tone of them, that his meaning left little work to the imagination.
Madame turned to stare at him, surprise ineffable in her glance--not at the thing that he suggested, but at the abruptness with which the suggestion came. The cynical, sneering tone rang in her ears after the words were spoken, and she looked in his face for a confirmation of their full purport.
She observed the wine-flush on his cheek, the wine-glitter in his eye, and she remarked the slight smile on his lips and the cynical a.s.sumption of nonchalance with which he fingered the jewel in his ear as he returned her gaze. She beheld now in her son a man more purposeful than she had ever known before.
A tense silence had followed his words, and the Lord Seneschal gaped at him, some of the colour fading from his plethoric countenance, suspecting as he did the true drift of Marius"s suggestion. At last it was madame who spoke--very softly, with a narrowing of the eyes.
"Call Fortunio," was all she said, but Marius understood full well the purpose for which she would have Fortunio called.
With a half-smile he rose, and going to the door he bade his page who was idling in the anteroom go summon the captain. Then he paced slowly back, not to the place he had lately occupied at table, but to the hearth, where he took his stand with his shoulders squared to the overmantel.
Fortunio came, fair-haired and fresh-complexioned as a babe, his supple, not ungraceful figure tawdrily clad in showy clothes of poor material the worse for hard usage and spilt wine. The Countess bade him sit, and with her own hands she poured a cup of Anjou for him.
In some wonder, and, for all his ordinary self-possession, with a little awkwardness, the captain did her bidding, and with an apologetic air he took the seat she offered him.
He drank this wine, and here was a spell of silence till Marius, grown impatient, brutally put the thing for which the Marquise sought delicate words.
"We have sent for you, Fortunio," said he, in a bl.u.s.tering tone, "to inquire of you what price you"d ask to cut the throat of my brother, the Marquis de Condillac."
The Seneschal sank back in his chair with a gasp. The captain, a frown between his frank-seeming, wide-set eyes, started round to look at the boy. The business was by no means too strong for the ruffler"s stomach, but the words in which it was conveyed to him most emphatically were.
"Monsieur de Condillac," said he, with an odd a.s.sumption of dignity, "I think you have mistaken your man. I am a soldier, not a cut-throat."
"But yes," the Marquise soothed him, throwing herself instantly into the breach, and laying a long, slender hand upon the frayed green velvet of the captain"s sleeve. "What my son means and what he says are vastly different things."
"It will sorely tax your wits, madame," laughed Marius brutally, "to make clear that difference."
And then the Seneschal nervously cleared his throat and muttering that it waxed late and he must be riding home, made shift to rise. Him, too, the Marquise at once subdued. She was not minded that he should go just yet. It might be useful to her hereafter to have had him present at this conference, into which she meant to draw him until she should have made him one with them, a party to their guilt. For the task she needed not over many words: just one or two and a melting glance or so, and the rebellion in his bosom was quelled at once.
But with the captain her wiles were not so readily successful. He had no hopes of winning her to wife--haply no desire, since he was not a man of very great ambitions. On the other hand, he had against him the very worst record in France, and for all that he might embark upon this business under the auspices of the Lord Seneschal himself, he knew not how far the Lord Seneschal might dare to go thereafter to save him from a hanging, should it come to that.
He said as much in words. In a business of this kind, he knew from experience, the more difficulties he advanced, the better a bargain he drove in the end; and if he was to be persuaded to risk his neck in this, he should want good payment. But even for good payment on this occasion he was none too sure as yet that he would let himself be persuaded.
"Monsieur Fortunio," the Marquise said, very softly, "heed not Monsieur Marius"s words. Attend to me. The Marquis de Condillac, as no doubt you will have learned for yourself, is lying at La Rochette. Now it happens that he is noxious to us--let the reasons be what they may. We need a friend to put him out of our way. Will you be that friend?"
"You will observe," sneered Marius, "how wide a difference there is between what the Marquise suggests and my own frank question of what price you would take to cut my brother"s throat."
"I observe no difference, which is what you would say," Fortunio answered truculently, his head well back, his brown eyes resentful of offence--for none can be so resentful of imputed villainy as your villain who is thorough-paced. "And," he concluded, "I return you the same answer, madame--that I am no cut-throat."
She repressed her anger at Marius"s sneering interference, and made a little gesture of dismay with her eloquent white hands.
"But we do not ask you to cut a throat."
"I have heard amiss, then," said he, his insolence abating nothing.
"You have heard aright, but you have understood amiss. There are other ways of doing these things. If it were but the cutting of a throat, should we have sent for you? There are a dozen in the garrison would have sufficed for our purpose."
"What is it, then, you need?" quoth he.
"We want an affair contrived with all decency. The Marquis is at the Sanglier Noir at La Rochette. You can have no difficulty in finding him, and having found him, less difficulty still in giving or provoking insult."
"Excellent," murmured Marius from the background. "It is such an enterprise as should please a ready swordsman of your calibre, Fortunio."
"A duel?" quoth the fellow, and his insolence went out of him, thrust out by sheer dismay; his mouth fell open. A duel was another affair altogether. "But, Sangdieu! what if he should slay me? Have you thought of that?"
"Slay you?" cried the Marquise, her eyes resting on his face with an expression as of wonder at such a question. "You jest, Fortunio."
"And he with the fever," put in Marius, sneering.
"Ah!" muttered Fortunio. "He has the fever? The fever is something.
But--but--accidents will happen."
"Florimond was ever an indifferent swordsman," murmured Marius dreamily, as if communing with himself.
The captain wheeled upon him once more.
"Why, then, Monsieur Marius," said he, "since that is so and you are skilled--as skilled as am I, or more--and he has a fever, where is the need to hire me to the task?"
"Where?" echoed Marius. "What affair may that be of yours? We ask you to name a price on which you will do this thing. Have done with counter-questions."
Marius was skilled with the foils, as Fortunio said, but he cared not for unbaited steel, and he was conscious of it, so that the captain"s half-sneer had touched him on the raw. But he was foolish to take that tone in answer. There was a truculent, Southern pride in the ruffler which sprang immediately into life and which naught that they could say thereafter would stamp out.
"Must I say again that you mistake your man?" was his retort, and as he spoke he rose, as though to signify that the subject wearied him and that his remaining to pursue it must be idle. "I am not of those to whom you can say: "I need such an one killed, name me the price at which you"ll be his butcher.""
The Marquise wrung her hands in pretty mimicry of despair, and poured out soothing words, as one might pour oil upon stormy waters. The Seneschal sat in stolid silence, a half-scared spectator of this odd scene, what time the Marquise talked and talked until she had brought Fortunio back to some measure of subjection.
Such reasoning as she made use of she climaxed by an offer of no less a sum than a hundred pistoles. The captain licked his lips and pulled at his mustachios. For all his vaunted scorn of being a butcher at a price, now that he heard the price he seemed not half so scornful.
"Tell me again the thing that you need doing and the manner of it," said he, as one who was moved to reconsider. She told him, and when she had done he made a compromise.
"If I go upon this business, madame, I go not alone."
"Oh, as for that," said Marius, "it shall be as you will. Take what men you want with you."