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 massive 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 passage and across an anteroom, and ushered the visitor finally into a spacious, gloomy hall, panelled in black oak and lighted as much by the piled-up fire that flared on the noble 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, noble 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 massive 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 cuirass. 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 assumed 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, assuring 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 surpassing 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 ambassador, 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."