"But if he has no French!" the Dowager protested.
"To ensure, no doubt, against any attempt of mine to win him to my side, to induce him to aid me escape from this prison. Oh, madame, I tell you you do but waste time, and you punish me and harass yourself to little purpose. Had Marius been such a man as I might have felt it in my nature to love which Heaven forbid!—these means by which you have sought to bring that thing about could but have resulted in making me hate him as I do."
The Dowager's fears were banished from her mind at that, and with them went all thought of conciliating Valerie. Anger gleamed in her eyes; the set of her lips grew suddenly sneering and cruel, so that the beauty of her face but served to render it hateful the more.
"So that you hate him, ma mie?" a ripple of mockery on the current of her voice, "and he a man such as any girl in France might be proud to wed. Well, well, you are not to be constrained, you say." And the Marquise's laugh was menacing and unpleasant. "Be not so sure, mademoiselle. Be not so sure of that. It may well betide that you shall come to beg upon your knees for this alliance with a man whom you tell me that you hate. Be not so sure you cannot be constrained."
Their eyes met; both women were white to the lips, but it was curbed passion in the one, and deadly fear in the other; for what the Dowager's words left unsaid her eyes most eloquently conveyed. The girl shrank back, her hands clenched, her lip caught in her teeth.
"There is a God in heaven, madame," she reminded the Marquise.
"Aye—in heaven," laughed the Marquise, turning to depart. She paused by the door, which the Italian had sprung forward to open for her.
"Marius shall take the air with you in the morning if it is fine. Ponder meanwhile what I have said."
"Does this man remain here, madame?" inquired the girl, vainly seeking to render her voice steady.
"In the outer anteroom is his place: but as the key of this room is on his side of the door, he may enter here when he so pleases, or when he thinks that he has reason to. If the sight of him displeases you, you may lock yourself from it in your own chamber yonder."
The same she said in Italian to the man, who bowed impassively, and followed the Dowager into the outer room, closing the door upon mademoiselle. It was a chamber almost bare of furniture, save for a table and chair which had been placed there, so that the gaoler might take his meals.
The man followed the Marquise across the bare floor, their steps resounding as they went, and he held the outer door for her.
Without another word she left him, and where he stood he could hear her steps as she tripped down the winding staircase of stone. At last the door of the courtyard closed with a bang, and the grating of a key announced to the mercenary that he and his charge were both imprisoned in that tower of the Chateau de Condillac.
Left alone in the anteroom, mademoiselle crossed to the window and dropped limply into a chair. Her face was still very white, her heart beating tumultuously, for the horrid threat that had been conveyed in the Dowager's words had brought her her first thrill of real fear since the beginning of this wooing-by-force three months ago, a wooing which had become more insistent and less like a wooing day by day, until it had culminated in her present helpless position.
She was a strong-souled, high-spirited girl, but tonight hope seemed extinguished in her breast. Florimond, too, seemed to have abandoned her. Either he had forgotten her, or he was dead, as the Dowager said. Which might be the true state of things she did not greatly care. The realization of how utterly she was in the power of Madame de Condillac and her son, and the sudden chance discovery of how unscrupulously that power might be wielded, filled her mind to the exclusion of all else.
By the window she sat, watching, without heeding them, the fading colours in the sky. She was abandoned to these monsters, and it seemed they would devour her. She could hope for no help from outside since they had as she believed—slain Monsieur de Garnache. Her mind dwelt for a moment on that glimpse of rescue that had been hers a week ago, upon the few hours of liberty which she had enjoyed, but which only seemed now to increase the dark hopelessness of her imprisonment.
Again with the eyes of her mind she beheld that grim, stalwart figure, saw his great nose, his greying hair, his fierce mustachios and his stern, quick eyes. Again she heard the rasp of his metallic voice with its brisk derision. She saw him in the hall below, his foot upon the neck of that popinjay of Condillac daring them all to draw a breath, should he forbid it; again in fancy she rode on the withers of his horse at the gallop towards Grenoble. A sigh escaped her. Surely that was the first man who was indeed a man she had ever set eyes on since her father died. Had Garnache been spared, she would have felt courage and she would have hoped, for there was something about him that suggested energy and resource such as it is good to lean upon in times of stress. Again she heard that brisk, metallic voice: "Are you content, madame? Have you had fine deeds enough for one day?"
And then, breaking in upon her musings came the very voice of her day-dream, so suddenly, sounding so natural and lifelike that she almost screamed, so startled was she.
"Mademoiselle," it said, "I beg that you'll not utterly lose heart. I have come back to the thing Her Majesty bade me do, and I'll do it, in spite of that tigress and her cub."
She sat still as a statue, scarce breathing, her eyes fixed upon the violet sky. The voice had ceased, but still she sat on. Then it was slowly borne in upon her that that was no dream-voice, no trick of her overburdened mind. A voice, a living, actual voice had uttered those words in this room, here at her elbow.
She turned, and again she almost screamed; for there, just behind her, his glittering eyes fixed upon her with singular intentness, stood the swarthy, black-haired Italian gaoler they had given her because he had no French.
He had come up so quietly behind her that she had not heard his approach, and he was leaning forward now, with an odd suggestion of crouching in his attitude, like a beast about to spring. Yet his gaze riveted hers as with a fascination. And so, while she looked, his lips moved, and from them, in that same voice of her dreams, came from this man who had no French, the words:
"Be not afraid, mademoiselle. I am that blunderer, Garnache, that unworthy fool whose temper ruined what chance of saving you he had a week ago."
She stared like one going mad.
"Garnache!" said she, in a husky whisper. "You Garnache?"
Yet the voice, she knew, was Garnache's and none other. It was a voice not easily mistaken. And now, as she looked and looked, she saw that the man's nose was Garnache's, though oddly stained, and those keen eyes, they were Garnache's too. But the hair that had been brown and flecked with grey was black; the reddish mustachios that had bristled like a mountain cat's were black, too, and they hung limp and hid from sight the fine lines of his mouth. A hideous stubble of unshorn beard defaced his chin and face, and altered its sharp outline; and the clear, healthy skin that she remembered was now a dirty brown.
Suddenly the face smiled, and it was a smile that reassured her and drove away the last doubt that she had. She was on her feet in an instant.
"Monsieur, monsieur," was all that she could say; but her longing was to fling her arms about the neck of this man, as she might have flung them about the neck of a brother or a father, and sob out upon his shoulder the sudden relief and revulsion that his presence brought.
Garnache saw something of her agitation, and to relieve it he smiled and began to tell her the circumstances of his return and his presentation to Madame as a knave who had no French.