‘For myself I renounce all pretensions, and leave the field to you. The poor student is no rival for the gallant captain of the Regiment de Tracy.’
And with a smile that had in it more of mockery than mirth, he rapidly remounted the stairs, without waiting for a reply.
Sainte-Croix offered none. It was only by his clenched teeth and the quivering of his brow that his thoughts could have been read, as he strode with a hasty step along the Rue St. Victor to his own lodgings. His was one of those natures that take their tone from the accidental circumstances around them. He might have been a military hero, an enthusiastic priest, a successful politician. The illegitimacy of his birth, and the colour of the times, had made him an adventurer, a gambler, a criminal. His love for Marie de Brinvilliers had been passionate and intense; as it can be only in natures like his own. Now that its current had been forced back upon his heart, it seemed changed to a deep, deadly, withering hate.
‘I will be her bane—her curse!’ he exclaimed, as he paced up and down the apartment, after flinging his hat and cloak aside. ‘I will be her bad angel. She shall be mine—yes, body and soul—in life and after it! And I will triumph over that besotted fool, her husband. Come, my power—my talisman!’
With a short dry laugh, he stopped before a massive bureau which stood, surmounted by a narrow mirror, between the windows of the room; and taking up a small iron-clamped box, he opened it, and brought from it a small packet carefully sealed, and a phial of clear, colourless fluid.
‘Come,’ he continued, ‘the fools who envy me—the bastard-captain—my fortune, have said I had discovered the philosopher’s stone. I have it—it is here; the source, not of life, but death!’
He held the packet in his hand a moment; and then returning it to its place in the casket, resumed his hasty walk and broken exclamations of passion, strangely mixed with triumph.
An hour had passed away when La Prairie, one of his servants, entering the room, announced Françoise Rousset, femme de chambre to the Marchioness of Brinvilliers. The girl entered with a look of terror that contrasted strangely with her lively and good-humoured face, and handing a note to Sainte-Croix with much the same air which a child would put on in presenting a cake to an elephant, timidly waited his answer.
‘Tell Madame la Marquise that I will attend to her,’ said Sainte-Croix, as he hastily ran over the contents of the note.
The girl curtsied, and left the room with more precipitation than grace. For Sainte-Croix was said to deal in strange and forbidden arts; and the same tastes which among the rich had won for him the reputation of a successful alchemist, had established for him also, amongst the vulgar, a character for intimacy with Satan and his imps, which his dark and lowering manner, at the moment Françoise entered, was well calculated to sustain.