She dismissed him with a wave of the hand.
“Yes, politics to-morrow,” she mused: “besides my conversation with Andrea may influence me on the course I take.”
CHAPTER XX.
WITHOUT HUSBAND—WITHOUT LOVER.
THE Queen was wrong for Charny did not go to his wife’s house. He went to the Royal Post to have horses put to his own carriage. But while waiting, he wrote a farewell to Andrea which the servant who took his horses home, carried to her.
She was still dwelling over it, having kissed it with profound feeling, when Weber arrived. Her answer to him was simply that she would conform to her Majesty’s orders. And she proceeded to the palace without dread as without impatience.
But it was not so with the Queen. Feverish, she had welcomed Count Provence coming to see how Favras had been received, and she committed the King more deeply than he had pledged himself.
Provence went away delighted, thinking that the King would be removed, thanks to the money he had borrowed from the Genoese banker Zannone, and to Favras and his Hectors. Then he stood a chance of becoming Regent of the realm, perhaps foreseeing that he would yet be King as Louis XVIII.
If the forced departure of the King failed, he would take to flight with what was left of the loan, and join his brothers in Italy.
On his leaving, the Queen went to Princess Lamballe, on whom she made it a habit to pour her woes or her joys in the absence of her other favorites, Andrea or the Polignacs.
Poor martyr! who dares grope in the darkness of alcoves to learn if this friendship were pure or criminal, when inexorable History was coming with feet red-shod in blood, to tell the price you paid for it?