“And you do not think I am there, eh?”
“Not at all; I would even add, if you are willful—for you know I dabble in telling fortunes—that you will not only risk your honor, and the fortune you seek—but your life. You will most likely be hanged!”
“They do not hang noblemen,” objected Beausire, wiping the perspiration streaming from his brow.
“That is so: but to avoid the gallows-tree and have your head cut off, you would have to prove your family-tree; it would take so long that the court would lose patience, and string you up for the time being—leaving your widow to demand compensation if you turned out to have deserved decapitation. Still you may say that it does not matter, as it is the crime that casts shame and not the scaffold, to quote a poet. Still again, I dare say you are not so attached to your opinions that you would lay down your life for them; I understand this. Deuse take us, but we have only one life, as another poet says, not so great as the other, but as truthful.”
“My lord,” faltered the ex-guardsman, “I have remarked in my too brief acquaintance with your lordship, that you have a way of speaking of some things which would make the hair of a more timid man than me bristle on his head.”
“Hang me if that is my intention,” responded Cagliostro; “Besides you are not a timid man.”
“No: yet there are circumstances,” began Beausire.
“I understand; such as when one has the jail for theft behind one and the gallows for high treason before one—for I suppose they give that name to the crime of kidnapping the King.”
“My lord,” cried Beausire, terrified.
“Wretch, is it on kidnapping that you build your fortune?” demanded Oliva.