'Without your knowledge—outwardly.'
'What do you mean?'
'Oh! nothing very obscure, my dear; nothing very remarkable. Monsieur Duc d'Anjou is young—he hath a romantic turn of mind. He admired you and desired you in marriage, but chose to woo you—have I not said that he is romantic?—chose to woo you under a mask.'
She gave a gasp, and quickly put her hand to her mouth to smother a cry. She sat bolt upright now, her two hands clutching the arms of her chair, her eyes—wide open, glowing, scared—fixed upon her guardian. He, obtuse and matter-of-fact, mistook the gasp and the tense expression of her face.
'No wonder you are aghast, my dear,' he said cheerily. 'Not unpleasantly, I hope. More than once it seemed to your old guardian that Monsieur's martial presence was not altogether distasteful to you. He hath sharper eyes, hath the old man, than you gave him credit for—what? Ah, well! I was young too, once, and I still like to bask in the sunshine of romance. 'Twas a pretty conceit on Monsieur's part, methinks, to pay his court to you under a disguise—to win your love by the charm of his personality, ere you realized the great honour that a Prince of the Royal House of France was doing to our poor country, by wooing her fairest maid.'
Monseigneur continued to ramble on in the same strain. Jacqueline hardly heard what he said. She was striving with all her might to appear composed, to understand what the old man was saying, and to reply to him with some semblance of coherence. Above all, she was striving to get the mastery over her voice, for presently she would have to speak, to say something which would shake her guardian's complacency, open his eyes to the truth, the whole hideous, abominable truth; without ... without ... Heavens above, this must be a hideous dream!
'It was all arranged with de Montigny, you remember?' Monseigneur continued, still engrossed in his own rhetoric, too blind to see that Jacqueline was on the verge of a collapse. 'Monsieur was so fanciful, and we had to give in to him. We all desired the alliance with our whole hearts, and Madame la Reyne de Navarre did approve of our schemes. I must say that de Lalain and I were against the masquerade at first, but Monsieur's soldierlike personality soon won our approval. And imagine our joy when we realized that our dear Jacqueline was not wholly indifferent to him either. He came to us this afternoon and made formal demand for your hand in marriage.... So de Lalain and I have taken measures that our poor people do have a holiday to-morrow, when Madame Jacqueline de Broyart, duchesse et princesse de Ramèse, will solemnly plight her troth to Monsieur Duc d'Anjou. So, my dear Jacqueline, I entreat you to wear your loveliest gown. Flanders is proud of her fairest flower. Monsieur desired to rejoin his armies to-day and leave the ceremony of betrothal waiting for happier times; but de Lalain and I would not hear of it. Everything is prepared for a festive holiday. Of a truth, to-morrow's forenoon will see the happiest hour which our sadly-afflicted province hath seen these many years.'
He paused; I think, for want of breath: he certainly had been talking uninterruptedly for the past ten minutes, going over the whole ground of de Montigny's mission, Monsieur's romantic desire and the final demand in marriage, till Jacqueline could have screamed to him to cease torturing her. The hideousness of the mystery appalled her: some dark treachery lurked here somewhere and she was caught in a net of odious intrigues, out of which for the moment she could see no issue. A feeling of indescribable horror came over her—a nameless, unspeakable terror, as in the face of a yawning, bottomless abyss, on the brink of which she stood and into which an unseen and mighty hand would presently hurl her.
Something of that appalling state of mind must have been reflected in her face, despite the almost superhuman effort which she made not to allow Monseigneur to guess at what was going on in her mind; for presently he looked at her more keenly, and then said gently:
'Jacqueline, my dear, you look so strange. What is it? Hath my news so gravely startled you?'