'Gilles must remain in the room,' he declared, 'during the interview.'
'Impossible!' she affirmed hotly. 'Messire de Montigny might not like it.'
'Then I'll not see him——'
Marguerite de Navarre was on the verge of tears. Vexation, impatience, choler, were wellnigh choking her.
'Very well!' she said at last, with a sigh of infinite weariness. 'I pray you, Messire,' she added, turning to Gilles, 'introduce Monseigneur le Baron d'Inchy's messenger and remain in the room, as Monsieur bids you, during the interview.'
II
Messire de Montigny was a short, stout, determined-looking gentleman who, very obviously, despite his outward show of deference to a scion of the house of France, had received his instructions as to the manner in which he was to deal with that procrastinating and indolent prince. He had clearly come here resolved to be firm and not to yield an inch in his demands, nor to allow any further delay in the negotiations wherewith he had been entrusted.
But with François, Duc d'Alençon et d'Anjou, a promise given was not of necessity a promise kept. No one knew that better than the sister who adored him, and whose quasi-maternal love for him was not wholly free from contempt. Therefore, all the while that Messire de Montigny was paying his devoirs to Monsieur and to herself, all the while that the preliminary flummery, the bowings and the scrapings, the grandiloquent phrases and meaningless compliments went on between the two men, Marguerite of Navarre was watching her brother, noting with a sinking of the heart every sign of peevish fretfulness upon that weak and good-looking face, and of that eternal desire to put decisions off, which she knew in this case would mean the ruin of all her ambitious plans for him. At times, her luminous dark eyes would exchange a glance of understanding or of appeal with Gilles de Crohin who, silent and apparently disinterested, stood in a corner of the room quietly watching the comedy which was being enacted before him. Marguerite de Navarre, whose sense of the ridiculous was one of her keenest attributes, could well appreciate how a man of Gilles' caustic humour would be amused at this double-edged duel of temperaments. She could see how, at Monsieur's perpetual parryings, Gilles' moustache would bristle and his deep-set eyes twinkle with merriment; and though she frowned on him for this impertinence, she could not altogether blame him for it. There certainly was an element of farce in the proceedings.
'I have come for Monseigneur's answer,' Messire de Montigny had declared with uncompromising energy. 'My brother de Lalain and M. d'Inchy cannot, and will not, wait!'
'You Flemings are always in such a devil of a hurry!' Monsieur had said, with an attempt at jocularity.