'For ridding your Highness of the abominable rebel who organized the defence last April,' assented de Landas. 'Yes! Cambray and all that it contains was to be my reward.'
'You killed the miscreant, I believe?'
'I shot him through the heart. He lies rotting now beneath the walls.'
'Well!' riposted the Duke. 'You earned your reward easily enough. There will be plenty left in Cambray, even after I have had my first pick of its treasures.'
De Landas made no protest. It would have been not only useless, but also impolitic to remind His Highness that, at the moment when he offered Cambray and all its contents to the man who would rid him of a valiant foe, he had made no proviso that he himself should fill his pockets first. There was no honour among these thieves and no probity in these savage tyrants—brute beasts, most of them, who destroyed and outraged whatever resisted their might. So de Landas held his tongue; for even so, he was not dissatisfied. The Duke, being rid of the rebel whom he feared, might easily have repudiated the ignoble bargain in its entirety, and de Landas would have had no redress.
As it was, there was always Jacqueline. The Spanish commanders were wont to make short shrift of Flemish heiresses who happened to be in a city which they entered as conquerors. By decree of His Highness, Jacqueline de Broyart would certainly be allocated to him—de Landas—if he chose to claim her. Of a truth, she was still well worth having—more so than ever, perhaps; for her spirit now would be chastened by bodily privations, broken by humiliation at the hands of the faithless Valois and by the death of her mysterious lover.
'So long as the heiress is there for me,' he said carelessly to the Duke, 'I am satisfied to let every other treasure go.'
'Oh! you shall have the heiress,' riposted His Highness hilariously. 'Rumour hath described her as passing fair. You lucky devil! Methinks you were even betrothed to her once.'
'Oh! long ago, your Highness. Since then the oily promises of the Duc d'Anjou have helped to erase my image from the tablets of Madame Jacqueline's heart.'
'Then she'll be all the more ready to fall back into your arms, now that she has discovered the value of a Valois prince's faith.'