‘I am no traitor,’ proudly answered the strange boy, and Berenger was forced to be thus satisfied, though intending to watch him closely.
CHAPTER XL. THE SANDS OF OLONNE
Is it the dew of night
That on her glowing cheek
Shines in the moonbeam?—
Oh, she weeps, she weeps,
And the good angel that abandoned her
At her hell baptism, by her tears drawn down
Resumes his charge... and the hope
Of pardon and salvation rose
As now she understood
Thy lying prophecy of truth.—SOUTHEY
‘M. de Ribaumont,’ said Henry of Navarre, as he stood before the fire after supper at Parthenay, ‘I have been thinking what commission I could give you proportioned to your rank and influence.’
‘Thanks to your Grace, that inquiry is soon answered. I am a beggar here. Even my paternal estate in Normandy is in the hands of my cousin.’
‘You have wrongs,’ said Henry, ‘and wrongs are sometimes better than possessions in a party like ours.’
Berenger seized the opening to explain his position, and mention that his only present desire was for permission, in the first place, to send a letter to England by the messenger whom the King was dispatching to Elisabeth, in tolerable security of her secret countenance; and, secondly, to ride to Nissard to examine into the story he had previously heeded so little, of the old man and his daughter rescued from the waves the day before La Sablerie was taken.
‘If Pluto relented, my dear Orpheus, surely Navarre may,’ said Henry good-humouredly; ‘only may the priest not be more adamantine than Minos. Where lies Nissard? On the Sable d’Olonne? Then you may go thither with safety while we lie here, and I shall wait for my sister, or for news of her.’
So Berenger arranged for an early start on the morrow; and young Selinville listened with a frown, and strange look in his dark eyes. ‘You go not to England?’ he said.