“But you—your own danger——” stammered Gilbert.
The prescript shrugged his shoulders. “I am only ‘Monsieur Milet’, a merchant of Bordeaux, staying at the château of Launay-Villiers. The person I am here to meet may not come to-night; if he does, so much the better. Barbette would let herself be cut in pieces for me.”
“But not for us,” thought Château-Foix, and hesitated.
“That is settled, then,” said the Breton easily. “Barbette, show Monsieur where to put the horses, and make us a bed ready at once.” He took the flask from Gilbert’s half unwilling hand and went back to his patient.
When Gilbert returned he found Louis propped in the corner of the settle, talking with rather feverish animation to their new acquaintance. And suddenly Gilbert realised how nothing, apparently, could more than a little dim his cousin’s charm—neither illness, nor fatigue, nor an ill-fitting coat, nor an uneasy conscience. But had he a conscience at all?
Undoubtedly the Marquis de la Rouërie had a way with him. It seemed but a short time after Gilbert’s re-entry that the owner of the house had been reduced to mute if not to acquiescent submission; that Louis, in spite of his expostulations, had been ensconced in the bed by which, after local custom, the corner of the living-room was adorned; and that Gilbert was sitting on the settle by the side of “Monsieur Milet,” talking as if he had known him all his life.
Armand de la Rouërie’s turbulent past was indeed common property, and Vendée no less than his native Brittany had heard of his light loves, his follies and his duels, as well as of his sojourn in the Bastille on a point of provincial independence and his service in America under Lafayette. Gilbert knew also, vaguely, that this firebrand had made himself the head of a secret Royalist organisation in Brittany, that his château near Antrain was its focus, and that since the end of the previous May he had disappeared, no research having revealed the retreat whence he still continued the direction of his schemes. But what he had heard of the Marquis had not particularly disposed him in his favour, and of his plans he knew no more than rumour whispered. And here, in a little Maine cottage, the man himself, impetuous and magnetic, and infinitely more capable than Gilbert had ever dreamt, was laying before him the details of an organisation astoundingly complete, ramified throughout Brittany and awaiting only the signal from Coblentz to put itself in motion. When the army of the Princes, said La Rouërie, entering France by Thionville and Verdun, had got as far as Chalons, he should give the word, and march on Paris with his nucleus of ten thousand men.
The man himself, of a character so diametrically opposed to his own, attracted Gilbert strangely; the organisation which his fiery brain had conceived and carried out in less than a year amazed him by its efficiency, but with its immediate object he could not sympathise, and he remained silent when La Rouërie had finished.
“You don’t approve?” said the Breton, flashing a quick glance at him.
“Not of invasion,” answered Gilbert.