“Ah, I see! Your cat, perhaps?” suggested the Marquis drily, glancing at that animal.
“Comme tu persistes! Lucidor never scratches! I suppose I may as well out with it,” said Louis, half laughing, half vexed. He raised himself on his elbow. “Though you think me a lie-a-bed, mon cousin, I have been abroad this morning for all that!” His eyes danced as he made this admission.
“Louis! You have not been—fighting?”
“Si fait!” returned the culprit, nodding cheerfully. “Tierce and carte at six o’clock this morning. The air was delightful; some day I shall take to early rising.”
Visions of Champcenetz, of Barnave, of Mirabeau-Tonneau, passed through the Marquis’ mind.
“But, my dear Louis,” he began, somewhat aghast, “the days are surely over when you of the Court can hope to rid yourselves by that means of obnoxious deputies. You are not in 1790 now. Who was it—and where did you meet? I should not have thought an encounter possible——” He broke off in perplexity and a genuine anxiety. “You are not deceiving me, Louis?” he asked. “You are not seriously hurt?”
“No more than this,” replied the Vicomte lightly, holding up the bandaged wrist. “As I told you, a scratch—due to my own carelessness. It was all over in three minutes.”
“And your adversary?”
“I ran him through the lungs,” returned Saint-Ermay. “He will recover.” Both statements were made with great indifference, but Gilbert remarked that the speaker’s face was many degrees graver than his tone, and that he was studying the ornamentation of the bottom of the bed with almost a sombre expression. For his own part he scarcely knew what to say.
“I am glad you are come out of it so well,” he observed at length, “and, considering the present state of affairs, perhaps even more glad that you did not kill your deputy. Is it permitted to ask the cause of dispute?”