At last as they galloped on with their horses following their natural instinct and keeping closely together as in a knot, the trouble, the worry became almost unbearable.
“Oh, if something fresh would only happen—something exciting!” Denis muttered. “I could then bear it better.”
At last a thought flashed through his brain, and he started, rose a little in his stirrups, and began looking about him.
“Are we going right?” he said to himself, and he looked straight ahead now—beyond Francis, who was slightly in advance, he being on the King’s left, while Leoni’s horse galloped level with his own, the beautiful animal’s head being almost within touch of the King’s saddle upon the right.
But all was dark and cloudy, and he could make out nothing.
“The King leads,” he muttered, “and what the King does is right.”
Thinking this to himself, Denis rode on, perfectly unconscious of the fact that he who rode on his right was vastly troubled too, and regardless of everything else kept one eye fixed upon his liege, for he had noticed that Francis was not riding according to his wont.
He was generally upright in his saddle, and he had never seen him bend low before like this.
At first he comforted himself with the thought that it was all due to excitement and the dread of being captured after this nefarious act; for gloze it over as he would, the subtle Franco-Italian knew in his heart that though it might be for reasons of State, and to ensure the stability and future of his King, the scheme was vile. Then, too, there was all that had taken place that night, the peculiar semi-trance-like state in which the King had seemed to be plunged. There was the draught, too, that had been taken, and its effects before he had grasped the King’s wrist and had led him, a passive instrument in his hands, to where the cabinet stood in the obscurity of the gallery, and had him standing there, participator of that which had followed, but in a half unconscious condition the while.
Once or twice after coming to the conclusion, and owning to himself that the state of Francis was due entirely to the draught he had administered, Leoni started nervously in his saddle, for the King had suddenly given a lurch as if partly unseated; but he regained his balance on the instant, and muttered angrily at his horse for stumbling.