“I am in your high Majesty’s power,” he answered, “to do with me as it seemeth best. If your Majesty wills it that I be returned to France, I pray you set me upon its coast as I came from it, a fugitive. Thence will I try to find my way to the army and the poor, stricken people of whom I was. I pray for that only, and not to be given to the red hand of the Medici.”
“Red hand—by my faith, but you are bold, monsieur!”
Leicester tapped his foot upon the floor impatiently, then caught the Queen’s eye and gave her a meaning look.
De la Forêt saw the look and knew his enemy, but he did not quail. “Bold only by your high Majesty’s faith, indeed,” he answered the Queen, with harmless guile.
Elizabeth smiled. She loved such nattering speech from a strong man. It touched a chord in her deeper than that under Leicester’s finger. Leicester’s impatience only made her more self-willed on the instant.
“You speak with the trumpet note, monsieur,” she said to De la Forêt. “We will prove you. You shall have a company in my Lord Leicester’s army here, and we will send you upon some service worthy of your fame.”
“I crave your Majesty’s pardon, but I cannot do it,” was De la Forêt’s instant reply. “I have sworn that I will lift my sword in one cause only, and to that I must stand. And more—the widow of my dead chief, Gabriel de Montgomery, is set down in this land unsheltered and alone. I have sworn to one who loves her, and for my dead chief’s sake, that I will serve her and be near her until better days be come and she may return in quietness to France. In exile we few stricken folk must stand together, your august Majesty.”
Elizabeth’s eye flashed up. She was impatient of refusal of her favor. She was also a woman, and that De la Forêt should flaunt his devotion to another woman was little to her liking. The woman in her, which had never been blessed with a noble love, was roused. The sourness of a childless, uncompanionable life was stronger for the moment than her strong mind and sense.
“Monsieur has sworn this, and monsieur has sworn that,” she said, petulantly—“and to one who loveth a lady, and for a cause—tut! tut! tut!—”
Suddenly a kind of intriguing laugh leaped into her eye, and she turned to Leicester and whispered in his ear. Leicester frowned, then smiled, and glanced up and down De la Forêt’s figure impertinently.