With a shrug of his shoulders Beaufoy turned on his heel. "Coward as well as bully," he began, but at a sign from their leader the troop gathered round, hemming him in in a circle.
"Now that my reasons are plainer to you, will you answer my question—where are you going? No reply? And yet no one understands the logic of numbers better than your coward of a master. But I'll have my answer. Are you going to Blois? No! To Tours? No! Amboise? Ah! your eyes have a tongue of their own. You cannot have lived very long in Valmy, my ingenuous friend. Why to Amboise? You won't tell? But, by God, you shall! Do you think I'll be baulked for a scruple?" His hand crept to his hilt as he spoke; now, with a swift wrench the blade was out and its point at Beaufoy's throat. "Come, your message?"
But Beaufoy only shook his head. The age had the quality of its defects. The law that might was right had bred a contempt for life, one's own or another's, it mattered little which. In the great game of national aggression the single life is a very small thing, and the man who slew without pity could die without fear. If any second incentive were needed, Beaufoy found it in the gibe at his name. Beaufoy would hold good faith let it cost Beaufoy what it might. Stiffening himself rigidly he answered nothing.
"Come, the message! I'll have it, though I rip it out of you. You won't answer? Then there is no help for it. Once!"—and the point touched—"twice!"—and the point pricked—"three times! Monsieur, you are a brave fool, but on your life do not stir. Grip him by the elbows, Jan. Now you, Michault, go through his pockets. What first? An empty purse! And yet you must have a horse, must you? Was I to collect its price at Valmy, my good sir? When I go to Valmy it will be for more than the life of a horse. Next, a woman's ribbon! No wonder the purse was empty. A paper! Give it me—a love-letter! I congratulate you, Monsieur Beaufoy, and return it without reading the signature. No doubt the empty purse is justified. May she show as firm a faith as you have done; her cause is the better of the two. Now that. This time we have it. Monsieur Beaufoy, you have done everything a brave and honourable gentleman could do. Give me your parole to hurt neither yourself nor us and Jan will release your arms."
Panting, every nerve tense with impotent resentment, Paul Beaufoy looked up into the not unkindly eyes turned down to his. A physiognomist would have said it was a reckless face rather than an evil one. The blade had been lowered, but Jan's muscular hands still held his elbows behind his back in an iron grip; beyond him was Michault. No prisoner in shackles was more helpless.
"For this time," he said between his teeth; "but God granting me life——"
"Let go your hold, Jan. Monsieur Beaufoy, I trust you as I would never trust that brute without a soul you call King. Trust the King? God help the man who trusts King Louis! One very dear to me trusted him, trusted his pledged word with his life, and I humbly pray God's mercy has him in its keeping, for he found none in Valmy." Sheathing his sword he sat back in the saddle and smoothed the looted paper carefully. "Go to Amboise. Arrest Monsieur Stephen La Mothe and bring him to Valmy without delay. Tell him his orders are cancelled, and on your life let him hold no communication with the Dauphin.—LOUIS."
Having read the order through from beginning to end, he read it over a second time, sentence by sentence, pausing to consider each separately.
"'Go to Amboise.' Monsieur Beaufoy, I do not wish to ask you anything a man of honour such as you are cannot answer. Do they know you in Amboise?"
"No," answered Beaufoy, after a moment's consideration; "and if I thought it mattered one way or the other, you would get no answer from me. I am from the north, and a stranger both in Valmy and Amboise."