"You play your game with a high hand, Monsieur," he said at last; "but if you think I have sweated here in the grime all these weeks while you were feasting at Morsigny, just to see you pocket the profits, you don't know your man."
But when, with another turn of his heel, he would have stridden past me, I stepped between him and the door.
"Monsieur, who shall pay you your wages I do not know, but you are not coming back to stab me unawares and rob me of what the King has committed to my trust. Since you have brought me here to this room, in this room you shall stay until I have read his Majesty's letter. Nor do I see why we should quarrel. If the end of this affair has indeed been committed to you, show me some token? God knows I have no love for the work. You have no token? No warrant? Nothing but your bare word? Then, since you profess to know so much, tell me at least what steps I am next to take, something, anything to prove you are in the King's confidence, and that your bare word is not a bare lie? You cannot? Then tell me this: if you were Gaspard Hellewyl, and I you, how far would you trust the man who came with nothing but a blustering wheedle of words in his mouth? Not a foot! Not an inch! Nor will I. It is my life, Monsieur Tapster-goatherd, it is my honour, and by God! I'll give neither the one nor the other to your keeping. Stand there by the window, Monsieur, and if the King bids me give you the letter, or—or anything else I control except these two, then, on the faith of a gentleman, you shall have it, but not unless."
Three times while I spoke I saw No! in his face, though he answered nothing; but as I ended, he half laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and did as he was bidden with a swagger that matched his clothing badly. Who he was, or what his rank, I never knew, but clothes so much make the man that not even the Prince de Talmont himself would in like circumstances have looked anything else than that very ridiculous object—a country inn-keeper in a rage.
Partly to gain time for thought, but partly, I confess, that his helplessness might gall him deeper, I played with the King's letter, examining silk, seal, and superscription as if all were strange, instead of as familiar as the bottom of my own pocket. The situation was growing clearer to me with every passing minute, and it will have been noticed that I do not think rapidly.
No doubt the fellow glowering at me from the window shutter was not alone in La Voulle; no doubt, too, his ten-crowns-a-month-cut-throats would be this, that, or the other about the inn—groom, drawer, even cook. Three or four of these there might be, but not more. Where there is a secret, there is no safety in numbers. Against these I had only Martin, unless, indeed, I played the bold game of raising La Voulle to defend its young Count, and as a climax carried him off myself! My scheme would have to be recast, which was a pity; its very simplicity had guaranteed success. But the nature and extent of the change must depend on the King's wishes, so with a smiling nod of encouragement in patience to my host at the window, I broke the seal.
Either the crackle of the paper or the polite impertinence roused him. Setting his foot against the angle of the wall, he stiffened himself for a spring. Once he had me on my back, circumstances would lead him. If his own fellows came in just then, there was an end to Gaspard Hellewyl; if La Voulle heard the scuffle, he would cry Treachery! and trust for justification to the King's letter found in my hands. But I saw the move, and hitched the handle of my sword forward a foot. It was a parry to his thrust, and back he lounged again against the shutters.
Tearing the outer wrappings to small pieces, I scattered them on the floor. The next sheet was a blank, nor, though I held it up to the light, could I trace a mark of any kind. Not so the third sheet, for eight or ten words were sprawled across it in short sentences. But at the first line the exultation of triumph over my enemy by the window fell cold and flat; the letter was in Latin, and never a word of Latin had I learned in my five-and-twenty years of life.
Latin! Why the plague Latin? No doubt it was part of the old Plessis fox's scheme for hiding his identity. Neither Jacob's voice nor Esau's hand must show the truth, though the supplanter and the Ishmaelite, he whose hand was against every man's, joined in him their cunning. Suppose the letter was seized upon me, what then? Outside the seal was Commines', the writing Commines'. Inside was a tag of monkish Latin scrawled as if an earwig had scratched its tail across the paper; who could connect either with Louis in Plessis if Louis chose to say No! with a sneer, and let Navarre's vengeance on the man who carried the letter pass unrequited? No one; and let it so pass he would, if, indeed, his virtuous indignation did not itself call aloud for vengeance. Louis had no mercy on failures.
But Latin! Why the plague Latin? Then I began to see. The cover once destroyed, Latin might come from Spain, from the Empire, from England—anywhere! And behind it France lay hidden in safety. More than that, and at the thought I ground my teeth, it was perhaps a tongue that brute grinning from the window at my perplexity could translate. If so, it was his turn to smile, and as I met his eye there was little of politeness in his ridicule. No doubt dismay was stamped across my face easier to be read than the words on the paper, and my need was his opportunity.