"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!" cried Blaise, half piteously, half in indignation. "Do not look so horrified, so troubled. It was a lie, we all know it was a lie."
"Did Monsieur de Commines say, It is a lie?"
"For policy's sake, Mademoiselle——"
"Policy! policy! policy! That is Monsieur de Commines all over. Truth? There is no truth, there is only policy. A woman's honour? her reputation? her good name? To his slippery, pliant policy all these are nothing. There, there, Monsieur Blaise, it is my turn to say, do not look so horrified! Monsieur de Commines is his master's mirror."
At the first door a red-haired youth whom Blaise called Dâvidd was waiting for us, and with him as surety we passed through guard after guard unchallenged. Up what stairs, along what corridors, through what anterooms we were led I do not know; nor could I tell whether the furnishings of Plessis were those of the palace or the prison. If the hanging, were of silk I did not see them; if there were carvings, gildings, fretwork, my eyes passed them blindly by. Only there were men everywhere, men who whispered eagerly together in groups of threes and fours, and who turned to watch us curiously as we left them behind.
Before an open door, guarded as every other door had been through which we had come, Monsieur de Commines was waiting for us.
"Come!" said he, brusquely, almost dragging me after him, while Blaise and Dâvidd stood aside, "and remember, no matter what he may say, remember more than de Helville's life hangs on the turn of a word."
"I am not afraid," I began.
"But I am," he interrupted, "horribly, horribly afraid."
"Hey! Is that de Helville's woman, d'Argenton?" said a weak, whispering voice from the end of the room. It was the King, pipingly thin and harshly raucous by turns as weakness of flesh or strength of spirit got the upper hand. "Get out of the light, and let me look at her. Heh! heh! heh!" and he laughed a little snickering laugh through his nose. "What a lover he was, that de Helville! Bloused as a poppy or peaked and pale, they were all as one to him. What is your name, girl?"