"To my bitter cost. Until to-day I thought--so much has he wronged me--that to him also I owed my detention here. Yet that, it seems now, can hardly be. Monsieur, how long has he been your companion?"
De Chevagny paused a moment as though endeavouring to count the time since first his companion had been there--his blue eyes gazing out wistfully to the Rue St. Antoine, the roofs of which could plainly be seen from this room--then he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I cannot tell. I do not know. I have lost the power of keeping count. Yet--yet--it must be many weeks. We had no fire when first he came, and--and--the swallows were---- No," he broke off, "I cannot remember."
That told Bertie much; told him that it could scarcely have been Fordingbridge who had been the cause, even though indirect, of his being seized and sent here. They must have come in almost at the same time. Who, then, was the strange, mysterious man of power--the friend of the King, of whom the Lieutenant had spoken, the man whose deadly vengeance he had incurred?
"Begone!" he said to his old enemy, still grovelling at his feet; "away from me, I say. Heavens!" he exclaimed, "must this companionship be added to my other sufferings? Is the Bastille so small, or are its chambers so crowded, that this wretch and I could not be kept apart? Oh, what an irony of Fate that I who have sought him so long must meet him thus!"
"Monsieur," said De Chevagny, while still Fordingbridge knelt at Bertie's feet, wringing his hands and muttering, "monsieur, if his wrongs to you, his evil doings, are not beyond all forgiveness, you may pardon him now, almost pity him. He is doomed to death, I hear; nothing, not even his madness, can save him."
"Pity him!" exclaimed Bertie, "pity him! He has ruined, broken my life for ever; how can I pity him? And, even though he be not the cause of my presence here, I curse the hour that he was born, the day that threw him across my path!"
"They say," repeated the wretched maniac, his eyes glinting about the room in his frenzy, "they say nothing can save me. The priests will have my blood, will have me broken upon the wheel, will even refuse me absolution at the last. Yet I confessed to one of them--I confessed--I should be spared."
"What fresh crime have you committed that brings you here?" asked Elphinston sternly of him. "What deed of treachery--or worse?"
"I slew him," said Fordingbridge, still shaking all over, "because I hated him, because he wrought my downfall. I came behind him on--on--the place, I had the knife up my sleeve thus," and he bent his hand as though to illustrate the holding of a concealed dagger's hilt in it, "and when he turned from me I drove it home. He was dead a moment afterwards. Dead! Dead at my feet!" and he leered hideously as he spoke.
"Who was it you assassinated thus, in a manner so well becoming all your actions? Some poor, feeble creature unable to protect himself; some old man or stripling, perhaps, and unarmed?"