Oriol thirsted for information. "What is it for, then?"
Æsop answered, gravely, with an amazing question: "Gentlemen, do you believe in ghosts?" And the gravity of his voice and the strangeness of his question forced his hearers, surprised and uneasy, in spite of themselves, to laugh disdainfully.
Æsop accepted their laughter composedly. "Of course not. No one believes in ghosts at noonday, on the crowded street, though perhaps some do at midnight when the world is over-still. But here, to-night, in all this glitter and crowd and noise and color, the king is perturbed and the guards are doubled because of a ghost—the ghost of a man who has been dead these seventeen years."
The Baron de la Hunaudaye, bluff old soldier of the brave days of the dawning reign, was interested in the hunchback’s words. "Of whom do you speak?" he asked.
Æsop turned to the new-comers, and addressed them more respectfully than he had been addressing the partisans of Gonzague: "I speak of a gallant gentleman—young, brave, beautiful, well-beloved. I speak to men who knew him. To you, Monsieur de la Hunaudaye, who would now be lying under Flemish earth if his sword had not slain your assailant; to you, Monsieur de Marillac, whose daughter took the veil for love of him; to you, Monsieur de Barbanchois, who fortified against him the dwelling of your lady love; to you, Monsieur de la Ferte, who lost to him one evening your Castle of Senneterre; to you, Monsieur de Vauguyon, whose shoulder should still remember the stroke of his sword."
As Æsop spoke, he addressed in turn each of the elder men, and as he spoke recognition of his meaning showed itself in the face of each man whom he addressed.
Hunaudaye nodded. "Louis de Nevers," he said, solemnly.
Instantly Æsop uncovered. "Yes, Louis de Nevers, who was assassinated under the walls of the Castle of Caylus twenty years ago."
Chavernay came over to Æsop. "My father was a friend of Louis de Nevers."
Æsop looked from the group of old men to the group of young men. "It is the ghost of Nevers that troubles us to-night. There were three Louis in those days, brothers in arms. Louis of France did all he could to find the assassin of Nevers. In vain. Louis de Gonzague did all he could to find the assassin of Nevers. In vain. Well, gentlemen, would you believe it, to-night Louis of France and Louis de Gonzague will be told the name of the assassin of Nevers?"