Not a man of all the baffled assassins answered to that challenge. Standing upon the steps of the bridge, Lagardere caught it up.
"Seek her behind my sword, assassin! You wear my mark, and I will find you out! You shall all suffer! After the lackeys, the master! Sooner or later Lagardere will come to you!"
IX
THE SCYTHE OF TIME
The years came and the years went, as had been their way since the fall of Troy and earlier. To the philosophic eye, surveying existence with the supreme wisdom of the initiate into mysteries, things changed but little through eons on the surface of the world, where men loved and hated, bred and slew, triumphed and failed, lorded and cringed as had been the way since the beginning, when the cave man that handled the heavier knuckle-bone ruled the roost. But to the unphilosophic eye of the majority of mankind things seemed to change greatly in a very little while; and it seemed, therefore, to the superficial, that many things had happened in France and in Paris during the seventeen years that had elapsed since the fight in the moat of Caylus.
To begin with, the great cardinal, the Red Man, the master of France, had dipped from his dusk to his setting, and was inurned, with much pomp and solemnity, as a great prince of the church should be, and the planet wheeled on its indifferent way, though Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, was no more. His Gracious Majesty Louis the Thirteenth, self-named Louis the Just, found himself, for the first time in his futile career, his own master, and did not know quite what to make of the privilege. He mourned the deceased statesman with one eye, as it were, while he ogled his belated goddess of freedom with the other. It might well be that she had paid too tardy a visit, but at least he would essay to trifle with her charms.
Many things had happened to the kingdom over which, for the first time, his Majesty the King held undivided authority since the night of Caylus fight. For one thing, by the cardinal’s order, all the fortified castles in France had been dismantled, and many of them reduced to ruins, owl-haunted, lizard-haunted, ivy-curtained. This decree did not especially affect Caylus, which had long ceased to be a possible menace to the state, and, after the death of the grim old marquis, was rapidly falling into decay on its own account without aid from the ministers of Richelieu’s will. For another thing, two very well-esteemed gentlemen of his Majesty’s Musketeers, having been provoked by two other very well-esteemed gentlemen of his Eminence’s Musketeers, had responded to the challenge with the habitual alacrity of that distinguished body, and had vindicated its superiority in swordcraft by despatching their antagonists. After this victory the gentlemen of the Musketeers, remembering the rigor of the cardinal’s antipathy to duelling, made a vain effort to put some distance between them and the king’s justice. They were arrested in their flight, brought back to Paris, and perished miserably on the scaffold by the pointless sword of the executioner. Each of these events proved in its degree that Monsieur de Richelieu had very little respect for tradition, and that if he disliked an institution, no matter how time-hallowed and admired by gentlemen, he did away with it in the most uncompromising and arbitrary manner. There were many other doings during the days of the cardinal’s glory that are of no account in this chronicle, though they were vastly of importance to the people of France. But many things had happened that are of moment to this chronicle, and these, therefore, shall be set down as briefly as may be.
News did not travel, when the seventeenth century was still young, from one end of the kingdom to the other with any desperate rapidity. Even when the posts rode at a hand gallop, the long leagues took their long time to cover, and, after all, of most of the news that came to the capital from abroad and afar it was generally safe to disbelieve a full half, to discredit the third quarter, and to be justifiably sceptical as to the remaining portion. But, credible or incredible, all news is blown to Paris, as all roads lead to Rome, and in the fulness of time it got to be known in Paris that the Duke Louis de Nevers, the young, the beautiful, the brilliant, had come to his death in an extraordinary and horrible manner hard by the Spanish frontier, having been, as it seemed, deliberately butchered by a party of assassins employed, so it was said, by his father-in-law, the old Count of Caylus.