Lagardere smiled reassuringly. "Evil he may be," he said, "but not dangerous—no, not dangerous. Indeed, I am inclined to think he will be more useful to us than otherwise."
"But he seemed to threaten you," the girl protested.
Lagardere admitted the fact. "He was a little threatening at first," he agreed, "but I have managed to pacify him, and he will not trouble us any more."
He took the girl’s cold hand and kissed it reverentially. "Gabrielle," he said, "we go to Paris to-day, but till I come for you and tell you it is time for us to depart I want you to remain in this chamber. You will do this for me, will you not?"
"I will always do whatever you wish," the girl answered, and her eyes filled with tears.
Lagardere was filled with the longing to clasp her in his arms, but he restrained himself, again kissed her hand with the same air of tender devotion, and motioned to her to enter her room. When she had closed the door he returned to his own room, and there, with amazing swiftness, divested himself of his outer garments and substituted for them those of the dead Æsop.
Producing a small box from a battered portmantle that stood in a corner, he produced certain pigments from it, and, facing a cracked fragment of unframed looking-glass that served for a mirror, proceeded with the skill of an experienced actor to make certain changes in his appearance.
His curiously mobile face he distorted at once into an admirable likeness to the hunchback, and then, this initial likeness thus acquired, he heightened and intensified it by few but skilful strokes of coloring matter. Then he dexterously rearranged his hair to resemble the hunchback’s dishevelled locks, compelling its curls to fall about his transformed face and shade it. Finally he surmounted all with the hunchback’s hat, placed well forward on his forehead. He gave a smile of satisfaction at the result of his handiwork, and the smile was the malign smile of Æsop.
"That is good enough," he murmured, "to deceive a short-sighted fellow like Peyrolles, and as for his Highness of Gonzague, he has not seen me for so many years that there will be no difficulty with him."
He glanced at his new raiment with an expression of distaste. "When I get to Paris," he mused, "I will shift these habiliments. It is all very well to play the bird of prey, but it is somewhat unpleasant to wear the bird’s own feathers."