“This one will be as brisk as I can make it,” said his Grace. “Up till the other day I gave you credit for the virtue you claim—the readiness to answer for yourself when the need happened. I was under the delusion that your duel with the Frenchman was the proof of it.”
“Oh, damn the Frenchman!” cried the Chamberlain with contempt and irritation. “I am ready to meet the man again with any arm he chooses.”
“With any arm!” said the Duke dryly. “'Tis always well to have a whole one, and not one with a festering sore, as on the last occasion. Oh yes,” he went on, seeing Simon change colour, “you observe I have learned about the old wound, and what is more, I know exactly where you got it.”
“Your Grace seems to have trustworthy informants,” said the Chamberlain less boldly, but in no measure abashed. “I got that wound through your own hand as surely as if you had held the foil that gave it, for the whole of this has risen, as you ought to know, from your sending me to France.”
“And that is true, in a sense, my good sophist. But I was, in that, the unconscious and blameless link in your accursed destiny. I had you sent to France on a plain mission. It was not, I make bold to say, a mission on which the Government would have sent any man but a shrewd one and a gentleman, and I was mad enough to think Simon Mac-Taggart was both. When you were in Paris as our agent—”
“Fah!” cried Simon, snapping his fingers and drawing his face in a grimace. “Agent, quo' he! for God's sake take your share of it and say spy and be done with it!”
The Duke shrugged his shoulders, listening patiently to the interruption. “As you like,” said he. “Let us say spy, then. You were to learn what you could of the Pretender's movements, and incidentally you were to intromit with certain of our settled agents at Versailles. Doubtless a sort of espionage was necessary to the same. But I make bold to say the duty was no ignoble one so long as it was done with some sincerity and courage, for I count the spy in an enemy's country is engaged upon the gallantest enterprise of war, using the shrewdness that alone differs the quarrel of the man from the fury of the beast, and himself the more admirable, because his task is a thousand times more dangerous than if he fought with the claymore in the field.”
“Doubtless! doubtless!” said the Chamberlain. “That's an old tale between the two of us, but you should hear the other side upon it.”
“No matter; we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart—and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man! You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. Countersap with a vengeance! We know now where Bertin got his information. You betrayed us and the woman Cecile Favart in the one filthy transaction.”
The Chamberlain showed in his face that the blow was home. His mouth broke and he grew as grey as a rag.