"But what does it mean?"
"Can you not see?" he said, with growing faintness. "We have been tricked,—I, by her pretense of love and by this appointment, to my death; you, by a similar appointment and her screams, to make yourself my slayer. I ought to have known! she belongs to Catherine, to the Queen-mother. Alas, monsieur! easily fooled is he who loves a woman!"
Then I remembered what De Rilly had told me,—that De Noyard's counsels to the Duke of Guise were an obstacle to Catherine's design of conciliating that powerful leader, who aspired to the throne on which her son was seated.
"No, no, monsieur!" I cried, unwilling to admit Mlle. d'Arency capable of such a trick, or myself capable of being so duped. "It cannot be that; if they had desired your death, they would have hired assassins to waylay you."
Yet I knew that he was right. The strange request that Mlle. d'Arency had made of me in the church was now explained.
A kind of smile appeared, for a moment, on De Noyard's face, struggling with his expression of weakness and pain.
"Who would go to the expense of hiring assassins," he said, "when honest gentlemen can be tricked into doing the work for nothing? Moreover, when you hire assassins, you take the risk of their selling your secret to the enemy. They are apt to leave traces, too, and the secret instigator of a deed may defeat its object by being found out."
"Then I have to thank God that you are not dead. You will recover, monsieur."
"I fear not, my son. I do not know how much blood I lose at every word I speak. Parbleu! you have the art of making a mighty hole with that toy of yours, monsieur!"
This man, so grave and severe in the usual affairs of life, could take on a tone of pleasantry while enduring pain and facing death.