"You may believe me, sweet Lady Sybilla," said the marshal, "because there is one vice which it is needless for me to practise in your presence, that of uncandour. I give you my word that unless your friends come worrying me from the land of Scots, the maids shall not die. Perhaps it were better to warn any visitors that even at Machecoul we are accustomed to deal with such cases. Is it not so, Astarte?"
At the sound of her name the huge wolf rose slowly, and, walking to her master's knee, she nosed upon him like a favourite hound.
"And if your intent be not that which causes fear to haunt the precincts of your palaces like a night-devouring beast, and makes your name an execration throughout Brittany and the Vendée, why have you carried the little child and the other pretty fool forth from their country? Was it not enough that you should slay the brothers? Wherefore was it necessary utterly to cut off the race of the Douglases?"
"Sybilla, dear sister of my sainted Catherine," purred the marshal, "it is your privilege that you should speak freely. When it is pleasing to me I may even answer you. It pleases me now, listen—you know of my devotion to science. You are not ignorant at what cost, at what vast sacrifices, I have in secret pushed my researches beyond the very confines of knowledge. The powers of the underworlds are revealing themselves to me, and to me alone. Evil and good alike shall be mine. I alone will pluck the blossom of fire, and tear from hell and hell's master their cherished mystery."
He paused as if mentally to recount his triumphs, and then continued.
"But at the moment of success I am crossed by a prejudice. The ignorant people clamour against my life—canaille! I regard them not. But nevertheless their foolish prejudices reach other ears. Hearken!"
And like a showman he beckoned Sybilla to the window. A low roar of human voices, fitful yet sustained, made itself distinctly audible above the shriller hooting of the tempest.
"Open the window!" he commanded, standing behind the curtain.
The girl unhasped the brazen hook and looked out. Beneath her a little crowd of poor people had collected about a woman who was beating with bleeding hands upon the shut door of the Hotel de Pornic.
"Justice! justice!" cried the woman, her hands clasped and her long black hair streaming down her shoulders, "give me my child, my little Pierre. Yester-eve he was enticed into the monster's den by his servant Poitou, and I shall never see him more! Give me my boy, murderer! Restore me my son!"