The marshal continued his scrutiny, and Laurence returned his gaze with interest.
"Well, boy," said the marshal, smiling as if not ill pleased at his boldness, "what do you think of me?"
"I think, sir," said Laurence, simply, "that you have grown older since I saw you in the lists at Thrieve."
It seemed to Laurence that the words were given him. And all the time he was saying to himself: "Now I have done it. For this he will surely put me to death. He cannot help himself. Why did I not stick to it that I was an Irelander?"
But, somehow, the answer seemed like an arrow from a bow shot at a venture, entering in between the joints of the marshal's armour.
"Do you think so?" he said, with some startled anxiety, yet without surprise; "older than at Thrieve? I do not believe it. It is impossible. Why, I grow younger and younger every day. It has been promised me that I should."
And setting his elbow on the sill of the window, Gilles de Retz looked thoughtfully out upon the cool dusk of the rose garden. Then all at once it came to him what was implied in that unlucky speech of Laurence's. The grim intensity returned to his eyes as he erected himself and bent his brows, white with premature age, upon the boy, who confronted him with the fearlessness born of youth and ignorance.
"Ah," he said, "this is interesting; you have changed your nation. You were an Irishman to De Sillé in Paris, to the clerk Henriet, and to the choir at Machecoul. Yet to me you admit in the very first words you speak that you are a Scot and saw me at the Castle of Thrieve."
Even yet the old Laurence might have turned the corner. He had, as we know, graduated as a liar ready and expert. He had daily practised his art upon the Abbot. He had even, though more rarely, succeeded with his father. But now in the day of his necessity the power and wit had departed from him.
To the lord of the Castle of Machecoul Laurence simply could not lie. Ringed as he was by evil, his spirit became strong for good, and he testified like one in the place of final judgment, when the earthly lendings of word and phrase and covering excuse must all be cast aside and the soul stand forth naked and nakedly answer that which is required.