"I shall go, if our Bearnais commands me," said Turenne; "but I wager they will dye the Loire as red as ever they did the Seine on Bartholomew's Day—aye, and fringe the Château with us, as they did at Amboise. These Guises do not forget their ancient tricks."
"And right pretty you would look, my good Lord Turenne, your frosty beard wagging in the wind and a raven perched on your bald pate!"
"If I were in your shoes, I would not talk so freely either of beards or of baldness, D'Aubigné," growled Turenne. "I mind well when a certain clever lad had no more than the beard of a rabbit, which only comes out at night for fear of the dogs!"
"It is strange," said D'Aubigné, not in the least offended with his comrade, "that he who has no fear of the swords, should grow weak at the fluttering of a kerchief or before the artful carelessness of a neck-ribbon."
"Not strange at all," said Turenne; "is he not a man and a Bearnais? Besides, being a Bourbon, he will pay those the best to whom he owes least. And we, who have loved him as we never loved father or mother, wife or child, will be sent back to the chimney-corner with our thumbs to suck!"
"Aye, because he is sure of us!" retorted D'Aubigné gloomily, unconsciously prefiguring a day when he should sit, an exile in a foreign town, eating his heart out, and writing a great book to the praise of an ungrateful, or perhaps forgetful master.
"The most curious thing of all," said Rosny, "is that we shall always love him—put down his fickleness to the account of others, cherish him as a deceived woman does the man from whom she cannot wholly tear her heart!"
"Yes," cried a new voice, as a red hassock of hair showed itself over the brown Capuchin's robe, "these things will we do—some of us in exile, all in sorrow, some in rags, and some in motley——"
He opened the robe wider, and under the stained brown the jester's motley met their eyes.
"Who is this fool who mixes so freely in the councils of his betters?" cried Turenne. "Is there never a wooden horse and a provost-marshal in this—this ball-room?"