‘Did you see the coin?’ I cried eagerly.
‘To be sure,’ he answered.
‘Then, mon dieu!’ I retorted, ‘either you are deceiving me, or the woman you saw deceived you. For mademoiselle has not got the token! I have it here, in my possession! Now, do you still say you saw it, man?’
‘I saw one like it,’ he answered, trembling, his face damp. ‘That I will swear. And the woman told me what I have told you. And no more.’
‘Then it is clear,’ I answered, ‘that mademoiselle has nothing to do with this, and is doubtless many a league away. This is one of M. de Bruhl’s tricks. Fresnoy gave him the token he stole from me. And I told him the story of the velvet knot myself. This is a trap; and had I fallen into it, and gone to the Parvis to-morrow evening, I had never kept another assignation, my lad.’
Simon looked thoughtful. Presently he said, with a crestfallen air, ‘You were to go alone. The woman said that.’
Though I knew well why he had suppressed this item, I forbore to blame him. ‘What was the woman like?’ I said.
‘She had very much of Franchette’s figure,’ he answered. He could not go beyond that. Blinded by the idea that the woman was mademoiselle’s attendant, and no one else, he had taken little heed of her, and could not even say for certain that she was not a man in woman’s clothes.
I thought the matter over and discussed it with him; and was heartily minded to punish M. de Bruhl, if I could discover a way of turning his treacherous plot against himself. But the lack of any precise knowledge of his plans prevented me stirring in the matter; the more as I felt no certainty that I should be master of my actions when the time came.
Strange to say the discovery of this movement on the part of Bruhl, who had sedulously kept himself in the background since the scene in the king’s presence, far from increasing my anxieties, had the effect of administering a fillip to my spirits; which the cold and unyielding pressure of the Jacobin had reduced to a low point. Here was something I could understand, resist, and guard against. The feeling that I had once more to do with a man of like aims and passions with myself quickly restored me to the use of my faculties; as I have heard that a swordsman opposed to the powers of evil regains his vigour on finding himself engaged with a mortal foe. Though I knew that the hours of grace were fast running to a close, and that on the morrow the priest would call for an answer, I experienced that evening an unreasonable lightness and cheerfulness. I retired to rest with confidence, and slept in comfort, supported in part, perhaps, by the assurance that in that room where my mother died her persecutor could have no power to harm me.