He eyed me for a moment closely; then with sudden heat he cried, 'Curse me if I am! Nor whether I have to do with a man very deep or very shallow, a fool or a knave!'
'You may say what you please to a prisoner,' I retorted coldly.
'Turenne commonly does--to whom he pleases!' he answered. The next moment he made me start by saying, as he drew out a comfit-box and opened it, 'I am just from the little fool you have bewitched. If she were in my power I would have her whipped and put on bread and water till she came to her senses. As she is not, I must take another way. Have you any idea, may I ask,' he continued in his cynical tone, 'what is going to become of you, M. de Marsac?'
I replied, my heart inexpressibly lightened by what he had said of mademoiselle, that I placed the fullest confidence in the justice of the King of Navarre.
He repeated the name in a tone I did not understand.
'Yes, sir, the King of Navarre,' I answered firmly.
'Well, I daresay you have good reason to do so,' he rejoined with a sneer. 'Unless I am mistaken he knew a little more of this affair than he acknowledges.'
'Indeed? The King of Navarre?' I said, staring stolidly at him.
'Yes, indeed, indeed, the King of Navarre!' he retorted, mimicking me, with a nearer approach to anger than I had yet witnessed in him. 'But let him be a moment, sirrah!' he continued, 'and do you listen to me. Or first look at that. Seeing is believing.'
He drew out as he spoke a paper, or, to speak more correctly, a parchment, which he thrust with a kind of savage scorn into my hand. Repressing for the moment the surprise I felt, I took it to the window, and reading it with difficulty, found it to be a royal patent drawn, as far as I could judge, in due form, and appointing some person unknown--for the name was left blank--to the post of Lieutenant-Governor of the Armagnac, with a salary of twelve thousand livres a year!