The steward glanced at his rival. "He is the Bishop's man!" he cried, throwing out his chest; and he gripped me again.
"And the Bishop is the Queen's!" was the curt and pithy reply; and the stranger, in whom I recognized the man who had delivered the dog's cape to me, quietly put him by. "Her Majesty has committed this person to the Cardinal's custody until inquiry be made into the truth of his story, and the persons who are guilty be ascertained. In the mean time, if you have any complaint to make you can make it to his Eminence."
After that there was no more to be said or done. The steward, baffled and bursting with rage, fell back; and the stranger, directing me by a gesture to attend him close, descended the stairs and crossing the courtyard, entered St. Honoré. I was in a maze what I was to expect from him; and overjoyed as I was at my present deliverance, had a sneaking fear that I might be courting a worse fate in this inquiry; so grim and secretive was my guide's face, and so much did that sombre dress—which gave him somewhat of the character of an inquisitor—add to the weight of his silence. However, when he had crossed St. Honoré and entered a lane leading to the river, he halted and turned to me.
"There are twenty crowns," he said abruptly; and he placed a purse in my hand. "Take them, and do exactly as I bid you, and all will be well. At the Quai de Notre Dame you will find a market-boat starting for Rouen. Go by it, and at the Ecce Homo in the Rue St. Eloi in that city you will find your wife and a hundred crowns. Live there quietly, and in a month apply for work at the Chancery; it will be given you. The rest lies with you. I have known men," he continued, with a puzzling smile, "who started at a desk in that Chancery and, being very silent men, able to keep a secret—able to keep a secret, mark you—lived to rent one of the great farms."
I tried to find words to thank him.
"There is no need," he said. "For what you have done, it is too much. For what you have to do—rule the unruly member—it is no more than is right."
And now I agree with him. Now—though his words came true to the letter, and to-day I hold one of the great farms on a second term—I too think that it was no more than was right. For if M. de Condé won Rocroy for his side in the field, the Cardinal on that day won a victory no less eminent at court; of which victory the check administered to M. de Beauvais—who had nothing but a good presence, and collapsing like a pricked bladder, became within a month the most discredited of men—was the first movement. Within a month the heads of the Importants—so, I have said, the Bishop's party were christened—were in prison or exiled or purchased; and all France knew that it lay in a master's hand—knew that the mantle of Richelieu, with a double portion of the royal favour, had fallen on Mazarin's shoulders. I need scarcely add that, before that fact became known to all—for such things do not become certainties in a minute—his Eminence had been happy enough to find the true Flore and restore it to her Majesty's arms.
CRILLON'S STAKE.
On a certain wet night, in the spring of the year 1587, the rain was doing its utmost to sweeten the streets of old Paris: the kennels were aflood with it, and the March wind, which caused the crowded sign-boards to creak and groan on their bearings, and ever and anon closed a shutter with the sound of a pistol-shot, blew the downpour in sheets into exposed doorways, and drenched to the skin the few wayfarers who were abroad. Here and there a stray dog, bent over a bone, slunk away at the approach of a roisterer's footstep; more rarely a passenger, whose sober or stealthy gait whispered of business rather than pleasure, moved cowering from street to street, under such shelter as came in his way.