She lowered her eyes, the colour mounting anew to her brow. "Yes," she murmured. "I know that your people can be silent. But the Lieutenant of Périgord is here. You have not"--with a quick, frightened look--"injured him?"
"Have no fear."
"For that were fatal," she continued anxiously. "Fatal! If things go wrong, he may prove our safety."
"Pooh, I know it well," Vlaye replied, with a nod of intelligence. "None better, my girl. But have no fear, he will hear naught of our doings. Not, I suppose"--with a searching look, half humorous, half suspicious--"that he is also a captive of your bow and spear."
"I hate him," she answered.
Her tone, vehement, yet low, struck the corresponding chord in his nature. He took her into his arms with a reckless laugh. "You were right and I was wrong!" he cried, as he fondled her. "You will bring me more than a clump of spears, my beauty! More than that foolish child! God! In a month I had strangled her! But you and I--you and I, sweet, will go far together! And now, to supper! To supper! And the devil take to-morrow and our cares!"
CHAPTER XXIV.
[FORS L'AMOUR.]
Though it was not des Ageaux' fate to lie in one of those underground dungeons, noisome and dark, which the lords of an earlier century had provided in the foundations of the castle, he was not greatly the better for the immunity. The humiliations of the mind are sometimes sharper than the pains of the body; and the Lieutenant of Périgord, defeated and a prisoner, was little the happier though a dry strong-room looking on a tiny inner court held him, and though he suffered nothing from cold or the slimy companionship of the newt and frog. On the ambitious man defeat sits more heavily than chains; into the nature that would fain be at work inaction gnaws deeper than a shackle-bolt. Never while he lived would des Ageaux forget the long hours which he spent, gazing drearily on the blank wall that faced his window, while his mind measured a hundred times over the depth and the completeness of his fall.
He feared little for his life if he deigned to fear at all. He knew that he was a prize too valuable to be wasted. In the last resort, indeed, when all hopes had failed the Captain of Vlaye, and ruin stared him in the face, he might wreak his vengeance on the King's governor. But short of that moment--and it depended upon many things--the Lieutenant accounted himself safe. Safe as to life, but a beaten man, a prisoner, a failure; a blot, every moment he lay there, on the King's dignity, whose deputy he was; an unfortunate, whose ill hap would never be forgiven by the powers he had represented so ill.