"Do you mean it?" said the priest, starting and looking up with a subtle challenge—almost a threat—in his tone.
"Yes, I do."
Their eyes met: and seeing their looks, I chuckled, nudging Croisette. No fear of their discovering us now. I recalled the old proverb which says that when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own, and speculated on the chance of the priest freeing us once for all from M. de Bezers.
But the two were ill-matched. The Vidame could have taken up the other with one hand and dashed his head on the floor. And it did not end there. I doubt if in craft the priest was his equal. Behind a frank brutality Bezers—unless his reputation belied him—concealed an Italian intellect. Under a cynical recklessness he veiled a rare cunning and a constant suspicion; enjoying in that respect a combination of apparently opposite qualities, which I have known no other man to possess in an equal degree, unless it might be his late majesty, Henry the Great. A child would have suspected the priest; a veteran might have been taken in by the Vidame.
And indeed the priest's eyes presently sank. "Our bargain is to go for nothing?" he muttered sullenly.
"I know of no bargain," quoth the Vidame. "And I have no time to lose, splitting hairs here. Set it down to what you like. Say it is a whim of mine, a fad, a caprice. Only understand that Madame de Pavannes stays. We go. And—" he added this, as a sudden thought seemed to strike him, "though I would not willingly use compulsion to a lady, I think Madame d'O had better come too."
"You speak masterfully," the priest said with a sneer, forgetting the tone he had himself used a few minutes before to Mirepoix.
"Just so. I have forty horsemen over the way," was the dry answer. "For the moment, I am master of the legions, Coadjutor."
"That is true," Madame d'O said; so softly that I started. She had scarcely spoken since Bezers' entrance. As she spoke now, she shook back the hood from her face and disclosed the chestnut hair clinging about her temples—deep blots of colour on the abnormal whiteness of her skin, "That is true, M. de Bezers," she said. "You have the legions. You have the power. But you will not use it, I think, against an old friend. You will not do us this hurt when I—But listen."
He would not. In the very middle of her appeal he cut her short—brute that he was! "No Madame!" he burst out violently, disregarding the beautiful face, the supplicating glance, that might have moved a stone, "that is just what I will not do. I will not listen! We know one another. Is not that enough?"