"No!" I said.
"Ah! you did not think that we should hear it so soon," he replied, shaking his head sagely. "Oh, I can tell you we are well provided. The campaign has begun, and the information department has not been neglected. Little escapes us, and we shall soon set these rogues right. But, for the fact, that damned rascal Doury let it out. I hear you told them some fine home-truths. A Committee, the insolents! And in our teeth! But you gave them a sharp set-back, I hear, M. le Vicomte. If you had joined it, now----"
He stopped abruptly. A man crossing the street had slightly jostled him. The old noble lost his temper, and on the instant raised his stick with a passionate oath, and the man cowered away begging his pardon. But M. de Gontaut was not to be appeased.
"Vagabond!" he cried after him, in a voice trembling with rage, "you would throw me down again, would you? We will put you in your place by-and-by. We will; why, Dieu! when I was young----"
"But, M. le Baron," I said to divert his attention, for two or three bystanders were casting ugly looks at us, and I saw that it needed little to bring about a fracas, "are you quite sure that we shall be able to keep them in check?"
The old noble still trembled, but he drew himself up with a gesture of pathetic gallantry.
"You shall see!" he cried. "When it comes to hard knocks, you shall see, Monsieur. But here we are; and there is Madame St. Alais on the balcony with some of her bodyguard." He paused to kiss his hand, with the air of a Polignac. "Up there, M. le Vicomte, you will see what you will see," he continued. "And I--I shall be in luck, too, for I have brought you."
It seemed to me more like a dream than a reality. A fortnight before, I had been spurned from this house with insults; I had been bidden never to enter it again. Now, on the balconies, from which pretty faces and powdered heads looked down, handkerchiefs fluttered to greet me. On the stairs, which, crowded with servants and lackeys, shook under the constant stream of comers and goers, I was received with a hum of applause. In every corner snuff-boxes were being tapped and canes handled; the flashing of roguish eyes behind fans vied with the glitter of mirrors. And through all a lane was made for me. At the door Louis met me. A little farther on, Madame came half-way across the room to me. It was a triumph--a triumph which I found inexplicable, unintelligible, until I learned that the rebuff which I had administered to the deputation had been exaggerated a dozen times, nay, a hundred times, until it met even the wishes of the most violent; while the sober and thoughtful were too glad to hail in my adhesion the proof of that reaction, which the Royalist party, from the first day of the troubles, never ceased to expect.
No wonder that, taken by surprise and intoxicated with incense, I let myself go. To have declared in that company and with Madame's gracious words in my ears, that I had not come to join them, that I had come on a different errand altogether, that though I had repelled the deputation I had no intention of acting against it, would have required a courage and a hardness I could not boast; while the circumstances of the deputation, Doury's presumption and Buton's hints, to say nothing of the violence of the Parisian mob, had not failed to impress me unfavourably. With a thousand others who had prepared themselves to welcome reform, I recoiled when I saw the lengths to which it was tending; and, though nothing had been farther from my mind when I entered Cahors than to join myself to the St. Alais faction, I found it impossible to reject their apologies on the spot, or explain on the instant the real purpose with which I had come to them.
I was, in fact, the sport of circumstances; weak, it will be said, in the wrong place and stubborn in the wrong; betraying a boy's petulance at one time, and a boy's fickleness at another; and now a tool and now a churl. Perhaps truly. But it was a time of trial; nor was I the only man or the oldest man who, in those days, changed his opinions, and again within the week went back; or who found it hard to find a cockade, white, black, red or tricolour, to his taste.