I stood a moment, but finding she still took no notice of us, I beckoned to one of the servants, and bade him tell his mistress a gentleman would speak with her. The man went with the message; but she sent him off with a flea in his ear, and screamed at him so violently that for a moment I thought she was mad. Then it appeared that the object of her attention was a door at the side of the hall; for, stopping suddenly in her walk, she went up to it, and struck it passionately with her hands.
"Come out!" she cried. "Come out, you villain!"
Restraining the King, I went forward myself, and, saluting her politely, begged a word with her apart, thinking she would recognize me.
Her answer, however, showed that she did not. "No!" she cried, waving me off, in the utmost excitement. "No; you will not get me away--I know you. You are as bad one as the other." Then turning again to the door, she continued, "Come out! Do you hear! Come out! I'll have no more of your intrigues and your Hallots!"
I pricked up my ears at the name "But, Madame," I said, "one moment."
"Begone!" she retorted, turning on me so wrathfully that I fairly recoiled before her. "I shall stay here till I drop; but I will have him out and expose him. There shall be an end of his precious plots and his Hallots if I have to go to the King!"
Words so curiously à propos could not but recall to my mind the confusion into which my mention of Du Hallot had thrown the secretary earlier in the day. And since they seemed also to be consistent with the warning conveyed to me, and indeed to explain it, they should have corroborated my worst suspicions. But a sense of something unreal and fantastic, with which I could not grapple, continued to puzzle me in the presence of this angry woman; and it was with no great assurance that I said, "Do I understand then, Madame, that M. du Hallot is in that room?"
"M. du Hallot?" she replied, in a tone that was almost a scream. "No; but he would be if he had taken the hint I sent him! He would be! I will have no more secrecy, however, and no more plots. I have suffered enough already, and now Madame shall suffer if she has not forgotten how to blush. Are you coming out there?" she continued, once more applying herself to the door, her face inflamed with passion. "I shall stay! Oh, I shall stay, I assure you. Until morning if necessary!"
"But, Madame," I said, beginning to see daylight, and finding words with difficulty--for I already heard in fancy the King's laughter and could conjure up the endless quips and cranks with which he would pursue me--"your warning did not perhaps reach M. du Hallot!"