‘You will get into the house as you can,’ he continued with energy. ‘For that you will need strategy, and good strategy. They suspect everybody. You must deceive them. If you fail to deceive them, or, deceiving them, are found out later, I do not think that you will trouble me again, or break the edict a second time. On the other hand, should you deceive me’—he smiled still more subtly, but his voice sank to a purring note—‘I will break you on the wheel like the ruined gamester you are!’
I met his look without quailing. ‘So be it!’ I said recklessly. ‘If I do not bring M. de Cocheforet to Paris, you may do that to me, and more also!’
‘It is a bargain!’ he answered slowly. ‘I think that you will be faithful. For money, here are a hundred crowns. That sum should suffice; but if you succeed you shall have twice as much more. That is all, I think. You understand?’
‘Yes, Monseigneur.’
‘Then why do you wait?’
‘The lieutenant?’ I said modestly.
The Cardinal laughed to himself, and sitting down wrote a word or two on a slip of paper. ‘Give him that,’ he said in high good-humour. ‘I fear, M. de Berault, you will never get your deserts—in this world!’
CHAPTER II. AT THE GREEN PILLAR
Cocheforet lies in a billowy land of oak and beech and chestnuts—a land of deep, leafy bottoms and hills clothed with forest. Ridge and valley, glen and knoll, the woodland, sparsely peopled and more sparsely tilled, stretches away to the great snow mountains that here limit France. It swarms with game—with wolves and bears, deer and boars. To the end of his life I have heard that the great king loved this district, and would sigh, when years and State fell heavily on him, for the beech groves and box-covered hills of South Bearn. From the terraced steps of Auch you can see the forest roll away in light and shadow, vale and upland, to the base of the snow peaks; and, though I come from Brittany and love the smell of the salt wind, I have seen few sights that outdo this.