“Swear,” she whispered. “Swear with your hand there that you will be loyal also to me, to Antoinette de Pompadour.”
“I swear.” Two words, but two words between a man and a woman can sweep a soul into hell or lift it to heaven.
“The heart of the Pompadour,” she murmured. “Can any man or woman read it? Can she read it herself? God knows. Take care, take care of yourself, my friend,” she added with a sudden wistful pathos. “You alone I can trust. Adieu!”
“The heart of the Pompadour,” André muttered as he stole back to the Queen’s apartments. “The heart of the Pompadour.” What, indeed, was there not written there of passion and ambition? Only a woman’s heart. Yes, but one of the half-dozen women, in the history of the world, the beatings of whose heart have shaped the destinies of peoples and moulded the fate of kingdoms.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FLOWER GIRL OF “THE GALLOWS AND THE THREE CROWS”
André had understated the truth to Madame de Pompadour when he said that he had learned much from Yvonne. Bit by bit her simple confessions had convinced him that “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold” played an important part in the inscrutable mystery of successful treachery summed up in the blood-stained cipher of “No. 101.” Yvonne indeed sorely puzzled him. She was only a hired wench at this hostelry kept by a man and his wife against whom nothing discreditable could be ferreted out. And he had utterly failed to break down the barriers of her simplicity. She related things she had seen or heard which to André with his knowledge of the facts were damningly conclusive, but that she was aware of this was contradicted at every turn by her speech, her gestures, her amazing innocence. In vain had he laid pitfall after pitfall to catch her tripping. Not one syllable, one flutter of an eyelid, one blush, one faltering tone, had rewarded his cunningest or his most artless efforts. The girl had passed ordeal after ordeal just as a peasant wench should who was only a peasant wench. Yet every failure only deepened the feeling that Yvonne was not merely Yvonne of the Spotless Ankles; proof he had none; proof indeed pointed to the very reverse. André had nothing but a vague, indefinable, apparently irrational, suspicion, and it maddened him. In the critical struggle on which he had now embarked he was convinced he was being beaten, tricked by a woman; she held, if he were right, the keys which would unlock the mystery and she was simply playing with him, no doubt for her own ends; she was probably betraying him daily to her accursed allies. Worse still, because it was ridiculous as he felt it, there was an inexplicable charm in this girl which threatened to master him. Despite Denise and Madame de Pompadour and the Comtesse des Forges and half a dozen other refined and attractive women at the Court to inspire love and gratify passion, he, André de Nérac, a Cordon Bleu, a Croix de St. Louis, a noble of the Maison du Roi, was in danger of falling a victim to an unkempt peasant with a smudged face. Yvonne told him things eminently useful, Yvonne baffled him, but these were not the only reasons why daily he went to see her. And he had discovered this humiliating fact by trying to answer a torturing question. If he could prove Yvonne to be a traitor or the ally of traitors, was he ready to hand her over to the awful mercies of the King’s justice? And if not, why not? Supposing he could show that she was the woman who had foiled him in the charcoal-burner’s cabin at Fontenoy, what then? And his heart revolted in its answer against his reason: “No, I cannot; I cannot leave Denise to the vengeance of Madame de Pompadour, because I love her; I cannot give Yvonne to the rack, the executioner’s whip and wheel, because”—and then he always stopped, because he had not the courage even in the most intimate sanctuary of his conscience to finish the answer.
But discover the mystery he must more than ever now. His own fate and Madame de Pompadour’s hung on success. The war was drawing to an end; the negotiations for peace were beginning. If the King’s secrets were betrayed as in the past Madame would be disgraced. André had deliberately broken with his friends and his order. Their implacable lust for vengeance on the mistress would require his punishment too. The issue was as clear as daylight. Either he must crush them or they would crush him. And succeed he must, because success alone meant safety, honour, and the love of Denise.
And so, after leaving Madame de Pompadour, André went as usual straight to Yvonne, whom he found in the stalls feeding the spotted cow. “The Englishman,” she informed him, “has been here, Monseigneur. He spoke with a gentleman from the Court. I only know that to-morrow night they will meet at a tavern in Paris; they called it ‘The Gallows and the Three Crows.’”
André took the lantern from her and let the light fall on her stained face.
“And this tavern, where is it?” he demanded.