“Carrion! scum!” she whispered, bending over him, “you deserve to die like the English dog you are. Miserable, insolent libertine!” and she struck him on the cheek. “No, I will not kill you, for you have my work to do and you shall do it. But a weak woman has taught you a lesson and your hour is not yet come. Another shall soil his hands or his sword with your rascallion blood. Go!”
She dragged him down the passages, loosened the rope on his ankles till he could just hobble, flung his coat about him, and with her dagger at his throat pushed him to the open door, where she propped him against the wall in the damp darkness of the court, and the silent serenity of the stars.
“It will take you,” she said pleasantly, “twenty minutes to bite through that cord, and by that time I shall have disappeared for ever from your sight. But remember my advice, or as sure as you stand here, before long my secret will die with you.” She drew the lace gag from his mouth and stuffed it inside his collar. “Cry out now if you please,” she continued contemptuously, “and my secret will die with you in two days on the executioner’s wheel. Oh, keep the lace; it came from a woman’s heart, and on the scaffold will be a pleasant souvenir of a night of love with a cipher. Adieu!”
The outer door was locked. The woman who was a cipher had disappeared; whence and whither, who could say?
As George Onslow stood with rage, jealousy, baffled passion, humiliation, surging within him, he was startled by the sudden appearance of a stranger.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the boyish voice of the Chevalier de St. Amant. “’Tis a friend.” He muttered a reassuring password. “So that woman has treated you as she treated me?” In a trice he had set the helpless spy free.
Onslow’s answer was an incoherent growl of gratitude, surprise, and relief.
“Well,” said the Chevalier, “we are in the same boat. You will hear from me shortly, I promise you. And then you and I can have our revenge on her and the Vicomte de Nérac. Revenge, my friend, revenge will be sweet. Meanwhile have courage, and be careful till our turn comes!”
And then he, too, glided away to be lost in the night that divined and protected all the treachery and treason, all the dreams of love and hate, of passion and ambition, the tears and laughter and prayers that throbbed then, and will always throb, in the heart of Paris.