André was not the only person at Versailles who, tortured with perplexity and fear, must now choose between loyalty to a cause or loyalty to the dictates of the heart. Poor Denise, whose womanhood, nobility, and devotion to her neglected and insulted Queen made her so bitter a foe of Madame de Pompadour, whose sensitive self-respect and self-reverence, whose ideal of purity so strange in the world of Versailles, whose indignation at André’s desertion to the side of the ambitious mistress, had combined to make her despise and twice reject the hero of her girlhood; yes, poor Denise had at last been driven by a cruel necessity to acknowledge to herself and to the Chevalier that she really loved André, and that she could not sacrifice him even to victory over Madame de Pompadour. Ever since that hour of misery she had bitterly blamed herself for her selfish weakness. She had not only been untrue to her own cause, but perhaps had ensured its defeat—and for what? Because she loved, despite all, one who did not love her. And unless she made atonement for this folly and sin she must forfeit her own self-respect for ever and be punished as well. Denise, therefore, goaded by remorse, by a dim hope of saving André at the last hour, had steeled herself to conquer her pride and her modesty and to speak to André himself.
He, too, oppressed with misgivings and fears, had returned early in the morning to Versailles, and when he found himself alone in the antechamber with Denise, pale and resolute, instinct warned him as it warned her that both their lives might now turn on silence or speech.
“Will you answer a question?” she began with nervous directness.
He bowed with a singularly poor attempt at resolute indifference.
“Why,” she demanded in a low voice, “why did you say you were going to Nérac when you really meant to visit a low cabaret in Paris?”
André had no answer ready, for it was not the question he had been expecting from Denise.
“I see,” he said, after a pitiful pause, “that you are well informed, Mademoiselle.”
Denise looked round the room as if to make sure they were not being spied on. Then she walked towards him, her trembling fingers revealing her emotion.
“I will tell you why I ask,” she said. “This morning, at three o’clock, in the gutter outside the cabaret—where you were seen at midnight—one of the King’s messengers was discovered by the police, gagged and bound, and his despatches gone—stolen, of course, by the traitor who has done this felon’s work before.”
“Good God!” The horror in his face was unmistakable, but was it due to guilty knowledge or innocent surprise? The crystal-gazer’s last words, “There will be news in the morning for you at Versailles,” were ringing in his ears, and now he stared dully and confused at the girl’s pale face.