She put a hand to his shoulder. “And your reward?” She was wooing him unconsciously, as she wooed all men.
“I will ask for it when I have succeeded.”
“And you shall have it. I promise.”
An hour later the Palace heard with rapture that Madame de Pompadour had fled to Paris, in such fear for her life that she had not had time to take even her jewels with her. Her household was to follow her as soon as possible. In the Queen’s antechamber the joy was inexpressible. A third miracle! a third miracle! The grisette had vanished. Ah! If she returned now to one of the King’s castles it would be to the Bastille, not Versailles.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE THIEF OF THE SECRET DESPATCH
What had André discovered?
When he had reached the stables he could not find Yvonne, but at “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” whither he hurried, he was not disappointed. And Yvonne had news to give him as thrilling as unexpected. The English spy she had learned was coming to the inn that very afternoon to meet a strange woman, and the meeting was to be kept a solemn secret. Yvonne had felt sure Monseigneur ought to know, and had ventured as far as the Palace in search of him. André’s heart leaped at the chance that fate, which had buffeted him so sorely, had now by a miracle put in his way. The spy could be no other than George Onslow, with whom he had crossed swords in the wood the night before Fontenoy; and the woman? Would she be the flower girl of “The Gallows and the Three Crows,” the crystal-gazer, the mysterious “princess,” whose dancing had first stirred his blood in London, the woman who had said she loved him? Or would it be some other unfortunate, caught like himself in the terrible toils of a mystery which bid fair to be the ruin of them all?
What did it matter? André was sure of one thing. Could he but hear what passed at that meeting he would be many steps nearer to the solution of the blood-stained riddle of “No. 101.”
Perhaps he could yet save Madame de Pompadour, yet win Denise, yet take vengeance on his foes. The hand of destiny was in this. With “No. 101” his life had as it were begun; at each stage he had been now thwarted, now strangely aided, by the acts of the unknown traitor; with “No. 101” it was clearly fated to end. Despair, insatiable curiosity, the blind impetus of forces he could not control, alike steeled him to make the attempt.
Yvonne was easily persuaded; indeed, she had already schemed for it, and with her help he lay concealed in the room of meeting and awaited with a beating pulse the arrival of the traitors. The spy proved to be George Onslow, as he had guessed, and André studied his able, sleuth-hound face, the dark eyes of slumbering passion, and the sensual lips, with the eery yet joyous shiver of one who feels that here is an opponent with whom reckoning must be made before life is over. The woman, however, was unknown to him. She was certainly not the crystal-gazer. Nothing more unlike the black hair and dark eyebrows, the creamy skin, of that mysterious enchantress could be imagined. For this was a lady who to-day we should say had stepped straight from a pastel by Latour, or, as André thought, from the Salon de Vénus at Versailles, a girl with the figure of Diana and that indefinable carriage and air which only centuries of high birth and the company of such can bestow. Denise’s grey eyes and exquisite pose of head were not more characteristic of the quality that the noblesse of the ancien régime rightly claimed as their monopoly, than were the blue eyes and innocent insolence of the stranger. And yet André felt that in the most mysterious and irritating way she reminded him of some one. But of whom? Of whom? And then he almost laughed out loud. Of Yvonne!