André found his sword coming slowly out of its sheath. Pah! Let the traitor wait. The woman was right. Onslow must first do his night’s work, and then—and then—ah!
Onslow, too, had said nothing, but his face was eloquent of his resolve. She let him kiss her fingers, even let them linger in his, and her look promised much more of reward when the task had been successfully accomplished. The spy left the room with the air André might have done, the air of a man who was daring all things, hoping all things, for a woman’s sake. Bitter as André felt towards this cold-blooded traitress, he wished so fair a woman had not looked at that sensual sleuth-hound like that.
Once alone the girl stood thoughtfully gazing into space, and presently with a shiver wiped her fingers. André, lost in his thoughts, missed the refined scorn with which she flung the handkerchief she had used on to the burning logs, as if it was soiled. Then she sat down in front of the fire, rested her chin on her hands, and mused. A faint but long-drawn sigh floated up to the blackened rafters. André started. Where was he? Lying, surely, in the damp grass on the rim of that grisly wood at Fontenoy, staring up at a window in a charcoal-burner’s cabin, which had been stealthily opened. For just such a sigh had greeted him on that night, a sigh from a weary woman’s heart.
And with an exultant throb in his blood he felt that at last he was in the presence of “No. 101.” The riddle was solved at last.
The woman stretched her arms as if in pain,—the gesture was strangely familiar,—rose with decision, and glided from the room.
André waited a few minutes before he cautiously made his escape. All his doubts were gone. His suspicions of the Chevalier had been dispelled by the traitorous pair; if Yvonne was an accomplice it mattered not; he saw what must be done. One more great stroke and the game which he had been fighting for so long would be his. Yes. He would save Madame de Pompadour, take vengeance on his foes, and win Denise. Not least, the man who had saved an army of France at Fontenoy would reveal the secret and destroy the traitor who had baffled all and betrayed the destinies of his race.
And it was with the scheme planned out to a nicety that he burst into Madame de Pompadour’s salon.
The Watteau-like shepherdesses of the clock on the mantelpiece in the salon of Madame de Pompadour chimed out eleven tinkling strokes into the darkness—how few of us who have stood to-day in that dismantled room have succeeded in hearing even the echoes of what those bare walls could tell of the true history of France, the history that can never be unearthed by the École des Chartes. Just as the chimes died away André climbed noiselessly up the secret stair, and crouched with drawn sword and pistol cocked behind the curtain, a corner of which he pulled back far enough to give a clear glimpse into the room. It was the third time since Madame had fled that he had, thief-like, lurked in that hiding-place, and, as before, all was ghastly still. Two or three of Madame’s servants had followed her flight; the rest, he was aware, had proclaimed their allegiance to the Court. The powerful favourite who had dismissed a minister was ruined, and none now more noisily swore to their hatred of her than the men and women who had thronged her toilette or taken her pay.
In the dim light André could make out the half-packed trunks, the litter of disorder, so eloquent of their owner’s disgrace. How were the mighty fallen. Here indeed was a truer text for priest and preacher than the sins of the woman who had not been the first to grace these silent apartments, an accomplice in the passions of a King of France. The air to-night was thick with ghostly memories of other women, not less fair and frail, to whose inheritance of soiled supremacy the Marquise de Pompadour had succeeded. And there, gleaming in a faint ray, shone the escritoire which contained the despatch. To complete her mastery of the master of France, Madame had written it with her own hand—had, by doing so, her enemies hoped, signed her own death-warrant. The King’s secret. Little did André know, as he waited, that the true story of Louis’s incredible and persistent determination to pursue his own tortuous policy, to revel in thwarting and intriguing against his own ministers—at once a disease, a passion, and a pastime in that enigma of kings—was in all its labyrinthine details reserved to be the discovery of a noble a century hence, and to be read in a Republican France, a France that had done with kings, that made Versailles a public picture gallery, a France that had seen the victorious legions of Germany offer an imperial crown to the descendant of the parvenu Prussian ally of Louis in the Fontenoy campaign in yonder Galerie des Glaces of the Roi Soleil.
André shivered. He was thinking only of “No. 101.” Could that girl of his own race, if ever woman was, really be the traitor? And if she was, by what temptation of the devil had she embarked on her awful career? To-night she would be a prisoner; she was doomed to die, but would they ever know her secret—the real secret of “No. 101”? Punish her they could, but the secret, the real secret, was beyond their power. André clenched his hands. She would baffle them after all. It was the secret that fascinated him, and that was surely destined to perish with her in a felon’s grave. “No. 101” would be like the man in the iron mask—unknown and unknowable—a perpetual puzzle to the generations to come. Torturing thought.