André had turned deadly pale. He stared in impotent silence. Yes, the jewel was Denise’s; on the back he knew was a fatal D. And it was a pendant that he himself, in a thrice happy hour, had given her.
“The King’s honour,” Madame said in her cruelly cold voice, “is at stake in that despatch. And he will not spare the thief even if she were of the blood-royal. Nor will I. This is proof enough for me; I promise you it will also be proof enough for His Majesty. I have here a lettre de cachet which the King gave me, already signed. But the name is not filled in. That was to be done to-night with the thief’s name. And filled in I swear it shall be. For unless the secret despatch is in my hands by to-morrow morning at ten o’clock the Marquise de Beau Séjour shall go to the Bastille.”
“Madame!”
“You cannot deceive me. You are shielding her. It is in your face. She is the thief. I repeat, to-morrow at ten—not one minute longer, and had it not been for our friendship I would have sent her there to-night.”
André was still silent, striving to think, be calm. If Denise were questioned she was ruined. Denise could not tell a lie. Nor could she save her lover now by a lie. “You can settle it,” Madame went on in her icy anger, “with Mademoiselle. I care not how or for what she gives way. Lovers’ confessions can be sweet, they say. But my life, my honour, my future, my dreams, my all, are at stake. Think you I will allow a girl, a noble, a woman who has insulted me, conspired against me, a thief of state secrets, to defeat me—me! Then you do not know the woman Antoinette de Pompadour.”
And André confessed to himself that till that moment he did not.
“Madame,” he said very quietly, “the Marquise de Beau Séjour has not got the despatch, nor did she steal it. However, I do not choose to discuss that now. I shall return to this room at ten o’clock to-morrow. But if I have the despatch by then I do not promise to give it back to you.” Madame had turned her back on him; she wheeled in a flash. “That will depend on some other things. But,” he bowed, “if the Marquise de Pompadour imagines that she can call gentlemen cowards and scoundrels with impunity, or that she can so easily ruin the Marquise de Beau Séjour, she does not know me—me, the man André de Nérac.”
And there he left her stunned into a fearful silence. He was about to pass, he was aware, a night of despairing, futile search, but it would not be such a prolonged agony of torture as this woman, amidst the litter of her humiliation, would endure. One last chance remained. The girl he called “No. 101” and George Onslow had arranged to meet at midnight at “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.” That agreement might not prove as false as other things he had overheard and been tricked into believing. If they were there they would not leave the inn alive, for André, too, had begun to divine the full meaning of this hellish plot. His enemies at Court had planned with the English traitors that they might ruin him and Denise likewise. To-morrow he would reckon with the Duc de Pontchartrain, the Comte de Mont Rouge, and the Comtesse des Forges, as well as with Madame de Pompadour, but to-night he had an account to settle with “No. 101,” with George Onslow, with the Chevalier de St. Amant, with Yvonne.
Only pausing to scribble a couple of orders, which went off to Paris by mounted couriers, warned that their royal master would brook of no delay, he gathered a dozen of his guards and spurred his way to “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.” And as he galloped he knew that in a couple of hours the police of Paris would be sweeping every slum, ransacking every cabaret and tavern, hunting down every suspect, and bribing for information every fille de joie from the Faubourg St. Antoine to the Faubourg St. Germain, from the Barrier of the Hôpital St. Louis to the Barriers of Les Gobelins, and the Palais Bourbon. And it was Denise that he must save. Love—not the sham idol of gallantry—but love can do things that neither the fear of death nor of hell can.
The inn was plunged in darkness. Not a light to be spied anywhere. André set his guards around it and began to explore systematically. The outhouses were empty save for Yvonne’s sleek cow contentedly chewing the cud. Not a soul to be seen. Torch in hand he strode into the parlour where he had been so successfully befoiled. There were the chairs, the screen, the tables.