André impulsively took her hand. “Forget my words, Madame,” he cried.
“They were forgotten hours ago,” she answered softly. “I only remember your oath of loyalty and how nobly you kept it.”
It was the vivandière at Fontenoy who was looking at him now; nay, rather it was the woman the beating of whose heart he had heard on the secret stair. Death alone would silence that beating now.
“See,” she said, “you are again the Captain of the Queen’s Guards, the King has promised, and you shall be Minister for War. And,” she unrolled a sheet of paper, “if you choose, to-morrow in the Galerie des Glaces they shall know that before long you will be Marquis de Beau Séjour as well as Vicomte de Nérac. But neither I nor you can settle that, nor the King, for kings and men alone,” she laughed gently, “cannot make a man’s fate.”
“I thank you, Madame. His Majesty, I hope, will know that I am his servant always, but my decision is already taken, and from to-day I shall not live at Versailles nor Paris; De Nérac is to be my home, and perhaps some day Beau Séjour.”
Madame had dropped the roll of paper in an astonishment she failed to master. Her lips parted as she looked him in the face.
“Yes,” André repeated. “The Marquise de Beau Séjour and I have decided. Nothing can alter that decision.”
“Is it because of me?” she asked in a low voice.
“No, Marquise. I had made up my mind before I knew Mademoiselle had made up hers.”
Madame endeavoured to penetrate his motives. There were mysteries fascinating to a woman, the wrestlings of the spirit that alter a human soul, to be read in that handsome face so grey, so tried, yet so nobly firm. Madame de Pompadour could discover no more than that a new element, born of spiritual travail in the night that had passed, had entered into André’s life. What it was, whence it came, and why, baffled her. It is, perhaps, well for women of genius to learn early that there are gifts of the spirit to a few men that it is not for a woman to comprehend, just as there are impulses in a woman that the choicest soul of man must accept by faith in the acts in which they find expression.