LITMIR.BIZ

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      “He was a Huguenot on his own confession,” cried the culprits together.

      “Hum!” The sergeant pulled doubtfully at his long moustache. “Shall we put the charge in that form, captain? Just as the captain pleases.” He gave a little shrug of his epauletted shoulders to signify his doubt whether any good could arise from it.

      “No,” said De Catinat, with a sudden happy thought. “I charge them with laying their halberds down while on duty, and with having their uniforms dirty and disarranged.”

      “That is better,” answered the sergeant, with the freedom of a privileged veteran. “Thunder of God, but you have disgraced the guards! An hour on the wooden horse with a musket at either foot may teach you that halberds were made for a soldier’s hand, and not for the king’s grass-plot. Seize them! Attention! Right half turn! March!”

      And away went the little clump of guardsmen with the sergeant in the rear.

      The Huguenot had stood in the background, grave and composed, without any sign of exultation, during this sudden reversal of fortune; but when the soldiers were gone, he and the young officer turned warmly upon each other.

      “Amory, I had not hoped to see you!”

      “Nor I you, uncle. What, in the name of wonder, brings you to Versailles?”

      “My wrongs, Amory. The hand of the wicked is heavy upon us, and whom can we turn to save only the king?”

      The young officer shook his head. “The king is at heart a good man,” said he. “But he can only see the world through the glasses which are held before him. You have nothing to hope from him.”

      “He spurned me from his presence.”

      “Did he ask your name?”

      “He did, and I gave it.”

      The young guardsman whistled. “Let us walk to the gate,” said he. “By my faith, if my kinsmen are to come and bandy arguments with the king, it may not be long before my company finds itself without its captain.”

      “The king would not couple us together. But indeed, nephew, it is strange to me how you can live in this house of Baal and yet bow down to no false gods.”

      “I keep my belief in my own heart.”

      The older man shook his head gravely.

      “Your ways lie along a very narrow path,” said he, “with temptation and danger ever at your feet. It is hard for you to walk with the Lord, Amory, and yet go hand in hand with the persecutors of His people.”

      “Tut, uncle!” said the young man impatiently. “I am a soldier of the king’s, and I am willing to let the black gown and the white surplice settle these matters between them. Let me live in honour and die in my duty, and I am content to wait to know the rest.”

      “Content, too, to live in palaces, and eat from fine linen,” said the Huguenot bitterly, “when the hands of the wicked are heavy upon your kinsfolk, and there is a breaking of phials, and a pouring forth of tribulation, and a wailing and a weeping throughout the land.”

      “What is amiss, then?” asked the young soldier, who was somewhat mystified by the scriptural language in use among the French Calvinists of the day.

      “Twenty men of Moab have been quartered upon me, with one Dalbert, their captain, who has long been a scourge to Israel.”

      “Captain Claude Dalbert, of the Languedoc Dragoons? I have already some small score to settle with him.”

      “Ay, and the scattered remnant has also a score against this murderous dog and self-seeking Ziphite.”

      “What has he done, then?”

      “His men are over my house like moths in a cloth bale. No place is free from them. He sits in the room which should be mine, his great boots on my Spanish leather chairs, his pipe in his mouth, his wine-pot at his elbow, and his talk a hissing and an abomination. He has beaten old Pierre of the warehouse.”

      “Ha!”

      “And thrust me into the cellar.”

      “Ha!”

      “Because I have dragged him back when in his drunken love he would have thrown his arms about your cousin Adele.”

      “Oh!” The young man’s colour had been rising and his brows knitted at each successive charge, but at this last his anger boiled over, and he hurried forward with fury in his face, dragging his elderly companion by the elbow. They had been passing through one of those winding paths, bordered by high hedges, which thinned away every here and there to give a glimpse of some prowling faun or weary nymph who slumbered in marble amid the foliage. The few courtiers who met them gazed with surprise at so ill-assorted a pair of companions. But the young soldier was too full of his own plans to waste a thought upon their speculations. Still hurrying on, he followed a crescent path which led past a dozen stone dolphins shooting water out of their mouths over a group of Tritons, and so through an avenue of great trees which looked as if they had grown there for centuries, and yet had in truth been carried over that very year by incredible labour from St. Germain and Fontainebleau. Beyond this point a small gate led out of the grounds, and it was through it that the two passed, the elder man puffing and panting with this unusual haste.

      “How did you come, uncle?”

      “In a caleche.”

      “Where is it?”

      “That is it, beyond the auberge.”

      “Come, let us make for it.”

      “And you, Amory, are you coming?”

      “My faith, it is time that I came, from what you tell me. There is room for a man with a sword at his side in this establishment of yours.”

      “But what would you do?”

      “I would have a word with this Captain Dalbert.”

      “Then I have wronged you, nephew, when I said even now that you were not whole-hearted towards Israel.”

      “I know not about Israel,” cried De Catinat impatiently. “I only know that if my Adele chose to worship the thunder like an Abenaqui squaw, or turned her innocent prayers to the Mitche Manitou, I should like to set eyes upon the man who would dare to lay a hand upon her. Ha, here comes our caleche! Whip up, driver, and five livres to you if you pass the gate of the Invalides within the hour.”

      It was no light matter to drive fast in an age of springless carriages and deeply rutted roads, but the driver lashed at his two rough unclipped horses, and the caleche jolted and clattered upon its way. As they sped on, with the road-side trees dancing past the narrow windows, and the white dust streaming behind them, the guardsman drummed his fingers upon his knees, and fidgeted in his seat with impatience, shooting an occasional question across at his grim companion.

      “When was all this, then?”

      “It was yesterday night.”

      “And where is Adele now?”

      “She is at home.”

      “And this Dalbert?”

      “Oh, he is there also!”

      “What! you have left her in his power while you came away to Versailles?”

      “She is locked in her room.”

      “Pah! what is a lock?” The young man raved with his hands in the air at the thought of his own impotence.

      “And Pierre is there?”

      “He is useless.”

      “And Amos Green.”

      “Ah, that is better. He is a man, by the look of him.”

      “His mother was one of our own folk from Staten Island, near Manhattan. She was one

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