I was on the subject of my morning's employment. Knowing how easily confidence begets confidence, and that in his position the matter could not be long kept from him, I told him as a secret where I had been.

"I do not wish all the world to know, my friend," I said. "But you are a discreet man, and it will go no farther. I am just from Du Hallot's."

He dropped his napkin and stooped to pick it up with a gesture so hasty that it caught my attention and led me to watch him. More, although my words seemed to call for an answer, he did not speak until he had taken a deep draught of wine; and then he said only, "Indeed!" in a tone of such indifference as might at another time have deceived me, but now was patently a.s.sumed.

"Yes," I replied, affecting to be engaged with my plate: we were eating nuts. "Doubtless you will be able to guess on what subject."

"I?" he said, as quick to answer as he had before been slow. "No, I think not."

"La Fin," I said. "And his disclosures respecting M. de Biron's friends."

"Ah!" he replied, shrugging his shoulders. He had contrived to regain his composure, but I noticed that his hand shook, and I saw that he was quite unable to chew the nut he had just put into his mouth. "They tell me he accuses everybody," he continued, his eyes on his plate. "Even the King is scarcely safe from him. But I have heard no particulars."

"They will be known by-and-by," I answered prudently. And after that I did not think it wise to continue, lest I should give more than I got.

But as soon as he had finished, and we had washed our hands, I led him to the closet looking on the river, where I was in the habit of working with my secretaries. I sent them away and sat down with him to his paper; but in the position in which I found myself, between suspicion and perplexity, I gathered little or nothing from it; and had I found another doing the King's service as negligently I had sent him about his business. Nevertheless, I made some show of attention, and had reached the schedule when something in the fairly written summary, which closed the account, caught my eye. I bent more closely to it, and presently making an occasion to carry the parchment into the next room, compared it with the hand-writing on the sc.r.a.p of paper I had found in the s...o...b..ll. A brief scrutiny proved that they were the work of the same person!

I went back to M. Nicholas, and after attesting the accounts, and making one or two notes, remarked in a careless way on the clearness of the hand. "I am badly in need of a fourth secretary," I added. "Your scribe might do for me."

It did not escape me that once again M. Nicholas looked uncomfortable.

His red face took a deeper tinge and his hand went nervously to his pointed grey beard. "I do not think he would do for you," he muttered.

"What is his name?" I asked, purposely bending over the papers and avoiding his eye.

"I have dismissed him," he rejoined curtly. "I do not know where he could now be found."

"That is a pity. He writes well," I answered, as if it were nothing but a whim that led me to pursue the subject. "And good clerks are scarce.

What was his name?"

"Felix," he said--reluctantly.

I had now all that I wanted. Accordingly I spoke of another matter, and shortly afterwards Nicholas withdrew. He left me in much suspicion; so that for nearly half an hour I walked up and down the room, unable to decide whether I should treat the warning of the s...o...b..ll with contempt, as the work of a discharged servant; or on that very account attach the more credit to it. By-and-by I remembered that the last sheet of the roll I had audited bore date the previous day; whence it was clear that Felix had been dismissed within the last twenty-four hours, and perhaps after the delivery of his note to me. Such a coincidence, which seemed no less pertinent than strange, opened a wide field for conjecture; and the possibility that Nicholas had called on me to sound me and learn what I knew occurring to my mind, brought me to a final determination to seek out this Felix, and without the delay of an hour sift the matter to the bottom.

Doubtless I shall seem to some to have acted precipitately, and built much on small foundations. I answer that I had the life of the King my master to guard, and in that cause dared neglect no precaution, however trivial, nor any indication, however remote. Would that all my care and vigilance had longer sufficed to preserve for France the life of that great man! But G.o.d willed otherwise.

I sent word at once to La Font, my _valet-de-chambre_, the same who persuaded me to my first marriage, to come to me; and directing him to make secret inquiry where Felix, a clerk in the Chamber of Accounts, lodged, bade him report to me on my return from the Great Hall, where, it will be remembered, it was my custom to give audience after dinner to all who had business with me. As it happened, I was detained that day, and found him awaiting me. A man of few words, as soon as the door was shut, "At the 'Three Half Moons,'" he said, "in the Faubourg St. Honore, my lord."

"That is near the Louvre," I answered. "Get me my cloak, and your own also; and bring your pistols. I am for a walk, and you will accompany me."

He was a good man, La Font, and devoted to my interests. "It will be night in half an hour," he answered respectfully. "You will take some of the Swiss?"

"In one word, no!" I rejoined. "We will go out by the stable entrance, and until we return, I will bid Maignan keep the door, and admit no one."

The crowd of those who daily left the a.r.s.enal at nightfall happened to be augmented on this occasion by a troop of my clients from Mantes; tenants on the lands of Rosny, who had lingered after the hour of audience to see the courts and garden. By mingling with these we pa.s.sed out un.o.bserved; nor, once in the streets, where a thaw had set in, that filled the kennel with water, was La Font long in bringing me to the house I sought. It stood on the outskirts of the St. Honore Faubourg, in a quarter sufficiently respectable, and a street marked neither by squalor nor ostentation--from one or other of which all desperate enterprises take their rise. The house, which was high and narrow, presented only two windows to the street, but the staircase was clean, and it was impossible to cross the threshold without feeling a prepossession in Felix's favour. Already I began to think that I had come on a fool's errand.

"Which floor?" I asked La Font.

"The highest," he answered.

I went up softly and he followed me. Under the tiles I found a door, and heard some one moving beyond it. Bidding La Font remain on guard, and come to my aid only if I called him, I knocked boldly. A gentle voice bade me enter, and I did so.

There was only one person in the room, a young woman with fair waving hair, a pale freckled face, and blue eyes; who, seeing a cloaked stranger instead of the neighbour she antic.i.p.ated, stared at me in the utmost wonder and in some alarm. The room, though poorly furnished, was neat and clean; which, taken with the woman's complexion, left me in no doubt as to her province. On the floor near the fire stood a cradle; and in the window a cage with a singing bird completed the homely aspect of this interior, which was such, indeed, as I would fain multiply by thousands in every town of France.

A lamp, which the woman was in the act of lighting, enabled me to see these details, and also discovered me to her. I asked politely if I spoke to Madame Felix, the wife of M. Felix, of the Chamber of Accounts.

"I am Madame Felix," she answered, advancing slowly towards me. "My husband is late. Do you come from him? It is not--bad news, Monsieur?"

The tone of anxiety in which she uttered the last question, and the quickness with which she raised her lamp to scan my face, went to a heart already softened by the sight of this young mother in her home. I hastened to answer that I had no bad news, and wished to see her husband on business connected with his employment.

"He is very late," she said, a shade of perplexity crossing her face. "I have never known him so late before. Monsieur is unfortunate."

I replied that with her leave I would wait; on which she very readily placed a stool for me, and sat down by the cradle. I remarked that perhaps M. Nicholas had detained her husband: she answered that it might be so, but that she had never known it happen before.

"M. Felix has evening employment?" I asked, after a moment's reflection.

She looked at me in some wonder. "No," she said. "He spends his evenings with me, Monsieur. It is not much, for he is at work all day."

I bowed, and was preparing another question, when the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs reached my ears, and led me to pause. Madame heard the noise at the same moment and rose to her feet. "It is my husband,"

she said, looking towards the door with such a light in her eyes as betrayed the sweetheart lingering in the wife. "I was afraid--I do not know what I feared," she muttered to herself.

Proposing to have the advantage of seeing Felix before he saw me, I pushed back my stool into the shadow, contriving to do this so discreetly that the young woman noticed nothing. A moment later it appeared that I might have spared my pains; for at sight of her husband, and particularly of the lack-l.u.s.tre eye and drooping head with which he entered, she sprang forward with a cry of dismay, and, forgetting my presence, appealed to him to know what was the matter.

He let himself fall on a stool, the first he reached, and, leaning his elbows on the table in an att.i.tude of dejection, he covered his face with his hands. "What is it?" he said in a hollow tone. "We are ruined, Margot. That is what it is. I have no more work. I am dismissed."

"Dismissed?" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

He nodded. "Nicholas discharged me this morning," he said, almost in a whisper. He dared not speak louder, for he could not command his voice.

"Why?" she asked, as she leant over him, her hands busy about him. "What had you done?"

"Nothing!" he answered with bitterness. "He has missed a place he thought to get; and I must suffer for it."

"But did he say nothing? Did he give no reason?"

"Ay," he answered. "He said clerks were plentiful, and the King or I must starve."

Hitherto I had witnessed the scene in silence, a prey to emotions so various I will not attempt to describe them. But hearing the King's name thus prost.i.tuted I started forward with a violence which made my presence known. Felix, confounded by the sight of a stranger at his elbow, rose from his seat, and retreating before me with alarm painted on his countenance, he asked with a faltering tongue who I was.

I replied as gently as possible that I was a friend, anxious to a.s.sist him. Notwithstanding that, seeing that I kept my cloak about my face--for I was not willing to be recognized--he continued to look at me with distrust.

"What is your will?" he said, raising the lamp much as his wife had done, to see me the better.

"The answers to two or three questions," I replied. "Answer them truly, and I promise you your troubles are at an end." So saying, I drew from my pouch the sc.r.a.p of paper which had come to me so strangely. "When did you write this, my friend?" I continued, placing it before him.

He drew a deep breath at sight of it, and a look of comprehension crossed his face. For a moment he hesitated. Then in a hurried manner he said that he had never seen the paper.

"Come," I rejoined sternly, "look at it again. Let there be no mistake.

When did you write that, and why?"