"Not she! Mere Migeon gave me one of her parlor-lectures once, and I care not for another. Egad, Cadet! she made me the nearest of being ashamed of Francois Bigot of any one I ever listened to! Could you have seen her, with her veil thrown back, her pale face still paler with indignation, her black eyes looking still blacker beneath the white fillet upon her forehead, and then her tongue, Cadet! Well, I withdrew my proposal and felt myself rather cheapened in the presence of Mere Migeon."

"Ay, I hear she is a clipper when she gets a sinner by the hair! What was the proposal you made to her, Bigot?" asked Cadet, smiling as if he knew.

"Oh, it was not worth a livre to make such a row about! I only proposed to send a truant damsel to the Convent to repent of MY faults, that was all! But I could never dispose of Angelique in that way," continued the Intendant, with a shrug.

"Egad! she will fool any man faster than he can make a fool of her! But I would try Mere Migeon, notwithstanding," replied Cadet. "She is the only one to break in this wild filly and nail her tongue fast to her prayers!"

"It is useless trying. They know Angelique too well. She would turn the Convent out of the windows in the time of a neuvaine. They are all really afraid of her," replied Bigot.

"Then you must marry her, or do worse, Bigot. I see nothing else for it," was Cadet's reply.

"Well, I will do worse, if worse can be; for marry her I will not!" said Bigot, stamping his foot upon the floor.

"It is understood, then, Bigot, not a word, a hint, a look is to be given to Angelique regarding your suspicions of her complicity in this murder?"

"Yes, it is understood. The secret is like the devil's tontine,--he catches the last possessor of it."

"I expect to be the last, then, if I keep in your company, Bigot,"

remarked Cadet.

Cadet having settled this point to his mind, reclined back in his easy chair and smoked on in silence, while the Intendant kept walking the floor anxiously, because he saw farther than his companion the shadows of coming events.

Sometimes he stopped impatiently at the window, beating a tattoo with his nails on the polished casement as he gazed out upon the beautiful parterres of autumnal flowers, beginning to shed their petals around the gardens of the Palace. He looked at them without seeing them. All that caught his eye was a bare rose-bush, from which he remembered he had plucked some white roses which he had sent to Caroline to adorn her oratory; and he thought of her face, more pale and delicate than any rose of Provence that ever bloomed. His thoughts ran violently in two parallel streams side by side, neither of them disappearing for a moment amid the crowd of other affairs that pressed upon his attention,--the murder of Caroline and the perquisition that was to be made for her in all quarters of the Colony. His own safety was too deeply involved in any discovery that might be made respecting her to allow him to drop the subject out of his thought for a moment.

By imposing absolute silence upon himself in the presence of Angelique, touching the death of Caroline, he might impose a like silence upon her whom he could not acquit of the suspicion of having prompted the murder.

But the certainty that there was a confederate in the deed--a woman, too, judging by the fragment of writing picked up by Cadet--tormented him with endless conjectures.

Still, he felt, for the present, secure from any discovery on that side; but how to escape from the sharp inquisition of two men like La Corne St. Luc and Pierre Philibert? And who knew how far the secret of Beaumanoir was a secret any longer? It was known to two women, at any rate; and no woman, in Bigot's estimation of the sex, would long keep a secret which concerned another and not herself.

"Our greatest danger, Cadet, lies there!" continued the Intendant, stopping in his walk and turning suddenly to his friend. "La Corne St.

Luc and Pierre Philibert are commissioned by the Governor to search for that girl. They will not leave a stone unturned, a corner unransacked in New France. They will find out through the Hurons and my own servants that a woman has been concealed in Beaumanoir. They will suspect, if they do not discover who she was. They will not find her on earth,--they will look for her under the earth. And, by St. Maur! it makes me quake to think of it, Cadet, for the discovery will be utter ruin! They may at last dig up her murdered remains in my own Chateau! As you said, the Bastile and the Place de Greve would be my portion, and ruin yours and that of all our associates."

Cadet held up his pipe as if appealing to Heaven. "It is a cursed reward for our charitable night's work, Bigot," said he. "Better you had never lied about the girl. We could have brazened it out or fought it out with the Baron de St. Castin or any man in France! That lie will convict us if found out!"

"Pshaw! the lie was a necessity," answered Bigot, impatiently. "But who could have dreamed of its leading us such a dance as it has done! Par Dieu! I have not often lied except to women, and such lies do not count! But I had better have stuck to truth in this matter, Cadet. I acknowledge that now."

"Especially with La Pompadour! She is a woman. It is dangerous to lie to her,--at least about other women."

"Well, Cadet, it is useless blessing the Pope or banning the Devil! We are in for it, and we must meet La Corne St. Luc and Pierre Philibert as warily as we can. I have been thinking of making safe ground for us to stand upon, as the trappers do on the great prairies, by kindling a fire in front to escape from the fire in the rear!"

"What is that, Bigot? I could fire the Chateau rather than be tracked out by La Corne and Philibert," said Cadet, sitting upright in his chair.

"What, burn the Chateau!" answered Bigot. "You are mad, Cadet! No; but it were well to kindle such a smoke about the eyes of La Corne and Philibert that they will need to rub them to ease their own pain instead of looking for poor Caroline."

"How, Bigot? Will you challenge and fight them? That will not avert suspicion, but increase it," remarked Cadet.

"Well, you will see! A man will need as many eyes as Argus to discover our hands in this business."

Cadet started, without conjecturing what the Intendant contemplated.

"You will kill the bird that tells tales on us, Bigot,--is that it?"

added he.

"I mean to kill two birds with one stone, Cadet! Hark you; I will tell you a scheme that will put a stop to these perquisitions by La Corne and Philibert--the only two men I fear in the Colony--and at the same time deliver me from the everlasting bark and bite of the Golden Dog!"

Bigot led Cadet to the window, and poured in his ear the burning passions which were fermenting in his own breast. He propounded a scheme of deliverance for himself and of crafty vengeance upon the Philiberts which would turn the thoughts of every one away from the Chateau of Beaumanoir and the missing Caroline into a new stream of public and private troubles, amid the confusion of which he would escape, and his present dangers be overlooked and forgotten in a great catastrophe that might upset the Colony, but at any rate it would free Bigot from his embarrassments and perhaps inaugurate a new reign of public plunder and the suppression of the whole party of the Honnetes Gens.

CHAPTER XLV. "I WILL FEED FAT THE ANCIENT GRUDGE I BEAR HIM."

The Treaty of Aix La Chapelle, so long tossed about on the waves of war, was finally signed in the beginning of October. A swift-sailing goelette of Dieppe brought the tidings to New France, and in the early nights of November, from Quebec to Montreal. Bonfires on every headland blazed over the broad river; churches were decorated with evergreens, and Te Deums sung in gratitude for the return of peace and security to the Colony.

New France came out of the struggle scathed and scorched as by fire, but unshorn of territory or territorial rights; and the glad colonists forgot and forgave the terrible sacrifices they had made in the universal joy that their country, their religion, language, and laws were still safe under the Crown of France, with the white banner still floating over the Castle of St. Louis.

On the day after the arrival of the Dieppe goelette bringing the news of peace, Bigot sat before his desk reading his despatches and letters from France, when the Chevalier de Pean entered the room with a bundle of papers in his hand, brought to the Palace by the chief clerk of the Bourgeois Philibert, for the Intendant's signature.

The Bourgeois, in the course of his great commercial dealings, got possession of innumerable orders upon the royal treasury, which in due course had to be presented to the Intendant for his official signature.

The signing of these treasury orders in favor of the Bourgeois never failed to throw Bigot into a fit of ill humor.

On the present occasion he sat down muttering ten thousand curses upon the Bourgeois, as he glanced over the papers with knitted eyebrows and teeth set hard together. He signed the mass of orders and drafts made payable to Nicolas Philibert, and when done, threw into the fire the pen which had performed so unwelcome an office. Bigot sent for the chief clerk who had brought the bills and orders, and who waited for them in the antechamber. "Tell your master, the Bourgeois," said he, "that for this time, and only to prevent loss to the foolish officers, the Intendant has signed these army bills; but that if he purchase more, in defiance of the sole right of the Grand Company, I shall not sign them.

This shall be the last time, tell him!"

The chief clerk, a sturdy, gray-haired Malouin, was nothing daunted by the angry look of the Intendant. "I shall inform the Bourgeois of your Excellency's wishes," said he, "and--"

"Inform him of my commands!" exclaimed Bigot, sharply. "What! have you more to say? But you would not be the chief clerk of the Bourgeois without possessing a good stock of his insolence!"

"Pardon me, your Excellency!" replied the chief clerk, "I was only going to observe that His Excellency the Governor and the Commander of the Forces both have decided that the officers may transfer their warrants to whomsoever they will."

"You are a bold fellow, with your Breton speech; but by all the saints in Saintonge, I will see whether the Royal Intendant or the Bourgeois Philibert shall control this matter! And as for you--"

"Tut! cave canem! let this cur go back to his master," interrupted Cadet, amused at the coolness of the chief clerk. "Hark you, fellow!"

said he, "present my compliments--the Sieur Cadet's compliments--to your master, and tell him I hope he will bring his next batch of army bills himself, and remind him that it is soft falling at low tide out of the windows of the Friponne."

"I shall certainly advise my master not to come himself, Sieur Cadet,"

replied the chief clerk; "and I am very certain of returning in three days with more army bills for the signature of his Excellency the Intendant."

"Get out, you fool!" shouted Cadet, laughing at what he regarded the insolence of the clerk. "You are worthy of your master!" And Cadet pushed him forcibly out of the door, and shut it after him with a bang that resounded through the Palace.

"Don't be angry at him, Bigot, he is not worth it," said Cadet. "'Like master like man,' as the proverb says. And, after all, I doubt whether the furred law-cats of the Parliament of Paris would not uphold the Bourgeois in an appeal to them from the Golden Dog."

Bigot was excessively irritated, for he was lawyer enough to know that Cadet's fear was well founded. He walked up and down his cabinet, venting curses upon the heads of the whole party of the Honnetes Gens, the Governor and Commander of the Forces included. The Marquise de Pompadour, too, came in for a full share of his maledictions, for Bigot knew that she had forced the signing of the treaty of Aix la Chapelle,--influenced less by the exhaustion of France than by a feminine dislike to camp life, which she had shared with the King, and a resolution to withdraw him back to the gaieties of the capital, where he would be wholly under her own eye and influence.

"She prefers love to honor, as all women do!" remarked Bigot; "and likes money better than either. The Grand Company pays the fiddler for the royal fetes at Versailles, while the Bourgeois Philibert skims the cream off the trade of the Colony. This peace will increase his power and make his influence double what it is already!"

"Egad, Bigot!" replied Cadet, who sat near him smoking a large pipe of tobacco, "you speak like a preacher in Lent. We have hitherto buttered our bread on both sides, but the Company will soon, I fear, have no bread to butter! I doubt we shall have to eat your decrees, which will be the only things left in the possession of the Friponne."

"My decrees have been hard to digest for some people who think they will now eat us. Look at that pile of orders, Cadet, in favor of the Golden Dog!"