"Well, duel or chance medley be it! I dare not have him assassinated,"

replied the Intendant. "He must be fought with in open day, and not killed in a corner. Eh, Cadet, am I not right?"

Bigot looked for approval from Cadet, who saw that he was thinking of the secret chamber at Beaumanoir.

"You are right, Bigot! He must be killed in open day and not in a corner. But who have we among us capable of making sure work of the Bourgeois?"

"Leave it to me," replied De Pean. "I know one partner of the Company who, if I can get him in harness, will run our chariot wheels in triumph over the Golden Dog."

"And who is that?" asked Bigot eagerly.

"Le Gardeur de Repentigny!" exclaimed De Pean, with a look of exultation.

"Pshaw! he would draw upon us more readily! Why, he is bewitched with the Philiberts!" replied Bigot.

"I shall find means to break the spell long enough to answer our purpose, your Excellency!" replied De Pean. "Permit me only to take my own way with him."

"Assuredly, take your own way, De Pean! A bloody scuffle between De Repentigny and the Bourgeois would not only be a victory for the Company, but would breakup the whole party of the Honnetes Gens!"

The Intendant slapped De Pean on the shoulder and shook him by the hand.

"You are more clever than I believed you to be, De Pean. You have hit on a mode of riddance which will entitle you to the best reward in the power of the Company to bestow."

"My best reward will be the fulfilment of your promise, your Excellency," answered De Pean.

"I will keep my word, De Pean. By God you shall have Angelique, with such a dowry as the Company can alone give! Or, if you do not want the girl, you shall have the dowry without the wife!"

"I shall claim both, your Excellency! But--"

"But what? Confess all your doubts, De Pean."

"Le Gardeur may claim her as his own reward!" De Pean guessed correctly enough the true bent of Angelique's fancy.

"No fear! Le Gardeur de Repentigny, drunk or sober, is a gentleman. He would reject the Princess d'Elide were she offered on such conditions as you take her on. He is a romantic fool; he believes in woman's virtue and all that stuff!"

"Besides, if he kill the Bourgeois, he will have to fight Pierre Philibert before his sword is dry!" interjected Cadet. "I would not give a Dutch stiver for Le Gardeur's bones five hours after he has pinked the Bourgeois!"

An open duel in form was not to be thought of, because in that they would have to fight the son and not the father, and the great object would be frustrated. But the Bourgeois might be killed in a sudden fray, when blood was up and swords drawn, when no one, as De Pean remarked, would be able to find an i undotted or a t uncrossed in a fair record of the transaction, which would impose upon the most critical judge as an honorable and justifiable act of self-defence.

This was Cadet's real intent, and perhaps Bigot's, but the Intendant's thoughts lay at unfathomable depths, and were not to be discovered by any traces upon the surface. No divining-rod could tell where the secret spring lay hid which ran under Bigot's motives.

Not so De Pean. He meditated treachery, and it were hard to say whether it was unnoted by the penetrating eye of Bigot. The Intendant, however, did not interfere farther, either by word or sign, but left De Pean to accomplish in his own way the bloody object they all had in view, namely, the death of the Bourgeois and the break-up of the Honnetes Gens. De Pean, while resolving to make Le Gardeur the tool of his wickedness, did not dare to take him into his confidence. He had to be kept in absolute ignorance of the part he was to play in the bloody tragedy until the moment of its denouement arrived. Meantime he must be plied with drink, maddened with jealousy, made desperate with losses, and at war with himself and all the world, and then the whole fury of his rage should, by the artful contrivance of De Pean, be turned, without a minute's time for reflection, upon the head of the unsuspecting Bourgeois.

To accomplish this successfully, a woman's aid was required, at once to blind Le Gardeur and to sharpen his sword.

In the interests of the Company Angelique des Meloises was at all times a violent partisan. The Golden Dog and all its belongings were objects of her open aversion. But De Pean feared to impart to her his intention to push Le Gardeur blindly into the affair. She might fear for the life of one she loved. De Pean reflected angrily on this, but he determined she should be on the spot. The sight of her and a word from her, which De Pean would prompt at the critical moment, should decide Le Gardeur to attack the Bourgeois and kill him; and then, what would follow? De Pean rubbed his hands with ecstasy at the thought that Le Gardeur would inevitably bite the dust under the avenging hand of Pierre Philibert, and Angelique would be his beyond all fear of rivals.

CHAPTER XLVI. THE BOURGEOIS PHILIBERT.

The Bourgeois Philibert, after an arduous day's work, was enjoying in his armchair a quiet siesta in the old comfortable parlor of his city home.

The sudden advent of peace had opened the seas to commerce, and a fleet of long-shut-up merchantmen were rapidly loading at the quays of the Friponne as well as at those of the Bourgeois, with the products of the Colony for shipment to France before the closing in of the St. Lawrence by ice. The summer of St. Martin was lingering soft and warm on the edge of winter, and every available man, including the soldiers of the garrison, were busy loading the ships to get them off in time to escape the hard nip of winter.

Dame Rochelle sat near the window, which to-day was open to the balmy air. She was occupied in knitting, and occasionally glancing at a volume of Jurieu's hard Calvinistic divinity, which lay upon the table beside her. Her spectacles reposed upon the open page, where she had laid them down while she meditated, as was her custom, upon knotty points of doctrine, touching free will, necessity, and election by grace; regarding works as a garment of filthy rags, in which publicans and sinners who trusted in them were damned, while in practice the good soul was as earnest in performing them as if she believed her salvation depended exclusively thereupon.

Dame Rochelle had received a new lease of life by the return home of Pierre Philibert. She grew radiant, almost gay, at the news of his betrothal to Amelie de Repentigny, and although she could not lay aside the black puritanical garb she had worn so many years, her kind face brightened from its habitual seriousness. The return of Pierre broke in upon her quiet routine of living like a prolonged festival. The preparation of the great house of Belmont for his young bride completed her happiness.

In her anxiety to discover the tastes and preferences of her young mistress, as she already called her, Dame Rochelle consulted Amelie on every point of her arrangements, finding her own innate sense of the beautiful quickened by contact with that fresh young nature. She was already drawn by that infallible attraction which every one felt in the presence of Amelie.

"Amelie was too good and too fair," the dame said, "to become any man's portion but Pierre Philibert's!"

The dame's Huguenot prejudices melted like wax in her presence, until Amelie almost divided with Grande Marie, the saint of the Cevennes, the homage and blessing of Dame Rochelle.

Those were days of unalloyed delight which she spent in superintending the arrangements for the marriage which had been fixed for the festivities of Christmas.

It was to be celebrated on a scale worthy of the rank of the heiress of Repentigny and of the wealth of the Philiberts. The rich Bourgeois, in the gladness of his heart, threw open all his coffers, and blessed with tears of happiness the money he flung out with both hands to honor the nuptials of Pierre and Amelie.

The Bourgeois was profoundly happy during those few brief days of Indian summer. As a Christian, he rejoiced that the long desolating war was over. As a colonist, he felt a pride that, unequal as had been the struggle, New France remained unshorn of territory, and by its resolute defence had forced respect from even its enemies. In his eager hope he saw commerce revive, and the arts and comforts of peace take the place of war and destruction. The husbandman would now reap for himself the harvest he had sown, and no longer be crushed by the exactions of the Friponne!

There was hope for the country. The iniquitous regime of the Intendant, which had pleaded the war as its justification, must close, the Bourgeois thought, under the new conditions of peace. The hateful monopoly of the Grand Company must be overthrown by the constitutional action of the Honnetes Gens, and its condemnation by the Parliament of Paris, to which an appeal would presently be carried, it was hoped, would be secured.

The King was quarreling with the Jesuits. The Molinists were hated by La Pompadour, and he was certain His Majesty would never hold a lit de justice to command the registration of the decrees issued in his name by the Intendant of New France after they had been in form condemned by the Parliament of Paris.

The Bourgeois still reclined very still on his easy chair. He was not asleep. In the daytime he never slept. His thoughts, like the dame's, reverted to Pierre. He meditated the repurchase of his ancestral home in Normandy and the restoration of its ancient honors for his son.

Personal and political enmity might prevent the reversal of his own unjust condemnation, but Pierre had won renown in the recent campaigns.

He was favored with the friendship of many of the noblest personages in France, who would support his suit for the restoration of his family honors, while the all-potent influence of money, the open sesame of every door in the palace of Versailles, would not be spared to advance his just claims.

The crown of the Bourgeois's ambition would be to see Pierre restored to his ancestral chateau as the Count de Philibert, and Amelie as its noble chatelaine, dispensing happiness among the faithful old servitors and vassals of his family, who in all these long years of his exile never forgot their brave old seigneur who had been banished to New France.

His reflections took a practical turn, and he enumerated in his mind the friends he could count upon in France to support, and the enemies who were sure to oppose the attainment of this great object of his ambition.

But the purchase of the chateau and lands of Philibert was in his power.

Its present possessor, a needy courtier, was deeply in debt, and would be glad, the Bourgeois had ascertained, to sell the estates for such a price as he could easily offer him.

To sue for simple justice in the restoration of his inheritance would be useless. It would involve a life-long litigation. The Bourgeois preferred buying it back at whatever price, so that he could make a gift of it at once to his son, and he had already instructed his bankers in Paris to pay the price asked by its owner and forward to him the deeds, which he was ambitious to present to Pierre and Amelie on the day of their marriage.

The Bourgeois at last looked up from his reverie. Dame Rochelle closed her book, waiting for her master's commands.

"Has Pierre returned, dame?" asked he.

"No, master; he bade me say he was going to accompany Mademoiselle Amelie to Lorette."

"Ah! Amelie had a vow to Our Lady of St. Foye, and Pierre, I warrant, desired to pay half the debt! What think you, dame, of your godson?

Is he not promising?" The Bourgeois laughed quietly, as was his wont sometimes.

Dame Rochelle sat a shade more upright in her chair. "Pierre is worthy of Amelie and Amelie of him," replied she, gravely; "never were two out of heaven more fitly matched. If they make vows to the Lady of St. Foye they will pay them as religiously as if they had made them to the Most High, to whom we are commanded to pay our vows!"