For some moments Francbois could not speak; his breath seemed to have failed him. Nay more, even though the breath had been there to give utterance to his words, his mind was incapable of forming thoughts that, in their turn, should be expressed in words. He could but gasp and whine and raise his hand to his brow to wipe away the hot sweat oozing from it; he was so prostrate that the sturdy dragoons holding him thought that he would sink lifeless to the floor. Yet all the time he knew that the eyes of the others were upon him, were fixed coldly and contemptuously on him; the eyes of all except those of De Violaine, who, beneath the greasy candle guttering in their sockets, was reading the papers he had but now received. Yet, once Francbois saw that the Governor turned over a letter again and re-read it, and that--then he raised his eyes from the sheet and also looked at him for an instant. In that instant Francbois anticipated, perhaps experienced, the agonies of death a hundred times.
[Illustration: "Francbois saw that the Governor turned over a letter again."]
At last, however, he found his voice: thoughts to utter by its aid came to him. Struggling in the troopers' arms, he raised himself into a firmer, a more upright position and was able to assume something more of the attitude of a man. Then, freeing his right hand from the grasp of one of the soldiers--the hand in which he held his handkerchief, now a rolled-up ball--he lifted and pointed it towards the Comtesse; after which he said, in a harsh, dry, raucous voice:
"Spies! You--you--both--have talked of these." It may be he forgot in his frenzy that from him alone had such talk originated. "So be it. Yet, besides this English bully, this swashbuckler who slays in dark houses, those who would bring him to justice, are then no others present? What is this woman who in her self-righteousness denounces me as a traitor----"
"She has done more; she has proved you to be one," the Comtesse said.
"What is she?" Francbois went on. "What? Her husband died a traitor at the galleys; if women could be punished thus, she would be in a fair way to do so, too. Is she no traitor? She? She who is here to meet with Marlborough, or Cutts, or Athlone; to throw herself in their path, to intrigue with them for an invasion of the South--she who would have escaped to-night with those others had I not warned you of her. Warned you! There was no need of that! You who, like her, are of the South--a Camisard, a Cévenole."