"You can count on me, Duke d'Epernon," said Jean-aux-Choux suddenly, "aye, if it were to do again the deed of Ehud, which he did in the summer parlour by the quarries of Gilgal, that day when the sun was hot in the sky."
"Good," said D'Epernon, "it is a bargain. To-morrow, then, do you seek out Hamilton, a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, and say to him 'The Man in the Black Cloak sent me to you'!"
"At six--seven--as soon as may be, what care I?"
"Aye," said Jean-aux-Choux, "that is good speaking. Is it not written, 'What thou doest, do quickly'?"
"It is indeed so written," said the Professor of Eloquence gravely, "but not of the Duke of Guise."
"Fear not," said Jean-aux-Choux, taking the reference, "I shall meet him face to face. There shall be no Judas kiss betwixt me and Henry of Guise."
"No," murmured the Professor, "there is more likely to be a good half-dozen of your countrymen of the Scottish Guard, each with a dagger in his right hand."
As it happened, there was a round dozen, but not of the Scottish archers.
D'Epernon--than whom no one could be more courteous, in a large, deft, half-scornful way--stooped to kiss Claire's hand under the spitting anger of the Abbé John's eyes.
"A good evening and a better daybreak," said D'Epernon. "I would escort you to Angoulême, my pretty maiden, to bide under the care of my wife, were it not that you might be worse off there. The last time my Lady Duchess went for a walk, our good Leaguers of the town held a knife to her throat under the battlements for half-a-day, bidding her call upon me to surrender the castle on pain of instant death. What, think you, said Margaret of Foix? 'Kill me if you like,' says she, 'and much good may it do you and your League. But tell Jean Louis, my husband, that if he yields one jot to such rascals as you, to save my life twenty times over--I--will never kiss him again'!"
"I should like to know your wife, my lord," said Claire; "she must be a brave woman."
"I know another!" D'Epernon answered, bowing courteously.
Then, after the great man was gone, the party about Dame Granier's fire sat silent, looking uncertainly at one another in the dull red glow, which gave the strange face of Jean-aux-Choux, bordered by its tussock of orange-saffron hair, the look of having been dipped in blood.