"Not strange at all," said Turenne; "is he not a man and a Bearnais? Besides, being a Bourbon, he will pay those the best to whom he owes least. And we, who have loved him as we never loved father or mother, wife or child, will be sent back to the chimney-corner with our thumbs to suck!"
"Aye, because he is sure of us!" retorted D'Aubigné gloomily, unconsciously prefiguring a day when he should sit, an exile in a foreign town, eating his heart out, and writing a great book to the praise of an ungrateful, or perhaps forgetful master.
"The most curious thing of all," said Rosny, "is that we shall always love him--put down his fickleness to the account of others, cherish him as a deceived woman does the man from whom she cannot wholly tear her heart!"
"Yes," cried a new voice, as a red hassock of hair showed itself over the brown Capuchin's robe, "these things will we do--some of us in exile, all in sorrow, some in rags, and some in motley----"
He opened the robe wider, and under the stained brown the jester's motley met their eyes.
"Who is this fool who mixes so freely in the councils of his betters?" cried Turenne. "Is there never a wooden horse and a provost-marshal in this--this ball-room?"
But Rosny, whose business it was to know all things, had had dealings with Jean-aux-Choux.
"It is the Fool of the Three Henries!" he whispered, "a wise man, they say--bachelor of Geneva, a deacon at the trade of theology, and all that!"
"I see nothing for it," D'Aubigné interrupted drily, "but that we should agree to put all three Henries into motley, and set Jean-aux-Choux on the throne!"
"Speak your mind plainly, Jean-aux-Choux," cried Turenne peremptorily; "we are none of us of the Three Henries. And we will bear no fooling. What is your message to us--Sir Fool with the Death's Head? Out with it, and briefly."
Jean-aux-Choux waved his hand in the direction of the bridge of Gargilesse.
"Yonder--yonder," he said, "is your answer coming to you!"
Beyond the crowded roofs of the old town, thatched and tiled, the white track to Gargilesse and Croizant meandered amid the sparse and sunburnt vegetation of autumn. Sparks of light, stars seen at noonday, began to dance behind the little broomy knolls, where the pods were cracking open merrily in the heat of the sun.