D’Epernon stood at the door.

The splendid favourite of the King of France was attired in a plain, close-fitting black dress, while a cloak of the like material dropped from his shoulders. A broad-brimmed hat, high-crowned, and with a sweeping black feather, was on his head. He held out both hands.

“See, my good Professor,” he began, “I am at your martial mercy. I have come without arms, clothed only with my sole innocence, into this haunt of heretics. Let me enter. I am, at least, a well-wisher of the white panache, and an old friend of Monsieur Anthony Arpajon there!”

The Professor of Eloquence, though in his heart he liked not the bold favourite, knew him for a keeper of his word. He stood back and let him pass within. D’Epernon carefully barred the door behind him, and with a grand salute strode masterfully into the kitchen of Dame Granier, which seemed to shrink in size at his entrance.

“Fairer waters than those we are now crossing be to us and to France!” said the Duke, who loved a sounding phrase. There was a silence in the kitchen, all wondering what this sudden interruption might mean. “You are all strangely speechless,” continued the Duke.

“We would be glad to know what is your Grace’s will with us,” said Jean-aux-Choux; “after that, we will speak as plain as men may!”

“You are, I take it, for the King of France so long as he may live, and for the Bearnais afterwards?”

“We are of different schools and habits of thought,” said Doctor Anatole, with a certain professional sententiousness, “but you may take it that on these points we are agreed with my Lord Duke of Epernon!”

“We are all against the League!” said Jean-aux-Choux brusquely.

“I stand by my cousin Henry,” said the Abbe John.

“And I keep an open hostelry and a shut mouth!” added Anthony Arpajon.

As for Claire, she said nothing, but only moved a little further into the shadow. For Dame Granier had thrown a handful of resinous chips on the fire, which blazed up brightly, at which D’Epernon muttered a curse and trampled the clear light into dim embers with the heel of his cavalier’s boot.

“To be seen here does not mean much to most of you,” he said, with sudden unexpected fierceness, “but with the city full of the spies of Guise, it would be death and destruction to me! In a word then for this I have come. The King has resolved to bear no longer the insolence of Guise and his brothers. There is to be an end. It will be a bitter day and a worse night in Blois. Women are better out of it. I have taken measures to keep safely mine own wife though there is no braver lass in France, as the burghers of Angoulême do know what I have to ask is, how many of you gentlemen I can count upon?”

“There is a difference,” said the Professor. “I am an advocate for peace. But then Duke Guise and the Princes of Lorraine will not leave us in peace. So, against my judgment and conscience, I am with you so far as fighting goes.”

“And I,” said the Abbe John eagerly; “but I will have no hand in the assassination. It smells of Saint Bartholomew!”

“It is going to smell of that,” answered D’Epernon coolly; “you are of Crillon’s party, my friend and truly, I do not wonder. There are butchers enough about the King to do his killings featly. Of what use else are swaggerers like D’O, Guast, Ornano, and Lognac? For me, I am happily supposed to be in my government of Angoulême. I am banished, disgraced, shamed, all to pleasure the League. But just the same, the King sends me daily proof of his kindness, under his own hand and seal. So I, in turn, endeavour to serve him as best I may.”

“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’!”

“When at what hour?”

“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 Abbe 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.

Then, without a word, the Fool of the Three Henries took down his wallet, stuck the long sheath of a dagger under his black-and-white baldrick, and strode out into the night.

His vow was upon him.

“I will betake me to my chamber,” said the Professor of Eloquence, “and pray to be forgiven for the thought of blood which leaped up in my heart when this proud man came to the door.”

“And I,” said Claire, “because I am very sleepy.”

She said good-night a little coldly to John d’Albret. At least, so he thought, and was indeed ill-content thereat.

“I am not permitted to fight in a good hard-stricken battle,” he murmured. “I cannot bring my mind to rank assassination for this, however my Lord of Epernon may wrap it up, means no less. And yonder vixen of a girl will not even let me hold her coloured threads when she broiders a petticoat!”

But without a doubt or a qualm Jean-aux-Choux went to find Hamilton of the Scots Guard and to perform his vow.

As for the Duke, he spent his days with the Queen-Mother, and his nights at the lodgings of Monsieur de Noirmoutiers. Catherine de Medici was ill and old, but she kept all her charm of manner, her Italian courtesy. Personally she liked Guise, and he had a soft side to the wizened old woman who had done and plotted so many things among others the night of Saint Bartholomew. When Guise came to any town where Catherine was, he always rode directly to her quarters. There she sermonised him on his latest sins, representing how unseemly these were in the avowed champion of the Church.

“But they make the people love me,” he would cry, with a careless laugh. And perhaps also, who knows, the perverse indurated heart of the ancient Queen! For the Queen-Mother, though relentless to all heretics and rebels, was kindly within doors and to those she loved who indeed generally repaid her with the blackest ingratitude.

But at Blois Guise had a new reason for frequenting his old ally. Valentine la Nina had become indispensable to Catherine. She was, it seemed, far more to her than her own daughter. The Queen-Mother would spend long days of convalescence as often, indeed, as she was fairly free from pain in devising and arranging robes for her favourite.

And amid the flurry Guise came and went with the familiarity of a house friend. His scarred face shone with pleasure as he picked a way to his old ally’s bedside. Arrived there, after steering his course through the wilderness of silks and chiffons which cumbered the chairs and made even sitting down a matter of warlike strategy, Guise would remain and watch the busy maids bending over their needlework, and especially Valentine la Nina seated at the other side of the great state bed, which had been specially brought from Paris for the Queen to die upon. There was a quaint delight in his eyes, not unmingled with amusement, but now and then a flush would mount to his face and the great scar on his cheek would glow scarlet.

Once he betrayed himself.

“What a queen what a queen she would have made!”

But the sharp-witted old woman on the bed, catching the murmured words, turned them off with Italian quickness.

“Too late, my good Henry,” she said, reaching out her hand; “you were born quite thirty years too late. Had you been King and I Queen well, the world would have had news!”

She thought a little while, and then added:

“For one thing all men would have known how stupid a man is the Fleming who calls himself King of Spain. We should have avenged Pavia, you and I, my Balafre, and Philip’s ransom would have bought the children each a gown!”

But Valentine la Nina knew well of what the Duke of Guise had been thinking. She understood his words, but she gave him no chance of private speech. Nor did she send him any further warning. Once at Paris she had warned him fully, and he had chosen to disobey her. It was at his peril. And now, in Blois itself, she treated the popular idol and all-powerful captain with a chilling disdain that secretly stung him.

Only once did they exchange words. It was on the stairway, as Valentine gathered her riding-skirt in her fingers in order to mount to the Queen-Mother’s room. The Duke was coming down slowly, a disappointed look on his face, but he brightened at sight of her, and taking her gloved hand quickly, he put it to his lips.

“Now I have lived to-day!” he said gently.

“If you do not get hence,” she answered him with bitterness, “it is one of the last days that you will!”

“Then I would spend these last here in Blois,” he said, smiling at her.

“You would do better for the Cause you pretend to serve if you took my grey alezan out there, and rode him at gallop through the North Gate. I give him to you if you will!”

“I should only bring him back by the South Gate,” he said, smiling. “While you remain here, I am no better than a poor moth fluttering about the candle!”

“But the Cause?” she cried, with an angry clap of her hands.

“That for the Cause!” said Guise, snapping his fingers lightly; “a man has but one life to live, and few privileges therein. But surely he may be allowed to lay that one at a fair lady’s feet!”

Without answering, Valentine la Nina swept up the stairs of the Queen’s lodging, her heart within her like lead.

“After all,” she murmured, as she shut herself in her room, “I have done my best. I have warned him time and again. I cannot save a man against his will. Paugh!” (she turned hastily from the window), “there he is again on the other side of the way, pacing the street as if it were the poop of an amiral!”

The little walled garden at Madame Granier’s, with its trellised vines, the wind-swept wintry shore of the Loire, and the bleached shell-pink of the shingle, all went back to their ancient quiet. The whole world was in, at, and about the Chateau. Men, women, and both sorts of angels were busy around the Castle of Blois in these short grey days of mid-most winter.

Now and then, however, would come a heavenly morning, when Claire, left alone, looked out upon the clear, clean, zenith-blue sweep of the river, and on the misty opal and ultramarine ash of the distance, ridge fading behind ridge as drowsy thought fades into sleep.

“It is a Paradise of beauty, but” here she hesitated a while “there is no Adam, that I can see!”

In spite of the winter day she opened her window to the slightly sun-warmed air.

“I declare I am somewhat in Eve’s mood to-day,” she continued, smiling to herself as she laid down her embroidery; “even an affable serpent would be better than nothing.”

But it could not be. For all the powers of good and evil the Old Serpent among them were full of business in the Chateau of Blois during these days of the King’s last parliament. And so, while Claire read her Amyot’s Plutarch and John Knox’s Reformation, the single stroke which changed all history hung unseen in the blue.