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Tressan sped after her and between them they raised the boy and helped him to a chair, where he now sat, passing a heavy hand across his no doubt aching brow. Clearly he was recovering, from which Garnache opined with regret that his blow had been too light. The Dowager turned to Fortunio, who had approached her, and her eyes seemed to take fire at something that he told her.
The Marquise wrung her hands in pretty mimicry of despair, and poured out soothing words, as one might pour oil upon stormy waters. The Seneschal sat in stolid silence, a half-scared spectator of this odd scene, what time the Marquise talked and talked until she had brought Fortunio back to some measure of subjection.
W. Scott of Maxpopple. In the fairy tale of Countess D'Aulnoy Fortunio. See Johnson's Rambler, Nos. 204 and 205. Afterwards Sir Philip Crampton. "The Surgeon-General struck Sir Walter as being more like Sir Humphry Davy than any man he had met, not in person only, but in the liveliness and range of his talk." Life, vol. viii. p. 23. Gaelic for "old women."
Florimond was a sick man, and were he otherwise, there was still Fortunio to stand by and see to it that the right sword pierced the right heart, else would his pistoles be lost to him. Nevertheless she was fretted by anxiety, and she waited impatiently for news, fuming at the delay, yet knowing full well that news could not yet reach her.
The captain, whose open, ingenuous countenance dissembled as villainous a heart as ever beat in the breast of any man, disowned the compatriotism with a smile. "Hardly, monsieur," said he. "'Battista' is a Piedmontese." Fortunio himself was a Venetian. "Is he to be relied upon, think you?" asked madame. Fortunio shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands.
Fortunio lived on for a week after this, and at length consented to see a clergyman. I brought the vicar, and was told to leave them alone together and come back in an hour's time. When I returned, Fortunio was stretched quietly on the rough bed we had found for him, and the Vicar, who knelt beside it, was speaking softly in his ear. As I entered on tiptoe, I heard
"I observe no difference, which is what you would say," Fortunio answered truculently, his head well back, his brown eyes resentful of offence for none can be so resentful of imputed villainy as your villain who is thorough-paced. "And," he concluded, "I return you the same answer, madame that I am no cut-throat."
She stood regarding him a moment with lips compressed and a white, startled, angry face. Then: "It was by Marius's contrivance that he was placed sentry over the girl," he heard her tell Fortunio, and he thought she sneered. She looked at the two bodies on the floor, one almost at her feet, the other just inside the doorway, now almost hidden in the shadows of the table.
Then she laughed softly. "Yes, it was a lucky chance for us, his staying at La Rochette. Florimond was born under an unlucky star, I think, and you under a lucky one, Fortunio."
Cortes having learnt, in the year 1536, that his ship, of which Fortunio Ximenez was pilot, had been seized by Nunnez de Guzman, sent three ships to Xalisco, while he marched thither by land with a respectable force; and, on his arrival there, he found his ship all spoiled and rifled.
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