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Captain King went with them, as well as Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a Frenchman named Manourie, who had made his first appearance in the Plymouth household on the previous day. Stukeley explained the fellow as a gifted man of medicine, whom he had sent for to cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment by which he was afflicted.
Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. "D'ye mean Stukeley?" quoth he, half-indignant already at the mere suggestion. "Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman." De Chesne shrugged. "You should know your family better than I. But who is this Manourie who accompanies you? Where is he come from? What you know of him?" Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing. "But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation.
He was caught diminishing the gold coin of the realm by the operation known to-day as "clipping," and with him was taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness against Stukeley.
Can you so drug me as to deceive physicians that I am in extremis?" Manourie considered awhile. "I... I think I could," he answered presently. "And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say.. two such stones?" The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it was prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir Walter's. "About it, then."
Looking into that lean, crafty face, he considered King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him of his kinsman's general neediness, remembered past events that shed light upon his ways and nature, and began now at last to have a sense of the man's hypocrisy and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned in regard to him precisely as he had reasoned in regard to Manourie.
On the morrow Manourie was gone, dismissed as a consequence of the part he had played. It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this a very well informed and injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to forfeit the knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter secretly concerted means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to trust him? Sir Walter wondered.
Facing him across the table at which both were seated, Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon the board, and, suddenly opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady eyes with the jewel sparkling in his palm. "Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?" Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-featured fellow, slight and wiry.
"So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them," returned Sir Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first argument, using now such forceful logic and obvious sincerity that Sir Walter was convinced. He was no less convinced, too, of the peril in which he stood. He plied those wits of his, which had rarely failed him in an extremity. Manourie was the difficulty.
Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral, which has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape, I'd never hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as closely as he watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And that is why I have held my peace on the score of this warrant.
His dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending first to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty husk to the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with the hare and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had done no less. Amongst them they had "cozened the great cozener" to use Stukeley's own cynical expression.
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