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Updated: June 12, 2025
My intendant was still talking of me. The room was crowded, for Rodenard alone had brought with him my twenty followers. One of these looked up as I brushed past him, and uttered a cry of surprise upon recognizing me. But Rodenard talked on, engrossed in his theme to the exclusion of all else. "Monsieur le Marquis," he was saying, "is a gentleman whom it is, indeed, an honour to serve "
A dull rage was in my soul as I thought of my position, for it had not needed Castelroux's recommendation to restrain me from building false hopes upon his chances of finding Rodenard and my followers in time to save me. Some little ray of consolation I culled, perhaps, from my thoughts of Roxalanne.
A naked foot shot past the edge of the door into my room, and for a second I thought of pinning it to the ground with my rapier; then came a leg, then a half-dressed body surmounted by a face the face of Rodenard! At sight of it, amazement and a hundred suspicions crossed my mind. How, in God's name, came he here, and for what purpose did he steal so into my chamber?
Did she but know that it was your pleasure she has been waiting upon, I should tremble for your future when the five years expire." Mademoiselle held the royal warrant of her father's banishment in her hand. She was pale, and her greeting of me had been timid. I stood before her, and by the door stood Rodenard, whom I had bidden attend me.
Never until that hour, as I stood in the porch of the Hotel de l'Epee, hearkening to my henchman's narrative and to the bursts of laughter which ever and anon it provoked from his numerous listeners, had I dreamed of the raconteur talents which Rodenard might boast.
"If any here be bold enough to step out, he shall have my answer." Then, as none responded, I signified my contempt for them by a laugh. "Monseigneur!" wailed Rodenard at my feet, his voice growing feeble. By way of answer, I gave him a final cut, then I flung the whip which had grown ragged in the fray back to the ostler from whom I had borrowed it.
Then came, he announced, the very cream of the jest, when I was arrested as Lesperon and brought to Toulouse and to trial in Lesperon's stead; he told them how I had been sentenced to death in the other man's place, and he assured them that I would certainly have been beheaded upon the morrow but that news had been borne to him Rodenard of my plight, and he was come to deliver me.
I have made over to Chatellerault and to his heirs for all time my estates of Bardelys." Oh, I had rehearsed it in my mind, and I was confident I knew that I should win her. And now the disclosure of that shameful traffic coming from other lips than mine had ruined everything by forestalling my avowal. Rodenard should pay for it by God, he should!
Yet these events, although significant in their total, were of so vague and slight a nature in their detail, that when I come to write of them I find really little that I may set down. Rodenard and his companions remained for two days at the chateau, and to me his sojourn there was a source of perpetual anxiety, for I knew not how far the fool might see fit to prolong it.
Then, whilst one of them gently drew off his boots, Rodenard, with the lanthorn close beside him, cut away the fellow's doublet, and laid bare the oozing sword-wound that gaped in his mangled side. He whispered an order to Gilles, who went swiftly off to the coach in quest of something that he had asked for; then he sat on his heels and waited, his hand upon the man's pulse, his eyes on his face.
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