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Galen Albret snarled like a wild beast, throwing aside the girl, as he did the chair in which he had been sitting. Ned Trent caught her, reeling, in his arms. For as is often the case with passionate but strong temperaments, though the Factor had attained a certain calm of control, the turmoil of his deeper anger had not been in the least stilled.
Where the studied insult of words had failed, this single cachinnation succeeded. The Trader saw his opponent's eyes narrow. For a moment he thought the Factor was about to spring on him. Then, with an effort that blackened his face with blood, Galen Albret controlled himself, and fell to striking the call-bell violently and repeatedly with the palm of his hand.
Where the studied insult of words had failed, this single cachinnation succeeded. The Trade saw his opponent's eyes narrow. For a moment he thought the Factor was about to spring on him. Then, with an effort that blackened his face with blood, Galen Albret controlled himself, and fell to striking the call-bell violently and repeatedly with the palm of his hand.
"Are you there, Galen Albret?" he challenged. The spell of twilight mystery broke. It seemed as if suddenly the air had become surcharged with the vitality of opposition. "What then?" countered the Factor's heavy, deliberate tones. "True, I see you now," rejoined the visitor carelessly, as he flung himself across the arm of a chair and swung one foot.
They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and ethereal, like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued couch on which she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly cradled on illimitable space.
In its uncompromising illumination Me-en-gan, the bows-man, standing straight and tall and silent by the door, studied his master's face and knew him to be deeply angered. For Galen Albret was at this moment called upon to deal with a problem more subtle than any with which his policy had been puzzled in thirty years.
Nevertheless, the young monarch who held his court alternately at Pau and at Nérac, the capital of the duchy of Albret, expended annually upon his household and establishment nearly twelve thousand pounds, and that at a period when, according to the evidence of Sully, "the whole Court could not have furnished forty thousand livres;" yet so inadequately were those about him remunerated, that Sully himself, in his joint capacity of councillor of state and chamberlain, received only two thousand annual livres, or ninety pounds sterling.
There lay between the window and the head of the table perhaps a dozen ordinary steps, for the room was large. The young man took them slowly, his eyes fixed with burning intensity on the seated figure, the muscles of his locomotion contracting and relaxing with the smooth, stealthy continuity of a cat. Galen Albret again laid hand on his revolver. "Come no nearer," he commanded.
After these again came Gonzague's own little tail of partisans, Navailles and Nocé, Taranne and Oriol, Choisy and Gironne, Albret and Montaubert, with Chavernay fluttering about them like an impudent butterfly, laughing at them, laughing at his august cousin, laughing at the king, laughing at himself laughing at everything.
Facing about in astonishment to discover the reason for this sudden change of decision, the other two men looked into the face of Virginia Albret, standing in the doorway of the other room. "Father!" she cried. "You must go back," said Ned Trent, speaking clearly and collectedly, in the hope of imposing his will on her obvious excitement. "This is not an affair in which you should interfere.
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