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Cocardasse amplified: "My letter told me to be outside the Inn of the Three Graces, near Neuilly, on a certain day this day to serve the Prince of Gonzague." Passepoil nodded again. "So did mine." Cocardasse continued: "Mine enclosed a draft on the Bank of Marseilles to pay expenses." Passepoil noted a point of difference: "Mine was on the Bank of Calais."
"I don't believe in secret thrusts," he said, decisively. The Gascon moved a little away from Staupitz and a little nearer to Æsop, whom he looked at fixedly. The hunchback sustained his gaze with his habitual air of cold indifference. Cocardasse spoke: "You will, if you ever face Louis de Nevers. Now, Passepoil, here, and I, we are, I believe, held in general repute as pretty good swordsmen "
'I am Henri de Lagardere, of the king's Light-Horse. I am always in trouble, always in debt, always in love. These are misfortunes a man can endure. But I am always hearing of your merits, which is fretting, and of your irresistible secret thrust, and that is unbearable." Lagardere paused to give dramatic effect to the point in his narrative. "What did he say to that?" asked Passepoil.
Like Æsop and like Passepoil, he was dressed in black, as became the confidential servant of a master with many confidences; but, unlike the amorous Æsop and unlike the amorous Passepoil though the two men were amorous after a very different fashion his garments were of fine quality and fine cut, with much costly lace at his yellow neck, and much costly lace about the wrists of yellow hands that to a casual glance might, in their affected ease, have passed for patrician.
And at the same moment Passepoil, with the gesture of one who salutes in a fencing-school, exclaimed the name "Lagardere." As for the other ruffians, they gathered together sulkily enough about the table, staring at the stranger. His face was familiar to all of them, and there was not one among them bold enough to follow the example of Æsop.
Cocardasse summed up, significantly: "The thrust of Nevers." The pair were silent for an instant, looking at each other with something like dismay upon their faces, and their minds were evidently busy with old days and old dangers. Passepoil broke the silence. "They didn't make much by their blood-money." "Yes," said Cocardasse; "but we, who refused to hunt Lagardere, we are alive."
He moved noiselessly from the bridge to the high-road, and came cautiously upon the swashbucklers at the very moment when Passepoil was saying, with a shiver: "I'm always afraid to hear Lagardere's voice cry out Nevers's motto." Even on the instant the man in the gypsy habit pushed his way between the two bandits, laying a hand on each of their shoulders and saying three words: "I am here!"
Lagardere looked at them as one looks at friends who act in accordance with one's expectation of them. "Thanks, friends," he said. Then he sat at Gonzague's table, dipped pen in ink, and wrote two hurried letters. One he handed to Cocardasse. "This letter to the king, instantly." The other he handed to Passepoil. "This to Gonzague's notary, instantly. Come back and wait in the anteroom.
Passepoil allowed a faint smile, expressive of satisfaction, to steal over his melancholy countenance. "Thank Heaven, in Paris we can't meet Lagardere." Cocardasse appeared plainly to share the pleasure of his old friend. "An exile dare not return," he said, emphatically, with the air of a man who feels sure of himself and of his words.
"Why?" asked Cocardasse, and Lagardere replied with a question: "Do you remember the Baron de Brissac?" Cocardasse nodded. "One of the best swords in Paris." Lagardere resumed: "Well, the late baron " Passepoil interrupted: "The late baron?" Lagardere explained: "Brissac had a lewd tongue and smirched a woman. So I pulled his ears." Cocardasse grinned. "The devil you did!"
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