Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/54

42 "Have you a good hand, come now? Ah! ventre saint gris! as my ancestor Henry IV. used to say, how dull and disagreeable you are to-night!"

Then, after glancing over his own cards,

"Ah, ha! my friend, I think you are done for this time."

The Marquis made a violent effort to speak, and turned so red in the face that the King stopped short panic stricken.

"Why, what is the matter, Chauvelin?" he asked; "speak, man, speak!"

But Monsieur de Chauvelin only put out his hands blindly, dropped his cards, heaved a sigh, and fell face downwards on the floor.

"Great God!" cried the King.

"A stroke! an apoplectic stroke!" whispered the courtiers who had hurried to the spot.

They lifted the Marquis from the ground, but he never moved a limb.

"Take that away, take it away, I tell you," the terrified King ordered.

Trembling and twitching with fear, he left the table and seized Madame du Barry's arm, who drew him away into her private apartments. He had not once turned his head to look back at the friend from whom only the day before he had found it impossible to be parted."

The King gone, no one gave another thought to the Marquis, lying there life-less. His body remained awhile reclining in an armchair, into which they had lifted him to see if life were extinct or no, and then let it fall back an inert mass.

The corpse had a weird effect, thus left all alone in the great deserted room, amidst the flashing lustres and the perfumed flowers.

Before long a man appeared on the threshold of the empty salon, looked all about him, saw the Marquis lying back in the chair, walked up to him, laid a hand over his heart, and in a hard, dry, clear voice, pronounced exactly as the great Palace clock struck seven:

"He is gone. A fine death, by God! a very fine death!"

Such was Monsieur de Chauvelin's only funeral oration, and it was no other than Lamartinière who spoke it. 

CHAPTER XI

THE APPARITION

T an early hour of the same day Père Delar had arrived at Grosbois, purposing to say mass in the Chapel and not to allow the Marquis's good and christianlike dispositions of the day before to cool. But Madame de Chauvelin informed him how their promising neophyte had slipped through their fingers at the first friendly word from the King, and with tears in her eyes expressed many fears for his eventual salvation.

She invited her Confessor to stay and dine with her, that she might have further opportunity of conversing with him and deriving from his wise advice the courage she needed so sorely after this fresh disappointment. After leaving the table, Madame de Chauvelin and the Monk walked in the park till it began to grow late, after which they had seats brought out and spent some time by the side of a fine sheet of water to enjoy the cooling evening breeze after the heat of the day.

"For all your comforting and consoling words. Reverend Father," declared the Marquise, "this sudden departure of Monsieur de Chauvehn makes me terribly anxious. I know what strong ties he has binding him to Court life; I know the King is all powerful to influence not his head only but his heart, and his Majesty's conduct is so very ill regulated.—It is not a sin, is it. Father, to say so? alas! the scandal of it is but too notorious!"

"I do assure you, Madame, that the Marquis has received a most salutary impression; 'tis the first battle won, Providence will complete the campaign. I spoke of the matter this morning to our Reverend Prior, and he ordered his Brethren of the House to pray for a happy consummation. You must pray likewise, my daughter, you who are most concerned of any in this blessed work; your children must pray; we must all pray. With the same intent I offered up this morning in the Chapel the holy sacrifice of the mass, and I mean to do the same every day."

"For twenty years,—ever since my marriage with Monsieur de Chauvelin," returned the Marquise, "I have never let an hour pass without asking God to touch his heart. Hitherto the Lord has not answered my prayers. I have lived