Saint Martins Summer | Page 5

not for harmony of hues and elegance of outline.
Babylas held the mirror, and Anselme adjusted the Seneschal's wig,
whilst Tressan himself twisted his black mustachios - how they kept
their colour was a mystery to his acquaintance - and combed the tuft of
beard that sprouted from one of his several chins.
He took a last look at his reflection, rehearsed a smile, and bade
Anselme introduce his visitor. He desired his secretary to go to the
devil, but, thinking better of it, he recalled him as he reached the door.
His cherished vanity craved expression.
"Wait!" said he. "There is a letter must be written. The King's business
may not suffer postponement - not for all the dowagers in France. Sit
down."
Babylas obeyed him. Tressan stood with his back to the open door. His
ears, strained to listen, had caught the swish of a woman's gown. He
cleared his throat, and began to dictate:
"To Her Majesty the Queen-Regent - " He paused, and stood with

knitted brows, deep in thought. Then he ponderously repeated - "To
Her Majesty the Queen Regent - Have you got that?"
"Yes, Monsieur le Comte. 'To Her Majesty the Queen Regent.'"
There was a step, and a throat-clearing cough behind him.
"Monsieur de Tressan," said a woman's voice, a rich, melodious voice,
if haughty and arrogant of intonation.
On the instant he turned, advanced a step, and bowed.
"Your humblest servant, madame," said he, his hand upon his heart.
"This is an honour which - "
"Which necessity thrusts upon you," she broke in imperiously.
"Dismiss that fellow."
The secretary, pale and shy, had risen. His eyes dilated at the woman's
speech. He looked for a catastrophe as the natural result of her taking
such a tone with this man who was the terror of his household and of
all Grenoble. Instead, the Lord Seneschal's meekness left him
breathless with surprise.
"He is my secretary, madame. We were at work as you came. I was on
the point of inditing a letter to Her Majesty. The office of Seneschal in
a province such as Dauphiny is helas! - no sinecure." He sighed like
one whose brain is weary. "It leaves a man little time even to eat or
sleep."
"You will be needing a holiday, then," said she, with cool insolence.
"Take one for once, and let the King's business give place for half an
hour to mine."
The secretary's horror grew by leaps and bounds.
Surely the storm would burst at last about this audacious woman's head.
But the Lord Seneschal - usually so fiery and tempestuous - did no
more than make her another of his absurd bows.

"You anticipate, madame, the very words I was about to utter. Babylas,
vanish!" And he waved the scribbler doorwards with a contemptuous
hand. "Take your papers with you - into my closet there. We will
resume that letter to Her Majesty when madame shall have left me."
The secretary gathered up his papers, his quills, and his inkhorn, and
went his way, accounting the end of the world at hand.
When the door had closed upon him, the Seneschal, with another bow
and a simper, placed a chair at his visitor's disposal. She looked at the
chair, then looked at the man much as she had looked at the chair, and
turning her back contemptuously on both, she sauntered towards the
fireplace. She stood before the blaze, with her whip tucked under her
arm, drawing off her stout riding-gloves. She was a tall, splendidly
proportioned woman, of a superb beauty of countenance, for all that she
was well past the spring of life.
In the waning light of that October afternoon none would have guessed
her age to be so much as thirty, though in the sunlight you might have
set it at a little more. But in no light at all would you have guessed the
truth, that her next would be her forty-second birthday. Her face was
pale, of an ivory pallor that gleamed in sharp contrast with the ebony of
her lustrous hair. Under the long lashes of low lids a pair of eyes black
and insolent set off the haughty lines of her scarlet lips. Her nose was
thin and straight, her neck an ivory pillar splendidly upright upon her
handsome shoulders.
She was dressed for riding, in a gown of sapphire velvet, handsomely
laced in gold across the stomacher, and surmounted at the neck, where
it was cut low and square, by the starched band of fine linen which in
France was already replacing the more elaborate ruff. On her head, over
a linen coif, she wore a tall-crowned grey beaver, swathed with a scarf
of blue and gold.
Standing by the hearth, one foot on the stone