Saint Martins Summer | Page 5

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 kerb, one elbow leaning lightly on the overmantel, she proceeded leisurely to remove her gloves.
The Seneschal observed her with eyes that held an odd mixture of furtiveness and admiration, his fingers - plump, indolent-looking stumps - plucking at his beard.
"Did you but know, Marquise, with what joy, with what a - "
"I will imagine it, whatever it may be," she broke in, with that brusque arrogance that marked her bearing. "The time for flowers of rhetoric is not now. There is trouble coming, man; trouble, dire trouble."
Up went the Seneschal's brows; his eyes grew wider.
"Trouble?" quoth he. And, having opened his mouth to give exit to that single word, open he left it.
She laughed lazily, her lip curling, her face twisting oddly,