XII.

LEFT alone, I grew numb and faint, and sat down on my couch with a feeling that rest was the thing I most desired on earth. The reaction from the tense hour I had spent, and the change from the iron climate above to the moist, malarious air of the dungeon also had their influence; so that, as I sat there, my eyes closed, and Gabord's last remark, which kept sounding painfully in my ear, floated away in fading echoes, and died. I was roused by the opening of the door. Doltaire entered. He advanced towards me with the manner of an admired comrade, and, with no trace of what would mark him as my foe, said, as he sniffed the air :

"Monsieur, I have been selfish. I asked myself to breakfast with you, yet, while I love the new experience, I will deny myself in this. You shall breakfast with me, as you pass to your new lodgings. You must not say no," he added, as though we were in some salon. "I have a sleigh here at the door, and a fellow has already gone to fan kitchen fires and forage for the table. Come," he went on, "let me help you with your cloak."

my

He threw my cloak around me, and turned towards the door. I had not spoken a word, for what with weakness, the announcement that I was to have new

lodgings, and the sudden change in my affairs, I was like a child walking in its sleep. I could do no more than bow to him and force a smile, which must have told more than aught else of my state, for he stepped to my side and offered me his arm. I drew back from that with thanks, for there passed through me a quick hatred of myself that I should take favors of the man who had moved for my destruction, and to steal from me my promised wife, her life and character weighing little with him while working for his ends. Yet what folly to refuse advantages thus placed in my way! It was my duty to live if I could, to escape if that were possible, to use every means to foil my enemies. It was all a game; why should I not accept advances at my enemy's hands, and match dissimulation with dissimulation?

When I refused his arm, he smiled comically, and raised his shoulders deprecatingly.

"You forget your dignity, monsieur," I said presently as we walked on, Gabord meeting us and lighting us through the passages; 66 you voted me a villain, a spy, at my trial!"

"Technically and publicly, you are a spy, a vulgar criminal," he replied; "privately, you are a foolish, blundering gentleman."

"A soldier, also, you will admit, who keeps his compact with his enemy."

together this morning," he answered. "What difference would it make to this government if our private matter had been dragged in? Technically, you still would have been the spy. But I will say this, monsieur, to me you are a man better worth torture than death."

I grasped his meaning fully. On the one hand, he wanted the papers for the Grande Marquise; on the other, he guessed a little of my love for Alixe, and the jealousy of race and nature roused all the cruelty in him, which would, no doubt, have sent me to my death long ago had he not had a sense of humor to see a longer sport.

"Do you ever stop to think of how this may end for you?" I asked quietly.

He seemed pleased with the question. "I have thought it might be interesting," he answered; "else, as I said, you should long ago have left this naughty world. Is it in your mind that we shall cross swords one day?"

At that moment we stood at the entrance to the citadel, where a good pair of horses and a sleigh awaited us. We got in, the robes were piled around us, and the horses started off at a long trot. I was muffled to the ears, but I could see how white and beautiful was the world, how the frost glistened in the trees, how the cedars were weighted down with snow, and how snug the châteaux looked with the smoke curling up from their hunched chimneys.

Presently Doltaire replied to my last remark. "Conviction is the executioner of the stupid," said he. "When a man is not great enough to let change and chance guide him, he gets convictions, and dies a fool."

"Conviction has made men and nations strong," I rejoined.

"Has made men and nations asses," he retorted. "The Mahometan has conviction, so has the Christian: they die

my life, and yet this morning he had saved me from death, and, though he was still my sworn enemy, I was going to breakfast with him.

Already the streets of the town were filling; for it was the day before Christmas, and it would be the great marketday of the year. Few noticed us as we sped along down St. Louis Street and Mountain Hill, past the Bishop's palace, and on round the base of the hill. I could not conceive whither we were going, until, passing the Hôtel Dieu, I saw in front the Intendance. I remembered the last time I was there, and what had happened then, and a thought flashed through me that perhaps this was another trap. But I put it from me, and soon afterwards Doltaire said,

"I have now a slice of the Intendance for my own, and we shall breakfast like squirrels in a loft."

As we drove into the open space before the palace, a company of soldiers

standing before the great door began to march down to the road by which we came. With them was a prisoner. I saw at once that he was a British officer, but I did not recognize his face. I asked his name of Doltaire, and found it was one Lieutenant Stevenson, of Roger's Rangers, those brave New Englanders; after an interview with Bigot, he was being taken to the common jail. To my request that I might speak with him Doltaire assented, and at a sign from my companion the soldiers stopped, and Stevenson and I fixed our eyes on each other, in his a puzzled, disturbed expression. He was well built, of intrepid bearing, with a fine openness of manner joined to handsome features. But there was a recklessness in his eye which seemed to me to come nearer the swashbuckling character of a young French seigneur than the wariness of a British soldier.

I spoke his name and introduced myself. His surprise and pleasure were pronounced, for he had thought (as he said) that by this time I would be dead. I could see too that he was perplexed by my being with Doltaire. There was an instant's flash of his eye, as if a suspicion of my loyalty had crossed his mind; but it was gone on the instant, and immediately Doltaire, who also had interpreted the look, smiled, and said he had carried me off to breakfast while the furniture of my former prison was being shifted to my new one. After a word or two more, with Stevenson's assurance that the British had recovered from Braddock's defeat and would soon be knocking at the portals of the Château St. Louis, we parted, and soon Doltaire and I got out at the high stone steps.

As I looked round, it came to me how in this new country had been planted the roots of monopoly; how here there would soon be but two classes, the peasant and the petty noble. In this space surround ing the Intendance was gathered the history of New France. This palace, large

enough for the king of an European country with a population of a million, was the official residence of the commercial ruler of a province. It was the house of the miller, and across the way was the King's storehouse, La Friponne, where the people were ground between the stones. The great square was already filling with people who had come to trade. Here were barrels of malt being unloaded; there, great sacks of grain, bags of dried fruits, bales of home-made cloth, and loads of fine-sawn boards and timber. Moving about among the peasants were the regular soldiers in their white uniforms faced with blue, red, yellow, or violet, with black three-cornered hats, and black gaiters from foot to knee, and the militia in coats of white with black facings. Behind a great collar of dogskin a pair of jet-black eyes flashed out from under a pretty forehead; and presently one saw these same eyes grown sorrowful or dull under heavy knotted brows, which told of a life too vexed by care and labor to keep alive a spark of youth's romance. Now the bell in the tower above us rang a short peal, the signal for the opening of La Friponne, and the bustling crowd moved towards its doors. As I stood there on the great steps, I chanced to look along the plain, bare front of the palace to an annex at the end, and standing in a doorway opening on a pair of steps was Voban. I was amazed that he should be therethe man whose life had been spoiled by Bigot. At the same moment Doltaire motioned to him to return inside, which he did.

Doltaire laughed at my surprise, and as he showed me inside the palace said, "There is no barber in the world like Voban. Interesting! Interesting! I love to watch his eye when he draws the razor down my throat. It would be so easy to fetch it across; but Voban, as you see, is not a man of absolute conviction. It will be sport, some day, to put Bigot's valet to bed with a broken leg or

a fit of spleen, and send Voban to shave him."

"Where is Mathilde?" I asked, as if I knew nothing of her whereabouts.

"Mathilde is where none may touch her, monsieur; under the protection of the daintiest lady of New France. It is the lady's whim; and when a lady is charming, an Intendant, even, must not trouble her caprice."

He did not need to speak more plainly. It was he who had prevented Bigot from taking Mathilde away from Alixe, and locking her up, or worse. I said nothing, however, and soon we were in a large room, sumptuously furnished, looking out on the great square. The morning sun stared in, some snowbirds twittered on the window-sill, and inside, a canary, in an alcove hung with plants and flowers, sang as if it were the heart of summer. All was warm and comfortable, and it was like a dream that I had just come from the dismal chance of a miserable death. My cloak and cap and leggings had been taken from me when I entered, as courteously as though I had been King Louis himself, and a great chair was drawn solicitously to the fire. All this was done by the servant, after one quick look from Doltaire. The servant seemed to understand his master perfectly, to read one look as though it were a volume,

"The constant service of the antique world." Such was Doltaire's influence. The closer you came to him, the more compelling was his fascination- an almost devilish attraction, notably selfish, yet capable of benevolence. I remember I remember that once, two years before, I saw him lift a load from the back of a peasant woman and carry it home for her, putting into her hand a gold piece when he left her. At another time, an old man had fallen ill and died of a foul disease in a miserable upper room of a warehouse. Doltaire was passing at the moment when the body should be brought forth. The stricken widow of

the dead man stood below, waiting, but no one would fetch the body down. Doltaire stopped and questioned her kindly, and in another minute he was driving the carter and another upstairs at the point of his sword. Together they brought the body down, and Doltaire followed it to the burying-ground; keeping the gravedigger at his task when he would have run away, and saying the responses to the priest in the short service read above the grave.

I said to him then, for it was not long after I came to Quebec, "You rail at the world and scoff at men and many decencies, and yet you do these things!"

To this he replied, he was in my own lodgings, "The brain may call all men liars and fools, but the senses feel the shock of misery which we do not ourselves inflict. Inflicting, we are prone to cruelty, as you have seen a schoolmaster begin punishment with tears, grow angry at the shrinking back under his cane, and give way to a sudden lust of torture. I have little pity for those who can help themselves let them fight or eat the leek. But the child and the helpless and the sick it is a pleasure to aid. I love the poor as much as I love anything. I could live their life, if I were put to it. As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the puddles of wretchedness: but I could have worked at the plough or the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf. I have no ethics, and yet I am on the side of the just when they do not put thorns in my bed to keep me awake at night."

Upon the walls hung suits of armor, swords of beautiful make, spears, belts of wonderful workmanship, a tattered banner, sashes knit by ladies' fingers, pouches, bandoleers, and many strong sketches of