The payment of my wager, forsooth! Even that
lost what virtue it might have contained. Where was the heroism of
such an act? Had I not failed, indeed? And was not, therefore, the
payment of my wager become inevitable?
Fool! fool! Why had I not profited that gentle mood of hers when
we had drifted down the stream together? Why had I not told her
then of the whole business from its ugly inception down to the pass
to which things were come, adding that to repair the evil I was
going back to Paris to pay my wager, and that when that was done,
I would return to ask her to become my wife? That was the course
a man of sense would have adopted. He would have seen the dangers
that beset him in my false position, and would have been quick to
have forestalled them in the only manner possible.
Heigh-ho! It was done. The game was at an end, and I had bungled
my part of it like any fool. One task remained me - that of meeting
Marsac at Grenade and doing justice to the memory of poor Lesperon.
What might betide thereafter mattered little. I should be ruined
when I had settled with Chatellerault, and Marcel de Saint-Pol, de
Bardelys, that brilliant star in the firmament of the Court of
France, would suffer an abrupt eclipse, would be quenched for all
time. But this weighed little with me then. I had lost everything
that I might have valued - everything that might have brought fresh
zest to a jaded, satiated life.
Later that day I was told by the Vicomte that there was a rumour
current to the effect that the Marquis de Bardelys was dead.
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