At this moment Catherine came with slow steps from the adjoining apartment and stood before Christophe, coldly observing him. Instantly she was the object of the closest attention on the part of the two brothers, who watched alternately the queen and her accomplice. On this solemn test the whole future of that ambitious woman depended;she felt the keenest admiration for Christophe, yet she gazed sternly at him; she hated the Guises, and she smiled upon them!
"Young man," said the queen, "confess that you have seen the Prince de Conde, and you will be richly rewarded.""Ah! what a business this is for you, madame!" cried Christophe, pitying her.
The queen quivered.
"He insults me!" she exclaimed. "Why do you not hang him?" she cried, turning to the two brothers, who stood thoughtful.
"What a woman!" said the duke in a glance at his brother, consulting him by his eye, and leading him to the window.
"I shall stay in France and be revenged upon them," thought the queen.
"Come, make him confess, or let him die!" she said aloud, addressing Montresor.
The provost-marshal turned away his eyes, the executioners were busy with the wedges; Catherine was free to cast one glance upon the martyr, unseen by others, which fell on Christophe like the dew. The eyes of the great queen seemed to him moist; two tears were in them, but they did not fall. The wedges were driven; a plank was broken by the blow. Christophe gave one dreadful cry, after which he was silent;his face shone,--he believed he was dying.
"Let him die?" said the cardinal, echoing the queen's last words with a sort of irony; "no, no! don't break that thread," he said to the provost.
The duke and the cardinal consulted together in a low voice.
"What is to be done with him?" asked the executioner.
"Send him to the prison at Orleans," said the duke, addressing Monsieur de Montresor; "and don't hang him without my order."The extreme sensitiveness to which Christophe's internal organism had been brought, increased by a resistance which called into play every power of the human body, existed to the same degree, in his senses. He alone heard the following words whispered by the Duc de Guise in the ear of his brother the cardinal:
"I don't give up all hope of getting the truth out of that little fellow yet."When the princes had left the hall the executioners unbound the legs of their victim roughly and without compassion.
"Did any one ever see a criminal with such strength?" said the chief executioner to his aids. "The rascal bore that last wedge when he ought to have died; I've lost the price of his body.""Unbind me gently; don't make me suffer, friends," said poor Christophe. "Some day I will reward you--""Come, come, show some humanity," said the physician. "Monseigneur esteems the young man, and told me to look after him.""I am going to Amboise with my assistants,--take care of him yourself," said the executioner, brutally. "Besides, here comes the jailer."The executioner departed, leaving Christophe in the hands of the soft-spoken doctor, who by the aid of Christophe's future jailer, carried the poor boy to a bed, brought him some broth, helped him to swallow it, sat down beside him, felt his pulse, and tried to comfort him.
"You won't die of this," he said. "You ought to feel great inward comfort, knowing that you have done your duty.--The queen-mother bids me take care of you," he added in a whisper.
"The queen is very good," said Christophe, whose terrible sufferings had developed an extraordinary lucidity in his mind, and who, after enduring such unspeakable sufferings, was determined not to compromise the results of his devotion. "But she might have spared me much agony be telling my persecutors herself the secrets that I know nothing about, instead of urging them on."Hearing that reply, the doctor took his cap and cloak and left Christophe, rightly judging that he could worm nothing out of a man of that stamp. The jailer of Blois now ordered the poor lad to be carried away on a stretcher by four men, who took him to the prison in the town, where Christophe immediately fell into the deep sleep which, they say, comes to most mothers after the terrible pangs of childbirth.
