I'll nail it over his own gate."
"It is not worth your fret, monsieur," Lucas said lightly. "If you did,
how long would it avail? _Souvent homme trahie_; that is the only fixed
fact about him. If they pass St. Quentin to-day, they will pass some one
else to-morrow, and some one else still the day after."
Mayenne looked at him, half angry, half startled into some deeper
emotion at this deft twisting of his own words.
"Souvent homme trahie,
Mal habile qui s'y fie,"
he repeated musingly. He might have been saying over the motto of the
house of Lorraine. For the Guises believed in no man's good faith, as no
man believed in theirs.
"_Souvent homme trahie_," Mayenne said again, as if in the words he
recognized a bitter verity. "And that is as true as King Francis's
version. I suppose you will be the next, Paul."
"When I give up hope of Lorance," Lucas said bluntly.
I caught myself suddenly pitying the two of them: Mayenne, because, for
all his power and splendour and rank next to a king's and ability second
to none, he dared trust no man--not the son of his body, not his
brother. He had made his own hell and dwelt in it, and there was no need
to wish him any ill. And Lucas, perjured traitor, was farther from the
goal of his desire than if we had slain him in the Rue Coupejarrets.
"What next? It appears you escaped the redoubted Vigo," Mayenne went on
in his every-day tone; and the vision faded, and I saw him once more as
the greatest noble and greatest scoundrel in France, and feared and
hated him, and Lucas too, as the betrayer of my dear lord Etienne.
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