“This woman,” he cried, “is the king’s own favourite, and if any harm come to a lock of her hair, I tell you that there is not a living soul within this portcullis who will not die a death of torture.  Fools, will you gasp out your lives upon the rack, or writhe in boiling oil, at the bidding of this madman?”

“Who are these men, Marceau?” cried the seigneur furiously.

“They are prisoners, your excellency.”

“Prisoners!  Whose prisoners?”

“Yours, your excellency.”

“Who ordered you to detain them?”

“You did.  The escort brought your signet-ring.”

“I never saw the men.  There is devilry in this.  But they shall not beard me in my own castle, nor stand between me and my own wife.  No, par dieu! they shall not and live!  You men, Marceau, Etienne, Gilbert, Jean, Pierre, all you who have eaten my bread, on to them, I say!”

He glanced round with furious eyes, but they fell only upon hung heads and averted faces.  With a hideous curse he flashed out his sword and rushed at his wife, who knelt half insensible beside the block.  De Catinat sprang between them to protect her; but Marceau, the bearded seneschal, had already seized his master round the waist.  With the strength of a maniac, his teeth clenched and the foam churning from the corners of his lips, De Montespan writhed round in the man’s grasp, and shortening his sword, he thrust it through the brown beard and deep into the throat behind it.  Marceau fell back with a choking cry, the blood bubbling from his mouth and his wound; but before his murderer could disengage his weapon, De Catinat and the American, aided by a dozen of the retainers, had dragged him down on to the scaffold, and Amos Green had pinioned him so securely that he could but move his eyes and his lips, with which he lay glaring and spitting at them.  So savage were his own followers against him—­for Marceau was well loved amongst them—­ that, with axe and block so ready, justice might very swiftly have had her way, had not a long clear bugle-call, rising and falling in a thousand little twirls and flourishes, clanged out suddenly in the still morning air.  De Catinat pricked up his ears at the sound of it like a hound at the huntsman’s call.

“Did you hear, Amos?”

“It was a trumpet.”

“It was the guards’ bugle-call.  You, there, hasten to the gate!  Throw up the portcullis and drop the drawbridge!  Stir yourselves, or even now you may suffer for your master’s sins!  It has been a narrow escape, Amos!”

“You may say so, friend.  I saw him put out his hand to her hair, even as you sprang from the window.  Another instant and he would have had her scalped.  But she is a fair woman, the fairest that ever my eyes rested upon, and it is not fit that she should kneel here upon these boards.”  He dragged her husband’s long black cloak from him, and made a pillow for the senseless woman with a tenderness and delicacy which came strangely from a man of his build and bearing.