The servant fled up the stairs.

“This man is not dead, my friend,” said the Marquis du Plessy.

Skenedonk knew it.

“But he will not live long in this cursed crypt,” the noble added.  “You will get into my carriage with him, we will take him and put him in hot sheets, and see what we can do for him.”

I could feel Skenedonk’s antagonism giving way in the relaxing of his muscles.

But maintaining his position the Oneida asserted: 

“He is not yours!”

“He belongs to France.”

“France belongs to him!” the Indian reversed.

“Eh, eh!  Who is this young man?”

“The king.”

“We have no king now, my friend.  But assuming there is a man who should be king, how do you know this is the one?”

If Skenedonk made answer in words it was lost to me.  The spirit sank to submergence in the body, I remember combating motion like a drugged person.

Torpor and prostration followed the recurring eclipse as that followed excitement and shock.  I was not ill; and gathered knowledge of the environment, which was different from anything I had before experienced.  De Chaumont’s manor was a wilderness fortress compared to this private hotel of an ancient family in the heart of Paris.

I lay in a bed curtained with damask, and looked through open glass doors at a garden.  Graveled walks, bosky trees and masses of flowers, plats of grass where arbored seats were placed, stretched their vista to a wall clothed in ivy, which proved to be the end of a chapel.  For high over the curtain of thick green shone a rose window.  The afternoon sun laid bare its fine staining, but only in the darkness when the church was illuminated and organ music rolled from it, did the soul of that window appear struck through with light.

Strange servants and Doctor Chantry by glimpses, and the old noble and the Oneida almost constantly, were about me.  Doctor Chantry looked complacently through the curtains and wished me good-morning.  I smiled to see that he was lodged as he desired, and that his clothes had been renewed in fine cloth, with lawn to his neck and silk stockings for his shrunk calves.  My master was an elderly beau; and I gave myself no care that he had spent his money—­the money of the expedition—­on foppery.

Skenedonk also had new toggery in scarfs and trinkets which I did not recognize, and his fine buckskins were cleaned.  The lackeys appeared subservient to him, and his native dignity was never more impressive than in that great house.  I watched my host and my servant holding interviews, which Skenedonk may have considered councils, on the benches in the garden, and from which my secretary, the sick old woman, seemed excluded.  But the small interest of seeing birds arrive on branches, and depart again, sufficed me; until an hour when life rose strongly.

I sat up in bed, and finding myself alone, took advantage of an adjoining room where a marble bath was set in the floor.  Returning freshened from the plunge, with my sheet drawn around me, I found one of those skilled and gentle valets who seem less men than he-maids.