Seeing that the neighborhood was vacant of all occupants, the hunchback advanced to the Inn, and, seating himself at a table under one of the little arbors, drummed lustily with his clinched fist upon the board. In answer to this summons the landlord appeared hurriedly at the door—such a man as had evidently been destined by heaven to play the part of landlord of a wayside inn.

He advanced and questioned his guest obsequiously: "Your honor wants—"

The hunchback answered him, roughly: "Wine, good wine. If you bring me sour runnings I’ll break your head."

The landlord bowed with a dipping upward projection of apologetic hands. "Your honor shall have my best."

The landlord went back into the Inn, and the hunchback sprawled at his ease, tilting back his chair and resting his lean, black legs on the table. He sat thus wise for some little time, blinking under the shadow of his large, black hat at the pleasant sunlight and the pleasant grasses about him with something of the sour air of one to whom such pleasant things meant little. But presently his careless eyes, that might almost have seemed to be asleep, so much were the lids lowered, suddenly grew alert again. A man appeared on the bridge—a lank, lean, yellow-skinned man, with a face that seemed carved out of old ivory, with furtive eyes and a fawning mouth. The new-comer was gorgeously, over-gorgeously, dressed, and his every movement affected the manners of a grand seigneur. He carried a tall cane with a jewelled knob, on which his left hand rested affectionately, as if it pleased him, even in this form, to handle and control costly things. Precious laces extravagantly lapped his unattractive hands. A sword with a jewelled hilt hung from his side. The moment the new-comer saw the hunchback he hastened towards him, but the hunchback, for his part, for all his plain habit, showed no deference to the splendidly dressed gentleman who saluted him. He remained in his easy, sprawling attitude, his chair still tilted back, his thin legs still lolling on the table. The magnificent gentleman addressed him with a certain air of condescension in his voice:

"Good-morning, Æsop. You are punctual. A merit."

Æsop, without rising or showing any deference in his manner, answered with a scarcely veiled note of insolence in his voice: "Good-morning, Monsieur Peyrolles. You are not punctual. A defect. Sit down."

Peyrolles, apparently somewhat dashed by the coolness of his reception, obeyed the injunction of the hunchback and seated himself, but he still forced the show of condescension into his manner and strove to maintain it in his voice as he continued the conversation. "Though it’s—let me see—why, it’s seventeen years since we met—I knew you at once."

Æsop grunted: "Well, I knew you at once, if it comes to that, though the time was no shorter."

Peyrolles smiled awkwardly. "You haven’t changed," he observed.

Æsop’s eyes travelled with a careful and contemptuous scrutiny over the person of his old employer. "You have. You didn’t wear quite such fine clothes when I saw you last, my friend. What luck it is to have a master who makes a rich marriage!"

As he said these words the landlord emerged from the Inn with a tray in his hands that bore a bottle and glasses. As he approached, Æsop swung his legs off the table and resumed the ordinary attitude of a feaster. The landlord placed the tray on the table, thankfully accepted Æsop’s money, and with many salutations returned to the shelter of the Inn. Æsop filled two glasses with a shining white wine and pushed one to Peyrolles. "Drink!" he said, gruffly.

Peyrolles waved his yellow fingers in polite refusal. "I thank you. No."

In a second Æsop had sprung to his feet angrily, and, leaning over the table, thrust his own twisted visage close to the yellow mask in front of him. "Damn you!" he screamed—"damn you! are you too proud to drink with a man who has travelled all the way from Madrid on your dirty business? Let me tell you—"

The man’s attitude of menace, the man’s violent words, clearly alarmed Monsieur Peyrolles, who interrupted him nervously with a voice quavering with protestation: "No, no, you need not. Of course, not too proud. Delighted."

Æsop dropped into his seat again. "That’s better. Your health." He lifted the glass to his lips as he spoke and slowly drained it. There was no sound of solicitation for his companion’s welfare in his words, there was no expression of pleasure on his face as he did so. He took the good wine as he took all bright and kindly things, sourly.

Peyrolles hastened to follow the example of his pledge. "Your health," he said, and sipped diffidently at the wine, and then, finding it agreeable, finished it.

There was a little pause, and then Æsop spoke again.

"Seventeen years," he murmured, with a chuckle—"seventeen years since we last met, on the morning, as I remember, after the little mishap in the moat of Caylus."

Peyrolles shivered, and seemed uneasy. Æsop paid no heed to his evident discomfort.

"What a wild-goose chase you sent us all on, I and Staupitz and the others—flying into Spain to find Lagardere and the child. The others hunted for him, as I suppose you know, with the results which, also, I suppose you know."

Peyrolles nodded feebly. His yellow face was several tinges yellower, his teeth seemed to threaten to chatter, and he looked very unhappy. His voice was grave as he spoke: "Those who did find him were not fortunate." Æsop laughed.

"They were fools," he asserted. "Well, for my part, I said to myself that the wise course for me to follow was not to waste my strength, my energy, and my breath in chasing Lagardere all over a peninsula, but to wait quietly for Lagardere to come to me. Madrid, I reasoned, is the centre of Spain; everyone in Spain comes to Madrid sooner or later; ergo, sooner or later Lagardere will come to Madrid."

"Well, did he?" Peyrolles asked, forcing himself to give tongue, and eying the hunchback dubiously. He found Æsop too humorous for his fancy. Æsop grinned like a monkey whose nuts have been filched.

"No," he said—"no, not as yet, to my knowledge, or he would be dead. But I have a conviction that our paths will cross one day, and when that day comes you may be sorry for Lagardere if your heart is inclined to be pitiful."

The unpleasant expression on Monsieur Peyrolles’s face whenever the name of Lagardere was mentioned now deepened sufficiently to make it quite plain that he cherished no such inclination. Æsop went on:

"He proved himself a pretty good swordsman on the night of the—shall we say altercation?—and he certainly succeeded in persuading me that there was something to be said for those secret thrusts that I treated too lightly. When I first met Lagardere I knew all that Italy and all that France could teach me of sword-play. Now I know all that Spain can teach. I tell you, friend Peyrolles, I think I am the best swordsman alive."

Peyrolles did not at all like to be hailed as friend in this familiar manner by the hunchback, but he had his reasons for mastering his feelings, and he showed no signs of distaste. Perhaps he had begun to realize that Æsop would not mind in the least if he did manifest displeasure.

"Now, finding myself in Madrid," Æsop resumed, "and not being inclined to follow the foolish example of my companions, which led each of them in turn to you know what, I cast about to make myself comfortable in Madrid. I soon found a way. I set up an excellent bagnio; I lured rich youths to the altars and alcoves of play and pleasure. I made a great deal of money, and enjoyed myself very much incidentally. It is always a pleasure to me to see straight, smooth, suave men killing themselves with sweet sins."

The expression of his face was so hideous, as he spoke in his demoniacal air of triumph over those that were less afflicted than himself, that Peyrolles, who was not at all squeamish, shuddered uncomfortably. Æsop seemed for a while to be absorbed in soothing memories, but presently he made an end of rubbing his hands together silently, and resumed his speech:

"It was all in the way of my ancient and honorable trade to have no small traffic with pretty women and the friends of pretty women and the parents of pretty women. And it was this part of my trade which put the idea into my head which prompted me to write to you, friend Peyrolles, and which persuaded me to uproot myself from my comfortable house and my responsive doxies, and jog all the way from Madrid to Paris."

The sense of what he had sacrificed in making the journey seemed suddenly to gall him, for he glared ferociously at Peyrolles, and said, sharply: "Here have I been talking myself dry while you sit mumchance. Tell me some tale for a change. Why in the name of the ancient devil did Nevers’s widow marry Gonzague?"

Peyrolles laughed feebly. "Love, I suppose."

Æsop waved the suggestion away. "Don’t talk like a fool. I expect old Caylus made her. He was a grim old chip, after my own heart, and our widow had no friends. Oh yes; I expect daddy Caylus made her marry Gonzague. What a joke!—what an exquisite joke!"

Peyrolles replied, with attempted dignity: "You didn’t travel all the way from Madrid to talk about my master’s marriage, I suppose."

In a moment Æsop’s manner became ferocious again. Again he thrust forward his seamed, malicious face, and again the yellow mask drew back from it. "You are right, I did not. I came because I am tired of Spain, because I lust for Paris, because I desire to enter the service of his Highness Prince Louis de Gonzague, to whom I am about to render a very great service."

Peyrolles looked at him thoughtfully, the yellow mask wrinkled with dubiety. "Are you serious about this service?" he asked. "Can you really perform what your letter seemed to promise?"

"I should not have travelled all this way if I did not know what I was about," Æsop growled. "I think it matters little if I have lost Lagardere if I have found the daughter of Nevers."

Peyrolles was thoroughly interested, and leaned eagerly across the table. "Then you think you have found her?"

Æsop grinned at him maliciously. "As good as found her. I have found a girl who may be—come, let’s put a bold face on it and say must be—Nevers’s daughter. I told you so much in my letter."

Peyrolles now drew back again with a cautious look on his face as he answered, cautiously: "My master, Prince Gonzague, must be satisfied. Where is this girl?"

Æsop continued: "Here. I found her in Madrid, the dancing-girl of a band of gypsies. She is the right age. The girl is clever, she is comely, her hair is of the Nevers shade, her color of the Nevers tint. She is, by good-fortune, still chaste, for when I first began to think of this scheme the minx was little more than a child, and the gypsies, who were willing to do my bidding, kept her clean for my need. Oh, she has been well prepared, I promise you! She has been taught to believe that she was stolen from her parents in her babyhood, and will meet any fable half-way. She will make a most presentable heiress to the gentleman we killed at Caylus—"

Peyrolles agitated his yellow hands deprecatingly. He did not like the revival of unpleasant memories. "My good friend!" he protested.

Æsop eyed him with disdain. "Well, we did kill him, didn’t we? You don’t want to pretend that he’s alive now, after that jab in the back your master gave him fifteen years ago?"

Peyrolles wriggled on his chair in an agony of discomfort. "Hush, for Heaven’s sake! Don’t talk like that!"

Æsop slapped the table till the glasses rang. "I’ll talk as I please."

Peyrolles saw it was useless to argue with the hunchback, and submitted. "Yes, yes; but let bygones be bygones. About this girl?"

Æsop resumed his narrative. "I sent her and her tribe Franceward from Madrid. I didn’t accompany them, for I’m not fond of companionship; but I told them to wait me here, and here they are. What place could be more excellent? All sorts of vagabonds come hither from all parts of the world at fair-time. How natural that your admirable master should amuse his leisure by visiting the fair, and in so diverting himself be struck by a beautiful gypsy girl’s resemblance to the features of his dear dead friend! It is all a romance, friend Peyrolles, and a very good romance. And I, Æsop, made it."

The hunchback struck an attitude as he spoke, and strove to twist his evil countenance into a look of inspiration.

Peyrolles was all eagerness now. "Let me see the girl," he pleaded.

Æsop shook his head. "By-and-by. It is understood that if Gonzague accepts the girl as Nevers’s child he takes me into his service in Paris. Eh?"

Peyrolles nodded. "That is understood."

Æsop yawned on the conclusion of the bargain. "Curse me if I see why he wants the child when he has got the mother."

Peyrolles again neared, and spoke with a lowered voice: "I can be frank with you, master Æsop?"

"It’s the best plan," Æsop growled.