And now I come to an affair of which there have been many accounts written, some of them within a mile or two of the truth, the most but sheer romantics. I have in my mind notably the account of the officer Buhot printed two years after the events in question, in which he makes the most fabulous statement as to the valiancy of Father Hamilton's stand in the private house in the Rue des Reservoirs, and maintains that myself—le fier Eccossais, as he is flattering enough to designate me—drew my sword upon himself and threatened to run him through for his proposition that I should confess to a complicity in the attempt upon his Royal Highness. I have seen his statement reproduced with some extra ornament in the Edinburgh Courant, and the result of all this is that till this day my neighbours give me credit, of which I am loth to advantage myself, for having felled two or three of the French officers before I was overcome at the hinder-end.

The matter is, in truth, more prosaic as it happened, and if these memorials of mine leave the shadow of a doubt in the minds of any interested in an old story that created some stir in its time, I pray them see the archives of M. Bertin, the late Lieut.-General of the police. Bertin was no particular friend of mine, that had been the unconscious cause of great trouble and annoyance to him, but he has the truth in the deposition I made and signed prior to my appointment to a company of the d'Auvergne regiment.

Well, to take matters in their right order, it was the evening of the day I had given the letter to the Prince that Father Hamilton expressed his intention of passing that night in the house of a friend.

I looked at him with manifest surprise, for he had been at the bottle most of the afternoon, and was by now more in a state for his bed than for going among friends.

“Well,” he cried peevishly, observing my dubiety. “Do you think me too drunk for the society of a parcel of priests? Ma foi! it is a pretty thing that I cannot budge from my ordinary habitude of things without a stuck owl setting up a silent protest.”

To a speech so wanting in dignity I felt it better there should be no reply, and instead I helped him into his great-coat. As I did so, he made an awkward lurching movement due to his corpulence, and what jumped out of an inner pocket but a pistol? Which of us was the more confused at that it would be hard to say. For my part, the weapon—that I had never seen in his possession before—was a fillip to my sleeping conscience; I picked it up with a distaste, and he took it from me with trembling fingers and an averted look.

“A dangerous place, Versailles, after dark,” he explained feebly. “One never knows, one never knows,” and into his pocket hurriedly with it.

“I shall be back for breakfast,” he went on. “Unless—unless—oh, I certainly shall be back.” And off he set.

The incident of the pistol disturbed me for a while. I made a score of speculations as to why a fat priest should burden himself with such an article, and finally concluded that it was as he suggested, to defend himself from night birds if danger offered; though that at the time had been the last thing I myself would have looked for in the well-ordered town of Versailles. I sat in the common-room or salle of the inn for a while after he had gone, and thereafter retired to my own bedchamber, meaning to read or write for an hour or two before going to bed. In the priest's room—which was on the same landing and next to my own—I heard the whistle of Bernard the Swiss, but I had no letters for him that evening, and we did not meet each other. I was at first uncommon dull, feeling more than usually the hame-wae that must have been greatly wanting in the experience of my Uncle Andrew to make him for so long a wanderer on the face of the earth. But there is no condition of life so miserable but what one finds in it remissions, diversions, nay, and delights also, and soon I was—of all things in the world to be doing when what followed came to pass!—inditing a song to a lady, my quill scratching across the paper in spurts and dashes, and baffled pauses where the matter would not attend close enough on the mood, stopping altogether at a stanza's end to hum the stuff over to myself with great satisfaction. I was, as I say, in the midst of this; the Swiss had gone downstairs; all in my part of the house was still, though vehicles moved about in the courtyard, when unusually noisy footsteps sounded on the stair, with what seemed like the tap of scabbards on the treads.

It was a sound so strange that my hand flew by instinct to the small sword I was now in the habit of wearing and had learned some of the use of from Thurot.

There was no knock for entrance; the door was boldly opened and four officers with Buhot at their head were immediately in the room.

Buhot intimated in French that I was to consider myself under arrest, and repeated the same in indifferent English that there might be no mistake about a fact as patent as that the sword was in his hand.

For a moment I thought the consequence of my crime had followed me abroad, and that this squat, dark officer, watching me with the scrutiny of a forest animal, partly in a dread that my superior bulk should endanger himself, was in league with the law of my own country. That I should after all be dragged back in chains to a Scots gallows was a prospect unendurable; I put up the ridiculous small sword and dared him to lay a hand on me. But I had no sooner done so than its folly was apparent, and I laid the weapon down.

“Tant mieux!” said he, much relieved, and then an assurance that he knew I was a gentleman of discretion and would not make unnecessary trouble. “Indeed,” he went on, “Voyez! I take these men away; I have the infinite trust in Monsieur; Monsieur and I shall settle this little affair between us.”

And he sent his friends to the foot of the stair.

“Monsieur may compose himself,” he assured me with a profound inclination.

“I am very much obliged to you,” I said, seating myself on the corner of the table and crushing my poor verses into my pocket as I did so, “I am very much obliged to you, but I'm at a loss to understand to what I owe the honour.”

“Indeed!” he said, also seating himself on the table to show, I supposed, that he was on terms of confidence with his prisoner. “Monsieur is Father Hamilton's secretary?”

“So I believe,” I said; “at least I engaged for the office that's something of a sinecure, to tell the truth.”

And then Buhot told me a strange story.

He told me that Father Hamilton was now a prisoner, and on his way to the prison of BicÊtre. He was—this Buhot—something of the artist and loved to make his effects most telling (which accounts, no doubt, for the romantical nature of the accounts aforesaid), and sitting upon the table-edge he embarked upon a narrative of the most crowded two hours that had perhaps been in Father Hamilton's lifetime.

It seemed that when the priest had left the Cerf d'Or, he had gone to a place till recently called the Bureau des Carrosses pour la Rochelle, and now unoccupied save by a concierge, and the property of some person or persons unknown. There he had ensconced himself in the only habitable room and waited for a visitor regarding whom the concierge had his instructions.

“You must imagine him,” said the officer, always with the fastidiousness of an artist for his effects, “you must imagine him, Monsieur, sitting in this room, all alone, breathing hard, with a pistol before him on the table, and—”

“What! a pistol!” I cried, astounded and alarmed. “Certainement” said Buhot, charmed with the effect his dramatic narrative was creating. “Your friend, mon ami, would be little good, I fancy, with a rapier. Anyway, 'twas a pistol. A carriage drives up to the door; the priest rises to his feet with the pistol in his hand; there is the rap at the door. 'Entrez!' cries the priest, cocking the pistol, and no sooner was his visitor within than he pulled the trigger; the explosion rang through the dwelling; the chamber was full of smoke.”

“Good heavens!” I cried in horror, “and who was the unhappy wretch?”

Buhot shrugged his shoulders, made a French gesture with his hands, and pursed his mouth.

“Whom did you invite to the room at the hour of ten, M. Greig?” he asked.

“Invite!” I cried. “It's your humour to deal in parables. I declare to you I invited no one.”

“And yet, my good sir, you are Hamilton's secretary and you are Hamilton's envoy. 'Twas you handed to the Prince the poulet that was designed to bring him to his fate.”

My instinct grasped the situation in a second; I had been the ignorant tool of a madman; the whole events of the past week made the fact plain, and I was for the moment stunned.

Buhot watched me closely, and not unkindly, I can well believe, from what I can recall of our interview and all that followed after it.

“And you tell me he killed the Prince?” I cried at last.

“No, Monsieur,” said Buhot; “I am happy to say he did not. The Prince was better advised than to accept the invitation you sent to him.”

“Still,” I cried with remorse, “there's a man dead, and 'tis as much as happens when princes themselves are clay.”

“Parfaitement, Monsieur, though it is indiscreet to shout it here. Luckily there is no one at all dead in this case, otherwise it had been myself, for I was the man who entered to the priest and received his pistol fire. It was not the merriest of duties either,” he went on, always determined I should lose no iota of the drama, “for the priest might have discovered before I got there that the balls of his pistol had been abstracted.”

“Then Father Hamilton has been under watch?”

“Since ever you set foot in Versailles last Friday,” said Buhot complacently. “The Damiens affair has sharpened our wits, I warrant you.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “let me protest that I have been till this moment in utter darkness about Hamilton's character or plans. I took him for what he seemed—a genial buffoon of a kind with more gear than guidance.”

“We cannot, with infinite regret, assume that, Monsieur, but personally I would venture a suggestion,” said Buhot, coming closer on the table and assuming an affable air. “In this business, Hamilton is a tool—no more; and a poor one at that, badly wanting the grindstone. To break him—phew!—'twere as easy as to break a glass, but he is one of a great movement and the man we seek is his master—one Father Fleuriau of the Jesuits. Hamilton's travels were but part of a great scheme that has sent half a dozen of his kind chasing the Prince in the past year or two from Paris to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Orleans, from Orleans to Hamburg, Seville, Lisbon, Rome, Brussels, Potsdam, Nuremburg, Berlin. The same hand that extracted his bullets tapped the priest's portfolio and found the wretch was in promise of a bishopric and a great sum of money. You see, M. Greig, I am curiously frank with my prisoner.”

“And no doubt you have your reasons,” said I, but beat, myself, to imagine what they could be save that he might have proofs of my innocence.

“Very well,” said M. Buhot. “To come to the point, it is this, that we desire to have the scheme of the Jesuits for the Prince's assassination, and other atrocities shocking to all that revere the divinity of princes, crumbled up. Father Hamilton is at the very roots of the secret; if, say, a gentleman so much in his confidence as yourself—now, if such a one were, say, to share a cell with this regicide for a night or two, and pursue judicious inquiries——”

“Stop! stop!” I cried, my blood hammering in my head, and the words like to choke me. “Am I to understand that you would make me your spy and informer upon this miserable old madman that has led me such a gowk's errand?”

Buhot slid back off the table edge and on to his feet. “Oh,” said he, “the terms are not happily chosen: 'spy'—'informer'—come, Monsieur Greig; this man is in all but the actual accomplishment of his purpose an assassin. 'Tis the duty of every honest man to help in discovering the band of murderers whose tool he has been.”

“Then I'm no honest man, M. Buhot,” said I bitterly, “for I've no stomach for a duty so dirty.”

“Think of it for a moment,” he pressed, with evident surprise at my decision. “BicÊtre is an unwholesome hostelry, I give you my word. Consider that your choice is between a night or two there and—who knows?—a lifetime of Galbanon that is infinitely worse.”

“Then let it be Galbanon!” I said, and lifted my sword and slapped it furiously, sheathed as it was, like a switch upon the table.

Buhot leaped back in a fear that I was to attack him, and cried his men from the stair foot.

“This force is not needed at all,” I said. “I am innocent enough to be prepared to go quietly.”