"Did I not bid you stop?" she blazed, her face white, her eyes on fire; and raising the whip she brought it down upon his head and shoulders, not once but half-a-dozen times in quick succession, until he fled, howling, to the other side of the horse trough for shelter. "It stings you, does it" she cried, whilst the Marquis, from angered that at first he had been, now burst into a laugh at her fury and at this turning of tables upon the executioner. She made shift to pursue the fellow to his place of refuge, but coming of a sudden upon the ghastly sight presented by La Boulaye's lacerated back, she drew back in horror. Then, mastering herself - for girl though she was, her courage was of a high order - she turned to her father.
"Give this man to me, Monsieur," she begged.
"To you!" he exclaimed. "What will you do with him?"
"I will see that you are rid of him," she promised. "What more can you desire? You have tortured him enough."
"Maybe. But am I to blame that he dies so hard?"
She answered him with renewed insistence, and unexpectedly she received an ally in M. des Cadoux - an elderly gentleman who had been observing the flogging with disapproval, and who had followed her into the courtyard.
"He is too brave a man to die like this, Bellecour," put in the newcomer. "I doubt if he can survive the punishment he has already received. Yet I would ask you, in the name of courage, to give him the slender chance he may have."
"I promised him he should be flogged to death - " began the Marquis, when Des Cadoux and Mademoiselle jointly interrupted him to renew their intercessions.
"But, sangdieu," the Marquis protested "you seem to forget that he has killed one of my servants."
"Why, then, you should have hanged him out of hand, not tortured him thus," answered Des Cadoux shortly.
For a moment it almost seemed as if the pair of them would have fallen a-quarrelling. Their words grew more heated, and then, while they were still wrangling, the executioner came forward to solve matters with the news that the secretary had expired. To Bellecour this proved a very welcome conclusion.
"Most opportunely!" he laughed "Had the rascal lived another minute I think we had quarrelled, Cadoux." He turned to the servant, "You are certain that it is so?" he asked.
"Look, Monsieur," said the fellow, as he pointed with his whip to the pilloried figure of La Boulaye. The Marquis looked, and saw that the secretary had collapsed, and hung limp in his bonds, his head fallen back upon his shoulders and his eyes closed.
With a shrug and a short laugh Bellecour turned to his daughter.
"You may take the carrion, if you want to. But I think you can do no more than order it to be flung into a ditch and buried there."
But she had no mind to be advised by him. She had the young man's body cut down from the pump, and she bade a couple of servants convey it to the house of Master Duhamel, she for remembered that La Boulaye and the old pedagogue were friends.
"An odd thing is a woman's heart," grumbled the Marquis, who begrudged La Boulaye even his last act of mercy. "She may care never a fig for a man, and yet, if he has but told her that he loves her, be he never so mean and she never so exalted, he seems thereby to establish some measure of claim to her."