OpportunityThat work'st our thoughts into desires, desiresTo resolutions,
OpportunityThat work'st our thoughts into desires, desiresTo resolutions,
kindled in him a burning impatience to act. If he did not act, if he were not going to act, if he were not going to take some surer and safer step, he had been foolish and trebly foolish to let slip the opportunity that had been his.
But he would act. For a fortnight he had abstained from visiting Basterga, and had even absented himself from the neighbourhood of the house lest the scholar's suspicions should be wakened. But to what purpose if he were not going to act? If he were not going to build on the ground so carefully prepared, to what end this wariness and this abstention?
Within an hour the Syndic, long so wary, had worked himself into a fever and, rather than remain inactive, was ripe for any step, however venturesome, provided it led to theremedium. He had still the prudence to postpone action until night; but when darkness had fairly set in and the bell of St. Peter, inviting the townsfolk to the evening preaching, had ceased to sound—an indication that he would meet few in the streets—he cloaked himself, and, issuing forth, bent his steps across the Bourg du Four in the direction of the Corraterie.
Even now he had no plan in his mind. But amid the medley of schemes that for a week had been hatching in his brain, he hoped to be guided by circumstances tothat one which gave surest promise of success. Nor was his courage as deeply rooted as he fancied: the day had told on his nerves; he shivered in the breeze and started at a sound. Yet as often as he paused or hesitated, the words "A dying man! A dying man!" rang in his ears and urged him on.
Messer Blondel'ssagacity in forbearing completely and for so long a period the neighbourhood of Basterga proved an unpleasant surprise to one man; and that was the man most concerned. For a day or two the scholar lived in a fool's paradise, and hugging himself on certain success, anticipated with confidence the entertainment which he would derive from the antics of the fish as it played about the bait, now advancing and now retreating. He had formed a low opinion of the magistrate's astuteness, and forgetting that there is a cunning which is rudimentary and of the primitives, he entertained for some time no misgiving. But when day after day passed by and still, though more than a week had elapsed, Blondel did not appear, nor make any overture, when, watch he never so carefully in the dusk of the evening or at the quiet hours of the day, he caught no glimpse of the Syndic's lurking figure, he began to doubt. He began to fear. He began to wait about the door himself in the hope of detecting the other: and a dozen times between dawn and dark he was on his feet at the upper window, looking warily down, on the chance of seeing him in the Corraterie.
At last, slowly and against his will, the fear that the fish would not bite began to take hold of him. Either the Syndic was honest, or he was patient as well as cunning. In no other way could Basterga explain hisdupe's inaction. And presently, when he had almost brought himself to accept the former conclusion, on an evening something more than a week later, a thing happened that added sharpness to his anxiety. He was crossing the bridge from the Quarter of St. Gervais, when a man cloaked to the eyes slipped from the shadow of the mills, a little before him, and with a slight but unmistakable gesture of invitation proceeded in front of him without turning his head.
There was mist on the face of the river that rushed in a cataract below; a steady rain was falling, and darkness itself was not far off. There were few abroad, and those were going their ways without looking behind them. A better time for a secret rendezvous could not be, and Messer Basterga's heart leapt up and his spirits rose as he followed the cloaked figure. At the end of the bridge the man turned leftwards on to a deserted wharf between two mills; Basterga followed. Near the water's edge the projecting upper floor of a granary promised shelter from the rain; under this the stranger halted, and turning, lowered with a brusque gesture his cloak from his face. Alas, the eager "Why, Messer Blondel——" that leapt to Basterga's lips died on them. He stood speechless with disappointment, choking with chagrin. The stranger noted it and laughed.
"Well," he said in French, his tone dry and sarcastic, "you do not seem overpleased to see me, Monsieur Basterga! Nor am I surprised. Large promises have ever small fulfilments!"
"His Highness has discovered that?" Basterga replied, in a tone no less sarcastic. For his temper was roused.
The stranger's eyes flickered, as if the other's words touched a sore. "His Highness is growing impatient!" he returned, his tone somewhat warmer. "That is whathe has sent me to say. He has waited long, and he bids me convey to you that if he is to wait longer he must have some security that you are likely to succeed in your design."
"Or he will employ other means?"
"Precisely. Had he followed my advice," the stranger continued with an air of lofty arrogance, "he would have done so long ago."
"M. d'Albigny," Basterga answered, spreading out his hands with an ironical gesture, "would prefer to dig mines under the Tour du Pin near the College, and under the Porte Neuve! To smuggle fireworks into the Arsenal and the Town House; and then, on the eve of execution, to fail as utterly as he failed last time! More utterly than my plan can fail, for I shall not put Geneva on its guard—as he did! Nor set every enemy of the Grand Duke talking—as he did!"
M. d'Albigny—for he it was—let drop an oath. "Are you doing anything at all?" he asked savagely, dropping the thin veil of irony that shrouded his temper. "That is the question. Are you moving?"
"That will appear."
"When? When, man? That is what his Highness wants to know. At present there is no appearance of anything."
"No," Basterga replied with fine irony. "There is not. I know it. It is only when the fireworks are discovered and the mines opened and the engineers are flying for their lives—that there is really an appearance of something."
"And that is the answer I am to carry to the Grand Duke?" d'Albigny retorted in a tone which betrayed how deeply he resented such taunts at the lips of his inferior. "That is all you have to tell him?"
Basterga was silent awhile. When he spoke again, itwas in a lower and more cautious tone. "No; you may tell his Highness this," he said, after glancing warily behind him. "You may tell him this. The longest night in the year is approaching. Not many weeks divide us from it. Let him give me until that night. Then let him bring his troops and ladders and the rest of it—the care whereof is your lordship's, not mine—to a part of the walls which I will indicate, and he shall find the guards withdrawn, and Geneva at his feet."
"The longest night? But that is some weeks distant," d'Albigny answered in a grumbling tone. Still it was evident that he was impressed by the precision of the other's promise.
"Was Rome built in a day? Or can Geneva be destroyed in a day?" Basterga retorted.
"If I had my hand on it!" d'Albigny answered truculently, "the task would not take more than a day!" He was a Southern Frenchman and an ardent Catholic; an officer of high rank in the employ of Savoy; for the rest, proud, brave, and difficult.
"Ay, but you have not your hand on it, M. d'Albigny!" Basterga retorted coolly. "Nor will you ever have your hand on it, without help from me."
"And that is all you have to say?"
"At present."
"Very good," d'Albigny replied, nodding contemptuously. "If his Highness be wise——"
"He is wise. At least," Basterga continued drily, "he is wiser than M. d'Albigny. He knows that it is better to wait and win, than leap and lose."
"But what of the discontented you were to bring to a head?" d'Albigny retorted, remembering with relief another head of complaint, on which he had been charged to deliver himself. "The old soldiers and rufflers whomthe peace has left unemployed, and with whom the man Grio was to aid you? Surely waiting will not help you with them! There should be some in Geneva who like not the rule of the Pastors and the drone of psalms and hymns! Men who, if I know them, must be on fire for a change! Come, Monsieur Basterga, is no use to be made of them?"
"Ay," Basterga answered, after stepping back a pace to assure himself by a careful look that no one was remarking a colloquy which the time and the weather rendered suspicious. "Use them if you please. Let them drink and swear and raise petty riots, and keep the Syndics on their guard! It is all they are good for, M. d'Albigny; and I cannot say that aught keeps back the cause so much as Grio's friends and their line of conduct!"
"So! that is your opinion, is it, Monsieur Basterga?" d'Albigny answered. "And with it I must go as I came! I am of no use here, it seems?"
"Of great use presently, of none now," Basterga replied with greater respect than he had hitherto exhibited. "Frankly, M. d'Albigny, they fear you and suspect you. But if President Rochette of Chambery, who has the confidence of the Pastors, were to visit us on some pretext or other, say to settle such small matters as the peace has left in doubt, it might soothe their spirits and allay their suspicions. He, rather than M. d'Albigny, is the helper I need at present."
D'Albigny grunted, but it was evident that the other's boldness impressed him. "You think, then, that they suspect us?" he said.
"How should they not? Tell me that. How should they not? Rochette's task must be to lull those suspicions to sleep. In the meantime I——"
"Yes?"
"Will be at work," Basterga replied. He laugheddrily as if it pleased him to baulk the other's curiosity. Softly he added under his breath,
"Captique dolis, lacrimisque coactis,Quos neque Tydides, nec Larrissæus AchillesNon anni domuere decem, non mille carinæ!
"Captique dolis, lacrimisque coactis,Quos neque Tydides, nec Larrissæus AchillesNon anni domuere decem, non mille carinæ!
D'Albigny nodded. "Well, I trust you are really counting on something solid," he answered. "For you are taking a great deal upon yourself, Monsieur Basterga. I hope you understand that," he added with a searching look.
"I take all on myself," the big man answered.
The Frenchman was far from content, but he argued no more. He reflected a moment, considering whether he had forgotten anything: then, muttering that he would convey Basterga's views to the Grand Duke, he pulled his cloak more closely about his face, and with a curt nod of farewell, he turned on his heel and was gone. A moment, and he was lost to sight between the wooden mills and sheds which flanked the bridge on either side, and rendered it at once as narrow and as picturesque as were most of the bridges of the day. Basterga, left solitary, waited a while before he left his shelter. Satisfied at length that the coast was clear, he continued his way into the town, and thinking deeply as he went came presently to the Corraterie. It cannot be said that his meditations were of the most pleasant; and perhaps for this reason he walked slowly. When he entered the house, shaking the moisture from his cloak and cap, he found the others seated at table and well advanced in their meal. He was twenty minutes late.
He was a clever man. But at times, in moments of irritation, the sense of his cleverness and of his superiority to the mass of men led him to do the thing which he had better have left undone. It was so this evening.Face to face with d'Albigny, he had put a bold face on the difficulties which surrounded him: he had let no sign of doubt or uncertainty, no word of fear respecting the outcome escape him. But the moment he found himself at liberty, the critical situation of his affairs, if the Syndic refused to take the bait, recurred to his mind, and harassed him. He had noconfidante, no one to whom he could breathe his fears, no one to whom he could explain the situation, or with whom he could take credit for his coolness: and the curb of silence, while it exasperated his temper, augmented a hundredfold the contempt in which he held the unconscious companions among whom chance and his mission had thrown him. A spiteful desire to show that contempt sparkled in his eyes as he took his seat at the table this evening; but for a minute or two after he had begun his meal he kept silence.
On a mind such as his, outward things have small effect; otherwise the cheerful homeliness of the scene must have soothed him. The lamp, telling of present autumn and approaching winter, had been lit: a wood-fire crackled pleasantly in the great fireplace and was reflected in rows of pewter plates on either dresser: a fragrant stew scented the air; all that a philosopher of the true type could have asked was at his service. But Basterga belonged rather to the fifteenth century, the century of the south, which was expiring, than to the century of the north which was opening. Splendour rather than comfort, the gorgeousness of Venice, of red-haired dames, stiff-clad in Titian velvets, of tables gleaming with silk and gold and ruby glass, rather than the plain homeliness which Geneva shared with the Dutch cities, held his mind. To-night in particular his lip curled as he looked round. To-night in particular ill-pleased and ill-content he found the place and thecompany well matched, the one and the other mean and contemptible!
One there—Gentilis—marked the great man's mood, and, cringing, after his kind, kept his eyes low on his platter. Grio, too, knew enough to seek refuge in sullen silence. Claude alone, impatient of the constraint which descended on the party at the great man's coming, continued to talk in a raised voice. "Good soup to-night, Anne," he said cheerfully. For days past he had been using himself to speak to her easily and lightly, as if she were no more to him than to the others.
She did not answer—she seldom did. But "Good?" Basterga sneered in his most cutting tone. "Ay, for schoolboys! And such as have no palate save for pap!"
Claude being young took the thrust a little to heart. He returned it with a boy's impertinence. "We none of us grow thin on it," he said with a glance at the other's bulk.
Basterga's eyes gleamed. "Grease and dish-washings," he exclaimed. And then, as if he knew where he could most easily wound his antagonist, he turned to the girl.
"If Hebe had brought such liquor to Jupiter," he sneered, "do you think he had given her Hercules for a husband, as I shall presently give you Grio? Ha! You flush at the prospect, do you? You colour and tremble," he continued mockingly, "as if it were the wedding-day. You'll sleep little to-night, I see, for thinking of your Hercules!" With grim irony he pointed to his loutish companion, whose gross purple face seemed the coarser for the small peaked beard that, after the fashion of the day, adorned his lower lip. "Hercules, do I call him? Adonis rather."
"Why not Bacchus?" Claude muttered, his eyes on his plate. In spite of the strongest resolutions, he could not keep silence.
"Bacchus? And why, boy?" frowning darkly.
"He were better bestowed on a tun of wine," the youth retorted, without looking up.
"That you might take his place, I suppose?" Basterga retorted swiftly. "What say you, girl? Will you have him?" And when she did not answer, "Bread, do you hear?" he cried harshly and imperiously. "Bread, I say!" And having forced her to come within reach to serve him, "What do you say to it?" he continued, his hand on the trencher, his eyes on her face. "Answer me, girl, will you have him?"
She did not answer, but that which he had quite falsely attributed to her before, a blush, slowly and painfully darkened her cheeks and neck. He seized her brutally by the chin, and forced her to raise her face. "Blushing, I see?" he continued. "Blushing, blushing, eh? So it is for him you thrill, and lie awake, and dream of kisses, is it? For this new youth and not for Grio? Nay, struggle not! Wrest not yourself away! Let Grio, too, see you!"
Claude, his back to the scene, drove his nails into the palms of his hands. He would not turn. He would not, he dared not see what was passing, or how they were handling her, lest the fury in his breast sweep all away, and he rise up and disobey her! When a movement told him that Basterga had released her—with a last ugly taunt aimed as much at him as at her—he still sat bearing it, curbing, drilling, compelling himself to be silent. Ay, and still to be silent, though the voice that so cruelly wounded her was scarcely mute before it began again.
"Tissot, indeed!" Basterga cried in the same tone of bitter jeering. "A fig for Tissot! No more shall we
Upon his viler metal test our purest pure,And see him transmutations three endure!
Upon his viler metal test our purest pure,And see him transmutations three endure!
And why? Because a mightier than Tissot is here! Because," with a coarse laugh,
"Our stone angelical wherebyAll secret potencies to light are brought
"Our stone angelical wherebyAll secret potencies to light are brought
has itself suffered a transmutation! A transmutation do I say! Rather an eclipse, a darkening! He, whom matrons for their maidens fear, has come, has seen, has conquered! And we poor mortals bow before him."
Still Claude, his face burning, his ears tingling, put force upon himself and sat mute, his eyes on the board. He would not look round, he would not acknowledge what was passing. Basterga's tone conveyed a meaning coarser and more offensive than the words he spoke; and Claude knew it, and knew that the girl, at whom he dared not look knew it, as she stood helpless, a butt, a target for their gloating eyes. He would not look for he remembered. He saw the scalding liquid blister the skin, saw the rounded arm quiver with pain; and remembering and seeing, he was resolved that the lesson should not be lost on him. If it was only by suffering he could serve her, he would serve her.
He dared not look even at Gentilis, who sat opposite him; and who was staring in gross rapture at the girl's confusion, and the burning blushes, so long banished from her pale features. For to look at that mean mask of a man was the same thing as to strike! Unfortunately, as it happened, his silence and lack of spirit had a result which he had not foreseen. It encouraged the others to carry their brutality to greater and even greater lengths. Grio flung a gross jest in the girl's face: Basterga asked her mockingly how long she had loved. They got no answer; on which the big man asked his question again, his voice grown menacing; and still she would not answer. She had taken refuge from Grio's coarseness in the farthestcorner of the hearth: where stooping over a pot, she hid her burning face. Had they gone too far at last? So far, that in despair she had made up her mind to resist? Claude wondered. He hoped that they had.
Basterga, too, thought it possible; but he smiled wickedly, in the pride of his resources. He struck the table sharply with his knife-haft. "What?" he cried. "You don't answer me, girl? You withstand me, do you? To heel! To heel! Stand out in front of me, you jade, and answer me at once. There! Stand there! Do you hear?" With a mocking eye he indicated with his knife the spot that took his fancy.
She hesitated a moment, scarlet revolt in her face; she hesitated for a long moment; and the lad thought that surely the time had come. But then she obeyed. She obeyed! And at that Claude at last looked up; he could look up safely now for something, even as she obeyed, had put a bridle on his rage and given him control over it. That something was doubt. Why did she comply? Why obey, endure, suffer at this man's hands that which it was a shame a woman should suffer at any man's? What was his hold over her? What was his power? Was it possible, ah, was it possible that she had done anything to give him power? Was it possible——
"Stand there!" Basterga repeated, licking his lips. He was in a cruel temper: harassed himself, he would make some one suffer. "Remember who you are, wench, and where you are! And answer me! How long have you loved him?"
The face no longer burned: her blushes had sunk behind the mask of apathy, the pallid mask, hiding terror and the shame of her sex, which her face had worn before, which had become habitual to her. "I have not loved him," she answered in a low voice.
"Louder!"
"I have not loved him."
"You do not love him?"
"No." She did not look at Claude, but dully, mechanically, she stared straight before her.
Grio laughed boisterously. "A dose for young Hopeful!" he cried. "Ho! Ho! How do you feel now, Master Jackanapes?"
The big man smiled.
"Galle, quid insanis? inquit, Tua cura LycorisPerque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est!"
"Galle, quid insanis? inquit, Tua cura LycorisPerque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est!"
he murmured. He bowed ironically in Claude's direction. "The gentleman passes beyond the jurisdiction of the court," he said. "She will have none of him, it seems; nor we either! He is dismissed."
Claude, his eyes burning, shrugged his shoulders and did not budge. If they thought to rid themselves of him by this fooling they would learn their mistake. They wished him to go: the greater reason he should stay. A little thing—the sight of a small brown hand twitching painfully, while her face and all the rest of her was still and impassive, had expelled his doubts for the time—had driven all but love and pity and burning indignation from his breast. All but these, and the memory of her lesson and her will. He had promised and he must suffer.
Whether Basterga was deceived by his inaction, or of set purpose was minded to try how far they could go with him, the big man turned again to his victim. "With you, my girl," he said, "it is otherwise. The soup was bad, and you are mutinous. Two faults that must be paid for. There was something of this, I remember, when Tissot—our good Tissot, who amused us so much—first came. And we tamed you then. You paid forfeit, I think. You kissed Tissot, I think; or Tissot kissed you."
"No, it was I kissed her," Gentilis said with a smirk. "She chose me."
"Under compulsion," Basterga retorted drily. "Will you ransom her again?"
"Willingly! But it should be two this time," Gentilis said grinning. "Being for the second offence, a double——"
"Pain," quoth Basterga. "Very good. Do you hear, my girl? Go to Gentilis, and see you let him kiss you twice! And see we see and hear it. And have a care! Have a care! Or next time your modesty may not escape so easily! To him at once, and——"
"No!" The cry came from Claude. He was on his feet, his face on fire. "No!" he repeated passionately.
"No?"
"Not while I am here! Not under compulsion," the young man cried. "Shame on you!" He turned to the others, generous wrath in his face. "Shame on you to torture a woman so—a woman alone! And you three to one!"
Basterga's face grew dark. "You are right! We are three," he muttered, his hand slowly seeking a weapon in the corner behind him. "You speak truth there, we are three—to one! And——"
"You maybe twenty, I will not suffer it!" the lad cried gallantly. "You may be a hundred——"
But on that word, in the full tide of speech he stopped. His voice died as suddenly as it had been raised, he stammered, his whole bearing changed. He had met her eyes: he had read in them reproach, warning, rebuke. Too late he had remembered his promise.
The big man leaned forward. "What may we be?" he asked. "You were going, I think, to say that we might be—that we might be——"
But Claude did not answer. He was passing througha moment of such misery as he had never experienced. To give way to them now, to lower his flag before them after he had challenged them! To abandon her to them, to see her—oh, it was more than he could do, more than he could suffer! It was——
"Pray go on," Basterga sneered, "if you have not said your say. Do not think of us!"
Oh, bitter! But he remembered how the scalding liquor had fallen on the tender skin. "I have said it," he muttered hoarsely. "I have said it," and by a movement of his hand, pathetic enough had any understood it, he seemed to withdraw himself and his opposition.
But when, obedient to Basterga's eye, the girl moved to Gentilis' side and bent her cheek—which flamed, not by reason of Gentilis or the coming kisses, but of Claude's presence and his cry for her—he could not bear it. He could not stay and see it, though to go was to abandon her perhaps to worse treatment. He rose with a cry and snatched his cap, and tore open the door. With rage in his heart and their laughter, their mocking, triumphant laughter, in his ears, he sprang down the steps.
A coward! That was what he must seem to them. A coward's part, that was the part they had seen him play. Into the darkness, into the night, what mattered whither, when such fierce anger boiled within him? Such self-contempt. What mattered whither when he knew how he had failed! Ay, failed and played the Tissot! The Tissot and the weakling!
Hehurried along the ramparts in a rage with those whom he had left, in a still greater rage with himself. He had played the Tissot with a vengeance. He had flown at them in weak passion, he had recoiled as weakly, he had left them to call him coward. Now, even now, he was fleeing from them, and they were jeering at him. Ay, jeering at him; their laughter followed him, and burned his ears.
The rain that beat on his fevered face, the moist wind from the Rhone Valley below, could not wipe outthat—the defeat and the shame. The darkness through which he hurried could not hide it from his eyes. Thus had Tissot begun, flying out at them, fleeing from them, a thing of mingled fury and weakness. He knew how they had regarded Tissot. So they now regarded him.
And the girl? What shame lay on his manhood who had abandoned her, who had left her to be their sport! His rage boiled over as he thought of her, and with the rain-laden wind buffeting his brow he halted and made as if he would return. But to what end if she would not have his aid, to what end if she would not suffer him? With a furious gesture, he hurried on afresh, only to be arrested, by-and-by, at the corner of the ramparts near the Bourg du Four, by a dreadful thought. What if he had deceived himself? What if he had given back before them, not because she had willed it, not because she hadlooked at him, not in compliance with her wishes; but in face of the odds against him, and by virtue of some streak of cowardice latent in his nature? The more he thought of it, the more he doubted if she had looked at him; the more likely it seemed that the look had been a straw, at which his craven soul had grasped!
The thought maddened him. But it was too late to return, too late to undo his act. He must have left them a full half-hour. The town was growing quiet, the sound of the evening psalms was ceasing. The rustle of the wind among the branches covered the tread of the sentries as they walked the wall between the Porte Neuve and the Mint tower; only their harsh voices as they met midway and challenged came at intervals to his ears. It must be hard on ten o'clock. Or, no, there was the bell of St. Peter's proclaiming the half-hour after nine.
He was ashamed to return to the house, yet he must return; and by-and-by, reluctantly and doggedly, he set his face that way. The wind and rain had cooled his brow, but not his brain, and he was still in a fever of resentment and shame when his lagging feet brought him to the house. He passed it irresolutely once, unable to make up his mind to enter and face them. Then, cursing himself for a poltroon, he turned again and made for the door.
He was within half a dozen strides of it when a dark figure detached itself from the doorway, and stumbled down the steps. Its aim seemed to be to escape, and leaping to the conclusion that it was Gentilis, and that some trick was being prepared for him, Claude sprang forward. His hand shot out, he grasped the other's neck. His wrath blazed up.
"You rogue!" he said. "I'll teach you to lie in wait for me!" And shifting his grasp from the man's neck to his shoulder, he turned him round regardless of hisstruggles. As he did so the man's hat fell off. With amazement Claude recognised the features of the Syndic Blondel.
The young man's arm fell, and he stared, open-mouthed and aghast, the passion with which he had seized the stranger whelmed in astonishment.
The Syndic, on the other hand, behaved with a strange composure. Breathing rather quickly, but vouchsafing no word of explanation, he straightened the crumpled linen about his neck, and set right his coat. He was proceeding, still in silence, to pick up his hat, when Claude, anticipating the action, secured the hat and restored it to him.
"Thank you," he said. And then, stiffly, "Come with me," he continued.
He turned as he spoke and led the way to a spot at some distance from the house, yet within sight of the door; there he wheeled about. "I was coming to see you," he said, steadfastly confronting Claude. "Why have you not called upon me, young man, in accordance with the invitation I gave you?"
Claude stared. The Syndic's matter-of-factness and the ease with which he ignored what had just passed staggered him. Perhaps after all Blondel had come for this, and had been startled while waiting at the door by the quickness of his approach. "I—I had overlooked it," he murmured, trying to accept the situation.
"Then," the Syndic answered shrewdly, "I can see that you have not wanted anything."
"No."
"You lodge there?" Blondel continued, pointing to the house. "But I know you do. And keep late hours, I fear. You are not alone in the house, I think?"
"No," Claude replied; and on a sudden, as his mind went back to the house and those in it, there leapt into it the temptation to tell all to this man, a magistrate, andappeal to him in the girl's behalf. He could not speak to a more proper person, if he sought the city through; and here was the opportunity, brought unsought, to his door. But then he had not the girl's leave to speak; could he speak without her leave? He shifted his feet, and to gain time, "No," he said slowly, "there are two or three who lodge in the house."
"Is not the person with whom you quarrelled at the inn one of them?" the Syndic asked. "Eh? Is not he one?"
"Yes," Claude answered; and the recollection of the scene and of the support which the Syndic had given to Grio checked the impulse to speak. Perhaps after all the girl knew best.
"And a person of the name of Basterga, I think?"
Claude nodded. He dared not trust himself to speak now. Could it be that a whisper of what was passing in the house had reached the magistrates?
The Syndic coughed. He glanced from the distant door, now a mere blur in the obscurity, to his companion's face and back again to the door—of which he seemed reluctant to lose sight. For a moment he seemed at a loss how to proceed. When he did speak, after a long pause, it was in a dry curt tone. "It is about him I wish to hear something," he said. "I look to you as a good citizen to afford such information as the State requires. The matter is more important than you think. I ask you what you know of that man."
"Messer Basterga!"
"Yes."
Claude stared. "I know no good," he answered, more and more surprised. "I do not like him, Messer Syndic."
"But he is a learned man, I believe. He passes for such, does he not?"
"Yes."
"Yet you do not like him. Why?"
Claude's face burned. "He puts his learning to no good use," he blurted out. "He uses it to—to torture women. If I could tell you all—all, Messer Blondel," the young man continued, in growing excitement, "you would understand me better! He gains power over people, a strange power, and abuses it."
"Power? What do you mean? What kind of power?"
"God knows."
The Syndic stared a moment, his face expressive of contempt. This was not the line he had meant his questions to take. What did it matter to him how the man treated women? Pshaw! Then suddenly a light—as of satisfaction, or discovery—gleamed in his eyes. "Do you mean," he muttered, lowering his voice, "by sorcery?"
"God knows."
"By evil arts?"
The young man shook his head. "I do not know," he answered, almost pettishly. "How should I? But he has a power. A secret power! I do not understand him or it!"
The Syndic looked at him darkly thoughtful. "You did not know that that was said of him?" he asked.
"That he——"
"Has magical arts?"
Claude shook his head.
"Nor that he has a laboratory upstairs?" Blondel continued, fixing the young man gravely with his eyes. "A laboratory in which he reads much in unknown tongues? And speaks much when no one is present? And tries experiments with strange substances?"
Claude shook his head. "No!" he said. "Never! I never heard it."
He never had; but in his eyes dawned none the less a look of horror. No man in those days doubted the existence of the devilish arts at which Blondel hinted—arts by the use of which one being could make himself master of the will and person of another. No man doubted their existence: and that they were rare, were difficult, were seldom brought within a man's experience, made them only the more hateful without making them seem to the men of that day the less probable. That they were often exercised at the cost of the innocent and pure, who in this way were added to the accursed brood—few doubted this too; but the full horror of it could be known only to the man who loved, and who reverenced where he loved. Fortunately, men who never doubted the reality of witchcraft, seldom conceived of it as touching those about them; and it was only slowly that Claude took in the meaning of the Syndic's suggestion, or discerned how perfectly it accounted for a thing otherwise unaccountable—the mysterious sway which the scholar held over the young girl.
But he reached, he came to that point at last; and his silence and agitation were more eloquent than words. The Syndic, who had not shot his bolt wholly at a venture—for to accuse Basterga of the black art had passed through his mind before—saw that he had hit the mark; and he pushed his advantage. "Have you noted aught," he asked, "to bear out the idea that he is given to such practices?"
Claude was silent in sheer horror: horror of the thing suggested to him, horror of the punishment in which he might involve the innocent.
"I don't know!" he stammered at last, and almost incoherently. "I know nothing! Don't ask me! God grant it be not so!" And he covered his face.
"Amen! Amen, indeed," Blondel answered gravely."But now for the woman, over whom you said he had power?"
"I said?"
"Aye, you, a minute ago! Who is she? Is she one of the household? Come, young man, you must answer me," the Syndic continued with severity proportioned to the other's hesitation. "I know much, and a little more light may enable us to act and to bring the guilty to punishment. Does she live in the house?"
Only the darkness hid Claude's pallor. "There is a woman," he muttered reluctantly, "who lives in the house. But I know nothing! I have no proof! Nothing, nothing!"
"But you suspect! You suspect, young man," the Syndic continued, eyeing him sternly, "and suspecting you would leave her in the clutches of the devil whose she must become, body and soul! For shame!"
"But I do not believe it!" Claude cried fiercely. "I do not believe it!"
"Of her?"
"Of her? No!Mon dieu!No! She is a child! She is innocent! Innocent as——"
"The day! you would say?" the Syndic struck in, almost solemnly. "The likelier prey? The choicest are ever the devil's morsels."
"And you think that she——"
"God help her, if she be in his power! This man," the Syndic continued, laying his hand on the other's arm, "has ruined hundreds by his secret arts, by his foul practices, by his sorceries. He has made Venice too hot for him. In Padua they will have him no more. Genoa has driven him forth. If you doubt this character of him there is an easy proof; for it is whispered, nay, it is almost certain, in what his power lies. Do you know his room?"
"No."
"No?" in a tone of dismay. "But is it not on a level with yours?"
"No," Claude answered, shivering; "it is over mine."
"No matter, there is an easy mode of proving him," the Syndic replied; and despite himself his tone was eager. "If he be the man they say he is, there is in his room a box of steel chained to the wall. It contains the spell he uses. By means of it he can enter where he pleases, he can enslave women to his will, he——"
"And you do not seize it?" Claude cried in a tone of horror.
"He has the Grand Duke's protection," the Syndic answered smoothly, "and to touch him without clear proof might cause much trouble to the State."
"And for that you suffer him," Claude exclaimed, his voice trembling. "You suffer him to work his will? You suffer him——"
"I must follow the law," Blondel answered, shaking his head. He looked warily round; the dark ramparts were quiet. "I act but as a magistrate. Were I a mere man and knew him, as I know him now, for what he is—a foul magician weaving his spells about the young, ensnaring, with his sorceries, the souls of innocent women, corrupting—but what is it, young man?"
"He is within?"
"No; he left the house a minute or so before you arrived. But what is it?" Seizing the young man's arm he restrained him. "Where are you going?"
"To his room!" Claude answered between his set teeth. "Be he man or devil—to his room!"
"You dare?"
"I dare and I will!" Resisting the Syndic's feigned efforts to hold him back, he strode towards the door. "That spell shall not be his another hour."
But Blondel terrified by his sudden success, and loth, now the time was come, to put all on a cast, kept his hand on him. "Stay! Stay!" he babbled, dragging him back. "Do not be rash!"
"Stay, and leave him to ruin her!"
"Still, listen! Whatever you do, listen!" the Syndic answered; and insisted, clinging to him. His agitation was such, that had Claude retained his powers of observation, he must have found something strange in this anxiety. "Listen! If you find the casket, on your life touch nothing in it! On your life!" Blondel repeated, his hands clinging more tightly to the other's arm. "Bring it entire—touch nothing! If you do not promise me I will raise the alarm here and now! To open it, I warn you, is to risk all!"
"I will bring it!" Claude answered, his foot on the steps, his hand on the latch. "I will bring it!"
"Ay, but you do not know what hangs on it! You will bring it as you find it?"
His persistence was so strange, he clung to the young man's arm with so complete an abandonment of his ordinary manner, that, with the latch half raised, Claude looked at him in wonder. "Very well, I will bring it as I find it!" he muttered. Then, notwithstanding a movement which the Syndic made to restrain him, he pushed the door.
It was not locked, and, in a moment, he stood in the living-room which he had left little more than an hour before. It was untenanted, but not in darkness; a rushlight, set in an earthen vessel on the hearth, flung long shadows on the walls and ceiling, and gave to the room, so homely in its every-day aspect, a sinister look. The door of Gentilis' room was shut; probably he was asleep. That at the foot of the staircase was also shut. Claude stood a moment, frowning; then he crossedthe floor towards the staircase door. But though his mind was fixed, the spell of the other's excitement told on him: the flicker of the rushlight made him start; and half-way across the room a sound at his elbow brought him up as if he had been stabbed. He turned his head, expecting to find the big man's eyes bent on him from some corner. He found instead the Syndic, who had stolen in after him, and with a dark anxious face was standing like a shadow of guilt between him and the door.
The young man resented the alarm which the other had caused him. "If you are going, go," he muttered. "And if you will do it yourself, Messer Syndic, so much the better." He pointed to the door of the staircase.
The Syndic recoiled, his beard wagging senilely. "No, no," he babbled. "No, I will go back."
It was no longer the formal magistrate, but a frightened man who stood at Claude's elbow. And this was so clear that superstition, which is of all things the most infectious, began to shake the young man's resolution. Desperately he threw it off, and went to open the door. Then he reflected that it would be dark upstairs, he must have a light; and re-crossing the floor he brought the rushlight from the hearth. Holding it aloft he opened the creaking door and began to ascend the stairs.
With every step the awe of the other world grew on him; while the shadow, which he had found at his elbow below, followed him upwards. When he paused at the head of the flight the Syndic's face was on a level with his knee, the Syndic's eyes were fixed on his.
Claude did not understand this; but the man's company was welcome now; and the sight of Basterga's door, not three paces from the place where he stood, diverted his thoughts. He had not been above stairssince the day of his arrival, but he knew that Basterga's room was the nearest to the stairs. That was the door then; behind that door the Italian wrought his devilish spells!
His light, smoky and wavering, cast black shadows on the walls of the passage as he moved. The air seemed heavy, laden with some strange drug; the house was still, with the stillness which precedes horror. Not many men of his time, suspecting what he suspected, would have opened that door, or at that hour of the night would have entered that room. But Claude, though he feared, though he shuddered, though unearthly terrors pressed upon him, possessed a charm that supported his courage: the memory of the scene in the room below, of the scalding drops falling on the white skin, of the girl looking at him with that face of pain. The devil was strong, but there was a stronger; and in the strength of love the young man approached the door and tried it. It was locked.
Somehow the fact augmented his courage. "Where the devil is, is no need of locks," he muttered, and he felt above the door, then, stooping, groped under it. In the latter place he found the key, thrust out of sight between door and floor, where doubtless it was Basterga's custom to hide it. He drew it out, and with a grim face set it in the lock.
"Quick!" muttered a voice in his ear, and turning he saw that the Syndic was trembling with eagerness. "Quick, quick! Or he may return!"
Claude smiled. If he did not fear the devil he certainly did not fear Basterga. He was about to turn the key in the lock when a sound stayed his hand, ay, and rooted him to the spot. Yet it was only a laugh—but a laugh such as his ears had never caught before, a laugh full of ghastly, shrill, unearthly mirth. It rang through thepassage, through the house, through the night; but whence it proceeded, whether from some being at his elbow, or from above stairs, or below, it was impossible to say; and the blood gone from his face, Claude stood, peering over his shoulder into the dark corners of the passage. Again that laugh rose, shrill, mocking, unearthly; and this time his hand fell from the lock.
The Syndic, utterly unmanned, leant sweating against the wall. He called upon the name of his Maker. "My God!" he muttered. "My God!"
"There is no God!"
The words, each syllable of them clear, though spoken in a voice shrill and cracked and strange, and such as neither of them had ever heard before, were beyond doubt. Close on them followed a shriek of weird laughter, and then the blasphemy repeated in the same tone of mockery. The hair crept on Claude's head, the blood withdrew to his heart. The key which he had drawn out of the lock fell from the hand it seemed to freeze.
With distended eyes he glared down the passage. The words were still in the air, the laughter echoed in his brain, the shadows cast by the shaking rushlight danced and took weird shapes. A rustling as of black wings gathered about him, unseen shapes hovered closer and closer—was it his fancy or did he hear them?
He tried to disbelieve, he strove to withstand his terror; and a moment his fortitude held. Then, as the Syndic, shaking as with the palsy, tottered, with a hand on either wall down the stairs, and moaning aloud in his terror, felt his way across the room below, Claude's courage, too, gave way; not in face of that he saw, but of that which he fancied. He turned too, and with a greater show of composure, and still carrying the light, he stumbled down the stairs and into the room below.
There, for an instant sense and nerve returned, and he stood. He turned even, and made as if he would re-ascend the staircase. But he had no sooner thrust his head into it, and paused an instant to listen ere he ventured, than a faint echo of the same mirthless laughter reached him, and he turned shuddering, and fled—fled out of the room, out of the house, out of the light, to the same spot under the trees whence he had started with so bold a heart a few minutes earlier.
The Syndic was there before him—or no, not the Syndic, but a stricken man, clinging to a tree; seized now and again with a fresh fit of trembling. "Take me home," he babbled. "There is no hope! There is no hope. Take me home!"
His house was not far off, and Claude, when he had a little recovered himself, assented, gave the tottering man his arm and supported him—he needed support—until they reached the dwelling in the Bourg du Four. Still a wreck Blondel was by this time a little more coherent. He foresaw solitude, and dreaded it; and would have had the other enter and pass the night with him. But the young man, already ashamed of his weakness, already doubting and questioning, refused, and would say no more than that he would return on the morrow. With an aspect apparently composed, he insisted on taking his leave, turned from the door and retraced his steps to the Corraterie. But when he came to the house, he lacked, brave as he was, the heart to enter; and passing it, he spent the time until daybreak, in walking up and down the rampart within hearing of the sentries.
His mind grown somewhat calmer, he set himself to recall, precisely and exactly, the thing that had happened. But recall it as he might, he could not account for it. The words of blasphemy that had scorched his ears as the key entered the lock, had been uttered, he was sure,in no voice known to him; nay more, in no voice of human intonation. How could he explain them? How account for them save in one way? How defend his cowardice save on one ground? He shuddered, gazing at the house, and murmuring now a prayer, and now a word of exorcism. But the day had come, the sky was red, and the sun was near its rising before he took courage and dared to cross the threshold.
Eventhen, with the daylight about him, he crept into the house under a weight of awe and dread. He left the door ajar that the daylight might enter with him and dispel the shadows: and when he had crossed the threshold it was with a pale and frowning face that he advanced to the middle of the floor, and stood peering round the deserted living-room. No one was stirring above or below, the house and all within it slept: the rushlight stand, its wick long extinguished, remained where he had set it down in the panic of his flight.
With that exception—he eyed it darkly—no trace of the mysterious event of the night was visible. The room wore, or minute by minute assumed, its daylight aspect. Nor had he stood long gazing upon it before he breathed more freely and felt his heart lightened. What was to be thought, what could be thought in the circumstances, he was not prepared to say. But the panic of the night was gone with the darkness; and with it all thought—if in the depths he had really sunk so low—of relinquishing the woman he loved to the powers of evil.
To the powers of evil! To a fate as much worse than death as the soul and the mind are higher than the body! Was he really face to face with that? Was this house, so quiet, so peaceful, so commonplace, in reality the theatre of one of those manifestations of Satan's power which were the horror of the age? His senses affirmedit, and yet he doubted. Such things were, he did not deny it. Few men of the time denied it. But presented to him, brought within his experience, they shocked him to the point of disbelief. He found that from the thing which he was prepared to admit in the general, he dissented fiercely and instinctively in the particular.
What, the woman he loved! Was he to believe her delivered, soul and body, to the power of Satan? Never! All that was sane and wholesome and courageous in the man rebelled against the thought. He would not believe it. The pots and pans on the hearth, the simple implements of work and life, on which his eyes alighted wherever he turned them, and to none of which her hand was stranger, his memory of the love that was between her and her mother, his picture of the sacred life led by those two above stairs, all gave the lie to it! Her subjection to Basterga, her submission to contumely and to insult—there must be a reason for these, a natural and innocent reason could he hit on it. The strange occurrences of the night, the blasphemous words, the mocking laughter, at the worst they might not import a mastery over her. He shuddered as he recalled them, they rang in his ears and brain, the vividness of his memory of them was remarkable. But they might not have relation to her.
He stood long in moody thought, but his ears never for an instant relaxed their vigil, their hearkening for he knew not what. At length he passed into his bedcloset, and cooled his hot face with water and repaired his dress. Coming out again, he found the house still quiet, the door as he had left it, the daylight pouring in through the aperture. No one was moving, he was still safe from interruption; and a curiosity to visit the passage above and learn if aught abnormal was to be seen, took possession of him. It was just possible that Bastergahad not returned; that the key still lay where he had dropped it!
He opened the door of the staircase and listened. He heard nothing, and he stole half-way up the flight and again stood. Still all was silent. He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top—whence, turning his head a little, he could command the passage—when a sound arrested him. It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved along the passage towards him.
She did not see him, and he could have escaped unnoticed, had he retired at once. But he stood fixed to the spot by something in her appearance; a something that, as she moved slowly towards him, fancying herself alone, filled him with dread, and with something worse than dread—suspicion.
For if ever woman looked as if she had come from a witch's Sabbath, if ever girl, scarce more than child, walked as if she had plucked the fruit of the Tree and savoured it bitter, it was the girl before him. Despair—it seemed to him—rode her like a hag. Dejection, fear, misery, were in her whole bearing. Her eyes looked out from black hollows, her cheeks were pallid, her mouth was nerveless. Three sleepless nights, he thought, could not have changed a woman thus—no, nor thrice three; and he who had seen her last night and saw her now, gazed fascinated and bewildered, asking himself what had happened, what it meant.
Alas, for answer there rose the spectre which he had been striving to lay; the spectre that had for the men of that day so appalling, so shocking a reality. Witchcraft! The word rang in his brain. Witchcraft would account for this, ay, for all; for her long submission to vile behests and viler men; for that which he had heard inthis house at midnight; for that which the Syndic had whispered of Basterga; for that which he noted in her now! Would account for it; ay, but by fixing her with a guilt, not of this world, terrible, abnormal: by fixing her with a love of things vile, unspeakable, monstrous, a love that must deprive her life of all joy, all sweetness, all truth, all purity! A guilt and a love that showed her thus!
But thus, for a moment only. The next she espied his face above the landing-edge, perceived that he watched her, detected, perhaps, something of his feeling. With startling abruptness her features underwent a change. Her cheeks flamed high, her eyes sparkled with resentment. "You!" she cried—and her causeless anger, her impatience of his presence, confirmed the dreadful idea he had conceived. "You!" she repeated. "How dare you come here? How dare you? What are you doing here? Your room is below. Go down, sir!"
He did not move, but he met her eyes; he tried to read her soul, his own quaking. And his look, sombre and stern—for he saw a gulf opening at his feet—should have given her pause. Instead, her anger faced him down and mastered him. "Do you hear me?" she flung at him. "Do you hear me? If you have aught to say, if you are not as those others, go down! Go down, and I will hear you there!"
He went down then, giving way to her, and she followed him. She closed the staircase door behind them; and that done, in the living-room with her he would have spoken. But with a glance at Gentilis' door, she silenced him, and led the way through the outer door to the open air. The hour was still early, the sun was barely risen. Save for a sentry sleeping at his post on the ramparts, there was no one within sight, and she crossed the open space to the low wall thatlooked down upon the Rhone. There, in a spot where the partly stripped branches which shaded the rampart hid them from the windows, she turned to him. "Now," she said—there was a smouldering fire in her eyes—"if you have aught to say to me, say it. Say it now!"
He hesitated. He had had time to think, and he found the burden laid upon him heavy. "I do not know," he answered, "that I have any right to speak to you."
"Right!" she cried; and let her bitterness have way in that word. "Right! Does any stay for that where I am concerned? Or ask my leave, or crave my will, sir? Right? You have the same right to flout and jeer and scorn me, the same right to watch and play the spy on me, to hearken at my door, and follow me, that they have! Ay, and the same right to bid me come and go, and answer at your will, that others have! Do you scruple a little at beginning?" she continued mockingly. "It will wear off. It will come easy by-and-by! For you are like the others!"
"No!"
"You are as the others! You begin as they began!" she repeated, giving the reins to her indignation. "The day you came, last night even, I thought you different. I deemed you"—she pressed her hand to her bosom as if she stilled a pain—"other than you are! I confess it. But you are their fellow. You begin as they began, by listening on stairs and at doors, by dogging me and playing eavesdropper, by hearkening to what I say and do. Right?" she repeated the word bitterly, mockingly, with fierce unhappiness. "You have the right that they have! The same right!"
"Have I?" he asked slowly. His face was sombre and strangely old.
"Yes!"
"Then how did I gain it?" he retorted with a dark look. "How"—his tone was as gloomy as his face—"did they gain it? Or—he?"
"He?" The flame was gone from her face. She trembled a little.
"Yes, he—Basterga," he replied, his eyes losing no whit of the change in her. "How did he gain the right which he has handed on to others, the right to shame you, to lay hand on you, to treat you as he does? This is a free city. Women are no slaves here. What then is the secret between you and him?" Claude continued grimly. "What is your secret?"
"My secret!" Her passion dwindled under his eyes, under his words.
"Ay," Claude answered, "and his! His secret and yours. What is the thing between you and him?" he continued, his eyes fixed on her, "so dark, so weighty, so dangerous, you must needs for it suffer his touch, bear his look, be smooth to him though you loathe him? What is it?"
"Perhaps—love," she muttered, with a forced smile. But it did not deceive him.
"You loathe him!" he said.
"I may have loved him—once," she faltered.
"You never loved him," he retorted. All the shyness of youth, all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him this power over you?"
"Nothing," she stammered, pale to the lips.
"Nothing! And was it for nothing that you werestartled when you found me upstairs? When you found me watching you five minutes ago, was it for nothing that you flamed with rage——"
"You had no right to be there."
"No? Yet it was an innocent thing enough—to be there," he answered. "To be there, this morning." And then, giving the words all the meaning of which his voice was capable, "To have been there last night," he continued, "were a different thing perhaps."
"Were you there?" Her voice was barely audible.
"I was."
It was dreadful to see how she sank under that, how she cringed before him, her anger gone, her colour gone, the light fled from her eyes—eyes grown suddenly secretive. It was a minute, it seemed a minute at least, before she could frame a word, a single word. Then, "What do you know?" she whispered. But for the wall against which she leant, she must have fallen.
"What do I know?"
She nodded, unable to repeat the words.
"I was at the door of Basterga's room last night."
"Last night!"
"Yes. I had the key of his room in my hand. I was putting it into the lock when I heard——"
"Hush!" She stepped forward, she would have put her hand over his mouth. "Hush! Hush!"
The terror of her eyes, the glance she cast behind her, echoed the word more clearly than her lips. "Hush! Hush!"
He could not bear to look at her. Her voice, her terror, the very defence she had striven to make confirmed him in his worst suspicions. The thing was too certain, too apparent; in mercy to himself as well as to her, he averted his eyes.
They fell on the hills on which he had gazed thatmorning barely a fortnight earlier, when the autumn haze had mirrored her face; and all his thoughts, his heart, his fancy had been hers, her prize, her easy capture. And now he dared not look on her face. He could not bear to see it distorted by the terrors of an evil conscience. Even her words when she spoke again jarred on him.
"You knew the voice?" she whispered.
"I did not know it," he answered brokenly. "I knew—whose it was."
"Mine?"
"Yes." He scarcely breathed the word.
She did not cry "Hush!" this time, but she caught her breath; and after a moment's pause, "Still—you did not recognise it?" she murmured. "You did not know that it was my voice?" Could it be that after all she hoped to blind him?
"I did not."
"Thank God!"
"Thank God?" He stared at her, echoing the words in his astonishment. How dared she name the sacred name?
She read his thoughts. "Yes," she said hardily, "why not?"
He turned on her. "Why not?" he cried. "Why not? You dare to thank Him, who last night denied Him? You dare to name His name in the light, who in the darkness——You! And you are not afraid?"
"Afraid?" she repeated. There was a strange light, almost a smile he would have deemed it had he thought that possible, in her face, "Nay, perhaps; perhaps. For even the devils, we are told, believe and tremble."
His jaw fell; for a moment he gazed at her in sheer bewilderment. Then, as the full import of her words and her look overwhelmed him, he turned to the wall and bowed his face on his arms. His whole being shook,his soul was sick. What was he to say to her? What was he to do? Flee from her presence as from the presence of Antichrist? Avoid her henceforth as he valued his soul? Pluck even the memory of her from his mind? Or wrestle with her, argue with her, snatch her from the foul spells and enchantments that now held her, the tool and chosen instrument of the evil one, in their fiendish grip?
He felt a Churchman's horror—Protestant as he was—at the thought of a woman possessed. But for that reason, and because he was in the way of becoming a minister, was it not his duty to measure his strength with the Adversary? Alas! he could conceive of no words, no thoughts, no arguments adequate to that strife. Had he been a Papist he might have turned with hope, even with pious confidence, to the Holy Stoup, the Bell and Book and Candle, to the Relics, and hundred Exorcisms of his Church. But the colder and more abstract faith of Calvin, while it admitted the possibility of such possessions, supplied no weapons of a material kind.
He groaned in his impotence, stifled by the unwholesome atmosphere of his thoughts. He dared not even ponder too long on what she was who stood beside him; nor peer too closely through the murky veil that hid her being. To do so might be to risk his soul, to become a partner in her guilt. He might conjecture what dark thoughts and dreadful aptitudes lurked behind the girl's gentle mask, he might strive to learn by what black arts she had been seduced, what power over visible things had been the price of her apostasy, what Sabbath-mark, seal and pledge of that apostasy she bore—but at what peril! At what risk of soul and body! His brain reeled, his blood raced at the thought.
Such things had lately been, he knew. Had there notbeen a dreadful outbreak in Alsace—Alsace, the neighbour almost of Geneva—within the last few years. In Thann and Turckheim, places within a couple of days' journey of Geneva, scores had suffered for such practices; and some of these not old and ugly, but young and handsome, girls and pages of the Court and young wives! Had not the most unlikely persons confessed to practices the most dreadful? The most innocent in appearance to things unspeakable!
But—with a sudden revulsion of feeling—that was in Alsace, he told himself. That was in Alsace! Such things did not happen here at men's elbows! He must have been mad to think it or dream it. And, lifting his head, he looked about him. The sun had risen higher, the rich vale of the Rhone, extended at his feet, lay bathed in air and light and brightness. The burnished hills, the brown, tilled slopes, the gleaming river, the fairness of that rare landscape clad in morning freshness, gave the lie to the suspicions he had been indulging, gave the lie, there and then, to possibilities he dared not have denied in school or pulpit. Nature spoke to his heart, and with smiling face denied the unnatural. In Bamberg and Wurzburg and Alsace, but not here! In Magdeburg, but not here! In Edinburgh, but not here! The world of beauty and light and growth on which he looked would have none of the dark devil's world of which he had been dreaming: the dark devil's world which the sophists and churchmen and the weak-witted of twoscore generations had built up!
He turned and looked at her, the scales fallen from his eyes. Though she was still pale, she had recovered her composure and she met his gaze without blenching. But now, behind the passive defiance, grave rather than sullen, which she presented to his attack, the weakness, the helplessness, the heart pain of the woman were plain.
He discerned them, and while he hungered for a more explicit denial, for a cry of indignant protest, for a passionate repudiation, he found some comfort in that look. And his heart spoke. "I do not believe it!" he cried impetuously, in perfect forgetfulness of the fact that he had not put his charge into words. "I do not—I will not! Only say that it is false! And I will say no more."
Her answer was as cold water thrown upon him. "I will tell you nothing," she answered.
"Why not? Why not?" he cried.
"You ask why not," she answered slowly. "Are you so short of memory? Is it so long since, against my will and prayers, you came into yonder house—that you forget what I said and what I did? And what you promised?"
"My God!" he cried in excitement. "You do not know where you stand! You do not know what perils threaten you. This is no time," he continued, holding out his hands to her in growing agitation, "for sticking on scruples or raising trifles. Tell me all!"
"I will tell you nothing!" she replied with the same quiet firmness. "I have suffered. I suffer. Can you not suffer a little?"
"Not blasphemy!" he said. "Not that! Tell me"—his voice, his face grew suppliant—"tell me only that it was not your voice, Anne. Tell me that it was not you who spoke! Tell me—but that."
"I will tell you nothing!" she answered in the same tone.
"You do not know——"