"I declare I am somewhat in Eve's mood to-day," she continued, smiling to herself as she laid down her embroidery; "even an affable serpent would be better than nothing."
But it could not be. For all the powers of good and evil—the Old Serpent among them—were full of business in the Château of Blois during these days of the King's last parliament. And so, while Claire read her Amyot'sPlutarchand John Knox'sReformation, the single stroke which changed all history hung unseen in the blue.
The most familiar servants of my Lord of Guise dared not awake their master. He had cast himself down on the great bed in his chamber when he came in late, or rather early—no man cared to ask which—from the lodging of Monsieur de Noirmoutier. Even his bravest gentlemen feared to disturb him, though the King's messenger had come twice to summon him to a council meeting at the Château.
"Early—very early? Well, what is that to me?" said the herald. "Bid your master come to the King!"
"The King! Who is he?" cried insolently the young De Bar. "Brother Henry the Monk may be your master—he is not ours."
"Hush!" said the aged Raincy, Guise's privileged major-domo and confidant, the only man from whom the Duke took advice, "it were wiser to send a message that my Lord of Guise is ill, but that he will be informed of the King's command and will be at the Château as soon as possible."
Guise finally awoke at eight, and looking out, shivered a little at the sight of as dismal a dawning as ever broke over green Touraine. It had been raining all night, and, indeed, when the Duke had come in from his supper-party he had thrown himself down with but little ceremony of undressing. This carelessness and his damp clothes had told upon him.
"A villain rheum," he cried, as he opened his eyes, to listen ill-humouredly enough to Raincy's grave communication of the King's demand. "And what do you tell me? A villain day? Draw aside the curtains that I may see the better. What—snow? It was rain when I came in."
He sneezed twice, on which Raincy wished him a long life.
"'Tis more than the King of all the Penitent Monks wishes me," said the Duke, shovelling notes and letters of all shapes and sizes out of his pockets. Some had been crumpled in the palm of the hand scornfully, some refolded meditatively, some twisted between the fingers into nervous spills, but by far the greater number had never been opened at all.
"See what they say, Raincy," cried the Duke. "I can dress myself—one does not need to go brave only to see the King of France playing monkey tricks in a turban and woman's dressing-gown, scented of musk and flounced in the fashion! Pah! But, Raincy, what a cold I have taken! 'Tis well enough for a man when he is young to go out supping in December, but for me, at eight-and-thirty—I am raucous as a gallows' crow! Give me my cloak, Raincy, and order my horse!"
"But, Your Grace," gasped the alarmed Raincy, "you have had no breakfast! Your Grace would not go thus to the council—you who are more powerful than the King—nay, whom all France, save a few heretics and blusterers, wish to be king indeed!"
"Aye—aye—perhaps!" said Guise, not ill-pleased, "that may be very true. But the Bearnais does not pay these rogues and blusterers of his. That is his strength. See what an army he has, and never a sou do they see from year's end to year's end! As for me"—here he took a paper out of his pocket-book, and made a rapid calculation—"to entertain a war in France, it were necessary to spend seven hundred thousand livres a month. For our Leaguers cry 'vivas' with their mouths, but they will not lift a pike unless we pay them well for it!"
He folded the paper carefully, as if for future reference.
"What money have I, Raincy?" he said, flapping his empty purse on the table; "not much, I fear. It is time I was leaving Blois, Raincy, if I wish to go with decent credit!"
Now was the valet's chance, which he had been waiting for.
"Ay, it is indeed time—and high time," said Raincy, "if these letters speak true. Let us mount and ride to Soissons—only Your Grace and I, if so it please you. But in an hour it may be too late."
The Duke of Guise laughed, and clapped his major-domo on the shoulder. "Do not you also become a croaker," he cried; "leave me at least Raincy, who sees that the League holds the King in a cleft stick. My good man, he dare not—this Henry of the Fox's Heart. I have the clergy, the Church, the people, most of the lords. The Parliament itself is filled with our people. Blois, all except the Château, is crammed with our men, as a bladder is with lard!"
"Ah, except the Château," groaned Raincy; "but that is the point. You are going to the Château, and the Fox is cunning—he has teeth as well as another!"
"But he dares not trap the lion, Raincy," laughed Guise. "Why, you are as bad as Madame de Noirmoutier, who made me promise to ride off to-day like a whipped cur—I, the Guise. There, no more, Raincy! I tell you I will dethrone the King. Then I will beat the Bearnais and take him about the land as a show in a cage, for he will be the only Huguenot left in all the realm of France. Then you, Raincy, shall be my grand almoner. Be my little one now! Quick, give me twelve golden crowns—that my purse, when I go among my foes, be not like that of my cousin of Navarre!"
As the major-domo went to seek the gold, Guise stretched his feet out to the blaze and, with a smile on his face, hummed the chorus of the Leaguers' marching-song.
"I would I were a little lessbalafréon such a cold morning," grumbled the Duke; "scars honourable are all very well, but—give me a handkerchief, Raincy. That arquebusier at Château Thierry fetched me a villain thwack on the cheek-bone, and on cold days one eye still weeps in sympathy with my misfortunes!"
"Ah, my good lord," said Raincy, "pray that before sundown this day many an eye in France may not have cause to weep!"
"Silence there, old croaker," cried the Duke; "my sword—my cloak! What, have you so forgot your business in prating of France, that you will not even do your office? Carry these things downstairs! A villain's day!—a dog's day! The cold the wolf-packs bring when they come down to harry the villages! Hold the stirrup, Raincy! Steady, lass! Wey there! Thou lovest not standing in the rain, eh? Wish me luck, Raincy. I carry the hope of France, you know—King Henry of Guise, and the throats of the Protestant dogs all cut—sleep on that sentiment, good Raincy."
And Raincy watched the Duke ride away towards the Castle of Blois. The last echo of his master's voice came back to him on the gusty December wind:
"The Guises are good men, good men,The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!For we'll fight till all be grey—The Valois at our feet to-day—"
"The Guises are good men, good men,The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!For we'll fight till all be grey—The Valois at our feet to-day—"
Raincy stood awhile motionless, the tears running down his face. He was about to shut the door, when, just where the Duke had sprung upon his horse, he caught the glimpse of something white on the black drip of the eaves. He stooped and picked it up. It was the handkerchief his master had bidden him fetch. It was adorned with the arms of Guise, the Lilies of France being in the centre. But now thefleurs-de-lyswere red lilies. The blood of the Guise had stained them.
And Raincy stood long, long there in the open street, the sleety snow falling upon his grey head, the kerchief in his hand, marvelling at the portent.
Above, in the Château of Blois, there were two men waiting the coming of Henry, Duke of Guise. One was another Henry, he of Valois, King of France. He had many things to avenge—his own folly and imprudence most of all, though, indeed, these never troubled him. Only the matter of Coligny, and the sombre shades of the dead upon St. Bartholomew's Eve, haunted his repose.
At the private gathering of the conspirators, the King had found many who were willing to sympathise with him in his woes, but few who would drive the steel.
"The Parliament are to make Constable of France the man who is intent on pulling down my throne. I shudder with horror (he whined) to think that the nobles of France support the Guises in this—I speak not of fanatic bishops and loud-mouthed priests, who cry against me from every pulpit because I will not have more Colignys gibbering at my bed-foot, nor yet give them leave to burn Frenchmen by the score, as Philip does his Spaniards t'other side the mountains!"
The Marshal d'Aumont, D'O, and Lognac, the Captain of the Forty-Five Guardsmen, bowed respectful assent.
"What is the state of France, friends," the King cried, in a frenzy of rage, "I bid you tell me, when an alien disputes the throne of Francis First with the legitimate heir of Saint Louis? And what of Paris, my capital city, wherein I have lived like a bourgeois these many years, which receives him with shouts and caressings, but chases me without like a dog?—aye, like a dog!"
The comparison seemed to strike him.
"'Without are dogs,' I have heard the priests say. Well, as to heaven, it may be so. But as to Paris, be sure that if the dogs are without—within are wolves and serpents and all manner of unclean beasts! I would rather trust the Bearnais than any of them!"
There was some dismay at this. It stood out on the faces of the leaders at the council board. If His Majesty went to the King of Navarre, they knew well that their day would be over. However, they swore to do everything that the King required, but of them all, only Lognac meant to keep his word. He was a stout fighter. The killing of Guise was all in the way of business; and if the worst came to the worst, the Bearnais would not refuse a company to one who, in his time, had been Captain of the Forty-Five.
Henry of Valois had been up early that morning, called from his slumbers to bait the trap with his most secret cunning. He did not mean to take any part in the deed himself. For the soldier who had fought so well against Coligny now dodged out and in, like a rat behind the arras.
The Scots Guards were posted in the courtyard of the Château, to shut the entrances as soon as the Duke of Guise should have passed within. In the great hall were the Lords of the Council—the Cardinal of Guise, the Archbishop of Lyons, that clarion of the League, the Cardinal Vendôme, the Marshal d'Aumont, D'O, the Royal favourite, together with the usual clerks and secretaries.
But within, in the ancient chamber of audience, next to the cabinet of the King himself, stood in waiting certain Gascons, ready with their daggers only half-dissembled under their cloaks. They were men of no determined courage, and the King well knew that they might fail him at the last moment. So, by the advice of Hamilton and Larchant of the Scots Guard, he had placed nearest to the door one who would make no mistake—him whom the Man in the Black Cloak had sent, even Jean-aux-Choux, the Fool of the Three Henries.
But on that mask of a face there was now no sign of folly. Stern, grey, immovable was now the countenance of him who, by his mirth, had set many courts in a roar. He could hear, as he had heard it on the night of the Bartholomew, the voice of the Duke of Guise crying, "Haste ye—is the work not done yet?"
And now another "work" was to be done. The feet that had spurned Coligny were even now upon the stairs. He thanked God. Now he would perform his vow upon the man who had made him go through life hideous and a laughing-stock.
For in those days the New Law concerning the forgiveness of enemies was a dead letter. If you wished to live, you had better not forgive your enemy—till after you had slain him. And the dread "Remember the Bartholomew," printed on all Huguenot hearts, was murmured behind the clenched teeth of Jean-aux-Choux. The Huguenots would be avenged. Innocent blood would no more cry unheeded from the ground. The hated League would fall with its chief. With Guise would perish the Guisards.
The princes of Lorraine had beheld their power grow through four reigns. It culminated on the day of the Barricades, when a king of France appealed to a subject to deliver him from the anger of the citizens of his own capital. So, secure in his power, Guise scorned all thought of harm to himself.
"They dare not," he repeated over and over, both to himself and to others; "the King—his kingdom—hangs upon a single hair, and that hair is my life!"
So he walked into the armed and defended fortress of his mortal enemy as freely as into his own house. Like perfect love, perfect contempt casteth out fear.
Yet when once he had saluted the company in the hall of audience, Guise sat him down by the fire and complained of being cold. He had, he said, lain down in his damp clothes, and had risen up hastily to obey the King's message.
"Soon you will be hot enough upon the branders of Tophet!" muttered D'O, the royal favourite, to Revol, the King's secretary, who went and came between the inner cabinet and the chamber where the council were sitting about a great table.
The superintendent of the finances, one Petremol, was reading a report. The Archbishop of Lyons bent over to the Duke of Guise, where he sat warming him by the fire.
"Where goes our royal Penitent so early—I mistrust his zeal? And specially," he added, as a furious burst of sleet battered like driven sea-spray on the leaded panes of the council room, "on such a morning; it were shame to turn out a dog."
"Oh, the dog goes of his own will—into retreat, as usual!" said the Duke carelessly; "in half-an-hour we shall see him set off with a dozen silken scourges and the softest down pillows in the castle. Our reverend Henry is of the excellent order of Saint Commode!"
Presently, leaving the fireside, the Duke returned to the table where the others sat. It was observed that he was still pale. But the qualm was physical only; no shade of fear mixed with it. He asked for a handkerchief from any of his people who might have followed him. As the greatest care had been taken to exclude these, he was supplied with one from the King's own wardrobe by St. Prix, the King'svalet de chambre. Then he asked for comfits to stop his cold, but all that could be found within the castle was only a paper of prunes of Brignolles, with which Guise had to content himself, instead of the Smyrna raisins and rose conserves of Savoy which he asked for.
He chatted indifferently with one and another while the routine of the council unrolled itself monotonously.
"I think brother Henry might have let us sleep in our beds, if this be all," he said. "What is the use of bringing us here at this hour, to pronounce on the fate of rascals who have done no worse than hold a few Huguenots to ransom? Wait a while, and we will give the Huguenots something that will put ransoming them out of the question!"
The Cardinal smiled at his brother shrewdly.
"Aye," he murmured, "but we will have the ransoms also. For, you know, the earth belongeth to the Lord, and He has given it to the chosen of His Church."
A hand touched the Duke's shoulder; a voice murmured in his ear. A soft voice—a voice that trembled. It was that of Revol, the King's secretary, whom at first De Nambre, one of the Forty-Five on guard at the door, would not permit to pass. Whereupon the King popped his head out of the closet to give the necessary order, and seeing the young man pale, he called out, "Revol, what's the matter with you? Revol, you are as white as paper, man! Rub your cheeks, Revol. Else you will spoil all!"
Henry III. always liked handsome young men about him, and certainly the messenger of death never came in a prettier form to any than when young Revol tapped the Duke of Guise on the shoulder as he sat by the council board.
The chief of the League rose and, courteous to the last, he bowed graciously to the Cardinal Vendôme, to whom he had not yet had the opportunity of speaking that day. He threw his cloak carefully over one arm, and in the other hand he took his silver comfit-box (for he ever loved sweet things) containing the prunes of Brignolles. He entered into the little narrow passage. De Nambre shut the door behind him. The tiger was in the fox's trap.
Vaguely Guise saw stern faces about him, but as was usual with him, he paid no particular heed, only saluting them as he had done the shouting spice-merchants' 'prentices and general varletage of Paris, which followed everywhere on his heels.
The eight Gascons held back, though their hands were on their daggers. After all, the tiger was a tiger, and they were but hirelings. The curtain which hid the King's closet shook as in a gale of wind. But suddenly the terrible mask of Jean-aux-Choux surged up, so changed that the victim did not recognise the man who had often made sport before him.
"For Coligny—one!" cried the tragic fool.
And at that dread word the other traitor behind the arras might well have trembled also. Then Jean struck his first blow.
"Saint Bartholomew!" cried Jean-aux-Choux, and struck the second time.
The Duke fell on his knees. The eight Gascons precipitated themselves upon the man who had been deemed, and who had deemed himself, the most invincible of the sons of men.
So strong was he that, even in death, he dragged them all after him, like hounds tearing at the flanks of a dying tiger, till, with a cry of "Oh, my friends—oh, what treachery! My sins——" the breath of life went from him. And he fell prone, still clutching in his agony the foot of the King's bed.
Then the turbaned, weasel face, pale and ghastly, jerked out of the royal closet, and the quavering voice of the King asked Guise's own question of sixteen years before—"Have you finished the work? Is he dead?"
Being assured that his enemy was indeed dead, Henry at last came out, standing over the body of the great Leaguer, holding back the skirts of his dressing-gown with his hand.
"Ah, but he is big!" he said, and spurned him with his foot. Then he put his hands on his brow, as if for a moment to hide the sight, or perhaps to commune with himself. Suddenly he thrust out an arm and called the man-slayers about him.
"Ye are my hands and arms," he said; "I shall not forget that you have done this for my sake."
"Not I!" said Jean-aux-Choux promptly. "I have done it for the sake of Coligny, whom he murdered even so. His blood—my master's blood—has called a long while from the ground. And so"—looking straight at the King—"perish all those who put their hands to the slaughter of the Bartholomew night."
Then King Henry of Valois abased his eyes, and men could hear his teeth chatter in his head. For, indeed, he and Catherine, his mother—the same who now lay a-dying in the chamber below—had guided, with foxy cunning and Italianate guile, that deadly conjuration.
He was, however, too much elated to be long subdued.
"At any rate," he said, "Guise is dead. I am avenged upon mine enemy. Guise is dead! But some others yet live."
The blue midland sea, the clear blue of heaven just turning to opal, and the glint of mother-of-pearl coming up with the gloaming! A beach, not flattened out and ribbed by the passage of daily tides, but with the sand and pebbles built steeply up by the lashing waves and the furious wind Euroclydon.
On different planes, far out at sea, were the sails of fishing-boats, set this way and that, for all the world like butterflies in the act of alighting. It was early spring—the spring of Roussillon, where it is never winter. Already the purple flowers of the wild Provençal mustard stood out from the white and yellow rocks, on which was perched a little town, flat-roofed and Moorish. Their leaves, grey-green like her own northern seas, of which she had all but lost the memory, drew Claire's attention. She bit absent-mindedly, and was immediately informed as to the species of the plant, without any previous knowledge of botany.
She kicked a strand of the long binding sea-grass, and then, after looking a moment resentfully at the wild mustard, she threw the plant pettishly away. Our once sedate Claire had begun to allow herself these ebullitions with the Professor. They annoyed the Abbé John so much—and it was practice. Also, they made the Professor spoil her. He had never watched from so near the sweet, semi-conscious coquetry of a pretty maid. So now he studied Claire like a newly-found fragment of Demosthenes, of which the Greek text has become a little fragmentary and wilful during the centuries.
"This will serve you better, if you must take to eating grass like an ox," said the Professor of Eloquence, reaching out his hand and plucking a sprig of sweet alison, which grew everywhere about.
Claire stretched out hers also and took the honey-scented plant, on which the tiny white flowers and the shining fruit were to be found together.
"Buzz-uzz-uzz!" said half-a-dozen indignant bees, following the sprig. For at that dead season of the year, sweet alison was almost their only joy.
"Ugh!" exclaimed Claire, letting it go. She loved none of the sting-accoutred tribe—unless it were the big, heavy, lurching bumble-bees, which entered a room with such blundering pomp that you had always time to get out before they made up their mind about you.
The Professor watched her with some pride. For in the quiet of Rousillon Claire had quickly recovered her peace of mind, and with it the light in the eye and the rose-flush on the cheek.
But quite suddenly she put her hands to her face and began to sob.
If it had been the Abbé John, he might have divined the reason, but the Professor was not a man advised upon such matters.
"What is it?" he said, stupidly enough; "are you ill?"
"Oh, no—no!" sobbed Claire; "it is so good to be here. It is so peaceful. You are so good to me—too good—your mother—your brothers—what have I done to deserve it?"
"Very likely nothing," said the Professor, meaning to be consoling; "I have always noticed that those who deserve least, are commonly best served!"
"That is not at all a nice thing to say," cried Claire; "they did not teach you polite speeches at your school—or else you have forgotten them at your dull old Sorbonne. Do you call that eloquence?"
"I only profess eloquence," said Doctor Anatole, with due meekness; "it is not required by any statute that I should also practise it!"
"Well," said Claire, "I can do without your sweet speeches. I cannot expect a Sorbonnist to have the sugared comfits of a king's mignon!"
"Who speaks so loud of sugared comfits?" said a voice from the other side of the weather-stained rock, beneath which the Professor and Claire Agnew were sitting looking out over the sea.
A tall shepherd appeared, wrapped in the cloak of the true Pyrenean herdsman, brown ochre striped with red, and fringed with the blue woollen tassels which here took the place of the silver bells of Bearn. A tiny shiver, not of distaste, but caused by some feeling of faint, instinctive aversion, ran through Claire.
Jean-aux-Choux did not notice. His eyes were far out on the sea, where, as in a vision, he seemed to see strange things. His countenance, once twisted and comical, now appeared somehow ennobled. A stern glory, as of an angry ocean seen in the twilight, gloating over the destruction it has wrought during the day, illumined his face. His bent back seemed somehow straighter. And, though he still halted in his gait, he could take the hills in his stride with any man. And none could better "wear the sheep" or call an erring ewe to heel than Jean-aux-Choux. For in these semi-eastern lands the sheep still follow the shepherd and are known of him.
"Who speaks of sugared comfits?" demanded Jean-aux-Choux for the second time.
"I did," said Claire, a little tremulously. "I only wished I had some, Jean, to while away the time. For this law-learned Professor will say nothing but rude things to me!"
Jean looked from one to the other, to make sure that the girl was jesting. His brow cleared. Then again a gleam of fierce joy passed momently over his face.
"Hehad comfits in his hand in a silver box," he said, "jeweller's work of a cunning artificer. And he entered among us like the Lord of All. But it was given to me—to me, Jean-aux-Choux, to bring low the haughty head. 'Guise, the good Guise!' Ha! ha! But I sent him to Hattil, the place of an howling for sin—he that had thought to walk in Ahara, the sweet savouring meadows!"
"I hated Guise and all his works," said the Professor, looking at the ex-fool boldly, "yet will I never call his death aught but a murder most foul."
"It may be—it may be," said Jean-aux-Choux indifferently; "I did my Lord's work for an unworthy master. I would as soon have set the steel to the throat of Henry of Valois himself. He and that mother of his, now also gone to the Place of Howling to hob-nob with her friend of Guise—they planned the killing. I did it. I give thanks! Michäiah—who is like the Lord? Jedaiah—the hand of the Lord hath wrought it. Jehoash-Berák—the fire of the Lord falls in the thunderbolt! Amen!"
The Professor started to his feet.
"What is that you say? The Queen-Mother dead? And you——?"
He looked at the long dagger Jean-aux-Choux carried at his side, which, every time he shifted his cloak, drew the unwilling gaze of Claire Agnew like a fascination.
"The Mother of Witchcrafts is indeed dead," said Jean-aux-Choux. "But that the world owes not to me. The hand of God, and not mine, sent her to her own place. Yet I saw in a vision the Woman drunken with the blood of saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus."
Then he, who had once been called the King's fool, became, as it were, transported. His eyes, directed at something unseen across the blue and sleeping sea, were terrible to behold. Faint greyish flecks of foam appeared on his lips. He cast his cloak on the ground and trod upon it, crying, "Even thus is it to-day with Great Babylon, the mystery, the mother of the abominations of the earth."
After a moment's pause he took up his prophecy.
"There was One who came and bade me listen, and I gave him no heed, for he blessed when I would have cursed; he cried 'Preserve' when I cried 'Cut off'; he cried 'Plant' when I would have burned up, root and branch. But when I heard that Catherine of the Medici was indeed dead, I shouted for joy; I said, 'She was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold and precious stones and pearls! I saw her glory. But now Babylon the Great is fallen—is fallen. And they that worshipped her throw dust on their heads—all they that have thriven on the abundance of her pleasures. For in one hour her judgment is come!'"
Then, all in a moment, he came down from the height of his vision. The light of satisfied vengeance faded from his face.
"But I forget—I must go to the herd. It is my duty—till the God, whose arm of flesh I am, finds fitter work for me to do. Then will I do it. I care not whether the reward be heaven or hell, so that the work be done. The cripple and the fool is not like other men. He is not holden by human laws or codes of honour, nor by the lust of land, nor wealth, nor power, nor the love of woman. He is free—free—free as Berák, the lightning of God is free—to strike where he wills—to fall where he is sent!"
The two watched him, and listened, marvelling.
And the Professor muttered to himself, "Before I lecture again, I must read that Genevan book of his. Our poor Vulgate is to that torrent as the waters of Siloah that flow softly!"
The voice of Jean-aux-Choux had ceased. That is, his lips moved without words. But presently he turned to Claire and said, almost in his old tones, "I am a fool. I fright you, that are but a child. I do great wrong. But now I will go to the flock. They await me. I am, you say, a careless shepherd to have left them so long. Not so! I have a dog in a thousand—Toàh the dart. And, indeed, I myself am no hireling—no Iscariot. For your good cousin, Don Raphael Llorient, of Collioure, hath as yet paid me no wages—neither gold Ferdinand nor silver Philip of the Indies. A good day to you, Professor! Sleep in peace, little Claire Agnew! For the sake of one Francis, late my master, we will watch over you—even I, Berák the lightning, and Toàh my dog!"
They went back, keeping step together, tall Claire with hand fearlessly placed on the shoulder of her Professor, who straightened his bowed student-back at the light touch.
As he went he meditated deeply, and Claire waited for him to speak. Treading lightly by his side, she smelled the honeysuckle scent of the sweet alison which she had carried idly away in her hand.
"If the Queen-Mother be dead," said the Professor, "that is one more stone out of the path of the Bearnais. The Valois loves a strong man to lean upon. For that reason he clings to D'Epernon, but some day he will find out that Epernon is only a man of cardboard. There is but one in France—or, at least, one with the gift of drawing other strong men about him."
"The Bearnais?" queried Claire, playing with the sweet alison; "I wonder where he has his camp now?"
She asked the question in a carelessly meditative way, and quite evidently without any reference to the fact that a certain John d'Albret (once called in jest the Abbé John) was the youngest full captain in that enthusiastic, though ill-paid array. But the Professor did not hear her question. His mind was set on great matters of policy, while Claire wondered whether the Abbé John looked handsome in his accoutrements of captain. Then she thought of the enemy trying to kill him, and it seemed bitterly wicked. That John d'Albret was at the same time earnestly endeavouring to kill as many as possible of the enemy did not seem to matter nearly so much.
"Yes," said the Professor, "Henry of Valois has nothing else for it. The Leaguers are worse than ever, buzzing like a cloud of hornets about his head. They hold Paris and half the cities of France. He must go to the King of Navarre, and that humbly withal!"
"It will be well for him then," said Claire, "if our Jean-aux-Choux has no more visions, with 'Remember Saint Bartholomew' for an over-word!"
"Ah," said the Professor, "make no mistake. A man may be brave and politic as well. 'I am excellent at taking advice, when it is to my own liking,' said the Bearnais, and he will teach Master Jean to see visions also to his liking!"
At which Claire laughed merrily.
"I am with him there!" she cried; "so as you hope for influence with me, good sir, advise me in the line of my desires. But, ah! yonder is your mother."
And clapping her hands, she picked up her skirts and ran as hard as she could up the path towards a trellised white house with a wide balcony, over which the vines clambered in summer. It was the house of La Masane, which looks down upon Collioure.
Madame Amélie, or, more properly, the Señora, was a little, quick-moving, crisp-talking woman, with an eye that snapped, and a wealth of speech which left her son, the Professor of Eloquence, an infinite distance behind. She had with her in the house two other sons, the elder of whom was Alcalde of the little town of Collioure, and therefore intimately linked with the great house of the Llorients, whose turreted castle stood up grimly midway between St. Elne and La Masane. The Alcalde of Collioure was a staid man of grave aspect, a grinder of much corn during his hours of work, the master of six windmills which creaked and groaned on the windy slopes above the sea-village. In his broad hat-brim and in the folds of his attire there was always more or less of the faint grey-white dust which hall-marks the maker of the bread of men.
The Alcalde of Collioure thought in epigrams, explaining his views in wise saws, Catalan, Castilian, and Provençal. French also he had at call, though, as a good subject of King Philip, he thought, or affected to think, little of that language. His brother, the lawyer of Elne, attached to the bishopric by his position, was a politician, and never tired of foretelling that before long Roussillon would be, even as Bearn and Navarre, a part of a great and united France. The Bearnais would hold the Pyrenees from end to end.
These three old bachelors, each according to his ability, did their best to spoil Claire. And it was a nightly battle of words, to be settled only by the Señora, who should sit next her at supper. With a twinkle in his eye the Professor argued his seniority, the Mayor of Collioure his official position, while the notary brazenly declared that being the youngest and the best-looking, it was no less than right and just that he should be preferred.
Madame Amélie miscalled them all for foolish old bachelors, who had wasted their time cosseting themselves, till now no fair young maid like Claire would look at any one of them.
"For me," she would say, "I was married at sixteen, and now my Anatole owns to more than fifty years and is growing bald. Jean-Marie there waxes stout and is a corn-miller, while as for you, Monsieur the Notary, you are a fox who rises too late in the morning to catch many roosting fowls!"
Claire had now been a month in the quiet of the Mas of La Masane, yet she only now began to understand that Roussillon was a detached part of the dominions of King Philip of Spain—though it was neverthelesstras los montes, and under a good governor at Perpignan enjoyed for the moment a comparative immunity.
But dark shadows loomed upon the favoured province.
The Demon of the South wanted money. Moreover, he wanted his land cleansed of heresy. Rich men in Roussillon were heretics or the children of heretics. Philip was fighting the Church's quarrel abroad in all lands, on all waters—against Elizabeth of England, against the bold burghers of the Low Countries, the Protestant princes of Germany, against the Bearnais, and (but this secretly) against the King of France.
Far away where the hills of the Gaudarrama look down upon Madrid, and where in the cold wind-drift from their snows the life of a man goes out while the flame of a candle burns steadily, sat a little wizened figure, bent and seared, spinning spiders' webs in a wilderness of stone, in the midst of a desert wherein no man dwelt. He spun them to an accompaniment of monks' chanting and the tolling of bells, but every hour horsemen went and came at full gallop across the wild.
The palace in the wilderness was the Escurial, and the man Philip II. of Spain, known all over Europe by the terrible name of "The Demon of the South."
For him there was no truce in this war. He moved slowly, as he himself boasted, with a foot of lead, but hitherto surely. Of his own land he was absolutely secure, save perhaps in that far corner of ever-turbulent Catalonia which is called Roussillon.
The inhabitants considered that province almost a part of France. The Demon of the South, however, thought otherwise—that little man at the desk whose was the League, who moved Guise and all the rest as concealed clockwork moves the puppets when the great Strasburg horologe strikes twelve—whose was the Armada and the army of Parma, camped out on the Flemish dunes. He held that Roussillon was for him a kind of gold mine. And his black tax-gatherers were the familiars of the Holy Office, that mystery of mysteries, the Inquisition itself.
Nevertheless, for the moment, there was peace—peace on Collioure, peace on the towered feudalism of the castle thereof, peace on the alternate fish-tailed sapphire and turquoise of its sleeping sea, and most of all peace on La Masane, over against the high-perched fortress of St. Elne.
The Señora's two maidens served the evening meal in the wide, seaward-looking room, the windows of which opened like doors upon the covered terrace. Though the spring was not yet far advanced the air was already sweet and scented with juniper and romarin, lavender, myrtle, and lentisque—growths which, like the bog-myrtle of Scotland, smell sweet all the year.
The three men saluted their house-guest sedately by kissing Claire on the forehead. To the Professor, as to an older friend with additional privileges, she presented also her cheek. From the head of the table, which was hers by right, Madame Amélie surveyed tolerantly yet sharply this interchange of civilities.
"Have done, children," she said, "the soup waits."
And as of all things the soup of the Mas of Collioure must not be kept waiting, all made haste to bring themselves to their places. Then the Señora, glancing about to see that all were in a fit and reverent frame of mind, prepared to say grace. "Bene——Don Jordy!" she interrupted sharply, "you may be a good man of the law, and learned in Papal bulls and seals, but the Grace of God is scant in you. You are thinking more of that young maid than of your Maker! Cross yourself reverently, Don Jordy, or no spoonful of soup do you eat at my table to-night."
Don Jordy (which is, of course, to say George) did as his mother bade him. For the little black-eyed old lady was a strict disciplinarian, and none crossed her will in the Mas of Collioure. Yes, these three grey-headed men, each with a man's work in the world behind him, as soon as they crossed the threshold became again all of an age—the age their mother wished them to be, when she had them running like wild goats among the flocks and herds of La Masane. Happy that rare mother whose sons never quite grow up.
After the first deep breathings, and the sigh of satisfaction with which it was the custom to pay homage to the excellent pottage of Madame Amélie, the second brother, Jean-Marie, Alcalde of Collioure, a quiet smile defining the flour dust in the wrinkles of his grave countenance (it was not his day for shaving), looked across at Claire Agnew and said, "I thought mayhap you might have come to see me to-day. I was down at the Fanal Mill, and——"
"There are finer things to be seen at Elne," interrupted the Bishop's notary, "to wit, cloisters, an organ, and fine pictured books on vellum."
"Pshaw!" cried his brother, "it is better in the mills—what with whirling sails, the sleepy clatter of the wheels, and the grinding stones, with the meal pouring down its funnel like a mine of gold."
"Ah," sighed the lawyer, "but I wearied to-day among my parchments. The sight of you has spoilt us. A day without you is as long as one of Count Ugolino's!"
"What was that?" demanded the miller, interested.
"A day without bread!" said the notary.
"Silence, Don Jordy," cried the Señora to her favourite son, "that tongue of yours may plead well in a court, or for aught I know speak the best of Latin before the wise of the earth, but that is no reason why here, in this my house, it should go like the hopper of the Fanal Mill!"
"Architæ crepitaculum!" said the notary, "you are right, mother mine—the truly eloquent man, like our Sir Professor, keeps his eloquence to practise on young maids by the sea-beach! But I have not observed him fill his mouth with pebbles like his master."
"You are indeed but young things," said Claire, smiling at the Señora; "I would not take any one of you from your mother—no, not at a gift."
"They are slow—slow, my sons," said the Señora, well pleased; "I fear me they will be buried ere they be wed."
"Then we shall have small chance," cried the ruddy Don Jordy, "for according to what I hear my betters say over yonder at the Bishop's palace, in the place whither we are bound there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage!"
"Good brother," said the Professor of Eloquence sententiously, "if you do not mend your ways, you may find yourself where you will have little time and less inclination for such like gauds!"
Meanwhile, without heeding their persiflage, the Señora pursued the even tenor of her meditation. "Slow—slow," she said, "good lads all, but slow."
"It was not our fault, but yours, that we are Long," declared that hardened humorist, Don Jordy; "you married our father of your own free will, as is the good custom of Roussillon. Blame us not then that we are like Lambin."
"Lambin," cried his mother, "who was he? Some monkish rascal runagate over there at the palace?"
"Nay, no runagate; he goes too slow ever to run," said Don Jordy. "Have you never heard of Lambin our barber episcopal?
'Lambin, the barber, that model of gravity,Shaving the chins of myself and my brother;Handles his blade with such reverend suavity,That ere one side is smooth—lo, 'tis rough on the other!'"
'Lambin, the barber, that model of gravity,Shaving the chins of myself and my brother;Handles his blade with such reverend suavity,That ere one side is smooth—lo, 'tis rough on the other!'"
"And I," said the Mayor of Collioure, "have been this day with one who goes fast enough, though perhaps he goes to the devil."
They looked at the miller in astonishment. It was but seldom that he served himself with words so strong.
"A cousin of yours, my little lady," he added, looking at Claire.
"Raphael Llorient!" cried the remaining two brothers; "is he then home again?"
"Aye, indeed he is!" said a voice from the doorway. The figure they saw there was that of a man clad in black velvet, fitting his slender, almost girlish figure like a glove. Only a single decoration, but that the order of the Golden Fleece, hung at his neck from a red ribbon. He was lithe and apparently young, but Claire could not see his face clearly. He remained obstinately against the light, but she could see the points of a slender moustache, and distinguish that the young man's eyebrows met in a thick black bar on his forehead.
"Don Raphael," said the Mayor of Collioure, "you are welcome to this your house. This is my brother Anatole, Professor of Eloquence at the Sorbonne——"
"Ah, the Parisian!" said the young man, bowing slightly; "so you have killed King Guise after crowning him? We in Madrid ever thought him a man of straw for all his strutting and cock-crowing. He would have none of our great King Philip's advice. And so—and so—they used him for firewood in the guard-room at Blois! Well, every dog has his day. And who may this be—I ask as lord of the manor and feudal superior, while warming myself by your fire as a friend—this pretty maid with the downcast eyes?"
"I believe," said the Professor gravely, "that the lady is your own cousin-german. Her name is Claire Agnew, and that of her mother was Colette Llorient of Collioure."
"Is this thing true?"
The young man in the velvet suit, with the order of the Golden Fleece on his breast, spoke hastily and haughtily, jerking his head back as if Doctor Anatole had made to strike him in the face.
"My friend Professor Anatole Long does not lie," said Claire firmly. "I am the daughter of Francis Agnew the Scot, and of his wife Colette Llorient."
"You are prepared to prove this?"
"I have neither wish nor need to prove it," said Claire. "I am content to be my father's daughter, and to have known him for an honest man. I trust not to shame his memory!"
The young man with the golden order at his throat stood biting his lip and frowning—with a frown so concentrated and deadly that Claire thought she had never seen the like.
"The daughter of Colette Llorient—to whom my grandfather——"
He broke off hastily, his sentence unachieved. Then all at once his mood appeared to alter. A smile broke upon his lips. Upon his forehead the bushy black brows disjoined, and he sat down near Claire, so that he could look in her face with the light of the sunset streaming upon it through the door, while his own was still in shadow.
"So you may be my cousin—my aunt Colette's daughter," he said meditatively. "Well, Don Jorge, you are a lawyer and learned, they say. I charge you to look at any papers the young lady may have, and report to your brother, this grinder of good meal and responsible civil authority of my town of Collioure. And pray tell me, little one," he continued, taking Claire's hand, as if he had been an old acquaintance, "how would you like me for a cousin? We have much need of one so young and fair in our dingy old castle. The stock of the Llorients of Collioure has worn itself away, till there remains only myself and—if there be no mistake—you, my kinswoman, fresh as the May morning! Why, you will redeem us all!"
It was then that the Señora found her tongue. Indeed, she had not lost it. But she did not approve of this too familiar and masterful young man, and she only waited an opportunity of telling him so.
"Raphael Llorient of Collioure, listen to me," she said. "I was your foster-mother—you and my Don Jordy there are of one age, and lay on my breast together. It is my right to speak to you, since, though they may owe you feudal obedience and service, I abide here in this house of La Masane for the term of my natural life. Let this maid stay with us. If I could bring up you and these children of my body, I am able to guide also this young maid, who has nor father nor mother."
"But we have gay company down yonder at the Castle," said Raphael Llorient, "ladies of the Court even—or rather, who would be of the Court if we had one, and not merely a monastery with a bureau attached for the Man-who-traffics-in-kingdoms!"
"I wish to stay here," said Claire, alarmed all at once by the strangeness of her kinsman's manner. "I am very happy, and Professor Anatole brought me from Paris!"
"Happy Professor," smiled the Lord of Collioure, somewhat sneeringly. "I presume he did not forget his office, but used his eloquence to some purpose by the way? But, all the same, though we will not compel you, sweet cousin, it would cheer us mightily if you would come. There are great ladies now doing the honours of my house—the Countess Livia, the Duchess of Err, and—Valentine la Niña."
"Raphael—little son," said the old lady, laying her withered hand on his lace wristband, "leave her with me. She is better and safer with old Mother Amélie than with all your great folk down there!"
"That for the great folk," cried the young man, snapping his fingers; "they are no greater than any daughter of the house of the Llorients of Collioure. Besides, they have seen her already. The duchess passed her yesterday with the Countess Livia on her way to the rock-fishing. But I will not tell what she reported of you to the duke, or it might make you vain!"
Claire moved uneasily. The man's eyes affected her curiously. She would now very gladly have sat as close to the Abbé John as even that encroaching youth could have wished.
"Do you know, little cousin," the lord of the manor continued, after a pause in which no one spoke, "you are not very gracious to your kinsfolk? Perhaps you have more of them than I—in Scotland, maybe?"
Claire shook her head sadly enough.
"Save these good friends here, I am alone in the world," she answered steadily. "I do not know my father's family in Scotland. I think they know as little of me as you did before entering that door!"
"Perhaps," Raphael went on courteously, "that is more than you think. We are a poor little village, a poverty-stricken countryside, in which such a pearl as you cannot long be hidden. Somebody will surely be wanting it for their crown!"
"Pearls mean tears and of those I have shed enough," said Claire simply; "also I have seen and heard much of crowns and those who wear them. I would rather stay at the Mas and take the goats to the mountains, and——"
"The learned Professor to the beach!" added Raphael, with a curl of his lip.
"Indeed, yes!" cried Claire, reaching out her hand to the Professor. "I am always happy with him. He teaches me so many things. My father was a wise man, but he lacked the time to talk much with me."
"And I dare say the learned Professor of the Sorbonne gives his time willingly," said the Lord of Collioure; "his tastes are not singular. And pray, of your courtesy, what might he teach you in yourtête-à-têtes?"
"I have everything to learn," Claire answered with intent, "except fencing with the small-sword and how to shoot straight with a pistol! These my father taught me!"
"Ah," cried Raphael Llorient, clapping his hands, "this is a dangerous damsel to offend. Why, you could call us all out, and kill us one by one, if duelling were not forbidden in Spain!"
"I stand for peace," said the Professor, interrupting unexpectedly, for even after many years filled with learned labours and crowned with success, the feudal reverence was strong on him; "I am a man of peace, but there are many who would not let Mistress Claire go without a defender. Even I——"
The feudal superior laughed unpleasantly.
"Oh, yes," he cried, "you would defend her with a syllogism, draw your major and minor premises upon the insulter, and vanquish the lady's foes before a full meeting of the Sorbonne!"
"Indeed," returned the Professor shortly, "we have had some meetings of that body lately which came near to losing kings their thrones!"
The keen, dark features of the Lord of Collioure took on a graver expression.
"Where I come from," he said, "we live too near to the rack and the water-torture to air our opinions concerning such things. Our Philip has taught us to guard our thoughts for times when we find ourselves some distance outside the frontiers of Spain."
He cast a significant look around, on the dusking purplish sea, on the great mass of Estelle and the Canigou, standing out black against a saffron sky. The glance conveyed to those who knew Raphael Llorient, that they dwelt at present too far within the dangerous bounds of Spain, and that if they had once to do with the Demon of the South, it would be worse for them than many Holy Leagues and Bearnais war-levyings.
He rose to take his leave, kissing the Señora, and palpably hesitating between Claire's cheek and her hand, till something in the girl's manner decided him on the latter.
"Au revoir, sweet cousin newly found!" he cried, lifting his black velvet bonnet to his head with grace; "I hope you will like me better the next time you see me. I warn you I shall come with credentials!"
"I sha'n't—I won't—I never could!" Claire was affirming to herself behind her shut lips, even as he was speaking.
"I hate that man!" she burst out, as soon as the lithe slender figure in the black velvet suit was sufficiently far out of ear-shot down the mountain side.
"You mean," said the Professor soothingly, "that you are a little afraid of Don Raphael. I do not wonder. Perhaps I did wrong to bring you here. But I never thought to see him cross this doorstep. He has not done so much for years and years. For how long, mother?"
"For sixteen years—not since his father's death," said the old woman; "he was angry that the farm of La Masane was left to me burden-free for my lifetime, when he had so great need of the money to spend in Madrid!"
"I hate him! I cannot tell why—no," added Claire, recurring to the former speech of Professor Anatole, "I do not fear him—why should I? In the end, I am stronger than he!"
"Ah," said the Professor, "but it is always such a long way to the end!"
There could be no longer any doubt about it. Raphael Llorient, Lord of Collioure, was in love with his cousin. At least he made love to her, which, of course, is an entirely different thing. The Professor pointed this out. The grave Alcalde of Collioure showed the meal-dust in a new wrinkle, and said that, for a Doctor of a learned college which excluded women as unholy things, Anatole was strangely learned in matters which concerned them. Whereupon the Professor asked his brother who had placed a handful of early roses beside Claire's platter, in a tall green Venice glass, at the mid-day meal. He further remarked that these roses came from the castle gardens, and wished to be informed whether the miller of Collioure was grinding his own corn or another man's.
Don Jordy openly laughed at them both. One he declared to be bald and the other musty. He alone, owing to his handsome face and figure—considering also his semi-ecclesiastical prestige, a great thing with women in all ages—had a right to hope!
The Professor broke in more sharply than became his learned dignity.
"Tush—what is the use?" he said, not without a certain bitterness; "she is not for any of us. I have seen another. I have stood silently by, while she was thinking about him. I do as much every day. If we all died for her sake——"
Don Jordy clapped his elder brother on the shoulder with a more anxious face, crying, "What, man, surely this is not serious? Why, Anatole, I thought you had never looked on women—since—but that is better not spoken of. I was only jesting, lad. You know me better than that!"
But Jean-Marie, the Alcalde of Collioure, gravely shook his head. He knew Raphael Llorient was not a man to stick at trifles, and that the fact that his young cousin loved an unseen captain warring for the Bearnais would only whet his desires. So it happened that once in a way the service of defence broke down. The Señora, a brave worker about her house, could not pass the bounds of her garden without laying herself up for days. The Alcalde was down at his mills, the Notary Ecclesiastical had ridden over to Elne on his white mule, by the path that zigzagged along the sea cliff, up among the rock-cystus and the romarin, twining and twisting like a dust-coloured snake striking from coil.
The Professor, called by a sudden summons to the castle to see a most learned man who had just arrived from Madrid, and was high in the favour of Philip of Spain, had betaken himself most unwillingly down to the town. It was a still day, and the sea without hardly moved on its fringe of pebbles, sucking a little with languid lip and sighing like an infant fallen asleep at the mother's breast. Claire Agnew wearied of the stillness of the house-place. In the base-court she could hear Madame Amélie calling "Viénn-nè, viénn-nè!" to her goats. For there was no milk like Madame Amélie's of the Mas of La Masane above Collioure, and no goats so well treated. Why, each day they had a greatpot-au-feuof nettles, and carrots, and wild mustard leaves, just like Christians. So careless and wasteful are some people. As if goats were not made to find their own living among rocks and stone walls!
Such, at least, was the collated opinion of Collioure, jealous more than a little of the good hill-farm in free life-rent, the three well-doing sons, and smarting, too, after fifty years' experience of the Señora's tongue, which, when the mood was upon her, could crack like a wine-waggoner's whip about the ears of the forward or froward.
The house silence, broken only by the solemn pacing of the great seven-foot Provençal clock, ventrose, aldermanic, profusely gilded as to its body and floreated as to its face, presently grew too much for Claire. She was nervous to-day, at any rate.
She regarded the dial of the big clock. Half-past three! In a little while the goats would be coming home to be milked. That would be something. They generally kicked her when they did not butt. Still, that also was interesting. "Patience," said Claire to herself, though it is hard to be patient with an active goat in an unfriendly mood.
Then, round the corner of the sea-road Notary Don Jorge would be arriving presently, the westering sun shining on the white mule which the bishop had given him for his easier transport. They believed greatly in Don Jordy over at Elne. He it was who had pled their case as against big, grasping, brand-new Perpignan, which wanted to take away their bishopric, their relics, their prestige, and its ancient glory from their hill-set cathedral. Yes, Don Jordy would be coming. He always had a new jest each evening—a merry man and a loyal, Don Jordy. Claire liked him, his rosy monk's face, and twinkling light-blue eyes.
Then, presently, the Alcalde Jean-Marie would come climbing up, the abundantly-vowelled Provençal speech, sweet and slow, dropping like honey from his lips. It was fun to tease Jean-Marie. He took such a long time to get ready his retorts. He was like the big, blundering, good-natured humble-bees aforesaid—you could always be far away before he got ready to be angry. Then, like them, he would go muttering and grumbling away, large and dusty, and—not too clever.
The Professor also; he would not stay long, she knew, down at the castle with that very learned man from Madrid. Nor yet with the great ladies. He would rather be listening to his friend, little Claire Agnew, reading the Genevan Testament, while he compared Calvin's rendering with the original Greek, or perhaps merely sitting silent on their favourite knoll above the blue Mediterranean, watching the white town, the grey and gold castle walls, and the whirling sails of Jean-Marie's windmills.
Yes, they would all be coming back, some one of them at least; or, if not, there would at least be the Señora and the kicking goats. It was better to be kicked than to be bored, andennuyée, and sickened with the measured immeasurable "tick-tack" of time, as it was doled emptily out by the big-bellied Provençal clock in the kitchen-corner.
At La Masane above Collioure, Claire suffered from the weariness of riches, the embarrassment of choice. In a little forsaken village, with her father busied about his affairs, she would have been well content all day with no more than her needlework and her Genevan Bible. There were maps in that, and a beautiful plan of the ark, so that she could discuss with herself where to put each of the animals. But at La Masane, with four people eager to do her pleasure, the maiden picked and chose as if culling flowers among the clover meadows.
So Claire went out, and stood a long minute. Her hand went up to her brow, and she looked abroad on her new world. She could hear where to find the Señora. She loved the Señora. But then the Señora and the goats she had always with her. On the whole, she preferred the men—any of the men—to amuse her, and, yes, of course, to instruct her also. Claire felt her need of instruction.
She looked down the steep zigzags of the path over the cliff to the towers of the Castle of Collioure. She saw no Professor, staff in hand, walking a little stiffly, his hat tilted on the back of his head, or carried in his hand, that he might the more easily look up at La Masane when he came in sight of his birthplace.
The Alcalde-miller's towers stood out dazzlingly white, the sails turning merrily as if at play. They made her giddy to look at long. But no sturdy Jean-Marie was to be seen, his bust thrown out, the stiff fuzz of his beard half a foot before him as he walked, every way a solid man, and worthy to be chief magistrate of a greater town than Collioure. Only, just at that moment, Claire could not see him.
The whip-lash path, running perilously along the cliff-edge towards Elne, was broken by no slowly-crawling white speck, the mule bestridden by Don Jordy, Notary Episcopal of the ancient See of the Bishops of Elne.
Remained for Claire—the Señora, the goats.
Now it chanced that the night before, the Alcalde Jean-Marie, grappling for small-talk in the dense medium of his brain, had thought to point out to Claire a little ravine far away to the left, beyond the pasture limits of La Masane. The Alcalde was strong on local topography. That, he said, was the famous sweet-water fountain and Chapel of the Consolation. You found your fate there. Young girls saw their husband that was to be, upon dropping a pin into its depths in the twilight. Good young women (imaginatively given) sometimes saw the Virgin, or thought they did. While bad men, stooping to drink, certainly saw the devil looking up at them—in the plain clear mirror of that sweet-water spring.
A most various spring—useful, too! She might see—but Claire did not anticipate even to herself what or whom she hoped to see. At any rate, pending the arrival of her three male servitors, she would go—there could be no harm in just going—to the Spring of the Consolation, hid deep in that bosky dell over which the willow and oleander cast so pleasant a shade.
Claire snatched a broad Navarrese bonnet and went.
"My sweet cousin, I bid you welcome," a voice spoke, mocking a little, but quiet and penetrating.
Hastily Claire let the laurel branch slip back, stood upright like a startled fawn, and—found herself in face of Raphael Llorient, who at the other side of the little brook which flowed from the Spring of Our Lady of the Consolation, leaned against a tree, tapping his knee with a switch and smiling triumphantly across at her.
"Ah, cousin," he said, "you did not give me any very pressing invitation to come again to see you at the Mas on the hillside yonder. All the more gracious of you, therefore, to have come so far to meet me at my favourite retreat!"
"But I—I did not know—I had no idea——" Claire stammered.
The Lord of Collioure waved his hand easily, as one who passed lightly from a childish indiscretion.
"Of course not—of course not," he agreed, as if humouring her mood, "how should you know? You had never even heard of the Spring of Our Lady of the Consolation, or of its magic properties. Well, we have time—I will explain them to you, sweet cousin Claire!"
"Oh, pray do not," cried Claire breathlessly; "I know—what they say—what Jean-Marie says, that is. He pointed out the nest of bushes on the hillside last night—I should not have come!"
"And he told you, I doubt not—he would not be a Collioure man if he did not, and a good Catholic of Roussillon (which is to say a good pagan)—that you had but to look in the well at the gloaming to see the Predestined. Well, look!"
In spite of herself Claire glanced downwards. She stood on the opposite side of it from her cousin Raphael, and it was with a thrill of anger and fear that she saw his slender figure mirrored in the black pool.
"It looks like a betrothal—eh, cousin?" said Raphael, "even by your friend Jean-Marie's telling?"
"No, no!" cried Claire desperately, "I do not believe it. It is only because I found you standing there. Of course, you can also see me from where you stand! It is nothing!"
"It is everything—a double proof of our fate, yours and mine, my cousin," said Raphael softly. "The Well of the Consolation has betrothed us. Sweet cousin Claire, there remains for me only to leap the slight obstacle and take possession! So fair a bride goes not long a-begging!"
"No, no!" cried Claire, more emphatically, and making sure of her retreat in case of need, "I do not want to marry. I could not marry you, at any rate—you are my cousin!"
Inwardly she was saying to herself, "I must speak him fair to get away. When once I am back at La Masane I shall never wander away again from the Señora. I shall milk goats all my life—even if they butt me. I wish it were now." Her cousin Llorient smiled with subtlety. There was a flash in his eyes in the dusk of the wood like that of a wild animal seen in a cave.
"Because I am your cousin—is it that I must not marry you? Pshaw!" he said, "what of that? Am I not a servant of King Philip, and of some favour with him? Also he with the Pope, who, though he hates him, dares not refuse all his asking to the Right Hand of Holy Church."
Claire glanced behind her. The little path among the bushes was narrow, but beyond the primrose sky of evening peeped through. Two steps, one wild rush, and she would be out on the open brae-face, the heath and juniper under foot, springy and close-matted—perfect running right to the door of La Masane.
She launched her ultimatum.
"I will not wed you, whether you speak in jest or earnest. I would rather marry Don Jordy, or his white mule, or one of Jean-Marie's windmills. No, not if you got fifty dispensations from as many popes. I am of the religion oppressed and persecuted—Huguenot, Calvinist, Protestant. As my father was—as he lived and died, so will I live and die!"
With a backward step she was gone, the bushes swishing about her. In a moment she was out on the open slope, flying towards La Masane. There was the Professor laboriously climbing up from the castle, his hat on the back of his head, his staff in his hand, just as she had foreseen. Good kind Professor, how she loved him!
There, at the door of the Fanal Mill, making signs to her with his arms, signals as clumsy as the whirling of the great sails, now disconnected and anchored for the night, was the Miller-Alcalde Jean-Marie, the flour-dust doubtless in his beard and mapping the wrinkles of his honest face. She loved him, too—she loved the flour-dust also, so glad was she to get away from the Well of the Consolation.
But nearer even than Don Jordy, whose white mule disengaged itself from the rocky wimples of the road to Elne (Claire loved Don Jordy and the mule also, even more than she had said to Raphael, her cousin), there appeared a lonely sentinel, motionless on a rock. A mere black figure it was, wrapped in a great cloak, on his head the slouched hat of the Roussillon shepherds, looped up at the side, and a huge dog couchant at his feet.
"Jean-aux-Choux! Jean—Jean—Jean!" cried Claire. And she never could explain how it came to pass that her arms were about Jean's neck, or why there was a tear on her cheek. She did not know she had been weeping.
By the Fountain of the Consolation, Raphael Llorient remained alone. He did not even trouble to follow Claire in her wild flight. He had the girl, as he thought, under his hand, whenever he chose to lift her. Her anger did not displease him—on the contrary.
He laughed a little, and the lifting of the lip gave a momentary glimpse of white teeth, which, taken together with the greenish sub-glitter (like shot silk) of his eyes, was distinctly unpleasant in the twilight of the wood.
"The little vixen," he said to himself, changing his pose against the great olive for one yet more graceful, "the small fury! A little more and she would have bitten her lip through. I saw the tremble of the under one where the teeth were biting into it, when she was holding herself in. But I like her none the worse for that. Women are the poorest sort of wild cattle—unless you have to tame them!"
The night darkened down. The primrose of the sky changed to the saffron red of a mountain-gipsy's handkerchief, crimsoned to a deep welter of incarnadine, the "flurry" of the dying day. Still Raphael stood there, by the black pool. A little bluish glimmer, which might have been Will-o'-the-wisp, danced across the marisma. The trees sighed. The water muttered to itself.
In that place and time, simple shepherd-folk who had often seen Raphael, Lord of Collioure, pass into the haunted coppice, were entirely sure of the explanation. The devil spoke with him—else, why was he not afraid? They were right.
For Raphael Llorient took counsel there with his own heart. And as that was evil, it amounted to the same thing.
The Kingdom of God is within you, saith the Word. The other kingdom also, according to your choice.