When Valentine la Niña left him in the summer parlour where their interview had taken place, the Abbé John made no attempt to free himself. He seemed still half-unconscious, and, indeed, proceeded without rhyme or reason to make some repairs in the once gay court suit, exactly as if he had been seated in his tent in the camp of the Bearnais.
As yet he had no thought of escape. He was in the fortress of the Inquisition. The influence of the Place of Eyes was on him still. To escape appeared an impossibility to his weakened mind. Indeed, he thought only of the strange girl who had just talked with him. Was she indeed a king's daughter, with provinces to bring in dower, or——No, she could not lie. He was sure of that. She didnotlie, certainly, decided the Abbé John, with natural masculine favour towards a beautiful woman. A girl like that could not have lied. Mad—perhaps, yes, a little—but to lie, impossible.
So in that quiet place, he watched the slow wheeling of the long checkered bars of the windowgrille, and the shadows made by the branches of the Judas tree in the courtyard move regularly across the carpet. One of the leaves boarded his foot as he looked, climbed up the instep, and made a pretty shifting pattern upon the silken toe.
The Abbé John had resumed his customary position of easy self-possession—one ankle perched upon the opposing knee, his head thrown far back, his dark hair in some disorder, but curling naturally and densely, none the less picturesque because of that—when Valentine la Niña re-entered.
He rose at once, and in some surprise. She held a knife in her hand, and her face carried something about it of wild and dangerous, a kind of storm-sunshine, as it seemed.
"Hum," thought the Abbé John, as he looked at her, "I had better have stayed in the Place of Eyes! I see not why all this should happen to me. I am an easy man, and have always done what I could to content a lady. But this one asks too much. And then, after all, now there is Claire! I told her so. It is very tiresome!"
Nevertheless he smiled his sweet, careless smile, and swept back his curls with his hand.
"If I am to die, a fellow may as well do it with some grace," he murmured; "I wish I had been more fit—if only Claire had had the time to make me a better man!"
Yet it is to be feared that even in that moment the Abbé John thought more of the process (as outlined in his mind with Claire as instructress) than of the very desirable result.
What the thoughts of Valentine la Niña were when she left the presence of her uncle could hardly be defined even to her own mind. But seeing this young man so easy, so debonair in spite of his dishevelled appearance, the girl only held out her left hand. A faint smile, like the sun breaking momentarily through the thunder-clouds, appeared on her lips.
"I was wrong," she said; "let me help you only—I ask no more. Come!"
And without another word she led him into a narrow passage, between two high walls. They passed door after door, all closed, one of them being the chamber of Mariana, in which he sat like a spider spinning webs for the Society of the Gesù. What might have happened if that door had been suddenly opened in their faces also remains a mystery. For Valentine's arm was strong, and the dagger her hand held was sharp.
However, as it chanced, the doors remained shut, so that when they came to a little wicket, of solid iron like all the rest, the steel blade of the dagger still shone bright.
Then Valentine la Niña snatched from a nail the long black mantle, with which any who left the House of the Holy Office by that door concealed from the curious their rank or errand. She flung it about John d'Albret's shoulders with a single movement of her arm.
"I do what I can," she said, "yield me the justice to allow that. I am giving you a chance to return to her. There—take it—now you are armed!"
She gave him the knife, and the sheath from which she had drawn it in her uncle's bureau.
"And now, bid me farewell—no thanks—I do not want them! You will not, I know, forget me, and I only ask you to pray that I may be able to forget you!"
The Abbé John stooped to kiss her hand, but she snatched it behind her quickly.
"I think I deserve so much," she said softly, holding up her face, "not even she would deny me!"
And the Abbé John, quieting his soul by the vow of necessity, future confession, and absolution, kissed Valentine la Niña.
She gave one little sobbing cry, and would have fallen, had he not caught her. But she shook him off, striking angrily at his wrist with her clenched hand.
"No! No!No!" she cried; "go—I bid you—go, do not heed me. I am well. They may be here any moment. They are ever on the watch. It cannot be long. Go. I am repaid. She has never risked as much for you! Lock the door without!"
And she pushed him into the street, shut the door, and fell in a white heap fainting behind it, as John d'Albret turned the key outside.
When the so-called uncle of Valentine la Niña, Mariana the Jesuit, found that even his acute ears could distinguish no sound within the darkened parlour of his niece, he did what he had often done before. He opened the door with the skill of an evil-doer, and peered through the crack. The evening sun struck on a spray of scattered blooms which Valentine had thrown down in her haste—grenadine flowers, red as blood—upon a broidery frame, the needle stuck transversely, an open book of devotion, across which the shadows of the window bars slowly passed, following, as on a dial of illuminated capitals, the swift westering of the sun. But he heard no sound save the flick-flick of the leaves of the Judas tree against the window, in the light airs from the Canigou, already damp with the early mist of the foot-hills.
The Jesuit listened, carefully opened the door a little more widely, and listened again, holding his hand to his lips. Still only the stirring air and the leaves that tapped. Mariana drew a long breath and stepped within. The room was empty.
Then he brought his hand hard down on his thigh, and turned as if to cry a hasty order. He stopped, however, before the words found vent.
"She has freed him—fled with him, the jade," he murmured; "she was playing to me also—what a woman—ah, what a woman!"
Then admiration took and held possession of him—a kind of connoisseur's envy in the presence of a masterpiece of guile. The great Jesuit felt himself beaten at his own weapons.
"Used for sanctified ends," he murmured, "what a power she would be!" And again, "What a woman!"
But the order did not leave his lips. He felt that it were better to leave the matter as it was. If only he could find Valentine la Niña, no one would know of her part in the prisoner's escape. It could be put down to the carelessness of the watchers. The principal familiars were at their work deep in the caves of the Inquisition. The eyes in the prisoner's cell were painted eyes only—their effect merely moral. None had seen John d'Albret go into the summer parlour of Valentine. None had heard her interview, stormy as it was, with her uncle. They had other things to do in the House of the Street of the Money. If only, then, he could find La Niña. All turned on that.
"Ah," he thought suddenly, "the key! She has the key of the little door giving upon the ancient bed of the Tet."
And, hastening down the passage by which, a few minutes before, Valentine la Niña had led the Abbé John, he stumbled upon his niece, fallen by the gate, her white dress and white face sombre under the dusk of vine-leaves, which clambered over the porch as if it had been a lady's bower.
But the key was not in her hand. With the single flash of intuition he showed in the matter, John d'Albret had thrown it away, and it now reposed in the bed of the Tet, not half a mile from the lost seal of the Holy Office which, some time previously, his friend Jean-aux-Choux had so obligingly disposed of there.
The Jesuit, in order to keep up his credit in the house of his friends, was obliged to carry his niece to her summer bower, and leave her there to recover in the coolness and quiet. Then he put on his out-of-doors soutane, and passed calmly through the main portal to dispatch a messenger of his own Order to the frontier with a description of a certain John d'Albret, evaded from the prison of the Holy Office in the Street of the Money at Perpignan—who, if caught, was by no means to be returned thither, but to be held at the disposition of Father Mariana, chief of the Order of the Gesù in the North of Spain, and bearing letters mandatory to that effect from the King himself.
"For the present he is gone and lost," he murmured, as he went back; "the minx has outwitted me"—here he chuckled, and all the soft childish dimples came out—"yet why should I complain? It was I who taught her. Or, rather, to say the truth, I outwitted myself—I, and that incalculable something in women which wrecks the wisdom of the wisest men!"
And, comforting himself with these reflections, Mariana returned alone to the House of the Holy Office in the Street of the Money, which, of necessity, he entered by the main door.
Now that buzzed like a hive, which had been silent and deserted enough when he went out. The Jesuit stood in apparent bewilderment, his lips moving as if to ask a question. He could hear Dom Teruel storming that he would burn every assistant, every familiar in the building, from roof to cellar, while Frey Tullio and Serra, the huge Murcian, made tumultuary perquisition into every chamber in search of the runaway.
"Hold there—I will open for you," commanded Mariana, as he saw that they were approaching the door within which lay Valentine; "I will go in, and you can follow. But let no one dare to disturb the repose of the lady, my niece. Or—ye know well the seal and mandate of the King concerning her!"
Mariana went softly in, not closing the door, and having satisfied himself that all was well, he beckoned the inquisitors to approach. Valentine la Niña lay on the oaken settle, her head on the pillow, exactly as he had placed her, but thanks to the few drops from the phial which he had compelled her to swallow, she was now sleeping peacefully, her bosom rising and falling with her measured breathing.
The men stood a moment uncertain, perhaps a little awestruck. Serra would have retreated, but the suspicious Neapolitan walked softly across and tested the bars of the window. They were firmly and deeply enough sunk in the stone to convince even Frey Tullio.
So it chanced that while the messenger of the Gesù sped northward to the frontier with orders to arrest one Jean d'Albret, a near relative of the Bearnais, clad in frayed court-suit of pale blue, and even while the couriers of the Holy Office posted in the same direction seeking a criminal whom it was death to shelter or succour, the Abbé John, looking most abbatical in his decent black cloak, passed out of the city by the empty bed of the Tet, the same which it had occupied before the straight cut known as the Basse led it to southward of the town. Then—marvel of marvels—the hunted man turned to the south and made across the hills in the direction of the House of La Masane upon the slopes of the hills behind Collioure.
And as he went he communed with himself.
"I will show her!" affirmed the Abbé John grimly (for there was a hot and lasting temper under that light exterior, perhaps that of the aboriginal Bourbon, who to this day "never learns and never forgives"). "I will show her! If I loved her as an ordinary man, I would hasten to follow and overtake her! But she is safe and has no need of me. If she has any thought for me—any care (he did not say 'any love'), it will be none the worse for keeping. I will go back to Jean-aux-Choux. He was to return and care for all that remained at La Masane. Well, surely he is no braver than I. What he does I can do. I will go and help him. Also, I shall be able to keep an eye on that rascal, Raphael Llorient!"
And so, with these excellent intentions he turned his face resolutely to the south—a determination which completely threw his pursuers off the scent. For it was a natural axiom in Spanish Roussillon, that whosoever embroiled himself with the powers-that-were in that province made instantly, by sea or by land, for the nearest French border.
Thus was John d'Albret saved by the Bourbon blood of his mother, or by his own native cross-grained temper. In short, he sulked. And for the time being, the sulking saved his neck.
It was a day of "mistral" in the valley of the Rhone—high, brave, triumphant mistral, the wind of God sent to sweep out the foul odours of little tightly-packed towns with tortuous streets, to dry the good rich earth after the rain, and to call forth the corn from the corn-land, the grapes from the ranged vines, and to prove for the thousandth time the strength and endurance of the misty, dusty, grey-blue olive trees, that streamed away from the north-east like a faint-blown river of smoke.
A brave day it was for those who loved such days—of whom was not Claire Agnew—certainly a brave day for the whirling wheels, the vast bird-pinions of Jean-Marie's new windmills on the mountain of Barbentane.
Jean-Marie found his abode to his taste. At first he had installed Claire with a decent Provençal couple at the famous cross-roads called in folk-speech "Le Long le Chemin," till he should find some resting-place other than the ground-floor of the creaking and straining monsters where he himself spread his mattress, and slept, bearded and night-capped, among his rich farina dust and the pell-mell of bags of corn yet to be ground.
By the time, however, that Madame Amélie with Professor Anatole was able to reach France (thanks to the care of the good Bishop of Elne, and the benevolence of the more secular powers set in motion by the Viceroy of Catalonia), a new Mas had been bought. The gold laid carefully up with Pereira, the honest Hebrew of Bayonne, had been paid out, and the scattered wanderers had once more a home, secure and apart, in the fairest and quietest province of France.
Nay more, though the way was long, the cattle-tracks across the lower Canigou were so well known and so constantly followed, that Jean-aux-Choux had been able to bring forward the most part of Dame Amélie's bestial. Even her beloved goats bleated on the rocks round the Mas of the mountain. The fowls indeed were other, but to the common eye even they seemed unchanged, for Jean-Marie had been at some pains to match them before the arrival of his mother. Dovesroo-cooedabout the sheds and circled the tall pigeon-cote on its black pole with flapping wings.
The house mistress was coming home.
That day Madame Amélie was to arrive with her son, the Professor, and Jean-aux-Choux for an escort. And then at last Claire would learn—what she had been wilfully kept in ignorance of by Jean-Marie—the reason for the sudden desertion of the Abbé John on the sea-shore at Collioure.
There had been a struggle long and mighty within the stout breast of the Miller-Alcalde before he could bring himself to play the traitor. After all (so he argued with his conscience), he was only keeping his promise. John d'Albret had bidden him be silent. Nevertheless, when he saw Claire's wan and anxious face, he was often prompted to speak, even though by so doing he might lose all hope of securing a mistress for the new Mas of the Mountain, who in course of time would succeed Madame Amélie there.
The grave, strong, sententious ex-Alcalde had allowed no lines of meal dust to gather in the frosty curls of his beard since he had brought Claire Agnew to France. Busy all day, he had rejoiced in working for her. Then, spruce as any love-making youth, he had promenaded lengthily and silently with her in the twilight, looking towards the distant sea, across which from the southward his mother and his brothers were to come.
The Miller Jean-Marie loved—after a fashion, his own silent, dour, middle-aged fashion—the young girl Claire Agnew, whom he called his "niece" in that strange land. For in this he followed the example of his brother, judging that what was right for a learned professor of the Sorbonne could not be wrong for a rough miller, earning his bread (and his "niece's") by the turning of his grindstones and the gigantic whirl of his sails.
Still, he had never spoken his love, but on this final morning the miller had not gone forth. He was determined to speak at last. His mother and brother were soon to arrive. The mistral drave too strong for work. He had indeed little corn to grind—nothing that an hour earlier on the morrow could not put to rights. Then and there he would speak to Claire. At long and last he was sure of himself. His courage would not, as usual, ooze away from his finger nails. He and she were alone in the newly-furnished rooms of the Mas of the Mountain—for only a few portable items such as his mother's chair and the ancient pot-bellied horologe had been brought in atartanafrom La Masane to the little harbour of Les Saintes Maries, where the big mosquitoes are.
"It is not good for man to be alone," began Jean-Marie, even more sententiously than usual; "I have heard you read that out of your Bible of Geneva—do you believe it, Claire?"
"Indeed I do," said the girl, looking up brightly; "I have longed—ah, how I have longed—all these weeks—for your mother!"
"I was thinking of myself!" said the miller heavily.
"Ah, well, that will soon be at an end," returned Claire; "I am sorry, but I did my best. I have often heard you sigh and sigh and sigh when you and I walked together of the evening. And I knew I was no company for you. I was too young and too foolish, was it not so? But now you will have your mother and your brother, the Professor, who is learned. He knows all about how to grow onions according to the methods of Virgil! He told me so himself!"
The big ex-Alcalde looked doubtfully sidelong at his little friend. He was not a suspicious man, and usually considered Claire as innocent as a frisking lambling. But now—no, it could not be. She was not making fun of him—of the man who had done all these things, who had brought her in safety by paths perilous to this new home!
So very wisely he decided to take Claire's words at their face value.
"My mother is my mother," he said, deciding that the time had come at last, and that nothing was to be gained by putting it off. "Doctor Anatole is my elder brother, and as for me, I have all the family affections. But a man of my age needs something else!"
"What, another windmill?" cried Claire; "well, I will help you. I saw such a splendid place for one yesterday, right at the top of the rocky ridge they call Frigolet. It is not too high, yet it catches every wind, and oh—you can see miles and miles all about—right to the white towers of Arles, and away to the twin turrets of Château Renard among the green vineyards. There is no such view in all the mountains. And I will go up there every day and knit my stocking!"
"Oh, if only it weremystocking!" groaned the miserable, tongue-tied miller, "then I might think about the matter of the windmill."
Foiled in a direct line, he was trying to arrive at his affair by a side-wind.
But Claire clapped her hands joyously, glad to get her own way on such easy terms.
"Of course, Jean-Marie, I will knit you a pair of hose—most gladly—winter woollen ones of the right Canigon fashion——"
"I did not mean one pair only," said the miller, with a slightly more brisk air, and an attempt at a knowing smile, "but—for all my life!"
"Come, you are greedy," cried Claire; "and must your mother go barefoot—and your brother the Professor, and Don Jordy, and——"
She was about to add another name, which ought to have been that of Jean-aux-Choux, but was not. She stopped, however, the current of her gay words swiftly arrested by that unspoken name.
"Jean-Marie, answer me," she said, standing with her back resolutely to the door, "there is a thing I must know. Tell me, as you are an honest man, what became of Jean d'Albret that night on the sand-dunes at Collioure? It is in my mind that you know more than you have told me. You do know, my brave Alcalde! I am sure of it. For it was you who came to borrow my hood and mantle, also my long riding-cape to give to him. And I have never seen them since. If, then, this Abbé John is a thief and a robber, you are his accomplice. Nothing better. Come—out with it!"
Jean-Marie stood mumbling faintly words without order or significance.
Claire crossed her arms and set her back to the oaken panels. The miller would gladly have escaped by the window, but the sill was high. Moreover, he felt that escalade hardly became either his age or habit of body.
Therefore, like many another in a like difficulty, he took refuge in prevarication—to use which well requires, in a man, much practice and considerable solidity of treatment. Women are naturally gifted in this direction.
"He bade—I mean he forbade—me to reveal the matter to you!"
"Then it had to do with me," she cried, fixing the wretched man with her forefinger; "now I have a right—I demand to know. I will not stay a moment longer in the house if I am not told."
As she spoke Claire turned the key twice in the lock, extracted it, and slid it into her pocket. These are not the usual preliminaries for quitting a house for ever in hot indignation. But the ex-Alcalde was too flustered to notice the inconsistency.
"Speak!" she cried, stamping her foot. And the broad, serious-faced Jean-Marie found, among all his wise saws and instances, none wherewith to answer her. "Where did he go, and what did he do with my long cloak and lace mantilla?" she demanded. "Were they a disguise to provide only for his own safety—the coward?"
The miller flushed. Up till now he had sheltered himself behind the Abbé John's express command to say nothing. Now he must speak, and this proud girl must take that which she had brought on her own head. It was clear to Jean-Marie, as it had been to numerous others, that she had no heart. She was a block of ice, drifted from far northern seas.
"Well, since you will have it, I will tell you," he said, speaking slowly and sullenly, "but do not blame me if the news proves unwelcome. Jean d'Albret borrowed your cloak and mantilla so that he might let himself be taken in your place—so as to give you—you—you—he cared not for the others—time to escape from the familiars of the Inquisition sent to take you!"
He nodded his head almost at each word and opened his hand as if disengaging himself from further responsibility. He looked to see the girl overwhelmed. But instead she rose, as it were, to the stature of a goddess, her face flushed and glorious.
"Tell it me again," she said hoarsely, even as Valentine la Niña had once pleaded to be told, "tell me again—he did that for me?"
"Aye, for you! Who else?" said the miller scornfully—"for whom does a man do anything but for a silly girl not worth the trouble!"
She did not heed him.
"He went to the death for me—to save me—he did what none else could have done—saying nothing about it, bidding them keep it from me, lest I should know! Oh, oh!"
The miller turned away in disgust. He pronounced an anathema on the hearts of women. But she wheeled him round and, laying her hands on both his shoulders, flashed wet splendid eyes upon him, the like of which he had never seen.
"Oh, I am glad—I am glad!" she cried; "I could kiss you for your news, Jean-Marie!"
And she did so, her tears dropping on his hands.
"This thing I do not understand!" said the miller to himself, when, no longer a prisoner, he left Claire to sink her brow into a freshly-lavendered pillow in her own chamber.
And he never would know.
Yet Valentine la Niña would have done the same thing. For in their hearts all women wish to be loved "like that."
The word is their own—and the voice in which they say it.
This was all of the most cheerful for John d'Albret. To be loved with wet glad eyes by the woman for whom you have done brave deeds is the joy of life. Only to taste its flavour, she herself must tell you of it. And John d'Albret was very far from the Mas of the Mountain of Barbentane. He did not feel the dry even rush of the high mistral, steady and broad as a great ocean current—yet how many times more swift. The wind that fanned his heated temples was the warm day wind of Africa, coming in stifling puffs as from an oven, causing the dust to whirl, and lifting the frilled leaves of the palms like a woman's garments. At night, on the contrary, the humid valley-winds stealing down from the Canigou made him shiver, as he crouched in the ancient sheepfolds and rude cane-built shelters where he had expected to find Jean-aux-Choux.
But these were deserted, the charge of his troop taken over by another. The house of La Masane had been put to sack—partly by those who had come to take away the more portable furniture for thetartanabound for Les Santes Maries, and also in part at a later date by the retainers of the Lord of Collioure. Several times, from his hiding-place on the mountain, John d'Albret had observed Raphael Llorient wandering idly about the abandoned house of La Masane, revolving new plots or brooding on the manner in which the old had been foiled.
As Jean-aux-Choux did not return, the Abbé John waxed quickly weary of the bare hillside, where also he was in constant danger of discovery from some of Jean-aux-Choux's late comrades. These, however, contented themselves chiefly with surveying their flocks from convenient hill-tops, or at most, in launching a couple of swift dogs in the tracks of any wanderers. But John knew that these very dogs might easily at any moment lead to his discovery, if they smelt out the reed-bed in which it was his habit to lie hid during the day.
Meantime the Abbé, with needle and thread drawn from Jean-aux-Choux's stores, had busied himself in repairing the ravages prison-life had made in his apparel. And with his habitual handiness, begun in the Bedouin tents of the Latin quarter, and continued in the camps of the Bearnais, he achieved, if not complete success, at least something which suggested rather a needy young soldier, a little battered by the wars, than a runaway prisoner from the dungeons of the Holy Office.
His aspect was rendered still more martial by Jean-aux-Choux's long Valaisian sword (with "Achille Serre, of Sion" engraved upon the blade), which hung from a plain black leather waist-belt, broad as the palm of the hand. The Abbé John, regarding himself at dawn in the spring near the chapel of the Hermitage, remarked with pleasure that during his sojourn upon the mountain his moustache had actually attained quite respectable proportions. As for his beard, it still tarried by the way, though he was pleased to say that in order to be respectable he must seek out a hostelry and find there refreshment and a razor—"If" he added, "mine host does not handle the blade himself"—an accomplishment which was not at all uncommon among the Bonifaces of Roussillon.
So leaving the town and castle of Collioure away to the left, and far below him, John d'Albret struck across the tumbled rocky country where the last bastions of the Pyrenees break down to meet the chafe of the Midland sea. He travelled by night, and as it was moonlight, made good enough going. It was pleasant and dry. The mountain wind cooled him, and many a time he paused to look down from the grey-white rocks upon the sweep of some little bay, pebbly-beached, its fringe of sand and surf dazzling white beneath the moon. He heard the sough and rattle as the water arched, foamed a moment, plashed heavily, and then retired, dragging the rounded stones downward in its suck.
John d'Albret meant to strike for Rosas, where he knew he might always hope to find some French boats come in from the pilchard and sardine fisheries about Ivitza and the Cape of Mallorca. He hoped for shelter on one of these. There would certainly be countrymen of his, drinking and running at large on the beach of Rosas. With them he would make his bargain in money or love, according to the province from which they hailed—the Norman for money, the Gascon for love, and the Provençal for a little of both.
There was also an inn at Rosas—the Parador of the Chevelure d'Or. Some fewventaswere scattered along the sea-front, hard to be distinguished from the white fishermen's cottages, save for the evening noises which proceeded from them when the crews of the vessels in the bay came ashore to carouse. Altogether no better place for getting away from the realms of King Philip seemed possible to John d'Albret.
The Bay (or Gulf) of Rosas is one of the noblest harbours in the world—fifteen Spanish leagues from horn to horn, when you follow the indentations of the coast. So at least avers the Geographer-Royal. But it is to be suspected that his legs either wandered or that he measured some of the course twice over. The Bay of Rosas could contain all the navies of the world. A notable harbour in peace or war, with its watch-tower at either side, and its strong castle in the midst, it was no inconsiderable place in the reign of the Golden Philip.
Even in these last years when the gold was becoming dim, when its late array of war-ships had mostly found a resting-place on the rocky skerries of Ireland or the Hebrides, there were sometimes as many as six or eight king's ships in the bay—a fact which John d'Albret had omitted to reckon in his forecast of chances concerning the harbourage of Rosas.
The landlord of the Parador was a jovial, bustling man—a type not Spanish but purely Catalan. In the rest of Spain, your landlord shows himself little, if at all. Generally you serve yourself, and if you want anything you have not brought, you buy it in the town and descend to the kitchen to cook it. But the host of the Inn of Rosas was omnipresent, loquacious, insistent, not to be abashed or shaken off.
He met the Abbé John on the doorstep, and taking in at a glance his frayed court suit, his military bearing, and the long sword that swung at his heels, the landlord bowed low, yet with vigilant eyes aslant to measure the chances of this young ruffler having a well-filled purse.
"Your Excellency," he cried, "you do honour to yourself, whoever you may be, by coming to seek lodgings at the hostel of La Cabeladura d'Oro, as we say in our Catalan. Doubtless you have come seeking for a place and pay from Philip our king. A place you may have for the asking—the pay not so surely. It behooves me therefore to ask whether you desire to eat in my house at the Table Solvent or at the Table Expectant?"
"I do not gather your meaning, mine host," said John d'Albret haughtily.
"Nay, I am a plain man," said the landlord, "and you may read my name above my door—Sileno Lorent y Valvidia. That tells all about me. Therein, you see, you have the advantage of me. I know nothing about you, save that you arrive at my door with a cocked bonnet and a long sword."
John d'Albret felt that it was no time to resent this Catalanbrusquerie. Indeed, he himself was enough of a Gascon to respect the man's aplomb. For what would be rudeness intentional in a Castilian, in a man of Catalonia is only the rough nature of the borderer coming out. So the Abbé John answered him in kind, using the Languedocean speech which runs like a kind ofLingua Francafrom Bayonne to Barcelona.
"I am for the Table Solvent. Bite on that, Master Sileno, and the next time be not so suspicious of a soldier who has fought in many campaigns, and hopes to fight in many another! Now, by my beard which is yet to be, give me a razor and shaving-tackle, that I may make myself fit to call upon the Governor—while do you, Master Sileno, be off and get a good dinner ready!"
The landlord pocketed the coin as an asset towards the lengthy bill he saw unrolling in his mind's eye.
"Our Lord Governor the Count of Livia is at present with the King in Madrid," he said, "so I fear that you will be compelled to await his return, that is, if your business be with him, or has reference to any of the ships in the harbour, or is connected with supplies or stores military."
Señor Don Sileno, of the Chevelure d'Or, felt that he had given his guest quite sufficient latitude for entering into an explanation. But the Abbé John only thrust the hilt of his sword hard down, till the point cocked itself suggestively under the landlord's nose as he turned his back upon him.
"My business is with the Governor," he said shortly, "and if your house prove a good one and your table well supplied, I may indeed be content to await his return!"
"This bantling mayoral," muttered the landlord, "keeps his mask up. Very well—so much the better, so long as he pays. None gives himself airs in the house of Don Sileno Lorent y Valvidia, hosteller of Rosas, without paying for it! That is the barest justice. But, methinks this young boaster of many campaigns and the long sword, might have a new suit of clothes to go and see the Governor withal. Yet I am not sure—fighting is a curious trade. A good cook is not always known by the cleanliness of his apron."
At this moment the Abbé John roared down the stairs for the hot water.
"Coming, your Excellency!" answered the host, making a wry face; "all that you desire shall be in your chamber as fast as my scullions' legs can bring it."
Shaved, reorganised as to his inner man, daintied as to his outer, the Abbé John looked out of the window of the Golden Chevelure upon the sleeping sea. The Parador was a little house with a trellised flower-garden running down to the beach, and sheltered from the heat of the sun by vine-leaves and trembling acacias.
"That is a strange name you have given your inn," said the Abbé John, taking some oil from the salad-bowl and burnishing the hilt of his sword with a rag, as became a good cavalier. He had the sign of the Golden Tresses held by Sileno Lorent y Valvidia under his eyes as he spoke.
"You think so, sir?" said the landlord, his formerbrusqueriereturning as soon as it was a question of property; "that shows you are unacquainted with the history of the country in which you desire to practise your trade of war!"
"I am none so entirely ignorant of it as you suppose," said John d'Albret.
"Yes, as ignorant as my carving-fork," said the landlord, pointing with that useful and newly-invented piece of cutlery to the sign below. "Now if you are a man of the pen as well as of the sword, what would you draw from that sign?"
"Why," said the Abbé John, smiling, "that you are named, curiously enough, Sileno—that your father's name was Lorent and your mother's Valvidia—that you are tenant of a well-provisioned inn called with equal curiosity the Golden Chevelure, and that you lodge (as you put it) both 'on horseback or on foot.' That is a good deal of printing to pay for at a penny a letter!"
"As I foretold, your Excellency knows nothing of the matter—and indeed, how should you? For by your tongue I would wager that you are from the Navarrese provinces—therefore a speaker of two languages and a wanderer over the face of the earth—your sword your bedfellow, a sack of fodder for your beast your best couch, and the loot of the last town taken by assault the only provender for your purse——"
"Let my purse alone," quoth the Abbé John, "you will find that there is enough therein to pay you, and—for a bottle of good wine on occasion for the pleasure of your company."
This mixture of hauteur and familiarity appeared to enchant the landlord, and he laid down on the bed the dishes he was carrying.
"I will explain," he said; "it is not every day that you can hear such a tale as mine for nothing."
"Bring a bottle of your best!" said John, who was disposed to talk, hoping that by-and-by he might receive also the best of informations as to the ships in the harbour, their incomings and outgoings, their captains and merchandises, together with the ports to which they sailed.
The wine was brought, and the host began his tale.
"This hostelry of mine was my father's also, and his father's before him for many generations. They were of noble blood—of the Llorients of Collioure, though the rolling of vulgar tongues has shortened it a little in these days. And my mother's name was Valvidia, being of one of the best houses of Spain. I am therefore of good blood on either side—you hear, Señor the Soldier?"
The Abbé John nodded. There was nothing remarkable in that. Every Spaniard counts himself so born, and it must be owned, so far at least as politeness is concerned, comports himself as such.
But the Chevelure d'Or, its carefully-mixed wine, and the tale thereto attached proved so soporific, that when John d'Albret awoke, he found himself chained to a bench in a long, low, evil-smelling place. A huge oar-handle was before him, upon which he was swaying drunkenly to and fro. He had on his left two companions who were doing the work of the rowing, and, erected upon a bench behind, a huge man with a fierce countenance walked to and fro with a whip in his hand.
"Where am I?" said John d'Albret feebly, his voice appearing to himself to come from an infinite distance, and sounding through the buzzing and racking of many windmills, like those of Jean-Marie the Miller-Alcalde when upon their beams and sails the mistral does its bitter worst.
"Hush!" whispered his neighbour, "thecomitewill flog you if you talk when at work. You are on the King of Spain's galleyConquistador, going south from Rosas to Barcelona. And as for me, I am a fellow-sufferer with you for the religion. I am Francis Agnew, the Scot!"
"But Francis Agnew is dead! With my own eyes I saw him lie dead, in the robing-room of Professor Anatole——"
"Row, you skulking 'Giffe'!" cried the "comite," bringing down his whip upon the Abbé John's shoulders, which were bare, with a force that convinced him that he at least was both alive and awake.
So he kept silence and rowed in his place next the side of the vessel. And even his wonder in the matter of Claire's father could not prevent his cursing in his heart the man who had brought him to this pass—the talkative, hospitable, and far-descended Don Sileno Lorent y Valvidia, of the Parador of the Cabeledura d'Oro in the town of Rosas.
The galley of the first class,Conquistador, was one of the few which had been left behind in the Mediterranean at the time of the Great Armada. Most of the others had been carried northward for coast defence, and now lagged idly in port for lack of crews to navigate them. So that it became a quaint dilemma of King Philip's how to obtain sufficient heretics for hisautos de féwithout impoverishing too greatly his marine.
TheConquistadorkept close company with thePuerto Reale, another of the same class, but with only two hundred slaves aboard to the three hundred and fifty of theConquistador. The "comite," or master-in-charge of the slaves, walked up and down a long central bench. His whip was hardly ever idle, but it did not fall again upon John d'Albret—not from any pity for a newcomer, but because the ship's purser had let out the fact that a considerable sum in gold was in his hands to the credit of the newcomer. For King Philip, though he persecuted the heretic with fire and sword, fine, imprisonment, and the galleys, did not allow his subordinates to interfere with his monopoly. And indeed, as the Abbé John learned, more than one officer had swung from the forty-foot yard of his own mainmast for intromitting wrongfully with a prisoner's money.
As to the captains, they were for the most part impoverished grandees or younger sons of dukes and marquises. Most were knights of Malta and so apparent bachelors, whose money would go to the Order at their death. In the meantime, therefore, they spent royally their revenues. The captain of theConquistadorwas the young Duke of Err, recently succeeded to the ambassadorial title, and it was said of him that he counted the life of a galley-slave no more than that of a black-beetle beneath his seigneurial heel.
So long as the boat remained at sea, there was no sleep for any slave. Neither, indeed, for any of the "comites" or sub-officers, who consequently grew snappish and drove their slaves to the very limit of endurance, so that they might the sooner reach the harbour. Yet it was full morning before the awnings were spread within the roads of Barcelona, and the Abbé John could stretch his limbs—so far, that is, as the chain allowed. He had been placed, at the request of the senior oarsman of his mess, Francis Agnew, in the easiest place, that next to the side of the galley. Here not only was the stroke of the oar shortest, but at night, or in the intervals of sleep, the curve of the ship's side made a couch, if not luxurious, at least, comparatively speaking, tolerable.
The "comite" hoisted his hammock across the broadcoursierorestradawhich ran the length of the ship, overlooking and separating the two banks of oars, and formed the only passage from the high poop to the higher stern. It was also useful in rough seas, when the waves broke right across the ship, and (a mere detail) over the rowers also. For the only communication with the hold was by gangways descending from either end of thecoursier.
The Abbé John heard the sound of the chief "comite's" whistle with astonishment—so varied were its tones, the quick succession of its notes, that the prompt understanding and obedience of the slaves and sailors, at whatever part of the deck they were placed, seemed as magic to him.
"Do as I do," said Francis Agnew, noticing his bewilderment. So the Abbé John halted and pulled, raised his oar level or backed water at the word of Claire's father. And all the while he kept looking sideways at the Dead-come-to-Life-again with speechless wonder and the sense of walking in a dream. Only the sound of the "comite's" lash on his comrades' backs kept him convinced of the general reality of things.
Francis Agnew was a strong and able-bodied rower, much remarked and approved by his chiefs. At various periods of an adventurous life he had served on the French and other galleys, even including those of Turkey. So that all the commands and disciplines came easily to him. He had even been charged with the provisioning of the rowers of the whole port side, and on occasion he could take the "comite's" whistle and pipe upon it, to the admiration of all.
Claire's father began his tale as soon as he had arranged his great grey cloak of woollen stuff commodiously, and laid the pillow (which he had by favour) close to the Abbé John's ear.
"The servants of the Sorbonne who were employed to carry my body to the vault were greedy rascals. It was their thought at first to sell my body to the younger surgeons for the purpose of their researching. But after stripping me of my apparel, it chanced that they cast a bucket of water over me to help me to 'keep'—the weather being hot in those Barricade Days in the city of Paris."
At this moment the tread of the night-sentinel approached along thecoursierabove their heads. The voices and whisperings ceased before him as by magic. It was full afternoon without, blazing under the chinked awnings. But officially it was night on board the galley. Day closed when the whistle of the "comite" blew. Mostly a careful captain, from motives of self-interest more than from any humanity, worked his men in the cool times of the night. For the Mediterranean is always so luminous of itself that the merest ripple of air is sufficient to stir the water and show the way. Moreover, in times of peace and on that safe coast galleys were rarely moored save in calm weather.
"It happened thus"—as the sentinel passed Francis Agnew took up the tale—"after the Sorbonne rascals had plashed the cool water over me, I sat up suddenly and looked about me for a sword. But, there being none, I was in their power. For ten days they kept me in hold in a secret place among firewood, deep underground, without any loophole whatever. Twice a day they brought me food, and by the light of a candle they dressed my wounds—one of them being expert at that business, having had practice in the hospitals. Then when I was recovered they gave me a candle which burned two hours only. And with it also a pile of brushwood to cut up into small pieces. This was the pleasantest part of the day to me. But they always took away the axe afterwards, bidding me push it through beneath the door, so that whoever came with my next meal might see it. Else I would get no dinner. For they feared lest I might brain one of them as he came in, and then make a rush for the passage-way. But I knew that the doors were shut behind, so that there was no chance. And besides, being a Christian man, I was covenanted to fight only when I could do so without sin, and with some chance of continuing the life so marvellously preserved to me!
"Then this Flamand, the chief of the servitors of the Sorbonne—Holtz was his name, a huge-handed animal of monkey breed, but with cunning under that sloping skull of his—made interest to find me a place in one of the slow waggons which carry the king's artillery to the port of Calais, where the new forts are. And me he laid, tied like a parcel between two brass guns for sieging, strapped down and gagged, feeding me at nights when the convoy halted. Also he paid the chief waggoner so much. For he meant to sell me for a slave to the Duke of Parma, who at that time was gathering a great fleet of galleys to destroy England. I had heard them arguing the matter somewhat thus:
"'Better kill him and be done,' said one; 'thus we are sure of a hundred shields for him from the lads of the beef barrel.' (So they spoke of the young surgeons of the Sorbonne.)
"However, the Flamand (a vantard and a bully, but very cunning) offered to fight any man there, or any two with fists or knives or any other weapon in their choice. And when no one took up his challenge, he cried out, 'Ho, stand back there, ye pack of cowards! This man is mine. A hundred silver shields! What is a hundred shields, when for such a wiry fellow, albeit a little old, we will get a hundred gold pieces from Parma, if only we can get him as far as Nieuport.'
"And so to Parma I was given, but the galley I was first placed in met with an English ship-of-war, and she ran us so close that we could not row. Her prow scraped us, breaking the oars and tossing the dead about, many being slain with the bounding fragments. And I—I was in the place next the port-hole, and I mind me I could lay my hand on the muzzle of a shotted gun. But that is the last I remember. For at that moment the Englishman fired a broadside and swept our decks. I alone was unhurt, and after a while in the lazar-house of Vigo, I came hither in a galleasse to teach the 'comites' of the Mediterranean side the newer practice of the fleets of the North."
He chuckled a little, his well-trained ear taking in thediminuendoandcrescendoof the sentinel's footsteps on the wooden platform above his head.
"But from what I saw of the English," he murmured, "I judge that before long there will be no need of galleys to fight Spain's battles."
In a moment John d'Albret knew that his companion had not yet heard of the destruction of the Great Armada. He told him.
"Glory to the God of Battles," he said, hushed and low, "to Him the praise!"
Just then all the bells of the city began to ring, slow and measured. The sound came mellowed over the water and filtered through the striped awnings of yellow and red.
"Some great man is dead," he said, "perhaps the King—Philip, I mean. Or else a day of humiliation——"
"Auto de fé!" came along the benches in a thrilling whisper, for in spite of their fatigue few of the slaves were asleep. The afternoon was too hot, the glare from the water intolerable.
"Ah, well, the sooner to peace for some poor souls," said Francis the Scot. Then a thought seemed to strike him. "It is not possible—no, you cannot have heard. I dare not expect it. But I had a daughter, she was named Claire. They told me—that is, the Flamand Holtz, a not unkindly brute, though he had resolved to make money out of me, dead or alive—well, he told me that one of the wisest of the professors, a learned man, had taken her under his care. They escaped together to go to his mother's house with one of the students, a cousin of the Hope of Israel. You never heard—no, it is not possible. Why should I dream it?"
The Abbé John's throat became suddenly dry. He gasped for a moment, but could not speak.
"You do know—she is dead—tell me!" said Francis the Scot, shaking him roughly by the arm. And that was the single unkindness he used to the young man.
"No, no!" gasped John d'Albret. "She is well. I love her. I was that third who escaped in her company!"
"Where is she?"
"Nay, that I do not know exactly," said the Abbé John, "but it is in France, in a quiet province, with good folk who love her—though not as I love her. For I came hither for her sake!"
And he told the tale—how, in Jean-aux-Choux's secretcachebehind the sheepfold on the hill, he had found a list of the articles for transport to Dame Amélie's new abode, with directions to the carriers, and one or two objects of price, evidently set aside for Jean to carry thither himself upon his next visit. So far, therefore, he was assured that all went well.
"God is great!" said Francis the Scot aloud; and the captive Turk who rowed outside oar, catching the well-known formula, added instantly, "And Mohammed is His prophet."
But on this occasion, at least, he was mistaken. For—like many a good proselyte who knows little of his master's doctrine yet draws converts notwithstanding—not Mohammed or Another, but plain, flippant, light-hearted John d'Albret was on this occasion the Prophet of the Lord.
Henceforth little personal was said. The two men spoke mostly of the work of the ship, the chances of escape (like all prisoners), and especially concerning the progress of the Holy War against ignorance and tyranny. But of Claire, nothing.
Something withheld them. A new thing was working in the heart of John d'Albret. Like many another he had been born a Catholic, and it had always seemed impossible to him to change. But the Place of Eyes, the Question Greater and Lesser in the Street of the Money, the comradeship of Rosny and D'Aubigné in the camps of the Bearnais, had shaken him. Now he listened, as often as he had time to listen, to the whispered arguments and explanations of his new friend. I do not know whether he was convinced. I am not sure even that he always heard aright. But, moved most of all by the transparent honesty of the man whose body had so suffered for that royal law of liberty which judges not by professions but by works, the Abbé John resolved no more to fight in the armies of the Huguenot Prince merely as a loyal Catholic, but to be even such a man as Francis Agnew, if it in him lay.
That it did not so lie within his compass detracts nothing from the excellence of his resolution. The flesh was weak and would ever remain so. This gay, careless spirit, bold and hardy in action, was much like that of Henry of Navarre in his earlier days. There were indeed two sorts of Huguenots in France in the days of the Wars of Religion. They divided upon the verse in James which says, "Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing."
The Puritans afterwards translated the verse, "Let him singpsalms." But the Genevan translators (whom in this book I follow in their first edition of 1560) more mercifully left out the "psalms": "Is any merry, let him sing!" say they.
Now such was the fashion of the men who fought for Henry IV. Even D'Aubigné, the greatest of all—historian, poet, and satirist—expelled from France for over-rigidity, found himself equally in danger in Geneva because of the liberty of his Muse's wing.
So, though the Abbé John became a suffering and warring Huguenot, on grounds good and sufficient to his own conscience, he remained ever the lad he was when he scuffled on the Barricades for the "Good Guise"—and the better fighting! A little added head-knowledge does not change men.
No motives are ever simple. No eye ever quite single. And I will not say what force, if any, the knowledge that Francis Agnew the Scot would never give his daughter in marriage to a Persecutor of the Brethren, had in bringing about the Abbé John's decision.
Perhaps none at all—I do not know. I am no man's judge. The weight which such an argument might have with oneself is all any man can know. And that is, after all, perhaps best left unstated.
At first John was all for revealing his name and quality; but against this Francis Agnew warned him At present he was treated as a pressed man, escaping the "hempen breakfasts of the heretic dogs"—which the captain, the young Duke d'Err, often commanded the "comite" to serve out to those condemned for their faith. Only the Turks, of whom there were a good many, captured during the Levantine wars, strong, grave, sturdy men, were better treated than he.
"If, then," said his companion, "they know that you are a cousin of the Bearnais, they will most likely send you to the Holy Bonfire, especially as you are of too light weight to row in the galley, at any rate."
The Abbé John cried out against this. He was as good as any man, in the galley or elsewhere.
"In intent, yes," said the Scot, "but your weight is as nothing to Hamal's or even mine, when it comes to pulling at fifty foot of oar on an upper deck!"
The Duke of Err was a young nobleman who had early ruined himself by evil life. The memory rankled, so that sometimes the very devil of cruelty seemed to ride him. He would order the most brutal acts for sport, and laugh afterwards as they threw the dead slaves over, hanging crucifixes, Korans, or Genevan Bibles about their necks in mockery according to their creed.
"My galley is lighter by so much carrion!" he would say on such occasions.
It chanced that in the late autumn, when the great heats were beginning to abate and the equinoctials had not yet begun to blow on that exposed eastern coast of Spain, that for a private reason the Duke-Captain desired to be at Tarragona by nightfall. So all that day the slaves were driven by the "executioners"—as the Duke invariably named his "comites"—till they prayed for death.
Although it was a known sea and a time of peace the slaves were allowed no quarter—that is, one half rowing while the other rested. All were forced most mercilessly through a long day's agony of heat and labour.
"Strike,bourreau—strike!" cried the captain incessantly; "what else are you paid the King's good money for? If we do not get to Tarragona by four o'clock this afternoon, I will have you hung from the yardarm. So you are warned. If you cannot animate, you can terrorise. Once I saw a 'comite' in the galleys of Malta cut off a slave's arm, and beat the other dogs about the head with it till they doubled their speed!"
It was in order to give a certain entertainment at Tarragona that the Duke of Err was so eager to get there. For hardly had theConquistadoranchored, before the great sail was down, the fore-rudder unshipped, the after part of the deck cleared, and a gay marquee spread, with tables set out underneath for a banquet.
By this time, what with the freshness of the sea and fear of missing a stroke occasionally—a crime always relentlessly punished—the men were so fatigued with the heat, the toil, and the bruising of their chests upon the oar-handles, that many would gladly have fallen asleep as they were—but the order came not. All were kept at their posts ready for the salute when the guests of the Duke should come on board—that is, the lifting of the huge oars out of the water all in a moment and holding them parallel and dripping, a thing which, when well performed, produces a very happy effect.
After dinner the Duke conducted his guests upon thecoursier, or raised platform, to look down upon the strange and terrible spectacle beneath. It was full moon, and the guests, among them several ladies, gazed upon that mass of weary humanity as on a spectacle.
"God who made us all," murmured the Abbé John, "can woman born of woman be so cruel?"
The young Duke was laughing and talking to a lady whom he held cavalierly by the hand, to preserve her from slipping upon the narrow ledge of thecoursier.
"I told you I had the secret of sleep," he said; "I will prove it. I will make three hundred and fifty men sleep with a motion of my hand."
He signed to one of the "comites," whom he was accustomed to call his "chief hangman," and the man blew a long modulated note. Instantly the whole of the men who had kept at attention dropped asleep—most of them being really so, because of their weariness. And others, like John d'Albret and Francis the Scot, only pretended to obey the order.
At the sight of the hundreds of miserable wretches beneath, crowded together, naked to the waist (for they had had no opportunity of dressing), their backs still bleeding from the blows of thebourreau, the lady shuddered and drew her arm hastily from that of the captain. But he, thinking that she was pleased, and only in fear of slipping among such a horrid gang, led her yet farther along the estrade, and continued his jesting in the same strain as before.
"My dear lady," he said, "you have now seen that I am possessed of the art of making men sleep. Now you will see that I know equally well how to awake them."
Again he signed to the "comites" to blow thereveille.
A terrible scene ensued as the men rose to resume their oars. The chains clanked and jingled. The riveted iron girdles about their waists glistened at the part where the back-pull of the oar catches it. Hardly one of the crew was fit to move. With the long strain of waiting their limbs had stiffened; their arms had become like branches of trees. Even the utmost efforts of "hangman" were hardly able to put into them a semblance of activity.
As the party looked from above upon that moving mass, the moon, which had been clouded over, began to draw clear. Above, was the white and sleeping town sprinkled with illuminated windows—beneath, many riding-lights of ships in harbour. The moon sprang from behind the cloud, sailing small and clear in the height of heaven, and Valentine la Niña found herself looking into a pallid, scarcely human face—that of John d'Albret, galley-slave.
He was—where she had vowed him. Her curse had held true. With a cry she slipped from the captain's arm, sprang from thecoursier, and threw her arms about the neck of the worn and bleeding slave!
But as he watched, a strange drawn look appeared on the countenance of Francis Agnew the Scot. And there came that set look to his mouth, which had enabled him to endure so many things.
"The lad also!" he muttered, "and I had begun to love him!"
For it was not given to Francis Agnew, more than to any other son of Adam, to divine the good when the appearance is evil. And with his elbows on his knees he thought of Claire, of her hope deferred, and of the waiting of the sick heart. She believed this man faithful. And now, would even her father's return (if ever he did return) make up to her for this most foul treachery?
To John d'Albret he spoke no further word. He asked no question, as they rested side by side during the night-watches. The stammered explanation which the Abbé John began after Valentine's departure was left unanswered. Francis Agnew had learned a great secret—how to keep silence. It is an excellent gift.
The ancient, high-piled town loomed up tier above tier, white and grey and purple under the splendours of the moon. The Abbé John took it in bit by bit—the black ledges and capes with the old Moorish castles, and later corsair watch-towers, the flaringphareat the mouth of the harbour, the huge double swell of the cathedral crowning all, the long lines of the arch-episcopal palace on the slope, the vineyards and oliveyards—all stood up blanched and, as it were, blotched in pen and ink under the silver flood of light and the steady milky blue arch of the sky. Such was Tarragona upon that night of sleepless silence.
The morning brought a new order, grateful to both.
The armourer of theConquistadorcame down, and with file, and rasp, and pince-monseigneur, he speedily undid the iron belt which had not yet had time to eat into the flesh. The Abbé John was commanded to go on shore. During his short time aboard he had made himself a favourite. The Turk, Ben Hamal, hugged him to his hairy chest and stammered a blessing in the name of the Prophet. Others here and there wished him good speed, and looked wistfully at him, even though after John had departed they shook their heads, and with quick upward motions of their thumbs imitated the darting flames of the bi-weeklyauto de fé.
They understood why he was sent for—and envied him.
Only Francis Agnew the Scot said no word, bade no adieu, wished no wish, gazing steadily at a post on the shore, which to his distorted imagination took on the shape of a woman dressed in white waiting for John d'Albret.
Had he only thought, he would have known that to be impossible. But he did not think—except of Claire, his daughter. And—as he had said—he had begun to love the lad. So much the worse for him and for all.
It was not upon the shore, but high in the city that the Abbé John found Valentine la Niña. She awaited him in that secular annex to the palace of the Archbishop which the great Terés Doria now occupied as Viceroy of Catalonia. The Archbishop-Governor had put his private cabinet at her service. One does not say no to the daughters of reigning sovereigns, when one has served both father and grandfather.
Doria had ordered his valet, a layman with mere servitor's vows to give him a standing, to assist John d'Albret in his toilet. So before long the Abbé John found himself in a suit of black velvet, severe and unbroidered, which fitted him better than it could ever have done the stouter Don Jacques Casas, for whom it had been made. A sword hung at his side—a feeble blade and blunt, as John d'Albret ascertained as soon as he was left a moment alone, but sheathed in a scabbard of price. He sat still and let the good valet perfume and lave, and comb out his love-locks, without thinking much of what was coming. His mind was benumbed and curiously oppressed. Fate planned above his head, shadowy but unseen. And somehow he was afraid—he knew not why.
Finally all was done. Even Jacques Casas was satisfied, and smiled. The galley-slave had become a man again.
The cabinet of the Cardinal-Viceroy of Catalonia looked over the city wall, very nearly at its highest seaward angle, in the place where now they have pierced a gate, where red-kerchiefed gipsies sit about on steps, and vagabonds in mauve caps sell snails by measure. But then a little vice-regal garden fronted the windows, and the ancient walls of Tarragona, older than the Romans or the Greeks, older than Carthage—older even than the galleys of Tyre—fell away beneath towards the sea verges, so solid that to the eye there was little difference between them and the living rock on which they were founded. The giants who were in the times before the flood built them, so the townsmen said. And as no one knows anything about the matter, that opinion is as good as any other.
The two young people stood regarding each other, silent. The blonde masses of the girl's hair seemed less full of living gold and fire than of yore. Perhaps there was a thread or two of grey mingling with the graciousness of those thick coils and curves. But the great eyes, coloured like clover-honey dropped from the comb, were moist and glorious as ever. They had manifestly gained in directness and nobility.
The Abbé John bowed low. Valentine la Niña did not respond. There was, however, a slight colour on her cheeks of clear ivory. Man born of woman had never seen that before.
"I have sent for you," said Valentine la Niña, in a low and thrilling contralto, "I would speak with you! Yet this one time more!"
She put her hand rapidly to her throat, as if something there impeded her utterance.
"Yes," she continued, swallowing down her emotion with difficulty, "I would speak with you—it may be for the last time."
After this she was silent a while, as if making up her mind what to say. Then with a single instinctive mechanical gesture she twitched her long robe of white and creamy lace behind her. It seemed as if she wanted all space wide and clear before her for what she had to say and do. Her eyes devoured those of John d'Albret.
"You—still—love her?" she said, forcing the words slowly from her lips.
"I love her!" John answered simply. He had nothing to add to that. It had been said before. Any apology would be an insult to Claire. Sympathy a deeper insult to the woman before him.
The carmine flush deepened on her cheek. But it was not anger. The girl was singularly mistress of herself—calm, resolved, clear-seeing.
"Ah," said Valentine la Niña softly, "I expected no other answer. But still, have you remembered that I once gave you your liberty? How you lost it a second time, I do not know. Now I am putting all my cards on the table. I play—hearts only. If I and my love are not worthy of yours, will you tell me why another, who has done nothing for you, is preferred to me, who has risked, and am willing to risk everything for you—life, death, the world, position, freedom, honour, all! Tell me! Answer me!"
"I loved her first!" said the Abbé John.
"Ah, that too you said before," she cried, with a kind of sigh, "and you have nothing more to say—I—nothing more to offer. Yet I cannot tell why it should be so. It seems, in all dispassion, that if I were a man, I should choose Valentine la Niña. Men—many men—ah, how many men, have craved for that which I have begged you to accept—not for your vague princedom, not for your vague hopes, not for your soldier's courage, which is no rare virtue. But for you—yourself! Because you are you—and have drawn me, I know not how—I see not where——"
"I do not ask you to obtain my release," said John d'Albret, somewhat uneasily, "I have no claim to that; but I have on board that ship a comrade"—here he hesitated—"yes, I will tell you his name, for you are noble. It is Francis Agnew, her father, he who was left for dead on the Street of the University by the Guisards of Paris on the Day of the Barricades. He is now at the same bench as I, in theConquistador——"
"What!" cried Valentine, "not the old man with the white tangled beard I saw by your side when—when—I saw you?"
"The same," the Abbé John answered her softly.
Then came a kind of glory over the girl's face, like the first certainty of forgiveness breaking over a redeemed soul. She drew in her breath sharply. Her hands clasped themselves on her bosom. Then she smiled, but the bitterness was gone out of the smile now.
"I must see this Claire," she said, speaking shortly and somewhat sternly to herself; "I must know whether she is worthy. For to obtain from my father (who will not of his own goodwill call me daughter)—from Philip the King, I mean—pardon for two such heretics, one of them the cousin of his chief enemy—I must have a great thing to offer. And such I have indeed—something that he would almost expend another Armada to obtain. But, before I decide, I must see Claire Agnew. I must look in her eyes, and know if she be worthy. Then I will do it. Or, perhaps, she and I together."
The last words were murmured only.
The Abbé John, who knew not of what she was speaking, judged it prudent to say nothing.
"Yes—I must know," she went on, still brusquely, "you will tell me where she is. I will go there. And afterwards I will return to the Escorial to see my father—Philip the King. Meantime I will speak to the Duke of Err, and to his mother, as well as to the Viceroy Doria. You shall abide in Pilate's House down there, where is a prison garden——"
"And my friend?" said John d'Albret.
The girl hesitated a little, and then held out her hand. The young man took it.
"And your friend!" she said. "There in Pilate's House you must wait, you two, till I see—till I know that she is worth the sacrifice."
Once again she laughed a little, seeing a wave of joy or perhaps some more complex emotion sweep over John's face.
"Ah," she cried, with a returning trace of her first bitterness, "you are certain that she is worthy. Doubtless so for you! But as the sacrifice is mine—I also must be certain—ah, very certain. For there is no back-going. It is the end of all things for Valentine la Niña."
She laughed little and low, like one on the verge of hysterics. A nerve twitched irregularly in her throat under her chin to the right. The pink came out brighter to her cheek. It was a terrible laugh to hear in that still place. And the mirthlessness of it—it struck the Abbé John cold.