The Long Night - Stanley Weyman (free novel 24 .txt) 📗

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"Do you hear what he says?" Basterga replied. "In the meantime, I tell you to keep your distance, young man. I am not used to be jostled!"

Claude hesitated a moment, scowling. Then, "Very well!" he said, drawing off with a gesture of menace. "It is only put off: I shall pay him another time. It is waiting for you, sneak, bear that in mind!" And shrugging his shoulders he turned with as much dignity as he could and moved off.

Basterga wheeled from him to the other. "So!" he said. "You have something to tell me, it seems?" And taking the trembling Louis by the arm, he drew him aside, a few paces from the approach of the bridge. In doing this he hung a moment searching the bridge and the farther bank with a keen gaze. He knew, and for some hours had known, on what a narrow edge of peril he stood, and that only Blondel's influence protected him from arrest. Yet he had returned: he had not hesitated to put his head again into the lion's mouth. Still if Louis' words meant that certain arrest awaited him, he was not too proud to save himself.

He could discern no officers on the bridge, and satisfied on the point of immediate danger, he turned to his shivering ally. "Well, what is it?" he said. "Speak!"

"I'll tell you the truth," Louis gabbled.

"You had better!" Basterga replied, in a tone that meant much more than he said. "Or you will find me worse to deal with than yonder hot-head! I will answer for that."

"Messer Blondel has been at the house," Louis murmured glibly, his mind centred on the question how much he should tell. "Last night and again this morning. He has been closeted with Anne and Mercier. And there has been some talk--of a box or a bottle."

"Were they in my room?" Basterga asked, his brow contracting.

"No, downstairs."

"Did they get--the box or the bottle?" There was a dangerous note in Basterga's voice; and a look in his eyes that scared the lad.

Louis, as his instinct was, lied again, fleeing the more pressing peril. "Not to my knowledge," he said.

"And you?" The scholar eyed him with bland suavity. "You had nothing to do--with all this, I suppose?"

"I listened. I was in my room, but they thought I was out. When I went," the liar continued, "they discovered me; and Messer Blondel followed me and overtook me on the bridge and threatened--that he would have me arrested if I were not silent."

"You refused to be silent, of course?"

But Louis was too acute to be caught in a trap so patent. He knew that Basterga would not believe in his courage, if he swore to it. "No, I said I would be silent," he answered. "And I should have been," he continued with candour, "if I had not run into your arms."

"But if you assented to his wish," Basterga retorted, eyeing him keenly, "why did he depart after that fashion?"

"Something happened to him," Louis said. "I do not know what. He seemed to be in distress, or to be ill."

"I could see that," the scholar answered dryly. "But Master Claude? What of him? And why was he so enamoured of you that he could not be parted from you?"

"It was to punish me for listening. They followed me different ways."

"I see. And that is the truth, is it?"

"I swear it is!"

The scholar saw no reason why it should not be the truth. Louis, a facile tool, had always been of his, the stronger, party. If Blondel tampered with any one, he would naturally, if he knew aught of the house, suborn Claude or Anne. And Louis, spying and fleeing, and when overtaken, promising silence, was quite in the picture. The only thing, indeed, which stood out awkwardly, and refused to fall into place, was the fashion in which the Syndic had turned and gone off the bridge. And for that there might be reasons. He might have been seized with a sudden attack of his illness, or he might have perceived Basterga watching him from the farther bank.

On the whole, the scholar, forgetting that cowards are ever liars, saw no reason to doubt Louis' story. It did but add one more to the motives he had for action: immediate, decisive, striking action, if he would save his neck, if he would succeed in his plans. That the Syndic alone stood between him and arrest, that by the Syndic alone he lived, he had learned at a meeting at which he had been present the previous night at the Grand Duke's country house four leagues distant. D'Albigny had been there, and Brunaulieu, Captain of the Grand Duke's Guards, and Father Alexander, who dreamed of the Episcopate of Geneva, and others--the chiefs of the plot, his patrons. To his mortification they had been able to tell him things he had not learned, though he was within the city, and they without. Among others, that the Council had certain knowledge of him and his plans, and but for the urgency of Blondel would have arrested him a fortnight before.

His companions at the midnight supper had detected his dismay, and had derided him, thinking that with that there was an end of the mysterious scheme which he had refused to impart. They fancied that he would not return to the city, or venture his head a second time within the lion's jaws. But they reckoned without their man, Basterga with all his faults was brave; and he had failed in too many schemes to resign this one lightly.

"Si fractus illabatur orbis Impavidum ferient ruinae,"

he murmured; and he had ventured, he had passed the gates, he was here. Here, with his eyes open to the peril, and open to the necessity of immediate action if the slender thread by which all hung were not to snap untimely.

Blondel! He lived by Blondel. And Blondel--why had he left the bridge in that strange fashion? Abruptly, desperately, as if something had befallen him. Why? He must learn, and that quickly.


CHAPTER XVI.

A GLOVE AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

Meanwhile, Claude, robbed of his prey, had gone into the town in great disgust. As he passed from the bridge, and paused before he entered the huddle of narrow streets that climbed the hill, he had on his left the glittering heights of snow, rising ridge above ridge to the blue; and most distant among them Mont Blanc itself, etherealised by the frosty sunshine and clear air of a December morning. But Mont Blanc might have been a marsh, the Rhone, pouring its icy volume from the lake, might have been a brook, for him. Aware, at length, of the peril in which Anne stood, and not doubting that these colloquies of Messers Blondel and Louis, these man[oe]uvrings to be rid of his presence, were part of a conspiracy against her, he burned with the desire to thwart it. They had made a puppet of him; they had sent him to and fro at their will and pleasure; and they had done this, no doubt, in order that in his absence they might work--Heaven knew what vile and miserable work! But he would know, too! He was going to know! He would not be so tricked thrice.

His indignation went beyond the Syndic. The smug-faced towns-folk whom he met and jostled in the narrow ways, and whose grave starched looks he countered with hot defiant glances--he included them in his anathema. He extended to them the contempt in which he held Blondel and Louis and the rest. They were all of a breed, a bigoted breed; all dull, blind worms, insensible to the beauty of self-sacrifice, or the purity of affection. All, self-sufficient dolts, as far removed, as immeasurably divided from her whom he loved, as the gloomy lanes of this close city lay below the clear loveliness of the snow-peaks! For, after all, he had lifted his eyes to the mountains.

One thing only perplexed him. He understood the attitude of Basterga and Grio and Louis towards the girl. He discerned the sword of Damocles that they held over her, the fear of a charge of witchcraft, or of some vile heresy, in which they kept her. But how came Blondel in the plot? What was his part, what his object? If he had been sincere in that attempt on Basterga's secrets, which Madame's delirious words had frustrated, was he sincere now? Was his object now as then--the suppression of the devilish practices of which he had warned Claude, and in the punishment of which he had threatened to include the girl with her tempter? Presumably it was, and he was still trying to reach the goal by other ways, using Louis as he had used Claude, or tried to use him.

And yet Claude doubted. He began to suspect--for love is jealous--that Blondel had behind this a more secret, a more personal, a more selfish aim. Had the young girl, still in her teens, caught the fancy of the man of sixty? There was nothing unnatural in the idea; such things were, even in Geneva; and Louis was a go-between, not above the task. In that case she who had showed a brave front to Basterga all these months, who had not blenched before the daily and hourly persecution to which she had been exposed in her home, was not likely to succumb to the senile advances of a man who might be her grandfather!

If he did not hold her secret. But if he did hold it? If he did hold it, and the cruel power it gave? If he held it, he who had only to lift his hand to consign her to duress on a charge so dark and dangerous that innocence itself was no protection against it? So plausible that even her lover had for a short time held it true? What then?

Claude, who had by this time reached the Tertasse gate and passed through it from the town side, paused on the ramparts and bared his head. What then?

He had his answer. Framed in the immensity of sky and earth that lay before him, he saw his loneliness and hers, his insignificance and hers, his helplessness and hers; he, a foreigner, young, without name or reputation, or aught but a strong right hand; she, almost a child, alone or worse than alone, in this great city--one of the weak things which the world's car daily and hourly crushes into the mud, their very cries unheard and unheeded. Of no more account than the straw which the turbid Rhone, bore one moment on its swirling tide, and the next swallowed from sight beneath its current!

They were two--and a mad woman! And against them were Blondel and Basterga and Grio and Louis, and presently all the town of Geneva! All these gloomy, narrow, righteous men, and shrieking, frightened women--frightened lest any drop of the pitch fall on them and destroy them! Love is a marvellous educator. Almost as clearly as we of a later day, he saw how outbreaks of superstition, such as that which he dreaded, began, and came to a head, and ended. A chance word at a door, a spiteful rumour or a sick child, the charge, the torture, the widening net of accusation, the fire in the market-place. So it had been in Bamberg and Wurzburg, in Geneva two generations back, in Alsace scarce as many years back: at Edinburgh in Scotland where thirty persons had suffered