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

knew as much as that, did she? She knew that they were one, and that they were plotting together; while in the Council men were clamouring for the Paduan's arrest, and were growing suspicious because he was not arrested--Baudichon, whom he had called a fat hog, and Petitot, that slow, plodding sleuth-hound of a patriot. What if light fell on the true state of things--and less than the girl had said might cast that light? Then the warrant might go, not for the Paduan only, but for himself. Ay, for him! For with an enemy ever lying within a league of the gates warrants flew quickly in Geneva. Men who sleep ill of nights, and take the cock-crow for war's alarum, are suspicious, and, once roused, without ruth or mercy.

There was the joint in his harness. Once let his name be published with Basterga's,--as must happen if the watch were summoned and the girl spoke out--and no one could say where the matter might end, or what suspicions might not be awakened. Nay, the matter was worse, more perilous and more lightly balanced; for, setting himself aside, none the less was a brawl that brought up Basterga's name, a thing to be shunned. The least thing might precipitate the scholar's arrest; his arrest must lead to the loss of the _remedium_, if it existed; and the loss of the _remedium_ to the loss of that which Messer Blondel had come to value the more dearly the more he sacrificed to keep it--the Syndic's life.

He dared not call the watch, and he dared not use violence. As he awoke to those two facts, he stood blinking in dismayed silence, swallowing his rage, and hating the girl and hating the man with a dumb hatred. Though the reasons which weighed with him were unknown to the two, they could not be blind to his fear and his baffled mien; and had he been alone they might have taken victory for certain. But Basterga was not one to be so lightly thwarted. His intellect, his wit, his very mass intimidated. Therefore it was with as much relief as surprise that Anne read in his face the reflection of the other's doubts, and saw that he, too, gave back.

"You are two fools!" he said. "Two great, big fools!" There was resignation, there was something that was almost approval in his tones. "You do not know what you are doing! Is there no way of making you hear reason?"

"You cannot go up," Anne said. She had won, it seemed, without knowing how she had won.

Basterga grunted; and then, "Ah, well," he said, addressing Claude, "if I had you in the fields, my lad, it would not be that bit of metal would save you!" And he spouted with appropriate gesture--

"--Illum fidi aequales, genua aegra trahentem Jactantemque utroque caput, crassumque cruorem Ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes Ducunt ad navis!

Half an hour in my company, and you would not be so bold."

Claude smiled with pardonable contempt, but made no reply, nor did he change his attitude.

"Come!" Blondel muttered, addressing his ally with his eyes averted. "I have reasons at present for letting them be!" They were strange reasons, to judge by the hang-dog look of the proud magistrate. "But I shall know how to deal with them by-and-by. Come, man, come!" he repeated impatiently. And he turned towards the door and unlocked it.

Basterga moved reluctantly after him. "Ay, we go now," he said, with a look full of menace. "But wait a while! Caesar Basterga does not forget, and his turn will come! Where is my cap?"

He had let it fall on the floor, and he turned to pick it up, stooping slowly and with difficulty as stout men do. As he raised himself, his head still low, he butted it suddenly and with an activity for which no one would have given him credit full into Claude's chest. The unlucky young man, who had lowered his weapon the instant before, fell back with a "sough" against the wall, and leant there, pale and breathless. Anne uttered one scream, then the scholar's huge arm enfolded her neck and drew her backwards against his breast.

"Up! up! Messer Blondel!" he cried. "Now is your chance! Up and surprise her!" And with his disengaged hand he gripped Claude, for further safety, by the collar. "Up; I will keep them quiet!"

The Syndic wasted a moment in astonishment, then he took in the situation and the other's cleverness. Before Basterga had ceased to speak, he was at the door of the staircase, and had dragged it open. But as he set his foot on the lowest stair, Anne, held as she was against Basterga's breast, and almost stifled by the arm which covered her mouth, managed to clutch the Syndic by his skirts, and, once having taken hold, held him with the strength of despair. In vain he struggled and strove and wrestled to jerk himself free; in vain Basterga, hampered by Claude, tried to drag the girl away--Blondel came away with her! She clung to him, and even, freeing her mouth for a moment, succeeded in uttering a scream.

"Curse her!" Basterga foamed: and had he had a hand to spare, he would have struck her down. "Pull, man, have you no strength! Let go, you vixen! Let go, or----"

He tried to press her throat, but in changing his hold allowed her to utter a second scream, louder, more shrill, more full of passion than the other. At the same instant a chair, knocked down by Blondel in his efforts, fell with a crash, throwing down a pewter platter; and Claude, white and breathless as he was, began to struggle, seeing his mistress so handled. The four swayed to and fro. Another moment, and either the Syndic must have jerked himself free, or the contest must have attained to dimensions that could not escape the notice of the neighbours, when a sound--a sound from within, from upstairs--stayed the tumult as by magic.

Blondel ceased to struggle, and stood aghast. Basterga relaxed his hold upon his prisoners and listened. Claude leant back against the wall. The girl alone--she alone moved. Without speaking, without looking, as a bird flies to its young, she sprang to the stairs and fled up them.

The maniacal laugh, the crazy words--a moment only, they heard them: and then the door above, which the poor woman, so long bedridden, had contrived in her frenzy of fear to open, closed on the sounds and stifled them. But enough had been heard: enough to convince Blondel, enough to justify Basterga, enough to change the fortunes of more than one in the room. The scholar's eyes met the Syndic's.

"Are you satisfied?" he asked, in a low voice.

Blondel, breathing hard, nodded.

"You heard?"

He nodded a second time. He looked scared.

"Then you have enough to burn the old witch and the young one with her!" Basterga replied. He turned his small eyes, sparkling with malignity, on the young man, who stood against the wall, pale, and but half recovered from the blow he had sustained. "You thought to thwart me, did you, Messer Claude? You thought yourself clever enough to play with Caesar Basterga, did you? To hold at bay--oh, clever fellow--a magistrate and a scholar! And defy us both! Now I will tell you what will come of it!" He shook his great finger in front of the young man. "Your pretty bit of pink and white will burn! Burn, see you! A show for the little boys, a holiday for the young men and the young women, a treat for the old men, who will see her white limbs writhe in the smoke! Ha!" as Claude, with a face of horror, would have waved him away, "that touches you, does it? You had not thought of that? Nay, you had not thought of other things. I tell you, before the sun sets this evening, this house shall be anathema! Before night what we have heard will be known abroad, and there will be much added to it. There was a child died in the fourth house from this on Sunday! It will be odd if she did not overlook it. And the young wife of the Lieutenant at the Porte Tertasse, who has ailed since her marriage--a pale thing; who knows but he looked this way once and Mistress Anne thought ill of his defection? Ha! Ha! You would cross Caesar Basterga, would you? No, Messer Claude," he set his huge foot on the fallen sword which Claude had made a movement to recover. "I fight with other weapons than that! And if you lay a finger on me"--he extended his arms to their widest extent--"I will crush the life out of you. That is better," as Claude stood glaring helplessly at him--"I teach you prudence, at any rate. And as," with a sneer, "you are so apt at learning, I will do you, if you choose, a greater kindness that man ever did you, or woman either!"

The young man, breathing quickly, did not speak. Perhaps his eyes were watching for an opening; at the least appearance of one he would have flung himself upon his enemy.

"You do not choose. And yet, I will do it. In one word--Go!

Teque his, puer, eripe flammis!"

He pointed to the door with a gesture tragic enough. "Go and live, for if you stay you die! Wait not until the chain is drawn before the door, until boards darken the windows, and men cross the street when they would pass! Until women hide their heads as they go by, and the market will not sell, nor the water run for you! For then, as surely as she will perish, you will perish with her!"

"So be it!" Claude cried. And in his turn he pointed, not without dignity, to the door. "Go you, and our blood be upon your head!"

Basterga shrugged his shoulders, and in one moment put the thing and his grand manner away from him. "Enough! we will go," he said. "You are satisfied, Messer Syndic? Yes. Farewell, young sir, you have my last word." And while the young man stood glowering at him, he opened the street door, and the two passed out.

"You will not go on with this?" Blondel muttered with a backward gesture, as the two paused.

"Nothing," Basterga answered in a low voice, "will suit our purpose better. It will amuse Geneva and fill men's mouths till the time come. For you too, Messer Blondel," he continued, with a piercing look, "will live and not die, I take it?"

The other knew then that the hour had come to set his seal to the bargain: and equally, that if at this eleventh hour he would return, the path was open. But _facilis_--known is the rest, and the grip which a strong nature gains on a weaker, and how hardly fear, once admitted, is cast out. Within the Syndic's sight rose one of the gates, almost within touch rose the rampart of the city, long his own, which he was asked to betray. The mountains of his native land, pure, cold and sunlit, stood up against the blue depth of winter sky, eloquent of the permanence of things, and the insignificance of men. The contemplation of them turned his cheek a shade paler and struck terror to his heart; but did not stay him. His eyes avoiding the other's gaze, his face shrinking and pitiable, shame already his portion, he nodded.

"Precisely," Basterga said.