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

/> "But it is not, by your leave, Messer Fabri, as I am informed," the man who had spoken before objected; supporting his opinion simply because he had voiced it, a thing seen every day in such assemblies. Fabri replied on him in the other sense: and presently Blondel had the satisfaction of listening to a discussion in which the one party said a dozen things that he saw would be of use to him--some day.

One only said not a word, and that was Petitot. He listened to all with a puzzled look. He resented the insult which Blondel had flung at his friend Baudichon, but he saw all going against them, and no chance of redress; nay, capital was being made out of that which should have been a disadvantage. Worst of all, he was uneasy, fancying--he was very shrewd--that he caught a glimpse, under the Fourth Syndic's manner, of another man: that he detected signs of emotion, a feverishness and imperiousness not quite explained by the circumstances.

He got the notion from this that the Fourth Syndic had learned more from Basterga than he had disclosed. His notion, even so, went no further than the suspicion that Blondel was hiding knowledge out of a desire to reap all the glory. But he did not like it. "He was always for risking, for risking!" he thought. "This is another case of it. God grant it go well!" His wife, his children, his daughters, rose in a picture before him, and he hated Blondel, who had none of these. He would have put him to death for running the tithe of a risk.

When the council broke up, Fabri drew Blondel aside. "The bird is flown, but what of the nest?" he asked. "Has he left nothing?"

"Between you and me," Blondel replied under his breath, as his eyes sought the other's, "I hope to make him speak yet. But not a word!"

"Ah!"

"Not a word! But there is just a chance. And it will be everything to us if I can induce him to speak."

"I see that. But the house? Could you not search it?"

"That would be to scare him finally."

"You have made no perquisition there?"

"None. I have heard," Blondel continued, hesitating as if he had not quite made up his mind to speak, "some things--strange things in respect to the house. But I will tell you more of that when I know more."

He was too clever to state that he held the house in suspicion for sorcery and kindred things. Charges such as that spread, he knew, upwards from the lower classes, not downwards to them. The poison, disseminated as he had known how to disseminate it, by hints and innuendoes dropped among his officers and ushers, was already in the air, and would do its work. Fabri, a man of sense, might laugh to-day, and to-morrow; but the third day, when the report came to him from a dozen quarters, mainly by women's mouths, he would not laugh. And presently he would shrug his shoulders and stand aside, and leave the matter in more earnest hands.

Blondel dropped no more than that hint, therefore, and as he passed homeward applauded his discretion. He was proud of the turn things had taken at the Council; elated by the part he had played, and the proof he had given of his mastery, he felt able to carry anything through. His mind, leaping over the immediate future, pictured a wider theatre, in which his powers would have full scope, and a larger stage on which he might aspire to play the first part. He saw himself not only wealthy, but ennobled, the fount of honour, the favourite, and, in time, the master of princes. Such as he was to-day the Medicis had been, and many another whom the world held noble. He had but to live and to dare; only to live and to dare! Only in order to do the one he must--it was no choice of his--do the other!

Before he was five minutes older he was reminded of the necessity. At the door of his house the pains of the disease from which he suffered--aggravated, perhaps, by the excitement through which he had just passed, or by the cold of the weather--seized him with unusual violence. He leant, pale and almost fainting, against the door-jamb, unable at the moment to do so much as raise the latch. The golden dreams in which he had lost himself by the way, the visions of power and fame, vanished as he had so many times seen the after-glow vanish from the snow-peaks; leaving only cold images of death and desolation. Presently, with an effort, he staggered within doors, poured out such medicine as he had, and, bent double and almost without breath, swallowed it; and so, by-and-by, a wan and wild-eyed image of himself came out of the fit.

He told himself in after days that it was that decided him; that but for that sharp fit of pain and the prospect of others like it, he would not have yielded to the temptation, no, not to be the Grand Duke's favourite, not to be Minister of Savoy! He ignored, in his looking backward, the visions of glory and ambition in which he had revelled. He saw himself on the rack, with life and immunity from pain drawing him one way, the prospect of a miserable death the other; and he pleaded that no man would have decided otherwise. After that experience the straw did not float, so thin that he was not ready to grasp it rather than die, rather than suffer again. Nor did the fact that the straw at that moment lay on the table beside him go for much.

It did lie there. When he felt a little stronger and began to look about him, he found a note at his elbow. It was a small, common-looking letter, sealed with a B, that might signify Blondel or Basterga, or, for the matter of that, Baudichon. He did not know the handwriting, and he opened it idly, in the scorn of small things that pain induced.

He had not read a line of the contents, before his countenance changed. The letter was from Basterga, and cunningly contrived. It gave him the directions he needed, yet it was so worded that even after the event it might pass for a trifling communication from a physician. The place and the hour were specified--the latter so near that for a moment his cheek grew pale. On that ensued the part which interested him most; but as the whole was brief, the whole may be given.

"Sir" (here followed a cabalistic sign such as physicians were in the habit of using to impose on the vulgar). "After paying a visit in the Corraterie, where I have an appointment on Saturday evening next between late and early, I will be with you. But the mixture with the necessary directions shall be sent to you twelve hours in advance, so that before my visit you may experience its good effects. As surely as the wrong potion in the case you wot of deprived of reason, so surely (as I hope for salvation) will this potion have the desired effect.

"The Physician of Aleppo."

"Saturday next, between late and early!" Blondel muttered, gazing at the words with fascinated eyes. "It is for the day after to-morrow! The day after to-morrow!" And in his thoughts he passed again over the road he had travelled since his first visit to Basterga's room, since the hour when the scholar had unrolled before him the map of the town he called "Aurelia," and had told him the story of Ibn Jasher and the Physician of Aleppo.

"No, I am not well," he answered. He sat, warmly wrapped up, in the high chair in his parlour, his face so drawn with want of sleep that Captain Blandano of the city guard, who had come to take his orders, had no difficulty in believing him. "I am not well," he repeated peevishly. "It is the weather." He had some soup before him. Beside it stood a tiny phial of medicine; a phial strangely shaped and strange looking, containing something not unlike the green cordial of the Carthusians.

"It troubles me a good deal, too," Blandano said. "There are seven men absent in the fourth ward. And two men, whose wives are urgent with me that they should have leave."

"Leave?" the Syndic cried. "Do they think naught"--leaning forward in a passion--"of the safety of the city? If I were not ill, I would take service on the wall myself to set an example!"

"There is no need of that," the Captain answered respectfully, "if I might have permission to withdraw a few men from the west side so as to fill the places on the east----"

"Ay, ay!"

"From the Rhone side of the town----"

"From the Corraterie? That is least open to assault."

"Yes, from that part perhaps would be best," Blandano assented, nodding. "Yes, I think so. If I might do that, I think I could manage."

"Well, then do it," Blondel answered. "And make a note that I assented to your suggestion to take them from the Corraterie and put them on the lower part of the wall. After all, the nights are very bitter now, and there are limits. Do the men grumble much?"

"It is as much as I can do to make them go the rounds," Blandano answered. "Some plead the weather; and some argue that, with President Rochette, whose word is as good as his bond, on the point of coming to an agreement with us, the rounds are a farce!"

The Syndic shrugged his shoulders. "Well!" he muttered, rubbing his chin and looking thoughtfully before him, "we must not wear the men out. There is no moon now, is there?"

"No."

"And the enemy can attempt nothing without light," Blondel continued, thinking aloud. "See here, Blandano, we must not put too heavy a burden on our people. I see that. As it is so cold, I think you may pass the word to pretermit the rounds to-night--save two. At what hours would you suggest?"

Blandano considered his own comfort--as the other expected he would--and answered, "Early and late, say an hour before midnight and an hour before dawn".

"Then let be it as you suggest. But see"--with returning asperity--"that those rounds go, and at their hours. Let there be no remissness. I will make a note," he continued, "of the hours fixed. An hour before midnight and an hour before dawn".

He extended his arm and drew the ink-horn towards him. Midway in the act, whether it was that his hand shook by reason of his illness, or that he was in a hurry to close an interview which tried him more severely than appeared, his sleeve caught the little phial of green water that stood beside the soup on the table. It reeled an instant on its edge, toppled on its side, and rolling, in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell the tale, to the verge of the table--fell over.

Messer Blondel made a strange noise in his throat.

But the Captain had seen what was happening. Dexterously he caught the bottle in his huge palm, and with an air of modest achievement was going to set it on the table, when he saw that the Syndic had fallen back