Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  She shrank back, and Claude’s eyes blazed. Fortunately, the bully’s mind passed to the first object of his coming; or it may be that he was sober enough to read a warning in the younger man’s face.

  “Oh! time enough,” he said. “You are not so nice always, I’ll be bound. And things come — hic! — to those who wait! I don’t belong to your Sabbaths, I suppose, or you’d be freer! But I want my things, and I am going to have them! I defy thee, Satan! And all thy works!”

  Still growling under his breath he burst open the staircase door, and stumbled noisily upwards, the light wavering in his hand. Anne’s eyes followed him; she had advanced to the foot of the stairs, and Claude understood the apprehension that held her. But the sounds did not penetrate to the room on the upper floor, or Madame Royaume did not take the alarm; perhaps she slept. And after assuring herself that Grio had entered his room the girl returned to the table.

  The Spaniard had spoken with brutal plainness; it was no longer possible to ignore what he had said, or to lie under any illusion as to the girl’s knowledge of her peril. Claude’s eyes met hers: and for a moment the anguished human soul peered through the mask of constancy, for a moment the woman in her, shrinking from the ordeal and the fire, from shame and death, thrust aside the veil, and held out quivering, piteous hands to him. But it was for a moment only. Before he could speak she was brave as before, quiet as he had ever seen her, patient, mistress of herself. “It is as you said,” she muttered, smiling wanly, “the rats are leaving us.”

  “Vermin!” he whispered. He could not trust himself to say more. His voice shook, his eyes were full.

  “They have not lost time,” she continued in a low tone. She did not cease to listen, nor did her eyes leave the staircase door. “Louis first, and now Grio. How has it reached them so quickly, do you think?”

  “Louis is hand in glove with the Syndic,” he murmured.

  “And Grio?”

  “With Basterga.”

  She nodded. “What do you think they will do — first?” she whispered. And again — it went to his heart — the woman’s face, fear-drawn, showed as it were beneath the mask with which love and faith and a noble resignation had armed her. “Do you think they will denounce us at once?”

  He shook his head in sheer inability to foresee; and then, seeing that she continued to look anxiously for his answer, that answer which he knew to be of no value, for minute by minute the sense of his helplessness was weighing upon him, “It may be,” he muttered. “God knows. When Grio is gone we will talk about it.”

  She began, but always with a listening ear and an eye to the open door, to remove from the table the remains of their meal. Midway in her task, she glanced askance at the window, under the impression that some one was looking through it; and in any case now the lamp was lit it exposed them to the curiosity of the rampart. She was going to close the shutters when Claude interposed, raised the heavy shutters and bolted and barred them. He was turning from them when Grio’s step was heard descending.

  Strange to say the Spaniard’s first glance was at the windows, and he looked genuinely taken aback when he saw that they were closed. “Why the devil did you shut?” he exclaimed, in a rage; and passing Anne with a sidelong movement, he flung a heavy bundle on the floor by the door. As he turned to ascend again he met her eyes, and backing from her he made with two of his fingers the ancient sign which southern people still use to ward off the evil eye. Then, half shamefacedly, half recklessly, he blundered upstairs again. A moment, and he came stumbling down; but this time he was careful to keep the great bundle he bore between himself and her eyes, until he had got the door open.

  That precaution taken, as if he thought the free cold air which entered would protect him from spells, he showed himself at his ease, threw down his bundle and faced her with an air of bravado.

  “I need not have feared,” he said with a tipsy grin, “but I had forgotten what I carry. I have a hocus-pocus here “ — he touched his breast— “written by a wise man in Ravenna, and sealed with a dead Goth’s hand, that is proof against devil or dam! And I defy thee, mistress.”

  “Why?” she cried. “Why?” And the note of indignation in her voice, the passionate challenge of her eyes, enforced the question. In the human mind is a desire for justice that will not be denied; and even from this drunken ruffian a sudden impulse bade her demand it. “Why should you defy me or fear me? What have I done to you, what have I done to any one,” she continued, with noble resentment, “that you should spread this of me? You have eaten and drunk at my hand a hundred times; have I poisoned or injured you? I have looked at you a hundred times; have I overlooked you? You have lain down under this roof by night a hundred times; have I harmed you sleeping or waking, full moon or no moon?”

  For answer he leered at her slyly. “Not a whit,” he said. “No.”

  “No?” Her colour rose.

  “No; but you see” — with a grin— “it never leaves me, my girl.” He touched his breast. “While I wear that I am safe.”

  She gasped. “Do you mean that I — —”

  “I do not know what you would have done — but for that!” he retorted. “Maimed me or wizened me, perhaps! Or, may be, made me waste away as you did the child that died three doors away last Sunday!”

  Her face changed slowly. Prepared as she had been for the worst by many an hour of vigil beside her mother’s bed, the horror of this precise accusation — and such an accusation — overcame her. “What?” she cried. “You dare to say that I — that I — —” She could not finish.

  But her eyes lightened, her form dilated with passion; and tipsy, ignorant, brutish as he was, the Spaniard could not be blind to the indignation, the resentment, the very wonder which stopped her breath and choked her utterance. At the sight some touch of shame, some touch of pity, made itself felt in the dull recesses even of that brain. “I don’t say it,” he muttered awkwardly. “It is what they are saying in the street.”

  “In the street?”

  “Ay, where else?” He knew who said it, for he knew whence his orders came: but he was not going to tell her. Yet the spark of kindliness which she had kindled still lived — how could it be otherwise in presence of her youth and gentleness? “If you’ll take my advice,” he continued roughly, “you’ll not show yourself in the streets unless you wish to be mishandled, my girl. It will be time enough when the time comes. Even now, if you were to leave your old witch of a mother and get good protection, there is no knowing but you might be got clear! You are a fair bit of red and white,” with a grin. “And it is not far to Savoy! Will you come if I risk it?”

  A gesture, half refusal, half loathing, answered him.

  “Oh, very well!” he said. The short-lived fit of pity passed from him; he scowled. “You’ll think differently when they have the handling of you. I’m glad to be going, for where there’s one fire there are apt to be more; and I am a Christian, no matter who’s not! Let who will burn, I’ll not!”

  He picked up one bundle and, carrying it out, raised his voice. A man, who had shrunk, it seemed, from entering the house, showed his face in the light which streamed from the door. To this fellow he gave the bundle, and shouldering the other, he went heavily out, leaving the door wide open behind him.

  Claude strode to it and closed it; but not so quickly that he had not a glimpse of three or four pairs of eyes staring in out of the darkness; eyes so curious, so fearful, so quickly and noiselessly withdrawn — for even while he looked, they were gone — that he went back to the hearth with a shiver of apprehension.

  Fortunately, she had not seen them. She stood where he had left her, in the same attitude of amazement into which Grio’s accusation had cast her. As she met his gaze — then, at last, she melted. The lamplight showed her eyes brimming over with tears; her lips quivered, her breast heaved under the storm of resentment.

  “How dare they say it?” she cried. “How dare they? That I would harm a child? A child?” And, unable to go
on, she held out protesting hands to him. “And my mother? My mother, who never injured any one or harmed a hair of any one’s head! That she — that they should say that of her! That they should set that to her! But I will go this instant,” impetuously, “to the child’s mother. She will hear me. She will know and believe me. A mother? Yes, I will go to her!”

  “Not now,” he said. “Not now, Anne!”

  “Yes, now,” she persisted, deaf to his voice. She snatched up her hood from the ground on which it had fallen, and began to put it on.

  He seized her arm. “No, not now,” he said firmly. “You shall not go now. Wait until daylight. She will listen to you more coolly then.”

  She resisted him. “Why?” she said. “Why?”

  “People fancy things at night,” he urged. “I know it is so. If she saw you enter out of the darkness” — the girl with her burning eyes, her wet cheeks, her disordered hair looked wild enough— “she might refuse to believe you. Besides — —”

  “What?”

  “I will not have you go now,” he said firmly. That instant it had flashed upon him that one of the faces he had seen outside was the face of the dead child’s mother. “I will not let you go,” he repeated. “Go in the daylight. Go to-morrow morning. Go then, if you will!” He did not choose to tell her that he feared for her instant safety if she went now; that, if he had his will, the streets would see her no more for many a day.

  She gave way. She took off her hood, and laid it on the table. But for several minutes she stood, brooding darkly and stormily, her hands fingering the strings. To foresee is not always to be forearmed. She had lived for months in daily and hourly expectation of the blow which had fallen; but not the more easily for that could she brook the concrete charge. Her heart burned, her soul was on fire. Justice, give us justice though the heavens fall, is an instinct planted deep in man’s nature! Of the Mysterious Passion of our Lord our finite minds find no part worse than the anguish of innocence condemned. A child? She to hurt a child? And her mother? Her mother, so harmless, so ignorant, so tormented! She to hurt a child?

  After a time, nevertheless, the storm began to subside. But with it died the hope which is inherent in revolt; in proportion as she grew more calm the forlornness of her situation rose more clearly before her. At last that had happened which she had so long expected to happen. The thing was known. Soon the full consequences would be upon her, the consequences on which she dared not dwell. Shudderingly she tried to close her eyes to the things that might lie before her, to the things at which Grio had hinted, the things of which she had lain thinking — even while they were distant and uncertain — through many a night of bitter fear and fevered anticipation.

  They were at hand now, and though she averted her thoughts, she knew it. But the wind is tempered to the shorn. Even as the prospect of future ill can dominate the present, embitter the sweetest cup, and render thorny the softest bed, so, sometimes, present good has the power to obscure the future evil. As Anne sank back on the settle, her trembling limbs almost declining to bear her, her eyes fell on her companion. Failing to rouse her, he had seated himself on the other side of the hearth, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands, in an attitude of deep thought. And little by little, as she looked at him, her cheeks grew, if not red, less pale, her eyes lost their tense and hopeless gaze. She heaved a quivering sigh, and slowly carried her look round the room.

  Its homely comfort, augmented by the hour and the firelight, seemed to lap them round. The door was locked, the shutters were closed, the lamp burned cheerfully. And he sat opposite — sat as if they had been long married. The colour grew deeper in her face as she gazed; she breathed more quickly; her eyes shone. What evil cannot be softened, what misfortune cannot be lightened to a woman by the knowledge that she is loved by the man she loves? That where all have fled, he remains, and that neither fear of death nor word of man can keep him from her side?

  He looked up in the end, and caught the look on her face, the look that a woman bestows on one man only in her life. In a moment he was on his knees beside her, holding her hands, covering them with kisses, vowing to save her, to save her — or to die with her!

  CHAPTER XX.

  IN THE DARKENED ROOM.

  Claude flung the cloak from his head and shoulders, and sat up. It was morning — morning, after that long, dear sitting together — and he stared confusedly about him. He had been dreaming; all night he had slept uneasily. But the cry that had roused him, the cry that had started that quick beating of the heart, the cry that still rang in his waking ears and frightened him, was no dream.

  As he rose to his feet, his senses began to take in the scene; he remembered what had happened and where he was. The shutters were lowered and open. The cold grey light of the early morning at this deadest season of the year fell cheerlessly on the living-room; in which for the greater safety of the house he had insisted on passing the night. Anne, whose daily task it was to open the shutters, had been down then: she must have been down, or whence the pile of fresh cones and splinters that crackled, and spirted flame about the turned log. Perhaps it was her mother’s cry that had roused him; and she had re-ascended to her room.

  He strode to the staircase door, opened it softly and listened. No, all was silent above; and then a new notion struck him, and he glanced round. Her hood was gone. It was not on the table on which he had seen it last night.

  It was so unlikely, however, that she had gone out without telling him, that he dismissed the notion; and, something recovered from the strange agitation into which the cry had cast him, he yawned. He returned to the hearth and knelt and re-arranged the sticks so that the air might have freer access to the fire. Presently he would draw the water for her, and fill the great kettle, and sweep the floor. The future might be gloomy, the prospect might lower, but the present was not without its pleasures.

  All his life his slowness to guess the truth on this occasion was a puzzle to him. For the materials were his. Slowly, gradually, as he crouched sleepily before the fire, it grew upon him that there was a noise in the air; a confused sound, not of one cry, but of many, that came from the street, from the rampart. A noise, now swelling a little, now sinking a little, that seemed as he listened not so distant as it had sounded a while ago. Not distant at all, indeed; quite close — now! A sound of rushing water, rather soothing; or, as it swelled, a sound of a crowd, a gibing, mocking crowd. Yes, a crowd. And then in one instant the change was wrought.

  He was on his feet; he was at the door. He, who a moment before had nodded over the fire, watching the flames grow, was transformed in five seconds into a furious man, tugging at the door, wrestling madly with the unyielding oak. Wrestling, and still the noise rose! And still he strained in vain, back and sinew, strained until with a cry of despair he found that he could not win. The door was locked, the key was gone! He was a prisoner!

  And still the noise that maddened him, rose. He sprang to the right-hand window, the window nearest the commotion. He tore open a panel of the small leaded panes, and thrust his head between the bars. He saw a crowd; for an instant, in the heart of the crowd and raised above it, he saw an uplifted arm and a white woman’s face from which blood was flowing. He drew in his head, and laid his hands to one of the bars and flung his weight this way and that, flung it desperately, heedless of injury. But in vain. The lead that soldered the bar into the strong stone mullion held, and would have held against the strength of four. With heaving breast, and hands from which the blood was starting, he stood back, glared round him, then with a cry flung himself upon the other window, tore it open and seized a bar — the middle one of the three. It was loose he remembered. God! why had he not thought of it before? Why had he wasted time?

  He wasted no more, with those shouts of cruel glee in his ears. The bar came out in his hands. He thrust himself feet first through the aperture. Slight as he was, it was small for him, and he stuck fast at the hips, and had to turn on his side. The rough edges of the bars
scraped the skin, but he was through, and had dropped to his feet, the bar which he had plucked out still in his hands. For a fraction of a second, as he alighted, his eyes took in the crowd, and the girl at bay against the wall. She was raised a little above her tormentors by the steps on which she had taken refuge.

  On one side her hair hung loose, and the cheek beneath it was cut and bleeding, giving her a piteous and tragic aspect. Four out of five of her assailants were women; one of these had torn her face with her nails. Streaks of mud were mingled with the blood which ran down her neck; and even as Claude recovered himself after the drop from the window, a missile, eluding the bent arm with which she strove to shield her face, struck and bespattered her throat where the collar of her frock had been torn open — perhaps by the same rough clutch which had dragged down her hair. The ring about her — like all crowds in the beginning — were strangely silent; but a yell of derision greeted this success, and a stone flew, narrowly missing her, and another, and another. A woman, holding a heavy Bible after the fashion of a shield, was stooping and striking at her knees with a stick, striving to bring her to the ground; and with the cruel laughter that hailed the hag’s ungainly efforts were mingled other and more ugly sounds, low curses, execrations, and always one fatal word, “Witch! Witch!” — fatal word spat at her by writhing mouths, hissed at her by pale lips, tossed broadcast on the cold morning wind, to breed wherever it flew fear and hate and suspicion. For, even while they mocked her they feared her, and shielded themselves against her power with signs and crossings and the Holy Book.

  To all, curse and blow and threat, she had only one word. Striving patiently to shield her face, “Let me go!” she wailed pitifully. “Let me go! Let me go!” Strange to say, she cried even that but softly; as who should say, “If you will not, kill me quietly, kill me without noise!” Ay, even then, with the blood running down her face, and with those eyes more cruel than men’s eyes hemming her in, she was thinking of the mother whom she had sheltered so long.