Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  Whether the good townsfolk were as brave in private — when at home with their wives, for instance — may be doubted; but this for certain, the Burgomaster’s trouble lay all with the women. Whether they had less faith in the great Louis, Fourteenth of the name, King of France — who, indeed, seemed in these days less superior to a world in arms than in the dawn of his glory — or they found the oldest inhabitant’s tales too precisely to the point, they had a way of growing restive once a week, besieged the good Burgomaster’s house, and demanded — with a thousand shrill and voluble tongues — immediate surrender on terms. Between whiles, being busy with scrubbing and baking, and washing their children, they were quiet enough. But as surely as Sunday came round, and with it a clean house and leisure to chat with the neighbours, the Burgomaster’s hour came too, and with it the mob of women shaking crooked fingers at him, and bursting his ears with their shrill abuse. He was a bold man, but he began to dream at night of De Witt and his fate — of which he knew, with many gruesome particulars; and, from a stout and pompous burgher, he dwindled in six weeks to a lean and morose old tyrant. Withal he had no choice, for at his shoulder lurked the French Commandant, a resolute man with a wit of his own and a pet curtain — between the Stadthaus bastion and the bastion of the Bronze Horse, and very handy to the former — whereat he shot deserters and the like on the smallest pretext.

  Still, the Burgomaster, as he wiped his sallow face, and watched the last of the women withdraw on the seventh Sunday of the Siege, began to think that, rather than pass through this again, he would face even the curtain and a volley; if he were sure that one volley would do it, and no botching. The ordeal had been more severe than usual: his cheek still twitched, and he leaned against his official table to belie his trembling knees. He had been settling a change of billets, when the viragos broke in on him, and only his clerk had been present; for his council — and this he felt sorely — much bullied in old days, were treating him to solitude and the monopoly of the burden. His clerk was with him now; but affected to be busy with the papers on the table. Perhaps he was scared too, and equally bent on hiding it; at any rate, it was the Burgomaster who first discovered that they were not alone, but that one woman still lingered. She had placed herself in a corner of the oak seat that ran round the panelled room; and the stained glass of the windows, blazoned with the arms of Huymonde and the Counts of Flanders, cast a veil of tawny lights between her and the gazer; behind which she seemed to lurk. The Burgomaster started, then remembered that the danger was over for the time — he was not afraid of one woman; and in a harsh voice he bade her follow her mates.

  “Begone, wench!” he said. “And go to your prayers! That is women’s work. Leave these things to men.”

  The woman rose to her full height. “When men,” she answered, in a voice at which the Burgomaster started afresh, “hide themselves, it is time women stood forward. Where is your son?”

  The Burgomaster swore.

  “Where is your son?” the woman repeated firmly.

  The Burgomaster swore again, his sallow face grown purple: then he looked at his clerk and signed to him to go. The clerk went, wondering and gaping — for this was unusual — and the two were left together.

  At that the Burgomaster found his voice. “You Jezebel!” he cried, approaching the woman. “How dare you come here to make mischief? How dare you lay your tongue to my son’s name? Do you know, shameless one, that if I were to give the word — —”

  But at that word the woman caught fire, blazed up, and outdid him in rage. She was a middle-aged woman and spare, with a face naturally pale and refined, and an air of pride that peeped even through the neat poverty of her dress. But at that word she shook her hands in his face and her eyes blazed.

  “Shameless?” she retorted. “No, but shameful; and through whom? Through your son, your villain, your craven of a son who hides now! Through your base-born tradesman of a son who dare face neither woman nor man.”

  “Silence!” the Burgomaster cried. “Silence!”

  She broke off, but only to throw her whole soul into one breathless cry.

  “Will he marry her?” she panted; and she held out her hands to him, palm uppermost. “Will he marry her? In a word.”

  “No,” the Burgomaster answered grimly.

  She flung up her arms.

  “Then beware!” she cried wildly, and for the first time she raised her voice to the pitch of those other shrews. “Beware! You and yours have brought us to shame; but the end is not yet, the end is not yet! You do not know us.”

  At that he rallied himself. “I may not know you yet,” he said hardily, and indeed brutally; “but I know this, that such things as these come, woman, of people setting themselves up to be better than their neighbours, when they are as poor as church mice. They come of slighting honest fellows and setting caps at those above you. Your daughter — or you, woman, if you like it better — set the trap, and you are caught in it yourselves. That is all.”

  “You wretch!” she gasped. “And he — will not marry her?”

  “Not while I live,” he answered firmly.

  “And that is your last word?”

  “It is,” he said. “My very last.”

  He was on his guard, prepared to defend himself even against actual violence. For he knew what angry women were and of what they were capable even against a Burgomaster. But after a tense pause of suspense, during every moment of which he expected her to fall upon him, she said only, “Where is he?”

  “I shall not tell you,” he answered. “Nor would it help you if you knew!”

  “And that is all?”

  “That is all.”

  It was not their first interview. She had pled with him before, and knelt and wept and abased herself before him. She had done all that the love that tore her heartstrings — the love that made it so much more difficult to see her child suffer than to suffer herself, the love that every moment painted the bare room at home, and her daughter prostrate there in shame and despair — she had done all that even love could suggest. There was no room therefore for farther pleading, for farther prayers; she had threatened, and she had failed. What, then, remained to be done?

  Nothing, the Burgomaster thought, as in a flash of triumph and relief he watched her go, outfaced and defeated. Nothing; and he hugged himself on the prudence that had despatched his son out of the way in time, and rendered a match with that proud pauper brat impossible. Nothing; but to the woman, as she went, it seemed that everything remained to be done. As she left the little square with its tall slender gabled houses and plunged into the narrow street that led to her house on the wall, the story of her life in Huymonde spread itself before her in a string of scenes that now — now alas! but never before — seemed to find their natural sequence in this tragedy. Nine years before she had come to Huymonde with her artist husband; but the great art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was already dying or dead in Flanders, and with it the artistic sense, and the honour once paid to it. Huymonde made delft still, and pottery, but on old conventional lines, in an endless repetition of old formal patterns, with no touch of genius or appreciation. Trade, and a desire to win the florid ease, the sleek comfort of the burgher, possessed the town wholly. The artist had found himself a stranger in a strange land; had struggled on, despising and despised, in the quaint house on the wall, at which he had snatched on his first coming because it looked over the open country. There, after seven years, he had slipped out of life, scarcely better known, and no whit more highly appreciated than on the day of his arrival.

  After that the story was of two women living sola cum solâ — one wholly for the other — suspected, if not disliked, by their neighbours, and for their part alien in all their thoughts and standards; since the artist’s widow could not forget that he had been the favourite pupil of Peter Paul’s old age, or that her father had counted quarterings. Sola cum solâ, until one day the war began, and Huymonde set about looking to its defences. Then a you
ng man appeared on a certain evening to inspect the House on the Wall, and see that the window, which looked out upon the level country side, was safely and properly built up and strengthened.

  “You must have a sergeant and guard billeted here!” was his first sharp word; and the widow had sighed at this invasion of their privacy, which was also their poverty. But the young girl, standing sideways in that very window, which was to be closed, had pouted her red lips and frowned on the intruder, and the sergeant had not come, nor the guard. Instead the young man had returned, at first weekly, then at shorter intervals, to see that the window defences remained intact; and with his appearance life in the House on the Wall had become a different thing. He was the son of the Burgomaster of the town, he would be the richest man in the town, his wife might repay with interest and advantage the dull bovine scorn to which the city dames had treated her mother. The widow permitted herself to hope. Her child was beautiful, with the creamy fairness of Gueldres, and as pure as the sky. The young man was gay and handsome; qualities which made their due impression on the elder woman’s heart, long unfamiliar with them. So, for more than a year he had had the run of the house, he had been one of the family; and then one day he had disappeared, and then one other day ——

  Oh, God of vengeance! She paused in the darkening street, as she thought of it. Beside her a long window, warmly curtained, sent out a stream of ruddy light. From the opposite house issued cheery voices and tinkling laughter, and the steam of cooking. And before and behind, whichever way she looked, firelight flashed through diamond panes and glowed in the heart of green bottle-glass. Out in the street men shouldered past her, talking blithely; and in distant kitchens cups clinked and ware clattered, and every house — every house from garret to parlour, seemed to her a home happy and gleeful. A home; and her home! She stood at the thought and cursed them; cursed them, and like the echo of her whispered words the solemn boom of a cannon floated over the town.

  A chance passer, seeing her stand thus, caught the whiteness of her face, and thought her afraid. “Cheer up, mother!” he said over his shoulder, “they are all bark and little bite!”

  “I would they bit to the bone!” she cried in fury.

  But luckily he was gone too far to hear or to understand; and, resuming her course, she hurried on, her head bowed. A few minutes’ walking brought her to the foot of the stone steps that, in two parallel flights, led up to the low-browed door of her house. There, as she set her foot on the lowest stair, and wearily began the ascent, a man advanced out of the darkness and touched her sleeve. For an instant she thought it the man, and she caught her breath and stepped back. But his first word showed her her mistake.

  “You live here?” he said abruptly. “Can I come in?”

  In ordinary times his foreign accent and the glint of a pistol-barrel, which caught her eye as he spoke, would have set her on her guard. But to-night she had nothing to lose — nothing, it seemed to her, to hope. She scarcely looked at the man. “As you please,” she said dully. “What do you want?”

  “To speak to you.”

  “Come in then,” she said.

  She did not turn to him again until they stood together in the room above, and the door was shut. Then she asked him a second time what he wanted.

  “Are we alone?” he returned, staring suspiciously about him.

  “My daughter is above,” she answered. “There is no one else in the house.”

  “And you are poor?”

  She shrugged her shoulders indifferently, and by a movement of her hands seemed to put the room in evidence; one or two pictures, standing on easels, and a few common painter’s properties redeemed it from utter bareness, utter misery, yet left it cold and faded.

  Nevertheless, his next question took her by surprise. “What rent do you pay?” he asked harshly.

  “What rent?” she repeated, shaken out of her moodiness.

  “Yes. How many crowns?”

  “Twenty,” she answered mechanically. What was his aim? What did he want?

  “A year?”

  “Yes, a year.”

  The man had a round shaven whitish face that sat in the circle of a tightly tied Steinkirk cravat, like an ivory ball in a cup; and short hair, that might on occasion line a periwig. Notwithstanding his pistol, he had rather the air of a tradesman than a soldier until you met his eyes, which flashed with a keen glitter that belied his smug face and shaven cheeks. Those eyes caught the widow’s eyes as he answered her, and held them.

  “Twenty crowns a year,” he said. “Then listen. I will give you two hundred crowns for this house — for one night.”

  “For this house for one night?” she repeated, thinking she had not heard aright.

  “For this house, for one night!” he answered.

  Then she understood. She was quick-witted, she had lived long in the house and knew it. Without more she knew that God or the devil had put that which she sought into her hands; and her first impulse was to pure joy. The thirst for vengeance welled up, hot and resistless. Now she could be avenged on all; on the hard-hearted tyrant who had rejected her prayer, on the sleek dames who would point the finger at her child, on the smug town that had looked askance at her all these years — that had set her beyond the pale of its dull grovelling pleasures, and shut her up in that lonely House on the Wall! Now — now she had it in her hand to take tenfold for one. Her face so shone at the thought that the man watching her felt a touch of misgiving; though he was of the boldest or he had not been there on that errand.

  “When?” she said. “When?”

  “To-morrow night,” he answered. And then, leaning forward, and speaking lightly but in a low voice, he went on, “It is a simple matter. All you have to do is to find a lodging and begone from here by sunset, leaving the door on the latch. No more; for the money it shall be paid to you, half to-night and half the day after to-morrow.”

  “I want no money,” she said.

  “No money?” he exclaimed incredulously.

  “No, no money,” she answered, in a tone and with a look that silenced him.

  “But you will do it?” he said, almost with timidity.

  “I will do it,” she answered. “At sunset to-morrow you will find the door on the latch and the house empty. After that see that you do your part!”

  His eyes lightened. “Have no fear,” he said grimly. “But mark one thing, mistress,” he continued. “It is an odd thing to do for nothing.”

  “That is my business!” she cried, with a flash of rage.

  He had been about to warn her that during the next twenty-four hours she would be watched, and that on the least sign of a message passing between her and those in authority the plot would be abandoned. But at that look he held his peace, said curtly that it was a bargain then; and in a twinkling he was gone, leaving her — leaving her alone with her secret.

  Yet for a time it was not of that or of her vengeance that she thought. Her mind was busy with the years of solitude and estrangement she had passed in that house and that room; with the depression that little by little had sapped her husband’s strength and hope, with the slow decay of their goods, their cheerfulness, even the artistic joys that had at first upheld them; with the aloofness that had doomed her and her child to a dreary existence; with this last great wrong.

  “Yes, let it be! let it be!” she cried. In fancy she saw the town lie below her — as she had often seen it with the actual eye from the ramparts — she saw the clustering mass of warm red roofs and walls, the outlying towers, the church, the one long straight street; and with outstretched arm she doomed it — doomed it with a vengeful sense of the righteousness of the sentence.

  Yet, strange to say, that which was uppermost in her mind and steeled her soul and justified the worst, was not the last thing of which she had to complain — her daughter’s wrong — but the long years of loneliness, the hundred, nay, the thousand, petty slights of the past, bearable at the time and in detail, but intolerable in the retrospe
ct now hope was gone. She dwelt on these, and the thought of what was coming filled her with a fearful joy. She thought of them, and took the lamp and passed into the next room, and, throwing the light on the rough face of brickwork that closed the great window, she eyed the cracks eagerly, and scarcely kept her fingers from beginning the work. For she understood the plot. One man working silently within, in darkness, could demolish the wall in an hour; then a whistle, rope ladders, a line of men ascending, and before midnight the house would vomit armed men, the nearest gate would be seized, the town would lie at the mercy of the enemy!

  Presently she had to go to her daughter, but the current of her thoughts kept the same course. The girl was sullen, and lay with her face to the wall, and gave short answers, venting her misery after the common human fashion on the one who loved her best. The mother bore it, not as before with the patience that scorned even to upbraid, but grimly, setting down each peevish word to the score that was so soon to be paid. She lay all night beside her child, and in the small hours heard her weep and felt the bed shake with her unhappiness, and carried the score farther; nay, busied herself with it, so that day and the twittering of sparrows and the booming of the early guns took her by surprise. Took her by surprise, but worked no change in her thoughts.