The Project Gutenberg EBook of The White Plumes of Navarre, by Samuel Rutherford Crockett This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The White Plumes of Navarre A Romance of the Wars of Religion Author: Samuel Rutherford Crockett Release Date: July 21, 2010 [EBook #33215] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE PLUMES OF NAVARRE *** Produced by Delphine Lettau, Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE WHITE PLUMES OF NAVARRE A Romance of the Wars of Religion BY S. R. CROCKETT SIXTH IMPRESSION LONDON THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Paul's Churchyard, E.C. 1917 First Edition, Oct., 1906 Second Impression, Oct., 1906 Third Impression, Oct., 1906 Fourth Impression, Dec., 1906 Fifth Impression, Jan., 1908 Sixth Impression, Aug., 1917 CONTENTS Before the Curtain Rises CHAPTER I. The Day of Barricades CHAPTER II. Claire Agnew CHAPTER III. The Professor of Eloquence CHAPTER IV. Little Colette of Collioure CHAPTER V. The Sprouting of Cabbage Jock CHAPTER VI. The Archer's Cloak CHAPTER VII. The Great Name of Guise CHAPTER VIII. The Golden Lark in Orleans Town CHAPTER IX. The Rebellion of Herodias's Daughter CHAPTER X. The Golden Duke CHAPTER XI. The Best-known Face in the World CHAPTER XII. The Waking of the Bearnais CHAPTER XIII. A Midnight Council CHAPTER XIV. Eyes of Jade CHAPTER XV. Mistress Catherine CHAPTER XVI. La Reine Margot CHAPTER XVII. Mate and Checkmate CHAPTER XVIII. The Apostle of Peace CHAPTER XIX. Death Warnings CHAPTER XX. The Blood on the Kerchief CHAPTER XXI. The Tiger in the Fox's Trap CHAPTER XXII. Berák the Lightning and Toàh His Dog CHAPTER XXIII. The Three Sons of Madame Amélie CHAPTER XXIV. Cousin Raphael, Lord of Collioure CHAPTER XXV. Claire's Embarrassment of Choice CHAPTER XXVI. First Council of War CHAPTER XXVII. Second Council of War CHAPTER XXVIII. Third Council of War CHAPTER XXIX. The Shut House in Money Street CHAPTER XXX. Jean-aux-Choux takes his Wages CHAPTER XXXI. The Way of the Salt Marshes CHAPTER XXXII. In their Clutches CHAPTER XXXIII. And One was Not! CHAPTER XXXIV. Bishop, Archbishop, and Angelical Doctor CHAPTER XXXV. The Place of Eyes CHAPTER XXXVI. Valentine la Niña CHAPTER XXXVII. The Wild Animal—Woman CHAPTER XXXVIII. The Vengeance of Valentine la Niña CHAPTER XXXIX. Saved by Sulks CHAPTER XL. The Mas of the Mountain CHAPTER XLI. "And Lazarus came Forth!" CHAPTER XLII. Secrets of the Prison House CHAPTER XLIII. In Tarragona Bay CHAPTER XLIV. Valentine and her Vengeance CHAPTER XLV. Valentine finds Claire Worthy CHAPTER XLVI. King and King's Daughter CHAPTER XLVII. Great Love—and Greater After the Curtain The White Plumes of Navarre BEFORE THE CURTAIN RISES The night was hot in Paris. Breathless heat had brooded over the city all Saturday, the 23rd of August, 1572. It was the eve of Saint Bartholomew. The bell of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois had just clashed out the signal. The Louvre was one blaze of lights. Men with lanterns and poleaxes, as if going to the shambles to kill oxen, hurried along the streets. Only in the houses in which were lodged the great Huguenot gentlemen, come to the city for the marriage of the King's sister Marguerite to the King of Navarre, there were darkness and silence. None had warned them—or, at least, they had taken no warning. If any suspected, the word of a King, his sworn oaths and multitudinous safe-conducts, lulled them back again into security. In one chamber, high above the courtyard, a light burned faint and steady. It was that beside the bed of the great Admiral—Coligny. He had been treacherously wounded by the arquebuse of one of the guard of the King's brother— Monsieur de France, Henry Duke of Anjou, afterwards to be known to history as Henry III., the favourite son of Catherine de Medici, the cunningest, and the most ungrateful. There watched by that bedside many grave men, holding grave discourse with each other and with the sick man, concerning the high mysteries of the religion, pure and reformed, of the state of France, and their hopes of better days for the Faith as it had been delivered to the saints. And at the bed-foot, with towels, bandages, and water in a silver salver ready for service, one young lad, a student of Geneva, fresh from Calvin and Beza, held his tongue and opened wide his ears. "Pray, Merlin de Vaux," said the wounded Admiral to his aged pastor, "pray for life if such be God's will, that we may use it better—for death (the which He will give us in any case), that the messenger may not find us unprepared." And Merlin prayed, the rest standing up, stern, grave, prepared men, with bowed and reverent heads. And the Genevan Scot thought most of his dead master Calvin, whom, in the last year of his life, he had often seen so stand, while his own power rocked under him in the city of his adoption, and the kingdoms of the earth stormed about him like hateful waves of the sea. And somewhat thus-wise prayed good Merlin. "Thou, O Lord, hast put down the mighty from their seats and has exalted them of low degree! Clay are all men in Thy hands—potter's clay, broken shards or vessels fit for altar-service. Yet Thou has sent us, Thy servants, into the wild, where we have seen things, and thought things, and given us many warnings, so that when Thou standest at the door and knockest, we may be ready for Thy coming!" Then at these words, prompt as an echo, the house leaped under the heavy noise of blows delivered upon the outer door. And the Admiral of France, sitting up in his bed, yet corpse-pale from his recent wound, lifted his hand and said, "Hush, be still—my Lord standeth without! For dogs and murderers, false kings and queens forsworn, are but instruments in His hand. It is God who calls us to His holy rest. For me, I have long been ready. I go with no more thought than if my chariot waited me at the door." Then he turned to the Huguenot gentlemen who were grouped about his bed. This one and that other had tried to catch a glimpse of the assailants from the windows. But in vain. For the door was in a recess which hid all but the last of the guard which the King had set about the house. "It is only Cosseins and his men," said one; "they will hold us safe. We have the King's word. He placed the guard himself." "The hearts of Kings are unsearchable," said the Admiral. "Put not your trust in princes, but haste ye to the garret, where is a window that gives upon the roof. There is no need that young and valiant men should perish with a wounded man and an old. Go and fight for the remnant that shall be preserved. If it be the Lord's will, He shall yet take vengence by your arms!" "Ay, go," said Merlin the pastor, casting back his white hair; "for me, I am old, and I stay. Only yester-night I saw an angel stand in the sun, crying to all souls that did fly through the midst of heaven, 'Come, gather yourselves to the Supper of the Great God.' But when, thinking myself called, I would have drawn nearer, lo! between me and the table spread, on which was the wine ready poured out, I saw the Beast, the kings of the earth, and their warriors gathered together to make war against the Lamb. And I heard a voice that said, 'Nay, but first thou must pass through the portal of death ere it be given thee to eat of the marriage supper of the Lamb.' So to me it spake. The message was not for you—ye heard not the Voice. I will stay, for I am weary, and am minded to fall on sleep—to find rest after many years." And to this Paré, the wise and skilled surgeon, who was ever beloved by Admiral Coligny, likewise adhered, saying, "I have not heard the voice of the angel. But I hear well enough that of false Cosseins who is sent by the King to murder us. I have looked from the window, and though I saw no vision of Beast, I saw clearly my Lord Duke of Guise stand without calling to them to slay and make an end! So I also will remain for the love I bear to my lord, and because it is my duty as a good physician so to do." And the lad John Stirling, the Scot from Geneva, the pupil of Calvin, ventured no word, being young. But, though the others would have carried him with them, he shook them off, and abode where he was. For his vision, and the purpose of it, were yet to be. And so it came to pass that this young man from Geneva saw the killing of the great Admiral, and heard the words in which he forgave his assassins, telling them how that he was ready to die, and that at the most they had but shortened his life by some short count of days or hours! And ever through the brief turmoil of the killing, the voice of the Duke of Guise mounted impatiently up the stairway asking if the Admiral were not yet dead, and hounding on his dogs to make an end of that noble quarry. And even when they assured him he would not believe, but desired to look on the face of his own and his father's enemy. "Open the window and throw him down!" he cried. So they cast him out. But the aged prince, with the life still in his body, clutched by instinct at the sill of the window as he fell. The young Duke, first ordering up a couple of flambeaux, deliberately wiped the blood from the face of his enemy with his kerchief, and cried out, "It is even he—I know him well. So perish all the enemies of the King and of the Catholic League!" Then, as his men still called from the window, the Duke looked up, angry to be disturbed in his gloating over his arch- foe. "There is also a lad here," they cried, "one from Geneva, who says he is of the Admiral's opinion. What shall we do with him?" "What is that to me?" said the Duke of Guise haughtily; "throw him after his master." And that is the reason why a certain John Stirling, a Scot of Geneva, went through life lame, wearing a countenance twisted like a mask at a fair, and—loved not the Duke Henry of Guise. Moreover, though he saw the Duke spurn his dead enemy with his foot, the boy felt not at the time the kicks with which the scullions imitated their master, but lay in a swoon on the body of Coligny. He came to himself, however, being cast aside as of no account, when they came to drag the Admiral's body to the gallows. After a while the spray of a fountain that played in the courtyard roused him. The lad washed his hands and crawled forth. He had lain all the terrible Sunday in the bloody court of Coligny's lodgings, under the shadow of the trembling acacias, which cast flecks of light and dark on the broad irregular stains of the pavement. But when the evening had come again, and the angry voices shouting "Kill! kill!" had died away, the lame boy hobbled painfully out. Somehow or other he passed through an unguarded gate, to find himself sustained by a fellow-countryman carrying a child, a little maid of four years. He must have been a strong man, that chance-met Scot, for he had an arm to spare for John Stirling. He spoke, also, words of hope and comfort to the boy. But these fell on deaf ears. For through the dull ache of his bones and the sharp nip of his wounds, undressed save for the blood that had dried upon them, the heart of the cripple remained with Henry of Guise. "No," he said over and over to himself, repeating the Duke's words, "the work is not yet finished!" It had, indeed, scarce begun. And he registered a vow. CHAPTER I. THE DAY OF BARRICADES "The good Duke! The sweet Prince! The Church's pillar! Guise! The good Guise!" Through the open window the shouts, near and far, invaded the quiet class-room of the Sorbonne. It was empty, save for the Professor of Eloquence, one Dr. Anatole Long, and a certain vagrant bluebottle which, with the native perversity of its tribe, sought out the only shut square of glass (bottle-green, by way of distinction) and buzzed loudly all over it. The Professor thumbed the discourse of the day on "Peace as the Characteristic Virtue of the Christian Faith." It was a favourite lecture with him. He had used it as exposition, homily, exhortation; and had even on one occasion ventured to deliver it before the Venerable the Conclave of the Sorbonne itself. Professor Anatole sighed as he listened to the ringing shouts outside, the clatter of steel on peaceful educational stairways, and when through the open windows, by which the early roses ought to have been sending up their good smell, there came a whiff of the reek of gunpowder, the excellent Anatole felt that the devil was loose indeed. It was the great Day of Barricades, and all Paris was in arms against the King, royal, long-descended, legitimate—and worthless. "Rebellion—rank rebellion," groaned the Professor; "no good will come of it. Balafré, the Scarred One, will get a dagger in his throat one day. And then—then—there will be a great killing! The King is too ignorant to forgive!" "Ah, what is that?" A noise of guns crashed, spat, and roared beneath the window which gave on to the narrow street. Professor Anatole rose hastily and went to the casement, worried a moment with the bar-fastening (for the window on that side was never unhasped), opened it, and looked forth. Little darting, shifting groups of lads in their dingy student cloaks, were defending themselves as best they might against a detachment of the King's Royal Swiss, who, on the march from one part of the city to another, had been surprised at the head of the narrow Street of the University. An old man had somehow been knocked down. His companion, a slim youth in a long, black cape, knelt and tried to hold up the failing head. The white beard, streaked with dark stains, lay across his knees. Now the Professor of Eloquence, though he lectured by preference concerning the virtues of peace, thought that there were limits even to these; so, grasping his staff, which had a sword concealed in the handle, of cunning Venice work, ran downstairs, and so found himself out on the street. In that short period all was changed. The Royal Swiss had moved on. The battling clerks had also vanished. The narrow Street of the University was blank save for the old man who lay there wounded on the little, knobbed cobble- stones, and the slim, cloaked youth bending over him. Professor Anatole does not remember clearly what followed. Certain it is that he and the lad must have carried the wounded man up the narrow stair. For when Anatole came a little to himself they were, all the three of them, in his wide, bare attiring-chamber, from which it was his custom to issue forth, gowned and solemn, in the midst of an admiring hush, with the roll of his daily lecture clasped in his right hand, while he upheld the long and troublesome academic skirts with the other. But now, all suddenly, among these familiar cupboards and books of reference, he found himself with a dying man—or rather, as it seemed, a man already dead. And, what troubled him far more, with a lad whose long hair, becoming loosened, floated down upon his shoulders, while he wept long and continuously, "Oh—oh—oh—my father!" sobbing from the top of his throat. Now Professor Anatole was a wise man, a philosopher even. It was the day of mignons. The word was invented then. King Henry III. had always half-a-dozen or so, not counting D'Epernon and La Joyeuse. That might account for the long hair. But even a mignon would not have cried "Ah—ah—ah!" in quick, rending sobs from the chest and diaphragm. He, Anatole Long, Professor of Eloquence at the Sorbonne, was in presence of a great difficulty—the greatest of his life. There was a dead man in his robing-room, and a girl with long hair, who wept in tremulous contralto. What if some of his students were minded to come back! A terrible thought! But there was small fear of that. The rascals were all out shouting for the Duke of Guise and helping to build the great barricades which shut in the Swiss like rats in a trap. They were Leaguers to a man, these Sorbonne students—for fun, however, not from devotion. Yet when he went back to the big empty class-room to bethink himself a little (it was a good twenty years since he had been accustomed to this sort of thing), lo! there were two young fellows rooting about among the coats and cloaks, from the midst of which he had taken his sword-cane when he ran downstairs. "What are you doing there?" he cried, with a sudden quick anger, as if students of eloquence had no right in the class- room of their own Professor. "Answer me, you, Guy Launay, and you, John d'Albret!" "We are looking for——" began Guy Launay, the son of the ex-provost of the merchants, a dour, dark clod of a lad, with the fingers of a swordsman and the muscles of a wrestler. He was going to say (what was the truth) that they had come up to look for the Professor's sword-cane, which they judged might be useful against the King's folk, when, of instinct far more fine, his companion, called the Abbé John, nephew of the great Leaguer Cardinal, stopped him with a swift sidelong drive of the elbow in the ribs, which winded him completely. "We have come to listen to your lecture, master!" he said, bowing low. "We are sorry indeed to be a little late. But getting entangled in the press, it was impossible for us to arrive sooner. We ask your pardon, dear master!" Under his breath the Abbé John confided to his companion, "Evidently old Blessings-of-Peace has carried that sword- stick off into his retiring-room for safety. Let him begin his lecture. Then in five minutes he will forget about everything else, and you or I will sneak in and bag it!" "You—you mean," said Launay; "I should move about as silently as a bullock on a pontoon bridge!" With his eye ever on the carefully-shut door of his private chamber, and his ear cocked for the sound of sobbing, the Professor moved slowly to his reading-desk. For the first time in his life he regretted the presence of students in the class-room. Why—why could they not have stayed away and dethroned anointed kings, and set up most Catholic princes, and fought for the Holy League and the pleasure of clouting heads? That was what students of the Sorbonne seemed to be for in these latter days. But to come here, at the proper hour, to take notes of a lecture on the Blessings of Peace, with the gun-shots popping outside, and dead men—no, somehow he did not care to think of dead men, nor of weeping girls either! So at this point he walked solemnly across the uneven floor and turned the key in the door of his robing-room. Instantly the elbow of Guy Launay sought the side of the Abbé John, called alternatively the Spaniard, and made him gasp. "D'ye see that?" whispered Guy, "the old rascal has locked the door. He suspects. Come, we may as well trip it. We shan't get either the sword-cane nor yet the pistols and bullets on the top of the guard-robe. My milk-brother, Stephen, saw them there when he took his week of chamber-valeting Old Peace-with-Honour!" "Screw up your mouth—tight!" said the Abbé John politely; "a deal of nonsense will get spread about otherwise. I will attend to everything in the room of Old Blessings-of-Peace!" "You!" "Yes, I—wait and see. Get out your tablets and take notes—spread your elbows, man! Do as I do, and the blessing of Saint Nicholas of Padua be upon all thieves and rascals—of whom we are two choice specimens!" "Speak for yourself, Spaniard!" spluttered the other, having accidentally sucked the wrong end of his pen; "my uncle is not a cardinal, and as to my father——" "He sells hanks of yarn, and cheats in the measurement!" "I dare you to say so, you left-hand prince, you grease-spot on the cardinal's purple—you——" "That will do," said the Abbé John calmly; "to-morrow I will give you thwacks when and where you like. But now listen, mark, learn, and in any case keep our good Master Anatole from so frequently glancing at that door. One would think he had the devil shut up within!" "Impossible—quite impossible; he is loose and exceedingly busy outside there! Listen to the shots," said Guy, inclining an ear to the window. Crack—crack! Bang! The windows rattled. "Hurrah for the People's Duke! Down with the King! Death to the Huguenots!—to the Barbets!—to the English! Death! Death! Death!" "Lively down there—I wish we were up and away!" mourned the son of the ex-provost of the merchants, "but without arms and ammunition, what can fellows do?" "As sayeth the Wise Man"—the voice of the Professor of Eloquence began to quicken into its stride—"'all her main roads are pleasant roads; and her very by-paths, her sentiers, lead to peace!'" "If we could only get at those pistols and things!" murmured Guy Launay. "I wager you a groat that the old man is mistaken! Oh, just hearken to them outside there, will you? Peace is a chafing-dish. War is the great sport!" "Down with the King! Bring along those chains for the barricade! Students to the rescue!" Then came up to their ears the blithe marching song, the time strongly marked: "The Guises are good men, good men, The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne! And we'll fight till all be grey— The Valois at our feet to-day, And in his grave the Bearnais— Our chief has come—the Balafré!" "Keys of Sainted Peter!" moaned Guy Launay, "I cannot stand this. I am going down, though I have no better weapon than a barrel-stave." And he hummed, rapping on the inscribed and whittled bench with his fingers, the refrain of the famous League song: "For we'll fight till all be grey— The Valois at our feet to-day, In his deep grave the Bearnais— Our chief has come—the Balafré!" But Professor Anatole did not hear. He was in the whirl of his exposition of the blessings of universal peace. The Church had always brought a sword, and would to the end. But Philosophy, Divine Philosophy, which was what Solomon meant—peace was within her walls, prosperity, etc. And by this time the Spaniard, otherwise the Abbé John, was crawling stealthily towards the locked door. Guy Launay, on the contrary, was breathing hard, rustling leaves, taking notes for two, both elbows working. The Master was in the full rush of his discourse. He saw nothing, knew nothing. He had forgotten the robing-room in the affirmation that, "In the midst of turmoil, the truly philosophic may, and often does, preserve the true peace—the truest of all, peace of mind, peace of conscience." Bang! There was a tremendous explosion immediately under the window. "The King's men blowing up a barricade!" thought the Abbé John, with his hand on the great flat key, but drawing back a little. "If that does not wake him up, nothing will." But the gentle, even voice went on, triumphing—the periods so familiar to the lecturer ringing out more clearly than ever. "Wars shall cease only when Wisdom, which is God, shall prevail. Philosophy is at one with Religion. The Thousand Years shall come a thousand times over and on the earth shall reign——" The key gritted in the lock. The Abbé John disappeared behind the heavy curtain which hid the door of the robing- room. The next moment he found himself in the presence of a man, lying rigidly on the Professor's table, all among the books and papers, and of the fairest young girl the Abbé John had ever seen, gently closing eyes which would never more look out upon the world. Within, the Professor's voice droned on, discoursing of peace, righteousness, and eternal law. The great Day of the Barricades rattled and thundered without. Acrid blasts of sulphurous reek drove into the quiet room, and the Abbé John, speechless with amazement, looked into the wet eyes of this wonderful vision—the purest, the loveliest, the most forlorn maid in France. CHAPTER II. CLAIRE AGNEW A long moment they stood gazing at each other, the girl and the Abbé John. They might have been sister and brother. There was the same dark clustering hair, close-gripped in love-locks to the head. The same large, dark, wide-pupilled eyes looked each into each as they stood and gazed across the dead man. For a moment nothing was said, but the Abbé John recovered himself first. "He knows you are here?" he questioned, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "Who?" The girl flung the question back. "Our Professor of Eloquence, the Doctor Anatole Long?" "Aye, surely," said the girl; "he it was brought us hither." He pointed to the dead man. "Your father?" The girl put her hand to her breast and sighed a strange piteous affirmative, yet with a certain reserve in it also. "What was he, and how came you here?" She looked at him. He wore the semi-churchly dress of a scholar of the University. But youth and truth vouched for him, shining from his eyes. So, at least, she thought. Besides, the girl was in a great perplexity. "I am Claire," she said, "the daughter of him who was Francis Agnew, secret agent from the King of Scots to his brother of Navarre!" "A heretic, then!" He fell back a step. "An agent of the Bearnais!" The girl said nothing. She had not even heard him. She was bending over her father and sobbing quietly. "A Huguenot," muttered the young Leaguer, "an agent of the Accursed!" He kept on watching her. There was a soft delicate turn of the chin, childish, almost babyish, which made the heart within him like water. "Chut!" he said, "what I have now to do is to get rid of that ramping steer of a Launay out there. He and his blanket- vending father must not hear of this!" He went out quietly, sinking noiselessly to the ground behind the arras of the door, and emerging again, as into another world, amid the hum and mutter of professorial argument. "All this," remarked Doctor Anatole, flapping his little green-covered pulpit with his left hand, "is temporary, passing. The clouds in the sky are not more fleeting than——" "Guise! Guise! The good Guise! Our prince has come, and all will now be well!" The street below spoke, and from afar, mingling with scattered shots which told the fate of some doomed Swiss, he heard the chorus of the Leaguers' song: "The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne! We will fight till all be grey— Put Valois 'neath our feet to-day, Deep in his grave the Bearnais— Our chief has come—the Balafré!" Abbé John recovered his place, unseen by the Professor. He was pale, his cloak dusty with the wriggling he had done under the benches. He was different also. He had been a furious Leaguer. He had shouted for Guise. He had come up the stairs to seek for weapons wherewith to fight for that Sole Pillar of Holy Church. "Well?" said Guy Launay, looking sideways at him. "Well, what?" growled the Abbé John, most unclerically. He had indeed no right to the title, save that his uncle was a cardinal, and he looked to be one himself some day—that is, if the influence of his family held. But in these times credit was such a brittle article. "Did you get the weapons?" snapped his friend—"the pistol, the sword-cane? You have been long enough about it. I have worn my pencil to a stub!" The Abbé John had intended to lie. But somehow, when he thought of the clear dark eyes wet with tears, and the dead Huguenot, within there—somehow he could not. Instead he blurted out the truth. "I forgot all about them!" he said. The son of the ex-provost of the merchants looked at him once, furiously. "I think you are mad!" he said. "So do I!" said the Abbé John, nodding blandly. "Well, what is the reason of it?" grumbled the other. "What has Old Blessings-of-Peace got in there—a hidden treasure or a pretty wench? By the milk-pails o' Mary, I will go and see for myself!" "Stop," said the Abbé John, with sudden heat, "no more spying! I am sick of it. Let us go and get weapons at the Hotel of the Duke of Guise, if you like—but respect the privacy of our master—our good and kind master!" Guy Launay eyed his companion a moment murkily. He gritted his teeth viciously, as if he could gladly have bitten a piece out of his arm. He showed large flat teeth when angry, for all the world like a bad-tempered horse. "Stop and take notes on the comforts of philosophy by yourself," he said; "I am off to do my duty like a man. You have turned soft at the moment of action, like all Spaniards—all the breed are alike, you and your master, the Demon of the South!" "You lie!" "And you! But wait till to-morrow!" "Ah," cried the Abbé John, "like all Frenchmen, you would put off a fight till to-morrow. Come out now, and I will break your head with a quarter-staff!" "Pshaw!" quoth Guy Launay, "quarter-staffs indeed, on the Day of Barricades. I am off to kill a King's man, or to help spit a Huguenot!" And the next moment the Professor of Eloquence had but one auditor. CHAPTER III. THE PROFESSOR OF ELOQUENCE "My name," she said, "is Claire Agnew. But since we lived long in Provence and Spanish Roussillon, my father, being learned in that speech, called me most often Euphrasia or Euphra, being, as he said, 'the light of his eyes'"! "Then you are English, and a heretic?" said the young man, while the Professor, having discharged his papers into the drawer of a cabinet, already full and running over, bent his ear to the breast of the old man. "I am Scottish, and you are the heretic!" said the girl, with spirit. "I am no heretic—I am of the Faith!" said the young man. "The Faith of treaty-breakers and murderers!" She knit her fingers and looked at him defiantly—perhaps, if the truth must be told, more in anger than in sorrow. The voice of the Professor of Eloquence broke in upon them. "Young man," he said, "you have surprised a secret which is not mine—much less yours. Be off at once to your uncle, the Cardinal d'Albret, and to your friend's father Launay, the ex-provost of the merchants. Get three passports—for me, for my daughter Claire, and—for my nephew——" "What nephew?" said the youth, rubbing the ear which the Professor had pulled. "One I have adopted recently!" said the Professor gravely, "a certain worthless loon, who came up hither seeking what was not his—a sword-cane and a pistol, and who found that which, God knows, belongs to neither of us—an uncomfortable possession in these days, a Huguenot maiden with eyes like a flame of fire!" "They are more like pansies!" said the young man doggedly. "How do you know? How dare you? Is she not my daughter?" "Aye, master, she is, of course, your daughter if you say so"—the voice of the Abbé John was uncertain. He did not like the Professor claiming so much—and he beginning to be bald too. What have bald pates to do with pretty young girls? Even thus he growled low to himself. "Eh, what's that?" the Professor caught him up. "Be off—it is to save her life, and you are a young blade who should never refuse an adventure, specially when at last it gives you a chance to be taken for the relative of a respectable man ——" "And the cousin of this fair maid, your—daughter?" "Well, and have I not a good right to a daughter of my own? Once on a day I was married, bonds and bands, parchments and paperings. For ten years I endured my pain. Well might I have had a daughter, and of her age too, had it not been my hard lot to wed a woman without bowels—flint-heart—double-tongue——" "I wager it was these ten years that taught him his eloquence!" said the young man under his breath. But aloud he answered otherwise, for the young girl had withdrawn into the small adjacent piece, leaving the men to talk. "And this?" said the Abbé John, indicating the dead man—"what are we to do with this?" The face of the Professor of Eloquence cleared. "Luckily we are in a place where such accidents can easily be accounted for. In a twinkle I will summon the servitors. They will find League emblems and holy crosses all about him, candles burning at his head and feet. The fight still rumbles without. It is but one more good Guisard gone to his account, whom I brought hither out of my love for the Cause, and that the Sorbonne might not be compromised." Almost for the first time the student looked at his master with admiration. "Your love for the Cause——" he said. "Why, all the world knows that you alone voted against the resolution of the assembled Sorbonne that it was lawful to depose a king who refused to do his duty in persecuting heretics!" "I have repented," said the Professor of Eloquence—"deeply and sorely repented. Surely, even in the theology of the Sorbonne, there is place for repentance?" "Place indeed," answered the young man boldly, "but the time is, perhaps, a little ill-chosen." However the Professor of Eloquence went on without heeding him. "And in so far as this girl's goodwill is concerned, let that be your part of the work. Her father, though a heretic, must be interred as a son of the Church. It is the only course which will explain a dead man among the themes in my robing- room. He has been in rebellion against the King—but there is none to say against which king! It does not need great wisdom to know that in Paris to-day, and especially in the Sorbonne, to die fighting against the Lord's Anointed, and for the Duke of Guise, is to receive the saint's aureole without ever a devil's advocate to say you nay!" "It is well known," commented the youth, "that you were ever of the King's party—a Politique! It was even spoken of in the Council of the Sixteen." "Do you go seek your cousin, sirrah," said the Professor of Eloquence, "and with her be very politic indeed!" The Abbé John accepted the duty indicated with brisk alertness. "Mind you, no love-making," said Dr. Anatole. "That would be not only misplaced, but also exceedingly ill-suited to your ecclesiastical pretensions." "Hear me before we go farther," cried the Abbé John; "I am a good Leaguer and a good Catholic, but I will not have it said that I am a churchman just because my uncle is!" The Professor paid no heed. Instead, he went to a corner cupboard of ornate Spanish mahogany carved into dragons and gargoyles, and from it he took the medal of the League, the portraits of the Duke of Guise and of the King of Spain. Then, tying a white armlet of Alençon lace about the dead man's wrist, he bade the Abbé John summon the servants. The Abbé John stood opened-mouthed watching the preparations. "I had always thought——" he began. "Of course you had—of course you did. You all do, you half-baked babies! You always take your instructors for ancient innocents, purblind, adder-deaf mumblers of platitudes. But you are wrong—you and Guy Launay, and all your like. A good professor is a man who has been a good student, who remembers the tricks of the animal, and is all ready fixed for them before the whisper has run along Bench One! I will conduct this necessary funeral in person. Please do you, since you can be of no other use, make it your business to explain matters to your cousin!" The servants of the Sorbonne, Leaguers to a man, at last appeared, trickling upstairs half reluctantly. The Professor of Eloquence met them at the door with a grave face. "This man has been slain—accidentally," he began, "I believe by the King's Swiss. I have brought him here myself. It will be as well for the Sorbonne that these matters go no further—good for you, as well as for myself, and for all the college of the Doctors, after the resolution of which we know. Let Father Gontier be called, and the dead man interred with all due ceremony in the private sepulchre of the faculty." When the servitors of the Sorbonne had seen the half-hidden wristlet of the good Leaguer, the medals of the two great chiefs, they understood. After all, the King might win—and then—men might stay or flee, Guises rise and set, but it was clearly the destiny of the Sorbonne to go on for ever, if only to afford them a means of livelihood. They were men with families, and the advantage of keeping a still tongue in each several head had often been pointed out to them. It was, indeed, a condition of their service at Sorbonne. So the funeral of Francis the Scot took place in the strictest secrecy. As a mourner, close beside the bier, knelt the niece of good Dr. Anatole, the Professor of Eloquence. It was not thought unusual, either that Doctors of the Sorbonne should have nieces, or that they should be overcome at the sight of war and dead men. Grave doctors' nieces were almost proverbially tender-hearted. The Abbé John, a cousin by the mother's side, and near relative of the great Leaguer Cardinal, ordered, explained, and comforted, according as he had to do with Sorbonne servitors, Jesuit fathers, or weeping girls. He found himself in his element, this Abbé John. CHAPTER IV. LITTLE COLETTE OF COLLIOURE While the Abbé John was gone to seek the passports from his uncle, and from what remained of royal authority in a city now wholly given over to the League, Anatole Long, college professor, explained matters to his new charge. "You saw but little of your father, I take it?" he began gently. The Sorbonnist was a large-framed, upstanding man, with an easy-going face, and manners which could be velvet soft or trampling, according to circumstances. They were generally the former. "There is no use in wasting good anger," he would say, "at least, on a pack of cublings." He was referring to the young men of his class, who thought themselves Platos for wisdom and Kings of Navarre in experience. For though they cursed "the Bearnais" in their songs and causeway-side shoutings, in their hearts they thought that there was none like him in the world—at once soldier, lover, and man. "My father," said Claire Agnew, looking the Professor in the face, "was a brave gentleman. He owed that to his race. But he had long been in this service of politics, which makes a man's life like a precious glass in the hands of a paralytic. One day or another, as he takes his medicine, it will drop, and there is an end." "You speak bitterly?" The Professor's voice was very soft. It was a wonder that he had never married again, for all knew that his youth had been severely accidented. "Bitterly," said the girl; "indeed, I may speak truly and yet without honey under my tongue. For my father made himself a hunted hare for the cause that was dear to him. Yet the King he served left him often without a penny or a crust. When he asked for his own, he was put off with fair words. He spent his own estate, which was all my portion, like water. Yet neither from King James of Scots, nor from Elizabeth of the English, did he get so much as a 'thank you' for the travail of years!" "And from Henry of Navarre?" said the Professor of the Sorbonne. "Why," said Claire Agnew, "I am shamed to own it. But though never a man needed money more than the King of Navarre, it is on his bounty that we have been living these four years. He is great and generous!" "I have heard something less than that said of the Bearnais," answered the Professor; "yet he is a true Frenchman of the Gascon breed, great to men, generous to women, hail-fellow-well-met with all the world. But he loves the world to know it! And now, little lady," said Professor Anatole, "I must conduct you elsewhere. It is not seemly that a pretty one like you should be found in this dingy parchment den, counting the sparrows under the dome of the Sorbonne. Have you any friends in Paris to whose care I can commit you for the time being?" "Not one!" cried the girl fiercely; "it is a city of murderers—Leaguers—our enemies!" "Gently—fairly, little one," the Professor spoke soothingly; "there are good men and bad in Paris, as elsewhere; but since you have no friends here, I must conduct you to Havre de Grace, where we will surely find a captain biding for a fair wind to take him through Queen Bess's Sleeve into the North Sea, far on the way for Scotland." The girl began to cry bitterly, for the first time. "I have no friends in Scotland, not any more than in France," she said. "My father was a true man, but of a quick high temper, and such friends as he had he quarrelled with long ago. It began about his marrying my mother, who was a little maid out of Roussillon, come to Paris in the suite of the wife of some Governor of Catalonia who had been made Spanish ambassador. It was in the Emperor's time, when men were men—not fighting machines—and priests. My father, Francis Agnew, was stiff-necked and not given to pardon-asking, save of his Maker. And though little Colette Llorient softened him to all the world else, she died too soon to soften him towards his kinsfolk." The Professor meditated gravely, like one solving a difficult problem. "What?" he said—"no, it cannot be. Your mother was never little Colette of the Llorients of Collioure?" "I have indeed always believed so," said the girl; "but doubtless in my father's papers——" "But they are Catholics of the biggest grain, those Llorients of Collioure, deep-dyed Leaguers, as fierce as if Collioure were in the heart of Lorraine!" Claire bent her head and nodded sadly. "Yes," she said, "for my father's sake my mother embroiled herself with her relatives. She became a Huguenot, a Calvinist like him. Then they had a family meeting about her. All the black brothers, mailed and gauntleted, they say, sat round a table and swore that my poor mother should be no more of their family!" "Yes, I can fancy it—I see them; there was huge Bernard, weasel-faced Giles, subtle Philippe——" "How," cried the girl, surprised in her turn; "you know them—my mother's people?" "Well, I ought," said the Professor of the Sorbonne, with a young look flushing back into his face, "seeing that my mother has held a 'mas' from the family of Llorient of Collioure for more years than I can remember. When I was a lad going to the collegiate school at Elne, I remember your mother, Mademoiselle Colette, as a little maid, playing by herself among the sand-dunes. I looked up from my Greek grammar to watch her, till the nurse in the flat Limousin cap shook her fist at me, stopping her nursing to do it." Here the Professor seemed to rouse himself as from a dream. "That rascal John should be getting back by now," he said, "unless he has elbowed a way into the crowd to fight or fall for his great Duke!" "You do not love the Duke of Guise?" said the girl. "I have not your reasons for hating him," the Professor of Eloquence answered. "I am no Huguenot, by family or feeling. But I think it is a poor day for France when the valet chases the master out of house and home. The King is the King, and all the Guises in the world cannot alter that. Also, since the King has departed, and I have been left, alone loyal of all the faculty of the Sorbonne, it is time that I too made my way to see my mother among the sand-hills of Collioure. Ah, John, you rascal, what has kept you so long?" "The porter at my uncle's would give me no satisfaction—swore I had come again to borrow money. A manifest falsehood! As, indeed, I proved on the spot by pulling him out of his lodge and thumping him well. A varlet—to dare to suppose, because a gentleman comes twice to borrow money from a rich and loving relative, that he has returned a third time upon the same errand! But I got the passports, and they are countersigned and stamped by Merlan at the Secretary's office, which will do no harm if we come across King's men!" "As for the Bearnais and his folk," said the Professor to Claire, "I suppose you have your father's papers safe enough?" The girl blushed and murmured something indefinite. As a matter of fact, she had made sure of these while he yet lay on the ground, and the Royal Swiss were firing over her head. It was the instinct of her hunted life. They left the Sorbonne together, all cloaked and hooded "like three carrion crows," said the Abbé John. None who saw them would have supposed that a young maid's face lurked beneath the sombre muffling. Indeed, beneath that of the Abbé John, curls of the same hue clustered just as tightly and almost as abundantly. The street were silent all about the quarter of the University. But every hundred yards great barricades of barrels and paving-stones, earth and iron chains, had to be passed. Narrow alleys, the breadth of a man and no more, were generally left, zig-zagging among the defences. But almost as often the barricades had to be surmounted, after discovery of identity, by the aid of friendly pushes and hauls. In all cases, however, the examination was strict. At every barricade they were stopped and called upon to declare their mission. However, the Doctor Anatole was generally recognised by some scapegrace runaway student, at scrambling horse-play among the pavement cobbles. At any rate, the Abbé John, who had been conspicuous at the meetings of the Elect Leaguers as the nephew of the great Cardinal d'Albret, was universally hailed with favour. He was also constantly asked who the lady in the hood might be, whom he was convoying away so secretly. He had but one reply to gentle and simple. "Give me a sword, come down hither, and I will afford any three men of you satisfaction on the spot!" For, in spite of the Abbé John's peaceful cognomen, his credit as a pusher of the unbuttoned foil was too good for any to accept his proposition. They laughed instead. One of the Duke Guise's "mud-porters" called the pair an ugly name. But it was (happily) in the Latin quarter, and a score of eager hands propelled him down into the gutter, where, after having his nose rubbed in the mire, he was permitted (and even assisted) to retire to the rear. He rubbed himself as he went and regretted mournfully that these things had not happened near the street of Saint Antoine. Altogether they escaped well. The Sorbonne, a difficult place to get into, is easy to get out of—for those who know how. And so the three, guided by the Abbé John, slipped into the great Rue St. Jacques by the little port St. Benoit, which the students and even the professors found so necessary, whenever their errands were of such a private nature as to disqualify them from crossing the square of the Sorbonne, with its rows on rows of enfilading windows. It was up the narrow stair of the Abbé John's lodgings that they found a temporary shelter while the final arrangements were being made. Horses and a serving-man (provided for in the passports) were the most pressing of these. It was in connection with the serving-man that Claire Agnew first found a tongue. "I know a lad," she said, "a Scot, seemingly stupid, but cunning as a fox, who may be of service to us. His apparent simplicity will be a protection. For it will be evident that none bent on escaping would burden themselves with such a 'Cabbage Jock.' He is of my father's country and they were ofttimes in close places together. His name is——" "No matter for his name—we will call him Cabbage Jock," cried the Abbé John. "Where is this marvel to be found?" "Not far away, as I judge," said the girl, taking a silver whistle, such as ladies wore at that time to call their waiting- maids, from about her neck. She blew lightly upon it, first two long and then two short notes. And from the street corner, prompt as if he had been watching (which, indeed, he had been), came running the strangest object ever seen in a civilised land. He gave one glance at the window at which Claire's head appeared. Then, diving under the low door like a rat making for a hole, he easily evaded the shouting concierge, and in a moment more stood before them. CHAPTER V. THE SPROUTING OF CABBAGE JOCK Cabbage Jock was immensely broad at the shoulders. He stooped slightly, so that his long arms fell below his knees when he stood erect. His mouth was slightly open, but so large in itself that a banana could easily have been inserted sideways without touching the wicks. There was a look of droll simplicity on the lad's face (he was apparently about twenty) which reminded one of the pictures of Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire, or the Brownie of Scottish fireside tales. Yet for one so simple he had answered with strange readiness. There was a quick flash of the eye as he took in the two men before him. "What may you be?" demanded the Professor of Eloquence. "A he-goat upon the mountains, comely in the going!" said the lout, in very good French. The learned man of the Sorbonne noted at once that he quoted (and mixed) words of the Genevan Version common among the Huguenots. "He speaks French, this good lad?" he asked, turning to Claire. "Yes, when it pleases him, which is not always—though indeed he always obeys me. Is it not so, Jock?" "My name is not Jock! Nowise—as you well do know. I am called Blastus of the Zamzummims! Against all Armenians, Hussites, Papishers, Anabaptists, Leaguers, and followers of the high, the low, and the middle way, I lift up my heel. I am a bird of fair plumage on the mountains of Zepher. I fly—I mount—I soar——" "Go and find four horses," said his mistress; "two of them good and strong, one Spanish jennet for me, one Flanders mare for yourself and the saddle-bags." The Bird of Fair Plumage scratched his long reddish locks in a sort of comic perplexity. "Am I to steal them or pay for them?" he said. "Pay, of course," said his mistress, scandalised. "That will leave our purse very light—the purse that was your father's. It were easier these days, and also more just to spoil the Egyptians. The lion-like man of Moab, which is the Duke of Guise, walketh about like the devil roaring (as sayeth Peter), and because of the barricades there are many good horses tied by their bridles at the gates of the city— masterless, all of them." "Pay for them, do you hear?" said Claire; "do not stand arguing with your master's daughter. I thought you had learned that long ago." Blastus of the Zamzummims went out...