The Long Night Part 18

His jaw fell; for a moment he gazed at her in sheer bewilderment. Then, as the full import of her words and her look overwhelmed him, he turned to the wall and bowed his face on his arms. His whole being shook, his soul was sick. What was he to say to her? What was he to do? Flee from her presence as from the presence of Antichrist? Avoid her henceforth as he valued his soul? Pluck even the memory of her from his mind? Or wrestle with her, argue with her, s.n.a.t.c.h her from the foul spells and enchantments that now held her, the tool and chosen instrument of the evil one, in their fiendish grip?

He felt a Churchman's horror--Protestant as he was--at the thought of a woman possessed. But for that reason, and because he was in the way of becoming a minister, was it not his duty to measure his strength with the Adversary? Alas! he could conceive of no words, no thoughts, no arguments adequate to that strife. Had he been a Papist he might have turned with hope, even with pious confidence, to the Holy Stoup, the Bell and Book and Candle, to the Relics, and hundred Exorcisms of his Church. But the colder and more abstract faith of Calvin, while it admitted the possibility of such possessions, supplied no weapons of a material kind.

He groaned in his impotence, stifled by the unwholesome atmosphere of his thoughts. He dared not even ponder too long on what she was who stood beside him; nor peer too closely through the murky veil that hid her being. To do so might be to risk his soul, to become a partner in her guilt. He might conjecture what dark thoughts and dreadful apt.i.tudes lurked behind the girl's gentle mask, he might strive to learn by what black arts she had been seduced, what power over visible things had been the price of her apostasy, what Sabbath-mark, seal and pledge of that apostasy she bore--but at what peril! At what risk of soul and body! His brain reeled, his blood raced at the thought.

Such things had lately been, he knew. Had there not been a dreadful outbreak in Alsace--Alsace, the neighbour almost of Geneva--within the last few years. In Thann and Turckheim, places within a couple of days'

journey of Geneva, scores had suffered for such practices; and some of these not old and ugly, but young and handsome, girls and pages of the Court and young wives! Had not the most unlikely persons confessed to practices the most dreadful? The most innocent in appearance to things unspeakable!

But--with a sudden revulsion of feeling--that was in Alsace, he told himself. That was in Alsace! Such things did not happen here at men's elbows! He must have been mad to think it or dream it. And, lifting his head, he looked about him. The sun had risen higher, the rich vale of the Rhone, extended at his feet, lay bathed in air and light and brightness. The burnished hills, the brown, tilled slopes, the gleaming river, the fairness of that rare landscape clad in morning freshness, gave the lie to the suspicions he had been indulging, gave the lie, there and then, to possibilities he dared not have denied in school or pulpit. Nature spoke to his heart, and with smiling face denied the unnatural. In Bamberg and Wurzburg and Alsace, but not here! In Magdeburg, but not here! In Edinburgh, but not here! The world of beauty and light and growth on which he looked would have none of the dark devil's world of which he had been dreaming: the dark devil's world which the sophists and churchmen and the weak-witted of twoscore generations had built up!

He turned and looked at her, the scales fallen from his eyes. Though she was still pale, she had recovered her composure and she met his gaze without blenching. But now, behind the pa.s.sive defiance, grave rather than sullen, which she presented to his attack, the weakness, the helplessness, the heart pain of the woman were plain.

He discerned them, and while he hungered for a more explicit denial, for a cry of indignant protest, for a pa.s.sionate repudiation, he found some comfort in that look. And his heart spoke. "I do not believe it!" he cried impetuously, in perfect forgetfulness of the fact that he had not put his charge into words. "I do not--I will not! Only say that it is false! And I will say no more."

Her answer was as cold water thrown upon him. "I will tell you nothing,"

she answered.

"Why not? Why not?" he cried.

"You ask why not," she answered slowly. "Are you so short of memory? Is it so long since, against my will and prayers, you came into yonder house--that you forget what I said and what I did? And what you promised?"

"My G.o.d!" he cried in excitement. "You do not know where you stand! You do not know what perils threaten you. This is no time," he continued, holding out his hands to her in growing agitation, "for sticking on scruples or raising trifles. Tell me all!"

"I will tell you nothing!" she replied with the same quiet firmness. "I have suffered. I suffer. Can you not suffer a little?"

"Not blasphemy!" he said. "Not that! Tell me"--his voice, his face grew suppliant--"tell me only that it was not your voice, Anne. Tell me that it was not you who spoke! Tell me--but that."

"I will tell you nothing!" she answered in the same tone.

"You do not know----"

"I know what it is you have in your mind!" she replied. "What it is you are thinking of me. That they will burn me in the Bourg du Four presently, as they burned the girl in Aix last year! As they burned the woman in Besancon not many months since; I have seen those who saw it.

As they did to two women in Zurich--my mother was there! As they did to five hundred people in Geneva in my grandfather's time. It is that," she continued, a strange wild light in her eyes, "that you think they will do to me?"

"G.o.d forbid!" he cried.

"Nay, you may do it, too, if you choose," she answered, gravely regarding him. "But I do not think you will, for you are young, almost as young as I am, and, having done it, you would have many years to live and think. You would remember in those years that it was my mother who nursed your father, that it was you who came to us not we to you, that it was you who promised to aid us, not I who sought your aid! You would remember all these things of a morning when you awoke early: and this--that in the end you gave me up to the law and burned me."

"G.o.d forbid!" he cried, and hid his face with his hands. The very quietness of her speech set an edge on horror. "G.o.d forbid!"

"Ay, but men allow!" she answered drearily. "What if I was mad last night, and in my madness denied my Maker? I am sane to-day, but I must burn, if it be known! I must burn!"

"Not by my mouth!" he cried, his brow damp with sweat. "Never, I swear it! If there be guilt, on my head be the guilt!"

"You mean it? You mean that?" she said.

"I do."

"You will be silent?"

"I will."

Her lips parted, hope in her eyes shone--hope which showed how deep her despair had been. "And you will ask no questions?" she whispered.

"I will ask no questions," he answered. He stifled a sigh.

She drew a deep breath of relief, but she did not thank him. It was a thing for which no thanks could be given. She stood a while, sad and thoughtful, reflecting, it seemed, on what had pa.s.sed; then she turned slowly and left him, crossed the open s.p.a.ce, and entered the house, walking as one under a heavy burden.

And he? He remained, troubled at one time by the yearning to follow and comfort and cherish her; cast at another into a cold sweat by the recollection of that voice in the night, and the strange ties which bound her to Basterga. Innocent, it seemed to him, that connection could not be. Based on aught but evil it could hardly be. Yet he must endure, witness, cloak it. He must wait, helpless and inactive, the issue of it.

He must lie on the rack, drawn one way by love of her, drawn the other by daily and hourly suspicions, suspicions so strong and so terrible that even love could hardly cast them out.

For the voice he had heard at midnight, and the horrid laughter, which greeted the words of sacrilege--were facts. And her subjection to Basterga, the man of evil past the evil name, was a fact. And her terror and her avowal were facts. He could not doubt, he could not deny them.

Only--he loved her. He loved her even while he doubted her, even while he admitted that women as young and as innocent had been guilty of the blackest practices and the most evil arts. He loved her and he suffered: doubting, though he could not abandon her. The air was fresh about him, the world lay sunlit under his eyes. But the beauty of the world had not saved young and tender women, who on such mornings had walked barefoot, none comforting them, to the fiery expiation of their crimes.

Perhaps--perhaps among the thousands who had witnessed their last agony, one man hidden in the crowd, had vainly closed ears and eyes, one man had died a hundred deaths in one.

CHAPTER X.

AUCTIO FIT: VENIT VITA.

In his s.p.a.cious chestnut-panelled parlour, in a high-backed oaken chair that had throned for centuries the Abbots of Bellerive, Messer Blondel sat brooding with his chin upon his breast. The chestnut-panelled parlour was new. The s.h.i.+elds of the Cantons which formed a frieze above the panels shone brightly, the or and azure, gules and argent of their quarterings, undimmed by time or wood-smoke. The innumerable panes of the long heavily leaded windows which looked out on the Bourg du Four were still rain-proof; the light which they admitted still found something garish in the portrait of the Syndic--by Schouten--that formed the central panel of the mantelpiece. New and stately, the room had not its pair in Geneva; and dear to its owner's heart had it been a short, a very short time before. He had antic.i.p.ated no more lasting pleasure, looked forward to no safer gratification for his declining years, than to sit, as he now sat, surrounded by its grandeur. In due time--not at once, lest the people take alarm or his enemies occasion--he had determined to rebuild the whole house after the same fas.h.i.+on. The plans of the oaken gallery, the staircase and dining-chamber, prepared by a trusty craftsman of Basle, lay at this moment in the drawer of the bureau beside his chair.

Now all was changed. A fiat had gone forth, which placed him alike beyond the envy of his friends, and the hatred of his foes. He must die. He must die, and leave these pleasant things, this goodly room, that future of which he had dreamed. Another man would lie warm in the chamber he had prepared; another would be Syndic and bear his wand. The years of stately plenty which he had foreseen, were already as last year's harvest. No wonder that the sheen of portrait and panel, the pride of echoing oak, were fled; or that the eyes with which he gazed on the things about him were dull and lifeless.

Dull and lifeless at one moment, and clouded by the apathy of despair; at another bright with the fierce fever of revolt. In the one phase or the other he had pa.s.sed many hours of late, some of them amid the dead-sea grandeur of this room. And he had had his hours of hope also. A fortnight back a ray of hope, bright as the goblin light which s.h.i.+nes the more brilliantly the darker be the night, had shone on him and amused and enchanted him. And then, in one moment, G.o.d and man--or if not G.o.d, the devil--had joined to quench the hope; and this morning he sat sunk in deepest despair, all in and around him dark. Hitherto he had regarded appearances. He had hidden alike his malady and his fears, his apathy and his mad revolt; he had lived as usual. But this morning he was beyond that. He could not rouse himself, he could not be doing. His servants, wondering why he did not go abroad or betake himself to some task, came and peeped at him, and went away whispering and pointing and nudging one another. And he knew it. But he paid no heed to them or to anything, until it happened that his eyes, resting dully on the street, marked a man who paused before the door and looked at the house, in doubt it seemed, whether he should seek to enter or should pa.s.s on.

For an appreciable time the Syndic watched the loiterer without seeing him. What did it matter to a dying man--a man whom heaven, impa.s.sive, abandoned to the evil powers--who came or who went? But by-and-by his eyes conveyed the ident.i.ty of the man to his brain; and he rose to his feet, laying his hands on a bell which stood on the table beside him. In the act of ringing he changed his mind, and laying the bell down, he strode himself to the outer door, the house door, and opened it. The man was still in the street. Scarcely showing himself, Blondel caught his eye, signed to him to enter, and held the door while he did so.

Claude Mercier--for he it was--entered awkwardly. He followed the Syndic into the parlour, and standing with his cap in his hand, began shamefacedly to explain that he had come to learn how the Syndic was, after--after that which had happened----He did not finish the sentence.

For that matter, Blondel did not allow him to finish. He had pa.s.sed at sight of the youth into the other of the two conditions between which his days were divided. His eyes glittered, his hands trembled. "Have you done anything?" he asked eagerly; and the voice in which he said it surprised the young man. "Have you done anything?"

"As to Basterga, do you mean, Messer Syndic?"

"As to what else? What else?"

"No, Messer Blondel, I have not."

"Nor learned anything?"

"No, nothing."

"But you don't mean--to leave it there?" Blondel cried, his voice rising high. And he sat down and rose up again. "You have done nothing, but you are going to do something? What will it be? What?" And then as he discerned the other's surprise, and read suspicion in his eyes, he curbed himself, lowered his tone, and with an effort was himself. "Young man," he said, wiping his brow, "I am still ridden--by what happened last night. I have lain, since we parted, under an overwhelming sense of the presence of evil. Of evil," he repeated, still speaking a little wildly, "such as this G.o.d-fearing town should not know even by repute!

You think me over-anxious? But I have felt the hot blast of the furnace on my cheek, my head bears even now the smell of the burning. h.e.l.l gapes near us!" He was beginning to tremble afresh, partly with impatience of this parleying, partly with anxiety to pluck from the other his answer.

The glitter was returning to his eyes. "h.e.l.l gapes near us," he repeated. "And I ask you, young man, what are you going to do?"