In Kings' Byways Part 9

The stranger turned from scrutinizing his surroundings, and stood at gaze. Another door had opened silently; he saw framed in the doorway and relieved by the lamplight against the darkness of the outer room the face and figure of a tall girl; doubtless the one whom he had seen at the window. A moment she stood pointing at them with her hand, her face white--and whiter in seeming by reason of the black hair which fell round it; her eyes were dilated, the neckband of her dark red gown was torn open that she might have air. "A Provencal!" the intruder murmured to himself. "Beautiful and a tigress."

At any rate, for the moment, beside herself. "So you have come at last!"

she said, panting, glaring at Felix with scorn, pa.s.sionate scorn in word and gesture. "Where were you while these slaves of yours did your bidding? At the Sorbonne with the black crows! Thinking out fresh work for them? Or dallying with your Normandy sweetheart?"

"Hus.h.!.+" he said, lowering his eyes, and visibly quailing before her.

"There is a stranger here."

"There have been many strangers here to-day!" she retorted with undiminished bitterness. "Hush, you say? Nay, but I will not be silent for you, for any! They may tear me limb from limb, but I will accuse them of this murder before G.o.d's throne. Coward! Parricide! Do you think I will ask mercy from them? Come, look on your work! See what the League have done--your holy League!--while you sat plotting with the black crows!"

She pointed into the dark room behind her, and the movement disclosed a younger girl clinging to her skirts, and weeping silently. "Come here, Susanne," Felix said; he had turned pale and red and s.h.i.+fted from one foot to another, under the lash of the elder girl's scorn. "Your sister is not herself. You do no good, Marie, staying in there. See, you are both trembling with cold."

"With cold?" was the fierce rejoinder. "Then do you warm yourselves! Sit down and eat and drink and be comfortable and forget him! But I will not eat nor drink while he hangs there! Shame, Felix Portail! Shame! Have you arms and hands, and will let your father hang before his own door?"

Her voice rang shrill to the last word audible far down the street; that said, an awkward silence fell on the room. The stranger nodded twice, almost as if he said, "Bravo!--Bravo." The two men of the house cast doubtful glances at one another. At length the clerk spoke. "It is impossible, mistress," he said gently. "Were he touched, the mob would wreck the house to-morrow."

"A little bird whispered to me as I came through the streets,"--it was the stranger who spoke--"that Mayenne and his riders would be in town to-morrow. Then it seems to me that our friends of the Sorbonne will not have matters altogether their own way--to wreck or to spare!"

The Sorbonne was the Theological College of Paris; at this time it was the headquarters of the extreme Leaguers and the Sixteen. Mayenne and D'Aumale, the Guise princes, more than once found it necessary to check the excesses of the party.

Marie Portail looked for the first time at the speaker. He sat on the edge of the chest, carelessly swinging one knee over the other; a man of middle height, neither tall nor short, with well-bronzed cheeks, a forehead broad and white, and an aquiline nose. He wore a beard and moustaches, and his chin jutted out. His eyes were keen, but good-humoured. Though spare he was sinewy; and an iron-hilted sword propped against his thigh seemed made for use rather than show. The upper part of his dress was of brown cloth, the lower of leather. A weather-stained cloak, which he had taken off, lay on the chest beside him.

"You are a man!" cried Marie, her eyes leaving him again. "But as for these----"

"Stay, mistress!" the clerk broke in. "Your brother does but collect himself. If the Duke of Mayenne returns to-morrow, as our friend here says is likely--and I have heard the same myself--he will keep his men in better order. That is true. And we might risk it if the watch would leave us a clear street."

Felix nodded sullenly. "Shut the door," he said to his sister, the deep gloom on his countenance in sharp contrast with the excitement she betrayed. "There is no need to let the neighbours see us."

This time she obeyed him. Susanne too crept from her skirts, and threw herself on her knees, hiding her face on a chair. "Ay," said Marie, looking down at her with the first expression of tenderness the stranger had noted in her. "Let her weep. Let children weep. But let men work."

"We want a ladder," the clerk said, in a low voice. "And the longest we have is full three feet short."

"That is just half a man," remarked he who sat on the chest.

"What mean you?" Felix asked wonderingly.

"What I said."

"But there is nothing on which we can rest the ladder," the clerk urged.

"Then that is a whole man," quoth the stranger, curtly. "Perhaps two. I told you you would have need of me." He looked from one to the other with a smile--a careless, reckless, self-contented smile.

"You are a soldier," said Marie. And abruptly she fixed her eyes upon him.

"At times," he replied, shrugging his shoulders.

"For which side?"

He shook his head. "For my own," he answered navely.

"A soldier of fortune?"

"At your service, mistress; now and ever."

The clerk struck in with impatience. "If we are to do this," he said, "we had better set about it. I will fetch the ladder."

He went out, and the other men followed more slowly down the stairs; leaving Marie still standing gazing into the darkness of the front room--she had opened the door again--like one in a trance. Some odd trait in the soldier led him, as he pa.s.sed out, to lay his hand on the hair of the kneeling child with a movement infinitely tender; infinitely at variance with the harsh clatter with which his sword next moment rang against the stairs as he descended.

The three men were going to do that which two for certain, and all perhaps, knew to be perilous. One went to it in gloom, reluctance and anger, as well as with sorrow at his heart. One bustled about nervously, and looked often behind him as if to see Marie's pale face at the window. And one strode out as to a ball, glancing up and down the dark lane with an air of enjoyment, which not even the grim nature of his task could suppress. The body was hanging from a bar which crossed the street at a considerable height, and served as a stay between the gables of two opposite houses, of which one was two doors only from the unhappy Portail's. The mob, with a barbarity very common in those days, had hung him on his own threshold.

The street, as the three moved into it, seemed empty and still. But it was impossible to say how long it would remain so. Yet the soldier loitered, staring about him, as one remembering things. "Did not the Admiral live in this street?" he inquired.

"De Coligny? No. Round the corner in the Rue de Bethisy," replied the clerk, brusquely. "But see! The ladder will not reach the bar--no, not by four feet."

"Set it against the wall then--thus," said the soldier, and having done it himself, he mounted a few steps. Then he seemed to bethink himself.

He jumped down again. "No," he exclaimed, peering sharply into the faces of one and the other, "I do not know you. If any one comes, my friends, and you leave the foot of the ladder, I shall be taken like a bird on a limed twig. Do you ascend, Monsieur Felix."

The young man drew back. He was not without courage, or experience of rough scenes. But the Louvre was close at hand, almost within earshot on one side, the Chatelet was scarcely farther off on the other; and both swarmed with soldiers and the armed scourings of the streets. At any moment a troop of these might pa.s.s; and should they detect any one interfering with King Mob's handiwork, he would certainly dangle in a few minutes from that same handy lamp-iron. Felix knew this, and stood at gaze. "I do not know you either," he muttered irresolutely, his hand still on the ladder.

A smile of surprising humour played on the soldier's face. "Nay, but you knew _him_!" he retorted, pointing upwards with his hand. "Trust me, young sir," he added significantly, "I am less inclined to mount now--than I was before."

The clerk intervened before Felix could resent the insult. "Steady," he said; "I will go up and do it."

"Not so!" Felix rejoined, pus.h.i.+ng him aside in turn. And he ran up the ladder. But near the top he paused, and began to descend again. "I have no knife," he said shamefacedly.

"Pshaw! Let me come!" cried the stranger. "I see you are both good comrades. I trust you. Besides, I am more used to this ladder work than you are, and time is everything."

He ran up as he spoke, and, standing on the highest round but one, he grasped the bar above his head, and swung himself lightly up, so as to gain a seat on it. With more caution he wormed himself along it until he reached the rope. Fortunately there was a long coil of this about the bar; and warning his companions in a whisper, he carefully, and with such reverence as the time and place allowed, let down the body to them.

They received it in their arms; and had just loosened the noose from the neck when an outburst of voices and the tramp of footsteps at the nearer end of the street surprised them. For an instant the two stood in the gloom, breathless, stricken still, confounded. Then with a single impulse they lifted the body between them, and huddled blindly towards the door of the Portails' house. It opened at their touch, they stumbled in, and it fell to behind them. The foremost of the armed watch had been within ten paces of them. The escape was narrow.

Yet they had escaped. But what next? What of their comrade? The moment the door was closed behind them, one at least would have rushed out again, ay, to certain death, so strongly had the soldier's trust appealed to his honour. But they had the body in their arms; and by the time it was laid on the stairs, a score of men had pa.s.sed. The opportunity was over. They could do nothing but listen. "Heaven help him!" fell from the clerk's quivering lips. Pulling the door close, they stood, looking each moment to hear a challenge, a shot, the clash of swords. But no. They heard the party halt under the gallows, and pa.s.s some brutal jest, and go on. And that was all.

They could scarcely believe their ears; no, nor their eyes, when a few minutes later, the street being now quiet, they pa.s.sed out, and stood in it shuddering. For there swung the corpse dimly outlined above them!

There! Certainly there! The clerk seized his companion's arm and drew him back. "It was the fiend!" he stammered. "See, your father is still there! It was the fiend who helped us!"

But at that the figure they were watching became agitated; an instant and it slid gently to the ground. It was the soldier. "O ye G.o.ds!" he cried, bent double with silent laughter. "Saw you ever such a trick? How I longed to kick, if it were but my toe at them, and I forbore! Fools!

Did man ever see a body hung in its sword? But it was a good trick, eh?"

he continued, appealing to them with a simple pride in his invention. "I had the rope loose in my hand when they came, and I drew it twice round my neck--and one arm trust me--and swung off gently. It is not every one who would have thought of that, my children!"

It was odd. They shook with fear, and he with laughter. He did not seem to give a thought to the danger he had escaped. Pride in his readiness and a keen sense of the humorous side of the incident possessed him entirely. At the very door of the house he still chuckled from time to time; muttering between the ebullitions, "Ah, I must tell Diane! Diane will be pleased--at that! It was good! Very good!"

Once in the house, however, he acted with more delicacy than might have been imagined. He stood aside while the other two carried the body upstairs; and while they were absent, he waited patiently in the bare room below, which showed signs of occasional use as a stable. Here the clerk Adrian presently found him, and murmured some apology. Mistress Marie, he said, had fainted.

"A matter which afflicts you, my friend," the soldier replied with a grimace, "about as much as your master's death. Pooh, man, do not look fierce! Good luck to you and your suit. Only if--but this is no house for gallantry to-night--I had spruced myself and taken a part, you had had to look to your one ewe lamb, I warrant you!"

The clerk turned pale and red by turns. This man seemed to read his thoughts as if he had indeed been the fiend. "What do you wish?" he stammered.

"Only shelter until the early morning when the streets are most quiet; and a direction to the Rue des Lombards."