The White Plumes of Navarre: A Romance of the Wars of Religion. Crockett Samuel Rutherford
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