She did not see him, and he could have escaped unnoticed, had he retired at once. But he stood fixed to the spot by something in her appearance; a something that, as she moved slowly towards him, fancying herself alone, filled him with dread, and with something worse than dread — suspicion.
For if ever woman looked as if she had come from a witch’s Sabbath, if ever girl, scarce more than child, walked as if she had plucked the fruit of the Tree and savoured it bitter, it was the girl before him. Despair — it seemed to him — rode her like a hag. Dejection, fear, misery, were in her whole bearing. Her eyes looked out from black hollows, her cheeks were pallid, her mouth was nerveless. Three sleepless nights, he thought, could not have changed a woman thus — no, nor thrice three; and he who had seen her last night and saw her now, gazed fascinated and bewildered, asking himself what had happened, what it meant.
Alas, for answer there rose the spectre which he had been striving to lay; the spectre that had for the men of that day so appalling, so shocking a reality. Witchcraft! The word rang in his brain. Witchcraft would account for this, ay, for all; for her long submission to vile behests and viler men; for that which he had heard in this house at midnight; for that which the Syndic had whispered of Basterga; for that which he noted in her now! Would account for it; ay, but by fixing her with a guilt, not of this world, terrible, abnormal: by fixing her with a love of things vile, unspeakable, monstrous, a love that must deprive her life of all joy, all sweetness, all truth, all purity! A guilt and a love that showed her thus!
But thus, for a moment only. The next she espied his face above the landing-edge, perceived that he watched her, detected, perhaps, something of his feeling. With startling abruptness her features underwent a change. Her cheeks flamed high, her eyes sparkled with resentment. “You!” she cried — and her causeless anger, her impatience of his presence, confirmed the dreadful idea he had conceived. “You!” she repeated. “How dare you come here? How dare you? What are you doing here? Your room is below. Go down, sir!”
He did not move, but he met her eyes; he tried to read her soul, his own quaking. And his look, sombre and stern — for he saw a gulf opening at his feet — should have given her pause. Instead, her anger faced him down and mastered him. “Do you hear me?” she flung at him. “Do you hear me? If you have aught to say, if you are not as those others, go down! Go down, and I will hear you there!”
He went down then, giving way to her, and she followed him. She closed the staircase door behind them; and that done, in the living-room with her he would have spoken. But with a glance at Gentilis’ door, she silenced him, and led the way through the outer door to the open air. The hour was still early, the sun was barely risen. Save for a sentry sleeping at his post on the ramparts, there was no one within sight, and she crossed the open space to the low wall that looked down upon the Rhone. There, in a spot where the partly stripped branches which shaded the rampart hid them from the windows, she turned to him. “Now,” she said — there was a smouldering fire in her eyes— “if you have aught to say to me, say it. Say it now!”
He hesitated. He had had time to think, and he found the burden laid upon him heavy. “I do not know,” he answered, “that I have any right to speak to you.”
“Right!” she cried; and let her bitterness have way in that word. “Right! Does any stay for that where I am concerned? Or ask my leave, or crave my will, sir? Right? You have the same right to flout and jeer and scorn me, the same right to watch and play the spy on me, to hearken at my door, and follow me, that they have! Ay, and the same right to bid me come and go, and answer at your will, that others have! Do you scruple a little at beginning?” she continued mockingly. “It will wear off. It will come easy by-and-by! For you are like the others!”
“No!”
“You are as the others! You begin as they began!” she repeated, giving the reins to her indignation. “The day you came, last night even, I thought you different. I deemed you” — she pressed her hand to her bosom as if she stilled a pain— “other than you are! I confess it. But you are their fellow. You begin as they began, by listening on stairs and at doors, by dogging me and playing eavesdropper, by hearkening to what I say and do. Right?” she repeated the word bitterly, mockingly, with fierce unhappiness. “You have the right that they have! The same right!”
“Have I?” he asked slowly. His face was sombre and strangely old.
“Yes!”
“Then how did I gain it?” he retorted with a dark look. “How” — his tone was as gloomy as his face— “did they gain it? Or — he?”
“He?” The flame was gone from her face. She trembled a little.
“Yes, he — Basterga,” he replied, his eyes losing no whit of the change in her. “How did he gain the right which he has handed on to others, the right to shame you, to lay hand on you, to treat you as he does? This is a free city. Women are no slaves here. What then is the secret between you and him?” Claude continued grimly. “What is your secret?”
“My secret!” Her passion dwindled under his eyes, under his words.
“Ay,” Claude answered, “and his! His secret and yours. What is the thing between you and him?” he continued, his eyes fixed on her, “so dark, so weighty, so dangerous, you must needs for it suffer his touch, bear his look, be smooth to him though you loathe him? What is it?”
“Perhaps — love,” she muttered, with a forced smile. But it did not deceive him.
“You loathe him!” he said.
“I may have loved him — once,” she faltered.
“You never loved him,” he retorted. All the shyness of youth, all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. “You never loved him!” he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. “And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him this power over you?”
“Nothing,” she stammered, pale to the lips.
“Nothing! And was it for nothing that you were startled when you found me upstairs? When you found me watching you five minutes ago, was it for nothing that you flamed with rage — —”
“You had no right to be there.”
“No? Yet it was an innocent thing enough — to be there,” he answered. “To be there, this morning.” And then, giving the words all the meaning of which his voice was capable, “To have been there last night,” he continued, “were a different thing perhaps.”
“Were you there?” Her voice was barely audible.
“I was.”
It was dreadful to see how she sank under that, how she cringed before him, her anger gone, her colour gone, the light fled from her eyes — eyes grown suddenly secretive. It was a minute, it seemed a minute at least, before she could frame a word, a single word. Then, “What do you know?” she whispered. But for the wall against which she leant, she must have fallen.
“What do I know?”
She nodded, unable to repeat the words.
“I was at the door of Basterga’s room last night.”
“Last night!”
“Yes. I had the key of his room in my hand. I was putting it into the lock when I heard — —”
“Hush!” She stepped forward, she would have put her hand over his mouth. “Hush! Hush!”
The terror of her eyes, the glance she cast behind her, echoed the word more clearly than her lips. “Hush! Hush!”
He could not bear to look at her. Her voice, her terror, the very defence she had striven to make confirmed him in his worst suspicions. The thing was too certain, too apparent; in mercy to himself as well as to her, he averted his eyes.
They fell on the hills on which he had gazed that morning barely a fortnight earlier, when the autumn haze had mirrored her face; and all his thoughts, his heart, his fancy had been hers, her prize, her easy capture. And now he dared not look on her face. He could not bear to see it distorte
d by the terrors of an evil conscience. Even her words when she spoke again jarred on him.
“You knew the voice?” she whispered.
“I did not know it,” he answered brokenly. “I knew — whose it was.”
“Mine?”
“Yes.” He scarcely breathed the word.
She did not cry “Hush!” this time, but she caught her breath; and after a moment’s pause, “Still — you did not recognise it?” she murmured. “You did not know that it was my voice?” Could it be that after all she hoped to blind him?
“I did not.”
“Thank God!”
“Thank God?” He stared at her, echoing the words in his astonishment. How dared she name the sacred name?
She read his thoughts. “Yes,” she said hardily, “why not?”
He turned on her. “Why not?” he cried. “Why not? You dare to thank Him, who last night denied Him? You dare to name His name in the light, who in the darkness —— You! And you are not afraid?”
“Afraid?” she repeated. There was a strange light, almost a smile he would have deemed it had he thought that possible, in her face, “Nay, perhaps; perhaps. For even the devils, we are told, believe and tremble.”
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, snatch 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 aptitudes 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 passive 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 passionate 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 God!” 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 Besançon 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?”
“God 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.”
“God forbid!” he cried, and hid his face with his hands. The very quietness of her speech set an edge on horror. “God 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 q
uestions,” 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 passed; then she turned slowly and left him, crossed the open space, 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 spacious 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 shields 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 anticipated 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 fashion. 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.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 411
