In Kings' Byways

by Stanley John Weyman

I

Paris had never seemed to the eye more peaceful than on a certain November evening in the year 1591: and this although many a one within its walls resented the fineness of the night as a mockery, as a scoff alike at the pain of some and the fury of others.

The moonlight fell on roofs and towers, on the bare open space of the Place de Grève, and the dark mass of the Louvre, and only here and there pierced, by chance, a narrow lane, to gleam on some foul secret of the kennel. The Seine lay a silvery loop about the Ile de la Cité—a loop cut on this side and that by the black shadows of the Pont au Change, and the Petit Pont, and broken again westward by the outline of the New Bridge, which was then in building.

The city itself lay in profound quiet in the depth of the shadow. From time to time at one of the gates, or in the vaulted lodge of the Châtelet, a sentinel challenged or an officer spoke. But the bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, which had rung through hours of the past day, was silent. The tumult which had leaped like flame from street to street had subsided. Peaceful men breathed again in their houses, and women, if they still cowered by the hearth, no longer laid trembling fingers on their ears. For a time the red fury was over: and in the narrow channels, where at noon the mob had seethed and roared, scarcely a stray wayfarer could now be found.

A few however were abroad: and of these some, who chanced to be threading the network of streets between the Châtelet and the Louvre, heard behind them the footsteps of one in great haste. Turning, they saw pass by them a youth, wearing a sword and a student's short cloak and cap—apparently he was a member of the University. He was pale of face, and for his part looked neither to right nor left: saw not one of them, and seemed bent only on getting forward.

He slackened his pace however near the corner of the Rue de Tirchape, where it shoots out of the Rue de Béthisy; and then turning the corner impulsively, he caught his foot in some obstacle, and, plunging forward, would have fallen, if he had not come against a man, who seemed to be standing still in the shadow of the corner house.

"Hold up!" exclaimed this person, withstanding the shock better than could have been expected, for he was neither tall nor bulky. "You should have a pretty mistress, young man, if you go to her at this pace!"

The student did not answer—did not seem to hear. He staggered against the wall, and stood propping himself up by it. His face, pale before, was ghastly, as he glared, horror-struck, at something beyond the speaker. The latter, after muttering angrily, "What the plague, then, do you go dashing about the streets like a Shrove Tuesday ox for?" turned also and glanced behind him.

But not at that to which the student's eyes were directed. The stranger seemed constrained to look first and by preference at the long, low casement of a house nearly opposite them. This window was on the first floor, and projected somewhat over the roadway. There seemed to be no light in the room within; but the moonlight reached it, and showed a woman's head bent on the sill—a girl's head, if one might judge from its wealth of hair. One white wrist gleamed amid the coil, but her face was hidden on her arms and showed not. In the whole scene—in the casement open at this inclement time, in the girl's attitude, in her abandonment, there was something which stirred the nerves. It was only after a long look that the stranger averted his eyes, and cast a casual glance at a queer, dark object, which a few paces away swung above the street, dimly outlined against the sky. It was clear that it was that which had fascinated his companion.

"Umph!" he ejaculated in the tone of a man who should say "Is that all?" And he turned to the youth again. "You seem taken aback, young man?" he said. "Surely that is no such strange sight in Paris nowadays. What with Leaguers hanging Politiques, and Politiques hanging Leaguers, and both burning Huguenots, I thought a dead man was no longer a bogey to frighten children with!"

"Hush, sir, in Heaven's name!" the young man exclaimed, shuddering at his words. And then, with a gesture of despair, "He was my father!"

The stranger whistled. "He was your father, was he!" he replied more gently. "I dare swear too that he was an honest man, since the Sixteen have done this. There, steady, my friend. These are no times for weeping. Be thankful that Le Clerc and his crew have spared your home, and your—your sister. That is rare clemency in these days, and Heaven only knows how long it may last. You wear a sword? Then shed no tears to rust it. Time enough to weep, man, when there is blood to be washed from the blade."

"You speak boldly," said the youth, checking his emotion somewhat, "but had they hung your father before his own door——"

"Good man," said the stranger with a coolness that bordered on the cynical, "he has been dead these twenty years."

"Then your mother?" the student suggested with the feeble persistence by which weak minds show their consciousness of contact with stronger ones, "you had then——"

"Hung them all as high as Haman!"

"Ay, but suppose there were among them some you could not hang," objected the youth, in a lower tone, while he eyed his companion narrowly, "some of the clergy, you understand?"

"They had swung—though they had all been Popes of Rome," was the blunt answer.

The young man shook his head, and drew off a pace. He scanned the stranger curiously, keeping his back turned to the corpse the while; but he failed by that light to make out much one way or the other. Scarcely a moment too was allowed him before the murmur of voices and the clash of weapons at the farther end of the street interrupted him. "The watch are coming," he said roughly.

"You are right," his companion assented, "and the sooner we are within doors the better."

It was noticeable that throughout their talk which had lasted some minutes no sign of life had appeared in any of the neighbouring houses. Scarce a light shone from doorway or window though it was as yet but nine o'clock. In truth fear of the Sixteen and of the mob whom they guided was overpowering Paris—was a terror crushing out men's lives. While the provinces of France were divided between two opinions, and half of them owned the Huguenot Henry the Fourth—now for two years the rightful sovereign—Paris would have none of him. The fierce bigotry of the lower classes, the presence of some thousands of Spanish soldiers, and the ambition and talents of the Guise family combined at once to keep the gates of Paris closed to him, and to overawe such of the respectable citizens as from religious sympathy in rare cases, more often out of a desire to see the re-establishment of law and order, would have adopted his cause. The Politiques, or moderate party, who were indifferent about religion as such, but believed that a strong government could be formed only by a Romanist king, were almost non-existent in Paris. And the events of the past day, the murder of three magistrates and several lower officials—among them poor M. Portail, whose body now decorated the Rue de Tirchape—had not reassured the municipal mind. No wonder that men put out their lights early, and were loth to go to their windows, when they might see a few feet from the casement the swollen features of a harmless, honest man, but yesterday going to and from his work like other men.

Young Portail stole to the door of the house and knocked hurriedly. As he did so, he looked, with something like a shiver of apprehension, at the window above his head. But the girl neither moved nor spoke, nor betrayed any consciousness of his presence. She might have been dead. It was a young man, about his own age or a little older, who, after reconnoitring him from above, cautiously drew back the door. "Whom have you with you?" he whispered, holding it ajar, and letting the end of a stout club be seen.

"No one," Portail replied in the same cautious tone. And he would have entered without more ado, and closed the door behind him had not his late companion, who had followed him across the street like his shadow, set his foot against it. "Nay, but you are forgetting me," he said good-humouredly.

"Go your way! we have enough to do to protect ourselves," cried Portail, brusquely.

"The more need of me," was the careless answer.

The watch were now but a few houses away, and the stranger seemed determined. He could scarcely be kept out without a disturbance. With an angry oath Felix Portail held the door for him to enter; and closed it softly behind him. Then for a minute or so the three stood silent in the darkness of the damp-smelling passage, while with a murmur of voices and clash of weapons, and a ruddy glimmer piercing crack and keyhole, the guard swept by.

"Have you a light?" Felix murmured, as the noise began to die away.

"In the back room," replied the young man who had admitted them. He seemed to be a clerk or confidential servant. "But your sister," he continued, "is distraught. She has sat at the window all day as you see her now—sometimes looking at it. Oh, Felix," in a voice shaken by tears, "this has been a dreadful day for this house!"

The young Portail assented by a groan. "And Susanne?" he asked.

"Is with Mistress Marie, terrified almost to death, poor child. She has been crouching all day beside her, hiding her face in her gown. But where were you?"

"At the Sorbonne," Felix replied, in a whisper.

"Ah!" the other exclaimed, something of hidden meaning in his tone. "I would not tell her that, if I were you. I feared it was so. But let us go upstairs."

They went up; the stranger following, with more than one stumble by the way. At the head of the staircase the clerk opened a door and preceded them into a low-roofed panelled room, plainly but solidly furnished, and lighted by a small hanging lamp of silver. A round oak table on six curiously turned legs stood in the middle, and on it some food was laid. A high-backed chair, before which a sheep-skin rug was spread, and two or three stools, made up, with a great oak chest, the furniture of the room.

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 Provençal!" 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, passionate 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?"

"Hush!" 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 God'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 shifted 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 naïvely.

"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 passed 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 Béthisy," 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 Châtelet 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 pass; 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, pushing 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 passed. 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 pass 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 passed 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 gods!" 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."

"The Rue des Lombards?"

"Yes, why not?" But though the soldier still smiled, the lines of his mouth hardened suddenly. "Why not to the Rue des Lombards?"

"I know no reason why you should not be going there," the clerk replied boldly. "It was only that the street is near; and a friend of my late master's lives in it."

"His name?"

The clerk started; the question was put so abruptly, and in a tone so imperious, it struck him as it were a blow. "Nicholas Toussaint," he answered involuntarily.

"Ay?" replied the other, raising his hand to his chin and glancing at Adrian with a look that for all the world reminded him of an old print of the eleventh Louis, which hung in a room at the Hotel de Ville—so keen and astute was it. "Your master, young man, was of the moderate party—a Politique?"

"He was."

"A good man and a Catholic? one who loved France? A Leaguer only in name?" the other continued with vividness.

"Yes, that is so."

"But his son? He is a Leaguer out and out—one who would rise to fortune on the flood tide of the mob? A Sorbonnist? The priests have got hold of him? He would do to others as they have done to his father? A friend of Le Clerc and Boucher? That is all so, is it not?"

Adrian nodded reluctantly. This strange man confounded and yet fascinated him: this man so reckless and gay one moment, so wary the next; exchanging in an instant the hail of a boon companion for the tone of a noble.

"And is your young master also a friend of this Nicholas Toussaint?" was the next question, slowly put.

"No," said Adrian, "he has been forbidden the house. M. Toussaint does not approve of his opinions."

"That is so, is it?" the stranger rejoined with his former gaiety. "And now enough: where will you lodge me until morning?"

"If my closet will serve you," Felix answered with a hesitation he would not have felt a few minutes before, "it is at your will. I will bring some food there at once, and will let you out if you please at five." And Adrian added some simple directions, by following which his guest might reach the Rue des Lombards without difficulty.

An hour later if the thoughts of those who lay sleepless under that roof could have been traced, strange contrasts would have appeared. Was Felix Portail thinking of his dead father, or of his sweetheart in the Rue des Lombards, or of his schemes of ambition? Was he blaming the crew of whom until to-day he had been one, or sullenly cursing those factious Huguenots as the root of the mischief? Was Adrian thinking of his kind master, or of his master's daughter? Was the guest dreaming of his narrow escape? or revolving plans beside which Felix's were but the schemes of a rat in a drain? Perhaps Marie alone—for Susanne slept a child's sleep of exhaustion—had her thoughts fixed on him, who only a few hours before had been the centre of the household.

But such is life in troubled times. Pleasure and pain come mingled, and men snatch the former from the midst of the latter with a trembling joy, a fierce eagerness: knowing that if they wait to go a pleasuring until the sky be clear, they may wait until nightfall.

When Adrian called his guest at cock-crow the latter rose briskly and followed him down to the door. "Well, young sir," he said, pausing an instant on the threshold, as he wrapped his cloak round him and took his sheathed sword in his hand, "I am obliged to you. When I can do you a service, I will."

"You can do me one now," the clerk replied bluntly. "It is ill work having to do with strangers in these days. You can tell me who you are, and to which side you belong."

"Which side? I have told you—my own. And for the rest," the soldier continued, "I will give you a hint." He brought his lips near to the other's ear, and whispered, "Kiss Marie—for me!"

The clerk looked up aflame with anger and surprise; but the other was far gone striding down the street. Yet Adrian received an answer to his question. For as the stranger disappeared in the gloom, he turned his head and broke with an audacity that took away the listener's breath into a well-known air,

"Hau! Hau! Papegots!
Faites place aux Huguenots!"

and trilled it as merrily as if he had been in the streets of Rochelle.

"Death!" the clerk exclaimed, getting back into the house, and barring the door in a panic. "I thought so. He is a Huguenot. But if he take his neck out of Paris unstretched, he will have the fiend's own luck, and the Béarnais' to boot!"