He spoke to an empty room, and if Ursula de Vesc closed the door between them with a greater vigour than the politeness strict deportment demanded she may surely be excused. It may be that even the angels lose their tempers at times over the follies of a blind humanity.
As to Stephen La Mothe, he stood staring at the closed door as if he were not only alone in the room but in the very world itself; or, rather, as if the world had suddenly dropped from under his feet and the shock bewildered him. She had been so gracious, so very sweet and gracious. He had been forgiven in advance; why such bitter offence? A single word was all he had asked—one little word. Then he flushed all over with a peculiar pricking sensation down the spine. Could it be that she expected a very different question; one whose answer might have been a Yes? If that were so—but it was absurd, and he called himself many hard names for having such an idea a single moment. To have thought such a thought of Ursula de Vesc was as preposterous as saying she would philander in a rose garden.
CHAPTER XVIII
FRENCH AND ENGLISH
Before the coming of the Maid, that is to say more than fifty years before Stephen La Mothe gave himself the heartache over his misreadings of the most read chapter in the book of nature, there stood upon the banks of the Loire, about a mile from Amboise, the flour mill of one Jean Calvet. For six generations it had passed from a Calvet to a Calvet, son succeeding father as Amurath an Amurath, and the Moulin Flèche d'Or was as well known to the countryside as Amboise itself. The kirkyard or the grinding stones; humanity must needs find its way to both.
When harvests were fat, and corn plentiful, its stones hummed from daylight to dark to the blent music of the creaking wheel and the splash-splash of the water which drove it. In lean years, when war or famine was abroad, and thanks to England these years were not few, the sluice was lifted, and in place of the hoarse murmur and complaint of the grinding stones and lumbering wheel there was the soft purr of the millrace, and the Calvet of his generation lived, like a turtle, on his own fat, waiting for better days. And sooner or later these always came, and with their coming grew the prosperity of the Golden Arrow. Corn and the human heart must needs be ground while the world lasts, and perhaps it is as much out of the grinding of the latter as the former that life is strengthened. Then came a day which brought an end to more than the prosperity of Jean Calvet the sixth.
Some clocks wear out, running down with little spurts of life and longer intervals of dumbness; others end with a sudden crashing of the pendulum while in its full swing, and a wild, convulsive whirr of the jarred wheels. One moment the sober tick tells that all is well, the next—silence. So was it with Calvet's mill.
In the fortune, or misfortune, of war an Englishman, one Sir John Stone, riding that way with his band of marauders, little better than licensed brigands, found Amboise too tough a nut for his teeth, and harried the Calvets in pure wantonness. Over the tree-tops the garrison of Amboise could see the smoke of the burning, but they were too weak to venture succour.
Calvet must fend for himself lest Calvet and Amboise both end in the one ruin. There was little defence, but that little was grimly in earnest and yet more grim the revenge of the attack. For that generation both pity and mercy had fled France. Jean Calvet the younger, he who should have been the seventh of his line, was coursed in the open like a hare, but turned at the last and died at bay as a wolf dies. Behind the barred door were Jean the sixth, his two younger sons, and the dead man's wife. The woman, grey-faced but tearless, fought as the men fought, using her Jean's cross-bow from the narrow upper windows. All that rage, desperation, and hate could do was done, and when the door fell in with a crash Jean the younger had been avenged four times over. John Stone took as little by his wantonness as he deserved.
Then came the end. There was a rush up the stone stairway, a brief struggle to gain the upper level, a minute's surging back and forth, a briefer, fiercer fury of strife among the cranks and meal-bags, a few rough oaths, a woman's scream, and then silence, or what by contrast passed for silence, since the sudden quiet was only broken by deep breathing and the sucking of air into dry throats. England had gained an ignoble victory.