The Sword of Gideon

by John Bloundelle-Burton

"Some of the patrol carried him to the Lutheran Spital; some chased me; one came so near that, with his pike, he tore my face, as your men have torn it again in capturing me," and Stuven laughed horribly. "But I knew the streets and alleys better than they--I was no stranger, no invader, so I escaped them.

"Then for three weeks I waited. I worked no more; I watched only. None came out of the Spital, none went in, but I saw them. I begged at the gate--it was a good vantage place--I tried to get into the Spital to wait on the sick, to help bury, carry out the dead. Had I not failed in my desire I need not have waited so long."

At this the young Duc de Guise muttered to his neighbour, "This fellow should have lived in earlier days. For one's rival now--an enemy--our dearest foe--he would have been the man."

"Nay," that neighbour, an older, grey-headed officer, muttered back, "he would have been useless. His fire was for his country's enemy, for his own. As a hired bravado, a paid assassin, he would have lacked the necessary spark. A handful of crowns would have awakened nothing in him."

"He came out at last," Stuven went on, even as those two whispered together, "three weeks later. He found his horse at the inn where he had left it; he rode slowly, a wounded man--wounded by me--to Liége. But he never rode from me, out of my sight. We entered the gates close together; he found a lodging, I slept in the street outside it. Then--then--after I had tracked him for some days I knew that he was tracking another. And at last I knew it was this man here," and again Stuven's eyes were turned on Bevill. "If I could have warned you," he said now to the latter, "I would have done so, but I could not leave him and I never saw you except when he drew near to you.

"So it went on. Had he had time, I think he would have come to you and denounced him," and now the man looked at De Violaine, "but he had not. He rose early, went to his bed late; and he was wary. In dark streets at night he had his sword drawn beneath his cloak; once, too, he noticed me, and from that time he feared for his own life. I think he understood that I was the man who fell on him at St. Trond.

"But now the night was come, the night of the storm. We--it was always we--he intent on following this man, and I on following him--were on our road to that great white house. Since dark I had been near the Gouden Leeuw, and I saw this Englishman come forth, mount his horse and ride to the house. I saw him enter a postern gate, opening it with a key; it took him some time to help his horse through it. Then the gate was shut again.

"A few moments later Sparmann went round to the wall on the other side, and, finding another postern gate in that, took from his pocket a key and entered; but he did not shut the gate, desiring doubtless to leave the way clear to escape quickly if he needed to. Then I knew he had been there before, or had been well directed how to gain entrance. Also, I remembered that more than once I had seen him with a man who on one occasion handed him something. I thought then that it was money; now, on this night, I understood that it was the key that he was using. And the man was this----" Stuven added, his eyes on Francbois, the contempt of his voice as biting, as burning as the bite of vitriol on live flesh; the very gesture of his hand, as he indicated the other, blighting, withering, in its disdainful scorn.

And Francbois, trembling before his late judges and present warders, and white, too, as the dead within their shrouds, could only mutter "False, false, false--all false!"

"Since Sparmann had left the door open behind him, my way was clear," Stuven went on, ignoring Francbois' feeble moan. "Five minutes later I knew that he was creeping slowly up the back stairs, and I, my knife in hand, was near him. The storm was at its height; now and again the great hall was lit by the lightning, so, too, was the whole house; it penetrated even to where he was, where I was, too. And now I knew that he feared something. The lightning showed me his backward glance, the glare of fear in his eyes, the look of the rat hunted through the streets by dogs. I guessed that he knew there was someone--something--near him that threatened danger. It may be that he thought it was this Englishman; or, also, he may have feared that it was I, the man who had failed once, but would never fail again."