"It is the name of the greatest persecutors we have ever known. The bearer of it is the descendant of those who splashed the walls of Paris and dyed the waters of the Seine with our ancestors' blood. Can I--I--do aught but shudder at learning it, at being beholden to a de Guise for courtesy?"
"Those days are passed----"
"Passed Are they passed? Does not their memory linger even now. Is not the reflex of their wicked deeds cast on these present days? Oh, sir, you do not know, you cannot know what is doing even now in France, in the South. Ah, God! it seems to me as though the fact of this man, this inheritor of all the wickedness and cruelty of his forerunners, having been the first I encounter here, is an omen that I shall never succeed in the task I have set myself."
"Madame, think not so, I implore you. The Ducs de Guise are harmless now. Their power is gone, their teeth are broken. The ancient nobility can do nothing against the people without the King's command. He rules, directs all."
"Therein is the fear, the danger. Under that woman--faugh!--De Maintenon, he does indeed rule and direct all, but he directs all for cruelty. Who has filled the prisons, the galleys--ah! the galleys," the Comtesse repeated with an exclamation of such pain that Bevill wondered if, in any of those hideous receptacles of suffering and misery in which countless Protestants were now suffering, there might be, in their midst, some person or persons dear to her. "Who has filled those, who has strung thousands of innocent men and women upon the gallows, to the lamps of their own villages, on the trees of their own orchards, but Louis the King and those, his nobles, under him? Ah! ah!" she went on, "do you know what, in the old days, far, far off, long before they slaughtered us on St. Bartholomew's eve, the motto of the Guises was? It was one word only--'Kill.' And killing is in their blood. It cannot be eradicated; it is there. Is it strange that, in encountering this man. I fear? I who go to save. I who pray nightly, hourly, that my mission may help to save, to prevent, further slaughter?" And, as the Comtesse de Valorme finished speaking, she threw herself back upon the cushions of her carriage and buried her face in her hands.
"I pray God, madame," Bevill said, he being deeply moved at her words, "that the mission you are upon may bear good fruit. It is partly for that, also, that we, the English, are banded against France and Spain. Perhaps it may be that we desire not more to lower the pride, to break down the power of this King, than to prevent those whom he rules over from cruelly persecuting those of our faith."
Now, however, this discourse between them had to cease. They were at the gates of Liége, outside the suburb of St. Walburg, which, although not the nearest point of admission, was the one to which those who were permitted to enter the city at all were forced to go.
Contrary, however, to any fears which either the Comtesse de Valorme or Bevill might have felt as to their admission being made difficult, they found that it was extremely easy. The fact of the trooper who accompanied them having been sent by the Duc de Guise as an escort brought about this state of things, since it was almost unheard of that, whatever might be the detachment on guard at the exterior lines, or whosoever might be the travellers, such thought for their convenience should be exercised.
Consequently, the slightest examination of the papers of each was made by those at this barrier, and a moment later the barrier was passed.
Bevill had accomplished part of the task he had set out to perform. He was in the city where dwelt the woman whom he had come from England to help and assist.