"Ten days," muttered Jean-aux-Choux, when he had read it over; "that gives us time. And there"—he heaved the seal of the Holy Office into the Tet—"they will have to get one made. That will be another length to our tether!"
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE WAY OF THE SALT MARSHES
The shore road from Perpignan to Collioure is a pass, dark and perilous, even on an August night. But Jean-aux-Choux trod it with the assured foot of one to whom the night is as the day. He had, as the people of Collioure asserted, been assuredly witch-born. Now to be "witch-born" may induce spiritual penalties hereafter, but, from all purely earthly points of view, it is a good thing. For then you have cat's eyes and can walk through black night as though it were noonday. Concerning this, however, Jean did not trouble himself. He considered himself well-born, well-baptised, one of the elect, and, therefore, perfectly prepared—a great thing when it is your lot to walk in the midst of many sudden deaths—for whatever the future might bring. He was turning over in his mind ways and means of getting Claire across the frontier—not very greatly troubled, because, first of all, there was the ten days' grace, and though the Inquisition would doubtless have watchers posted about the house, he, Jean-aux-Choux, could easily outwit them.
So he traversed the desolate flats between Perpignan and Elne, across which wild bulls were then permitted to range. Indeed, they came at times right up to the verge of the vineyards, which cultivators were just beginning to hedge from their ravages with the strange spike-leaved plant called the Fig of the Moors. But Jean-aux-Choux had no fear of anything that walked upon four feet. He carried his long shepherd's staff with the steel point to it, trailing behind him like a pike. And though, rounding the salt marshes and étangs or "stanks," there came to his ears the crooning of the herds, muttering discontentedly in their sleep with bovine noises, the sharp click of horns that tossed and interlocked in their effort to dislodge the mosquitoes, the sludgy splash of broad hooves in the wallows, the crisp snap of the salt crust, like thin ice breaking—for all which things Jean-aux-Choux cared nothing. Of course, his trained ear took in all these noises, registering, classifying, and drawing deductions from them. But he never once even raised his pointed staff, nor changed his direction. Perhaps the shepherd's cloak deceived the animals, or more likely the darkness of the night. For ordinarily it is death to venture there, save on horseback, and armed with the trident of Camargue. Once or twice he shouldered two or three bulls this way and that, pushing them over as one who grooms horses in their stalls after the labours of the day.
But all the time his thoughts were on the paths by which he would carry off his master's daughter, Claire Agnew, and set her in safety on the soil of free, if stormy, France, where the Inquisition had no power—nor was likely to have so long as the Bearnais lived, and the old-time phalanx of the Calvinists, D'Aubigné, Rosny, Turenne, and the rest stood about him.
Once or twice he thought, with some exultation, of the dead Valois. For, if Guise had been the moving spirit and bloody executioner of Saint Bartholomew, this same Henry of Valois, who had died at St. Cloud, had been the chief plotter—rather, say, the second—for Catherine, his mother, the Medicean woman, had assuredly been the first. For all he had done personally, Jean had no care, no remorse. As to the deed of Jacques Clement, he himself would not have slain an ally of the Bearnais. But, after all, it was justice, that the priest should slay the priest-ridden, and that the fanatic monk should slay the founder of the Order of the Penitents.
Altogether, Jean-aux-Choux had a quiet mind as he went. Above him, and somewhat to his left hand, hung a black mass, which was the rock-set town of Elne on its look-out hill. Highest of all loomed the black, shadowy mass of its cathedral, with the towers cutting a fantastic pattern against the skies.
Then came again the cultivated fields, hedges, ditches, the spiked agavé dykes, over which he swung, using his long staff for a leaping-pole—again the salt marshes, and lastly, the steep shingle and blown sand of the sea.