The Abbess Of Vlaye

by Stanley John Weyman

The little group which Bonne had left when her feelings compelled her to flight remained in the same place. But all who formed it, the Vicomte and his eldest daughter as well as des Ageaux and the Countess, were now on their feet. The Vicomte and the ladies stood together in the background, while des Ageaux, who had placed himself before them, confronted an excited body of men, some hundred in number, and composed in part at least of those whom the Bat had been lately drilling. Whether these had broken from his control and gathered their fellows as they moved, or the impulse had come from outside and they were but recruits, their presence rendered the movement more formidable. They were not indeed of so low and savage a type as the creatures who had met des Ageaux in the gate the previous day, but viewed in this serried mass, their lowering brutish faces and clenched hands called up a vivid sense of danger. They must have made some outcry as they approached, or Roger had not noticed their assemblage. But now they were fallen silent. A grim mass of scowling, hard-breathing men, then small suspicious eyes glaring through tangled locks irresistibly reminded the observer of that quarry the most dangerous of all the beasts of chase, the wild boar.

Bonne's colour faded as her eyes took in the meaning of the scene. She grew still paler as her brain pictured for the first time the things that might happen in this camp of clowns of whose real sentiments the intruders had so little knowledge, at whose possible treachery it was so easy to guess. Time has not wiped, time never will wipe from the French memory the fear of a Jacquerie. The horrors of that hideous revolt, of its rise and its suppression are stamped on the minds of the unborn. "What is it?" she repeated more than once, her heart fluttering. How very, very near he stood--on whom all depended--to the line of scowling men!

"A mutiny, I fear!" Roger answered hastily. "Come!" And, with face slightly flushed, he hurried, running and sliding down the slope.

She was not three paces behind him when he reached the foot. Here they lost sight of the scene, but quickly passed between two huts and reached the Vicomte's side. Des Ageaux was speaking.

"I cannot give you the man," he was saying, "but I can give you justice."

"Justice?" the spokesman of the peasants retorted bitterly--he wore the dress of a smith, and belonged to that craft. "Who ever heard but of one sort of justice for the poor man? Justice, Sir Governor, is the poor man's right to be hung! The poor man's right to be scourged! The poor man's right to be broken on the wheel! To see his hut burned and his wife borne off! That is the justice"--rudely--"the poor man gets-- be it high or low, king's or lord's!"

"Ay, ay!" the stern chorus rose from a hundred throats behind him, "that is the poor man's justice!"

"It is to put an end to such things I am here!" des Ageaux replied, marking with a watchful eye the faces before him. He was far from easy, but he had handled men of their kind before, and thought that he knew them.

"There was never a beginning of such things, and there will never be an end!" the smith returned, the hopelessness of a thousand years of wrong in his words. "Never! But give us this man--he has done all these things, he and his master, and we will believe you."

"I cannot give him to you," des Ageaux answered. The same prisoner, one of Vlaye's followers, was in question whom the Old Crocans had yesterday required to be given up to them. "But I have told you and I tell you again," the Lieutenant continued, reading mischief in the men's faces, "that you shall have justice. If this man has wronged you and you can prove it----"