“Ay, but that is not all.”
“What more, then?”
“It is briefly told,” answered the soldier. “His father was sent by her Majesty, our queen, with messages to Henry of Navarre, in whose army we two fought side by side. The envoy and his wife, who were passing through Paris—”
“What!” interrupted the poet, “were they his parents? I had forgot the story. It was the night when Papists murdered Huguenots, the night of St. Bartholomew. An Englishman and his wife were slain ere their son, who had come from the South to warn them, could intervene. He saw his mother struck down, saw the sword and the bared breast in the glare of a dozen torches, and saw his father killed, too, after a brief struggle. Then the youth, who had cut his way nearer to the scene, found himself beset on all sides by a bristling thicket of steel that no man could divide. He fell. The Catholics laughed and left him for dead across the bodies of his parents. But the lad was not so easily undone. He rose, despite a wound beneath the heart, and, dripping blood, carried the two dead forms to the Seine, where, in the shadow of the Pont Neuf, he weighted his burdens with stones and buried them beyond the reach of desecration. The tale came to me as come so many legends of the wars from nameless narrators. That youth, then, is—”
“John Vytal,” concluded the soldier, gravely. “He had fought before then at Jarnac and Moncontour; but now he warred against the Catholics with redoubled fury. ’Twas through him, I tell you, came the victorious peace of Beaulieu and Bergerac, and the fall of Cahors.”
“Find me this man!” The words burst from the young poet in a voice of eager, impetuous command. “I must see him!”
“He was to have been at the ‘Tabard’ two hours since,” returned the soldier, despondently, “but came not.”
“Then let us return thither and wait for him a year, if need be. He will come at last, ’tis sure.”
The narrow way on the bridge near by was now choked with its evening throngs, and, as daylight began to fade, a babble of many tongues rose and fell in the streets of Southwark, with which the creaking song of tavern signs, aswing in the evening breeze, blent an invitation to innumerable stragglers from the bear-fight.
“Eh, now,” said Rouse to one of these who joined him, “do you honor the ‘Spurre,’ Tom Watkins, or the ‘King’s Head’?”