No sooner had Jean-aux-Choux departed from the terrible house in the Street of the Money at Perpignan, in which he had found the three inquisitors seated, than Mariana, with a sigh of relief, drew from his breast a document on cream-coloured vellum.

Before reading it he looked at the other two, and especially at Frey Tullio the Neapolitan.

“We are all good Spaniards,” he was about to begin. But remembering in time the birthplace of the junior inquisitor, he altered his sentence into, “We are all good subjects of King Philip?”

Surintendant Teruel and Frey Tullio bowed their heads. They wondered what was coming, and Tullio was growing not a little sleepy. Even inquisitors must sleep. A pulley-wheel creaked overhead uneasily. Down in the Place of Pain the familiars were trying the ropes for the morrow. There was one that had not acted satisfactorily in the case of that Valencian Jew in the afternoon. They had been ordered to mend it. King Philip did not approve of paying for new ropes too often. Besides, the old were better. They did not stretch so much. Blood and tears had dropped upon them.

So ever and anon the pulley creaked complainingly between two rafters, in the pauses of the Jesuit’s soft voice, as he read the Pope’s condemnation of King Henry III. of France (called of Valois) excommunicated, outcasted, delivered to Satan that he might learn not to offend for the sin of alliance with the heretic, for the sin of schism and witchcraft “ordered to be read from the chair of our cathedral-church of Meaux, and of all others occupied by faithful bishops ”

The face of the peasant-ecclesiastic Teruel lighted with a fierce joy as he listened.

“We shall yet be able to send the Valois before our tribunals. The Holy Office shall be set up in France. At last the Edicts of Trent shall be obeyed. What glory! What joy to judge a King of France, and send him to the stake as a heretic, a schismatic, a hater of Holy Church ”

“Softly softly, Brother Teruel,” said Mariana, smiling fixedly. “France is not our happy Spain. The people there are not accustomed to fires in the market-places and the smell of burned sacrifice to the sight of their parents and children being fagoted for the glory of God. See what happened in England a few years ago, when our Philip’s wife Mary, Queen of that country, tried to introduce a little oh, such a very little of her husband’s methods.”

“Here we have no difficulty,” said Teruel, from his peasant-bigot’s point of view. “It is God’s good method with the world to extirpate the heretic!”

But the Jesuit answered him truly.

“Make no mistake,” he said, tapping the Papal Bull with a plump forefinger, “you succeed here in Spain, my country and yours, because the Spaniard, ninety-nine out of a hundred, is wishful that you should succeed. Our good John Spaniard hates Jews he despises heretics. To him they are a foolish remnant. They prosper abominably; they are patient, unwarlike, easily plundered. Yet they take it upon themselves to offend the eye by their unnecessary industry. A striped blanket in the shade, a little wine, a little gossip and in these later times, since blessed Ferdinand, a good rollicking auto de fe once a week. These suffice him when the King does not call our Spaniard to war. They are the very ‘bread-and-bull-fights’ for which he cried when he was yet a Roman and a citizen. But in France and in England even in Italy we must act otherwise. We attain our end just the same, but without noise. Only one man somewhere, with a clear brain and an arm that will not fail, drives a knife or, when all backs are turned, inverts the bottom of a poison phial. He gains the martyr’s crown, skips Purgatory with a bound, and finds himself in Paradise!”

The little grey Neapolitan blinked owlishly at Mariana. He was growing sleepy, and with all his soul he wished this too-wise man would be silent. But being applied to, he thought it was safer to agree.

“Certainly certainly,” he said, “it is the same in Italy.”

“In Italy not quite, my friend,” said Mariana; “your needs are scarcely the same. With you, cup-and-dagger are as common as fleas, and as little thought of. You have means (literally) to your hand! But here we have to manufacture them, put spirit into them, send them out on their mission as only we of the Gesù can do.”

The Jesuit of Toledo paused a little in his argument, turning his eyes from one to the other.

“As to this little matter,” he said, again tapping the Papal Bull with his finger-nail, “I have a man who will execute His Holiness’s will in your national manner, my good Tullio. Only first, he would have a mandate from the Holy Office, a sort of safe-conduct for his soul the promise of absolution for breaking his vow against the shedding of blood. He is, I must tell you, a little Dominican of Sens, presently misbehaving himself in the mother-college of St. Jacques at Paris. But he is good material for all that, properly handled.”

Teruel spoke with the natural caution of the peasant.

“But,” said he, “we will be held responsible if aught goes amiss; our duty here is difficult enough! The King ”

“The King I will take in my own hand,” said Mariana. “I warrant you his fullest protection, and approval. You shall have great favour perhaps even be moved to Seville or Granada, or some other place where Jews, Moriscos, and heretics are frequent and rich. Write me the paper and seal it with the seal official!”

So with his Papal Bull and an order from the chiefs of the Holy Office, assembled in council at the nearest accessible point, Mariana withdrew to his bed, and none in all the Street of the Money slept sounder than he that night, though when he opened the window to let in a breath of the cool, moist air off the Tet, the prayers of the prisoners could be heard coming up in moaning gusts from the dungeons beneath.

The machinery set in motion by the Jesuit Mariana revolved statedly, wheel within his wheel. The “young Dominican of Sens,” delivering himself to a strange but not unusual mixture of fanaticism and debauch, misspent his days with the rabble of Paris, his evenings in listening to the fair speeches and yet fairer promises of Madame de Montpensier, the Duke of Guise’s sister, while all night mysterious voices whispered in the darkness of his cell that he was the chosen of God, the approved, and that if he, Jacques Clement, would only kill the King, angels would immediately waft his body, safe and unseen, to the quiet of his convent.

Had he not heard the Bull of the Pope read by the Father Superior? Had the Holy Office not promised him immunity, nay, even canonisation had not Madame de Montpensier ? But enough, Jacques Clement, riotous monk of Sens, sat him down and made his dagger like a needle for sharpness, like a mirror for polish. This he did when he should have been reading his breviary in the monastery of the Dominicans in the Rue Saint-Jacques.

So it came to pass that on the evening of the third day of August, 1589, Jean-aux-Choux, still wearing his great shepherd’s cloak, though all Perpignan city panted in the fervent heat, and the cool water of the Tet reeked against the sun-heated banks, stood again at the door of that gloomy house in the Street of the Money.

Above, the three men waited as before. But this time there was no hesitation about admittance, not even a question asked. The three men who had done a great thing far away, without lifting one of their little fingers, now waited, tense with anxiety not for themselves, for no one of them cared for his own safety, but to know that they had won the game for their Church and cause.

To them Jean-aux-Choux opened his mouth.

“He is dead!” he announced, solemnly “Henry of Valois is dead! The siege of Paris is raised. Epernon and the great lords have refused to serve a Huguenot king. They have gone home ”

“And the Bearnais the Bearnais?” interrupted Mariana hoarsely, “what of him?”

“I saw him ride sadly away the White Scarves only following!”

Then for once, at the crowning moment of his life, Mariana, the smiling Jesuit, leaned face-forward on the table. His strength had gone from him.

“Enough,” he said, “I have done the Society’s will. But so great success even I had not hoped for!”

And he rocked himself to and fro in that terrible crisis of nervous emotion which comes only to the most self-restrained, while Teruel, the Surintendant of the Holy Inquisition, and Frey Tullio his second, were prodigal of their cares, lavishing restoratives, of which (in virtue of their office) they had great store in the Street of the Money.

None minded Jean-aux-Choux, or even thanked him. But he, seeing a parchment with a familiar name written upon it, the ink scarcely dry, and as a paper-weight the seal of the Holy Office ready to append to it, coolly pocketed both seal and mandate.

It was a warrant to the familiars of the Holy Office in the city of Perpignan to seize the body of one Claire Agnew, a known and warrantable heretic, presently residing at the house of La Massane near Collioure, and to bring her within the prisons of the aforesaid Inquisition in the Street of the Money, in the city above mentioned, within ten days at most from that date upon peril of their several lives, and of the lives of all that should defend, aid, assist, or shelter the said Claire Agnew, heretic, daughter of Francois of that name, plotter, spy, and Calvinist.

Followed the signs and signatures of the two inquisitors in charge to wit, Teruel and Tullio. The name of Mariana did not anywhere appear.

“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!”