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’Aubigne, 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 agave 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.
Here the waves fell with a soft and
cooling sound. Twenty miles of heavy, grey-black
salt water, the water of the Midland sea, statedly
said “Hush” to the stars.
Jean stopped and listened. There
was no need for haste. Ten days, and the task
would need thinking over how to get her,
by Salses, to Narbonne, where there was good
French authority, and the protection of the great
lords of his own party. But he would succeed.
He knew it. He had never failed yet.
So Jean was at peace. The stars
looked down, blinking sleepily through various coloured
prisms. The sea said so. You heard the wavelet
run along the shore, and the “Hush” dying
out infinitesimally, as the world’s clamour
dies into the silence of space.
But Jean-aux-Choux would have been
a little less at ease, and put a trifle more powder
into his heels, had he known that the warrant of the
Holy Office which he carried in his pocket was only
a first draft, and that the actual document was already
in the hands of the familiars, to be executed at their
peril. Also, that in this there was no question
of days, either of ten or any other number. The
acolytes of the Black Robe had a free hand.
The morning was coming up, all peach
and primrose, out of the East, reddening the port-waters
of Collioure, and causing the white house of La Masane,
up on its hill, to blush, when Jean-aux-Choux leaped
the wall of his own sheepfold, and came suddenly upon
a figure he knew well.
He saw a young man, bare of head,
his steel cap, velvet-covered and white-plumed, resting
on a low turf dyke. He had laid aside his weapons,
all except his dagger, and with that he was cultivating
and cherishing his finger-nails. His heel was
over the knee of his other leg, in that pose which
the young male sex can only attain with grace between
the ages of twenty and twenty-five.
“Hallo, Jean-aux-Choux!”
he cried. “Here have I been waiting you
for hours and hours unnumbered. Is this the way
you keep your master’s sheep? If I were
that most scowling nobleman of the castle down there,
I would soon bid you travel. If it had not been
for me, your sheep would have been sore put to it
for a mouthful, and the nursing ewes certainly dead
of thirst. Where have you been all these three
days?”
“The Abbe John the
little D’Albret!” cried Jean-aux-Choux,
thoroughly surprised for once in his life; “how
do you come here?”
“I have been on my master’s
business,” answered the Abbe John carelessly,
“and now I am waiting to do a little on my own
account. But there have been so many suspicious
gentry about, that I hesitated to go down till I had
seen you. Now tell me all that has happened.
That SHE is safe, I know; I have seen her every day from
a distance!”
“She who?” asked Jean, though
he knew very well.
“Who why Claire,
of course,” said the cousin of the Bearnais;
“you do not suppose I came so far to see the
little old woman in the blue pinafore, who walks nodding
her head and rattling her keys? Or you, you great,
thick-skulled oaf of Geneva, or the Sorbonnist with
the bald head and the eyes that look and see nothing?
What should a young man come so far for, and risk
his life to see, if not a fair young girl? Answer
me. What did John Calvin teach you as to that?”
“Only this,” said Jean-aux-Choux
solemnly; “’From the lust of the flesh,
from the lust of the eye, from the pride of life, good
Lord deliver me!’”
The young man looked up from his nail-polishing,
sharply and keenly.
“Aye so,” he said. “Well and
did He?”
For a moment, but only for a moment,
Jean-aux-Choux stood nonplussed. Then he found
his answer, and this time it was John Stirling, armiger,
scholar in divinity, who spoke.
“The God of John Calvin has
delivered me from all thought of self in the matter
of this maid, my master’s daughter. What
might have grown up in my heart, or even what may
once have been in my heart, had I been aught but a
battered masque of humanity, an offence to the beauty
of God’s creation that is not your
business, nor that of any man!”
The young fellow dropped his knife,
and rising, clasped Jean-aux-Choux frankly about the
neck.
“Jean Jean old
friend,” he cried, “wherefore should I
hurt you? Why should you think it of me?
Not for the world you know that well.
Forgive an idle word.”
But Jean-aux-Choux was moved, and
having the large heart, when once the waves tossed
it, the calm returned but slowly.
“Sir,” he said, “it
is only a few months since you first saw Claire Agnew.
Yet you have, as I judge from your light words, admired
her after your kind. But I I have
loved her as my own maid my sole thought,
my only ever since her father gathered
me up, a lame and bleeding boy, on the morning after
the Bartholomew. And ever since that day I have
loved much, showed little, and said nothing at all.
Yet I have kept keen guard. Night and day I have
gone about her house, like a faithful dog when the
wolves are howling in the forests. Now, if you
love this girl with any light love, take your way
as you came for you shall have to reckon
with me!”
The Abbe John dropped back on the
round stone which served equally as seat and rubbing-post
in the sheepfold. The oil off many woolly backs
had long since rendered it black and glistening.
He resumed the polishing of his nails with his dagger-edge.
Grave and stem, Jean-aux-Choux stood
before him, his hand on the weapon which had slain
the Guise. The Abbe John rubbed each finger-nail
carefully on the velvet of his cap as he finished it,
breathed on it, rubbed again, and then held it up
to the light.
“Ah, Jean,” he said at
last, “I may not go about her house howling like
a wolf, nor yet do any great thing for her. As
you say, our acquaintance has not been long.
But if you can love her more than I, or serve her
better, or are willing to give your life more lightly
for her sake than I why then, Jean, my
friend, you are welcome to her!”
Jean-aux-Choux did not answer, but
D’Albret took no heed. He went on:
“’By their deeds ye shall
know them. They taught you that at Geneva, I
warrant. Well, from what I have seen these past
three days, Claire Agnew is far from safe down there.
I have watched that black-browed master of yours conferring
with certain other gentlemen of singularly evil physiognomy.
There has been far too much dodging into coppices and
popping heads round stone walls. And then, as
often as the maid comes to the door with the little
old woman in the stomacher of blue click they
are all in their holes again, like a warren-full of
rabbits when you look over the hedge and clap your
hands! I do not like it, Jean-aux-Choux!”
Neither did Jean-aux-Choux so
little, indeed, that he decided to take this light-minded
young gentleman, of good family and few ambitions,
into his confidence which, perhaps, was
the wisest thing he could have done. From his
blouse he drew the parchment he had lifted off the
table of the Inquisition in the Street of the Money,
and thrust it silently into the other’s hand.
This was all Jean-aux-Choux’s
apology, but, for the Abbe John, it was perfectly
sufficient.