The Long Night: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

A GLOVE AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

Meanwhile, Claude, robbed of his prey, had gone into the town in great
disgust. As he passed from the bridge, and paused before he entered the
huddle of narrow streets that climbed the hill, he had on his left the
glittering heights of snow, rising ridge above ridge to the blue; and
most distant among them Mont Blanc itself, etherealised by the frosty
sunshine and clear air of a December morning. But Mont Blanc might have
been a marsh, the Rhone, pouring its icy volume from the lake, might
have been a brook, for him. Aware, at length, of the peril in which Anne
stood, and not doubting that these colloquies of Messers Blondel and
Louis, these man[oe]uvrings to be rid of his presence, were part of a
conspiracy against her, he burned with the desire to thwart it. They had
made a puppet of him; they had sent him to and fro at their will and
pleasure; and they had done this, no doubt, in order that in his absence
they might work--Heaven knew what vile and miserable work! But he would
know, too! He was going to know! He would not be so tricked thrice.

His indignation went beyond the Syndic. The smug-faced towns-folk whom
he met and jostled in the narrow ways, and whose grave starched looks he
countered with hot defiant glances--he included them in his anathema. He
extended to them the contempt in which he held Blondel and Louis and the
rest. They were all of a breed, a bigoted breed; all dull, blind worms,
insensible to the beauty of self-sacrifice, or the purity of affection.
All, self-sufficient dolts, as far removed, as immeasurably divided from
her whom he loved, as the gloomy lanes of this close city lay below the
clear loveliness of the snow-peaks! For, after all, he had lifted his
eyes to the mountains.

One thing only perplexed him. He understood the attitude of Basterga and
Grio and Louis towards the girl. He discerned the sword of Damocles that
they held over her, the fear of a charge of witchcraft, or of some vile
heresy, in which they kept her. But how came Blondel in the plot? What
was his part, what his object? If he had been sincere in that attempt on
Basterga's secrets, which Madame's delirious words had frustrated, was
he sincere now? Was his object now as then--the suppression of the
devilish practices of which he had warned Claude, and in the punishment
of which he had threatened to include the girl with her tempter?
Presumably it was, and he was still trying to reach the goal by other
ways, using Louis as he had used Claude, or tried to use him.

And yet Claude doubted. He began to suspect--for love is jealous--that
Blondel had behind this a more secret, a more personal, a more selfish
aim. Had the young girl, still in her teens, caught the fancy of the man
of sixty? There was nothing unnatural in the idea; such things were,
even in Geneva; and Louis was a go-between, not above the task. In that
case she who had showed a brave front to Basterga all these months, who
had not blenched before the daily and hourly persecution to which she
had been exposed in her home, was not likely to succumb to the senile
advances of a man who might be her grandfather!

If he did not hold her secret. But if he did hold it? If he did hold
it, and the cruel power it gave? If he held it, he who had only to lift
his hand to consign her to duress on a charge so dark and dangerous that
innocence itself was no protection against it? So plausible that even
her lover had for a short time held it true? What then?

Claude, who had by this time reached the Tertasse gate and passed
through it from the town side, paused on the ramparts and bared his
head. What then?

He had his answer. Framed in the immensity of sky and earth that lay
before him, he saw his loneliness and hers, his insignificance and hers,
his helplessness and hers; he, a foreigner, young, without name or
reputation, or aught but a strong right hand; she, almost a child, alone
or worse than alone, in this great city--one of the weak things which
the world's car daily and hourly crushes into the mud, their very cries
unheard and unheeded. Of no more account than the straw which the turbid
Rhone, bore one moment on its swirling tide, and the next swallowed from
sight beneath its current!

They were two--and a mad woman! And against them were Blondel and
Basterga and Grio and Louis, and presently all the town of Geneva! All
these gloomy, narrow, righteous men, and shrieking, frightened
women--frightened lest any drop of the pitch fall on them and destroy
them! Love is a marvellous educator. Almost as clearly as we of a later
day, he saw how outbreaks of superstition, such as that which he
dreaded, began, and came to a head, and ended. A chance word at a door,
a spiteful rumour or a sick child, the charge, the torture, the widening
net of accusation, the fire in the market-place. So it had been in
Bamberg and Wurzburg, in Geneva two generations back, in Alsace scarce
as many years back: at Edinburgh in Scotland where thirty persons had
suffered in one day--ten years ago that; in the district of Como, where
a round thousand had suffered!

Nobility had not availed to save some, nor court-favour others; nor
wealth, nor youth, nor beauty. And what had he or she to urge, what had
they to put forward that would in the smallest degree avail them? That
could even for a moment stem or avert the current of popular madness
which power itself had striven in vain to dam. Nothing!

And yet he did not blench, nor would he; being half French and of good
blood, at a time when good French blood ran the more generously for a
half century of war. He would not have blenched, even if he had not,
from the sunlit view of God's earth and heaven which lay before his
eyes, drawn other thoughts than that one of his own littleness and
insignificance. As this view of vale and mountain had once before lifted
his judgment above the miasma of a cruel superstition, so it raised him
now above creeping fears and filled him with confidence in something
more stable than magistrates or mobs. Love, like the sunlight, shone
aslant the dark places of the prospect and filled them with warmth.
Sacrifice for her he loved took on the beauty of the peaks, cold but
lovely; and hope and courage, like the clear blue of the vault above,
looked smiling down on the brief dangers and the brief troubles of man's
making.

The clock of St. Gervais was striking eleven as, still in exalted mood,
he turned his back on the view and entered the house in the Corraterie.
He had entered on his return from his fruitless visit to Blondel, and
had satisfied himself that Anne was safe. Doubtless she was still safe,
for the house was quiet.

In his new mood he was almost inclined to quarrel with this. In the
ardour of his passion he would gladly have seen the danger immediate,
the peril present, that he might prove to her how much he loved her,
how deeply he felt for her, what he would dare for her. To die on the
hearth of the living-room, at her feet and saving her, seemed for a
moment the thing most desirable--the purest happiness!

That was denied him. The house was quiet, as in a morning it commonly
was. So quiet that he recalled without effort the dreams which he had
dreamed on that spot, and the thoughts which had filled his heart to
bursting a few hours before. The great pot was there, simmering on its
hook; and on the small table beside it, the table that Basterga and Grio
occupied, stood a platter with a few dried herbs and a knife fresh from
her hand. Claude made sure that he was unobserved, and raising the knife
to his lips, kissed the haft gently and reverently, thinking what she
had suffered many a day while using it! What fear, and grief and
humiliation, and----

He stood erect, his face red: he listened intently. Upstairs, breaking
the long silence of the house, opening as it were a window to admit the
sun, a voice had uplifted itself in song. The voice had some of the
tones of Anne's voice, and something that reminded him of her voice. But
when had he heard her sing? When had aught so clear, so mirthful, or so
young fallen from her as this; this melody, laden with life and youth
and abundance, that rose and fell and floated to his ears through the
half-open door of the staircase?

He crept to the staircase door and listened; yes, it was her voice, but
not such as he had ever heard it. It was her voice as he could fancy it
in another life, a life in which she was as other girls, darkened by no
fear, pinched by no anxiety, crushed by no contumely; such as her voice
might have been, uplifted in the garden of his old home on the French
border, amid bees and flowers and fresh-scented herbs. Her voice,
doubtless, it was; but it sorted so ill with the thoughts he had been
thinking, that with his astonishment was mingled something of shock and
of loss. He had dreamed of dying for her or with her, and she sang! He
was prepared for peril, and her voice vied with the lark's in joyous
trills.

Leaning forward to hear more clearly, he touched the door. It was ajar,
and before he could hinder it, it closed with a sharp sound. The singing
ceased with an abruptness that told, or he was much mistaken, of
self-remembrance. And presently, after an interval of no more than a few
seconds, during which he pictured the singer listening, he heard her
begin to descend.

Two men may do the same thing from motives as far apart as the poles.
Claude did what Louis would have done. As the foot drew near the
staircase door, treading, less willingly, less lightly, more like that
of Anne with every step, he slid into his closet, and stood. Through the
crack between the hinges of the open door, he would be able to view her
face when she appeared.

A second later she came, and he saw. The light of the song was still in
her eyes, but mingled, as she looked round the room to learn who was
there, with something of exaltation and defiance. Christian maidens
might have worn some such aspect, he thought--but he was in love--as
they passed to the lions. Or Esther, when she went unbidden into the
inner court of the King's House, and before the golden sceptre moved.
Something had happened to her. But what?

She did not see him, and after standing a moment to assure herself that
she was alone, she passed to the hearth. She lifted the lid of the pot,
bent over it, and slowly stirred the broth; then, having covered it
again, she began to chop the dried herbs on the platter. Even in her
manner of doing this, he fancied a change; a something unlike the Anne
he had known, the Anne he had come to love. The face was more animated,
the action quicker, the step lighter, the carriage more free. She began
to sing, and stopped; fell into a reverie, with the knife in her hand,
and the herb half cut; again roused herself to finish her task; finally
having slid the herbs from the platter to the pot, she stood in a second
reverie, with her eyes fixed on the window.

He began to feel the falseness of his position. It was too late to show
himself, and if she discovered him what would she think of him? Would
she believe that in spying upon her he had some evil purpose, some low
motive, such as Louis might have had? His cheek grew hot. And then--he
forgot himself.

Her eyes had left the window and fallen to the window-seat. It was the
thing she did then which drew him out of himself. Moving to the
window--he had to stoop forward to keep her within the range of his
sight--she took from it a glove, held it a moment, regarding it; then
with a tender, yet whimsical laugh, a laugh half happiness, half
ridicule of herself, she kissed it.

It was Claude's glove. And if, with that before his eyes he could have
restrained himself, the option was not his. She turned in the act, and
saw him; with a startled cry she put--none too soon--the table between
them.

They faced one another across it, he flushed, eager, with love in his
eyes, and on his lips; she blushing but not ashamed, her new-found joy
in her eyes, and in the pose of her head.

"Anne!" he cried. "I know now! I know! I have seen and you cannot
deceive me!"

"In what?" she said, a smile trembling on her lips. "And of what, Messer
Claude, are you so certain, if you please?"

"That you love me!" he replied. "But not a hundredth part"--he stretched
his arms across the table towards her "as much as I love you and have
loved you for weeks! As I loved you even before I learned last
night----"

"What?" Into her face--that had not found one hard look to rebuke his
boldness--came something of her old silent, watchful self. "What did you
learn last night?"

"Your secret!"

"I have none!" Quick as thought the words came from her lips. "I have
none! God is merciful," with a gesture of her open arms, as if she put
something from her, "and it is gone! If you know, if you guess aught of
what it was"--her eyes questioned his and read in them if not that which
he knew, that which he thought of her.

"I ask you to be silent."

"I will, after I have----"

"Now! Always!"

"Not till I have spoken once!" he cried. "Not till I have told you once
what I think of you! Last night I heard. And I understood. I saw what
you had gone through, what you had feared, what had been your life all
these weeks, rising and lying down! I saw what you meant when you bade
me go anywhere but here, and why you suffered what you did at their
hands, and why they dared to treat you--so! And had they been here I
would have killed them!" he added, his eyes sparkling. "And had you been
here----"

"Yes?" she did not seek to check him now. Her bearing was changed, her
eyes, soft and tender, met his as no eyes had ever met his.

"I should have worshipped you! I should have knelt as I kneel now!" he
cried. And sinking on his knees he extended his arms across the table
and took her unresisting hands. "If you no longer have a secret, you
had one, and I bless God for it! For without it I might not have known
you, Anne! I might not have----"

"Perhaps you do not know me now," she said; but she did not withdraw her
hands or her eyes. Only into the latter grew a shade of trouble. "I have
done--you do not know what I have done. I am a thief."

"Pah!"

"It is true. I am a thief."

"What is it to me?" He laughed a laugh as tender as her eyes. "You are a
thief, for you have stolen my heart. For the rest, do you think that I
do not know you now? That I can be twice deceived? Twice take gold for
dross, and my own for another thing? I know you!"

"But you do not know," she said tremulously, "what I have done--what I
did last night--or what may come of it."

"I know that what comes of it will happen, not to one but to two," he
replied bravely. "And that is all I ask to know. That, and that you are
content it shall be so?"

"Content?"

"Yes."

"Content!"

There are things, other than wine, that bring truth to the surface. That
which had happened to the girl in the last few hours, that which had
melted her into unwonted song, was of these things; and the tone of her
voice as she repeated the word "Content!" the surrender of her eyes that
placed her heart in his keeping, as frankly as she left her hands in
his, proclaimed it. The reserves of her sex, the tricks of coyness and
reticence men look for in maids, were shaken from her; and as man to man
her eyes told him the truth, told him that if she had ever doubted she
no longer doubted that she loved him. In the heart which a single
passion, the purest of which men and women are capable, had engrossed
so long, Nature, who, expel her as you will, will still return, had won
her right and carved her kingdom.

And she knew that it was well with her--whatever the upshot of last
night. To be lonely no more; to be no longer the protector, but the
protected; to know the comfort of the strong arm as well as of the
following eye, the joy of receiving as well as of giving; to know that,
however dark the future might lower, she had no longer to face it alone,
no longer to plan and hope and fear and suffer alone, but with
_him_--the sense of these things so mingled with her gratitude on her
mother's account that the new affection, instead of weakening the old
became as it were part of it; while the old stretched onwards its pious
hand to bless the new.

If Claude did not read all this in her eyes, and in that one word
"Content?" he read so much that never devotee before relic rose more
gently or more reverently to his feet. Because all was his he would take
nothing. "As I stand by you, may God stand by me," he said, still
holding her hands in his, and with the table between them.

"I have no fear," she replied in a low voice. "Yet--if you fail, may He
forgive you as fully as I must forgive you. What shall I say to you on
my part, Messer Claude?"

"That you love me."

"I love you," she murmured with an intonation which ravished the young
man's heart and brought the blood to his cheeks. "I love you. What
more?"

"There is no more," he cried. "There can be no more. If that be true,
nothing matters."

"No!" she said, beginning to tremble under a weight of emotion too heavy
for her, following as it did the excitement of the night. "No!" she
continued, raising her eyes which had fallen before the ardour of his
gaze. "But there must be something you wish to ask me. You must wish to
know----"

"I have heard what I wished to know."

"But----"

"Tell me what you please."

She stood in thought an instant: then, with a sigh, "He came to me last
evening," she said, "when you were at his house."

"Messer Blondel?"

"Yes. He wished me to procure for him a certain drug that Messer
Basterga kept in his room."

Claude stared. "In a steel casket chained to the wall?" he asked.

"Yes," she whispered with some surprise. "You knew of it, then? He had
tried to procure it through Louis, and on the pretence that the box
contained papers needed by the State. Failing in that he came last
evening to me, and told me the truth."

"The truth?" Claude asked, wondering. "But was it the truth?"

"It was." Her eyes, like stars on a rainy night, shone softly. "I have
proved it." Again, with a ring of exultation in her voice, "I have
proved it!" she cried.

"How?"

"There was in the box a drug, he told me, possessed of an almost
miraculous power over disease of body and mind; so rare and so wonderful
that none could buy it, and he knew of but this one dose, of which
Messer Basterga had possessed himself. He begged me to take it and to
give it to him. He had on him, he said, a fatal illness, and if he did
not get this--he must die." Her voice shook. "He must die! Now God help
him!"

"You took it."

"I took it." Her face, as her eyes dropped before his, betrayed trouble
and doubt. "I took it," she continued, trembling. "If I have done wrong,
God forgive me. For I stole it."

His face betrayed his amazement, but he did not release her hands.
"Why?" he said.

"To give it to her," she answered. "To my mother. I thought then that it
was right--it was a chance. I thought--now I don't know, I don't know!"
she repeated. The shade on her face grew deeper. "I thought I was right
then. Now--I--I am frightened." She looked at him with eyes in which her
doubts were mirrored. She shivered, she who had been so joyous a moment
before, and her hands, which hitherto had lain passive in his, returned
his pressure feverishly. "I fear now!" she exclaimed. "I fear! What is
it? What has happened--in the last minute?"

He would have drawn her to him, seeing that her nerves were shaken; but
the table was between them, and before he could pass round it, a sound
caught his ear, a shadow fell between them, and looking up he discovered
Basterga's face peering through the nearer casement. It was pressed
against the small leaded panes, and possibly it was this which by
flattening the huge features imparted to them a look of malignity. Or
the look--which startled Claude, albeit he was no coward--might have
been only the natural expression of one, who suspected what was afoot
between them and came to mar it. Whatever it meant, the girl's cry of
dismay found an echo on Claude's lips. Involuntarily he dropped her
hands; but--and the action was symbolical of the change in her life--he
stepped at the same moment between her and the door. Whatever she had
done, right or wrong, was his concern now.

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