第21章 THE ROAD TO BLOIS.(3)

Noticing that mademoiselle was benumbed and cramped with long sitting,I would have helped her to dismount;but she fiercely rejected my aid,and I had to content myself with requesting the landlord to assign the best accommodation he had to the lady and her attendant,and secure as much privacy for them as possible.

The man assented very civilly and said all should be done;but Inoticed that his eyes wandered while I talked,and that he seemed to have something on his mind.When he returned,after disposing of them,it came out.

'Did you ever happen to see him,sir?'he asked with a sigh;yet was there a smug air of pleasure mingled with his melancholy.

'See whom?'I answered,staring at him,for neither of us had mentioned any one.

'The Duke,sir.'

I stared again between wonder and suspicion.'The Duke of Nevers is not in this part,is he?'I said slowly.'I heard he was on the Brittany border,away to the westward.'

'Mon Dieu!'my host exclaimed,raising his hands in astonishment.'You have not heard,sir?'

'I have heard nothing,'I answered impatiently.

'You have not heard,sir,that the most puissant and illustrious lord the Duke of Guise is dead?'

'M.de Guise dead?It is not true!'I cried astonished.

He nodded,however,several times with an air of great importance,and seemed as if he would have gone on to give me some particulars.But,remembering,as I fancied,that he spoke in the hearing of half-a-dozen guests who sat about the great fire behind me,and had both eyes and ears open,he contented himself with shifting his towel to his other arm and adding only,'Yes,sir,dead as any nail.The news came through here yesterday,and made a pretty stir.It happened at Blois the day but one before Christmas,if all be true.'

I was thunderstruck.This was news which might change the face of France.'How did it happen?'I asked.

My host covered his mouth with his hand and coughed,and,privily twitching my sleeve,gave me to understand with some shamefacedness that he could not say more in public.I was about to make some excuse to retire with him,when a harsh voice,addressed apparently to me,caused me to turn sharply.I found at my elbow a tall thin-faced monk in the habit of the Jacobin order.He had risen from his seat beside the fire,and seemed to be labouring under great excitement.

'Who asked how it happened?'he cried,rolling his eyes in a kind of frenzy,while still observant,or I was much mistaken,of his listeners.Is there a man in France to whom the tale has not been told?Is there?'

'I will answer for one,'I replied,regarding him with little favour.'I have heard nothing.'

'Then you shall!Listen!'he exclaimed,raising his right hand and brandishing it as though he denounced a person then present.

'Hear my accusation,made in the name of Mother Church and the saints against the arch hypocrite,the perjurer and assassin sitting in high places!He shall be Anathema Maranatha,for he has shed the blood of the holy and the pure,the chosen of Heaven!He shall go down to the pit,and that soon.The blood that he has shed shall be required of him,and that before he is one year older.'

'Tut-tut.All that sounds very fine,good father,'I said,waxing impatient,and a little scornful;for I saw that he was one of those wandering and often crazy monks in whom the League found their most useful emissaries.'But I should profit more by your gentle words,if I knew whom you were cursing.'

'The man of blood!'he cried;'through whom the last but not the least of God's saints and martyrs entered into glory on the Friday before Christmas.'

Moved by such profanity,and judging him,notwithstanding the extravagance of his words and gestures,to be less mad than he seemed,and at least as much knave as fool,I bade him sternly have done with his cursing,and proceed to his story if he had one.

He glowered at me for a moment,as though he were minded to launch his spiritual weapons at my head;but as I returned his glare with an unmoved eye--and my four rascals,who were as impatient as myself to learn the news,and had scarce more reverence for a shaven crown,began to murmur--he thought better of it,and cooling as suddenly as he had flamed up,lost no more time in satisfying our curiosity.

It would ill become me,however,to set down the extravagant and often blasphemous harangue in which,styling M.de Guise the martyr of God,he told the story now so familiar--the story of that dark wintry morning at Blois,when the king's messenger,knocking early at the duke's door,bade him hurry,for the king wanted him.The story is trite enough now.When I heard it first in the inn on the Clain,it was all new and all marvellous.