He was early at the meeting, therefore, but to his surprise found it in session before the hour. This, and the fact that the hubbub of voices and discussion died down at his entrance--died down and was succeeded by a chilling silence--put him on his guard. He had not come unprepared for opposition; to meet it he had wound himself to a pitch, telling himself that after this all would be easy; that he had this one peril to face, this one obstacle to surmount, and having succeeded might rest.
Nevertheless, as he pa.s.sed up the Great Council Chamber amid that silence, and met strange looks on faces which were wont to smile, his courage for one moment, even in that familiar scene--conscience makes cowards of all--wavered. His smile grew sickly, his nerves seemed suddenly unstrung, his knees shook under him. It was a dreadful instant of physical weakness, of mental terror, under the eyes of all. To himself, he seemed to stand still; to be self-betrayed, self-convicted!
Then--and so brief was the moment of weakness no eye detected it--he moved on to his place, and with his usual coolness took his seat. He looked round.
"You are early," he said, ignoring the glances, hostile or doubtful, that met his gaze. "The hour has barely struck, I believe?"
"We were of opinion," Fabri answered, with a dry cough, "that minutes were of value."
"Ah!"
"That not even one must be lost, Messer Blondel!"
"In doing?" Blondel asked in a negligent tone, well calculated to annoy those who were eager in the matter. "In doing what, if I may ask?"
"In doing, Messer Syndic," Pet.i.tot answered sharply, "that which should have been done a week ago; and better still a fortnight ago. In issuing a warrant for the arrest of the person whose name has been several times in question here."
"Messer Basterga?"
"The same."
"You may save yourselves the trouble," the Syndic replied, with a little contempt. "The warrant has been issued. It was issued yesterday, and would have been executed in the afternoon, if he had not got wind of it, and left the town. And on this let me say one more word," Blondel continued, leaning forward and speaking in sudden heat, before any one could take up the question. "That word is this. If it had not been for the importunity of some who are here, the warrant had _not_ been issued, the man had still been within the walls, and we had been able still to trace his plans! We had not been as we now are, and as I foretold we should be, in the dark, ignorant from which quarter the blow may fall, and not a whit the wiser for the hint given us."
"You have let him escape!" The words were Pet.i.tot"s.
"I? No! I have not let him escape, but those who forced my hand!"
Blondel retorted in pa.s.sion, so real, or so well simulated, that it swept away the majority of his listeners. "They have let him escape!
Those who had no patience or craft! Those whose only notion of statesmanship, whose only method of making use of the doc.u.ment we had under our hand was to tear it up. Only yesterday morning I was with him----"
"Ay?" Baudichon cried, his eyes glowing with dull pa.s.sion. "You were with him! And he went in the afternoon! Mark that!" He turned quickly to his fellows. "He went in the afternoon! Now, I would like to know----"
Blondel stood up. "Whether I am a traitor?" he said, in a tone of fury; and he extended his arms in protest. "Whether I am in league with this Italian, I, Philibert Blondel of Geneva? That is what you ask, what you wish to know! Whether I sought him yesterday in the hope of worming his secrets from him, and doing what I could for the benefit of the State in a matter too delicate to be left to underlings? Or went there, one with him, to betray my country? To sell the Free City? That--that is what you ask?"
His pa.s.sion was full, overpowering, convincing; so convincing--it almost stopped his speech--that he believed in it himself, so convincing that it swept away all but his steady and professed opponents. "No, no!"
cried a dozen voices, in tones that reflected his indignation. "No, no!
Shame!"
"No?" Blondel took up the word, his eyes sparkling, his adust complexion heated and full of fire. "But it is--yes, they say! Yes, they say whom you have to thank if we have lost our clue, they who met me going to him but yesterday and threatened me! Threatened me!" he repeated, in a voice of astonishment. "Me, who desired only, sought only, was going only to do my duty! I used, I admit the fault," he allowed his voice to drop to a tone more like his own, "words on that occasion that I now regret. But is blood water? Does no man besides Councillor Baudichon love his country? Is the suspicion, the open suspicion of such an one, no insult, that he must cavil if he be repaid in insult? I have given my proofs. If any man can be trusted to sound the enemy, it is I! But I have done! Had Messer Baudichon not pressed me to issue the warrant, not driven me beyond my patience, it had not been issued yesterday. It had been in the office, and the man within the walls! Ay, and not only within the walls, but fresh from a conference with the Sieur d"Albigny, primed with all we need to know, and in doubt by which side he could most profit!"
"It was about that you saw him?" Pet.i.tot said slowly, his eyes fixed like gimlets to the other"s face.
"It was about that I saw him," Blondel answered. "And I think in a few hours more I had won him. But in the street he had some secret word or warning; for when I handed the warrant--against my better sense--to the officers, they, who had never lost sight of him between gate and gate, answered that he had crossed the bridge and left the town an hour before. Mon Dieu!"--he struck his two hands together and snapped his teeth--"when I think how foolish I was to be over-ridden, I could--I could say more, Messer Baudichon"--with a saturnine look--"than I said yesterday!"
"At any rate the bird is flown!" Baudichon replied, with sullen temper.
"That is certain! And it was you who were set to catch him!"
"But it was not I who scared him," Blondel rejoined.
"I don"t know what you would have had of him!"
"Oh, I see that plainly enough," said Fabri. He was an honest man, without prejudice, and long the peace-maker between the two parties.
"I thank you," Blondel replied dryly. "But, by your leave, I will make it clear to Messer Baudichon also, who will doubtless like to know. I would have had of him the time and place and circ.u.mstance of the attack, if such be in preparation. And then, when I knew all, I would have made dispositions, not only to safeguard the city, but to give the enemy such a reception that Italy should ring with it! Ay, and such as should put an end for the rest of our lives to these treacherous attacks!"
The picture which he drew thus briefly of a millennium of safety, charmed not only his own adherents, but all who were neutral, all who wavered. They saw how easily the thing might have been done, how completely the treacherous blow might have been parried and returned.
Veering about they eyed Baudichon, on whom the odium of the lost opportunity seemed to rest, with resentment--as an honest man, but a simpleton, a dullard, a block! And when Blondel added, after a pause, "But there, I have done! The office of Fourth Syndic I leave to you to fill," they barely allowed him to finish.
"No! No!" came from almost all mouths, and from every part of the council table.
"No," Fabri said, when silence was made. "There is no provision for a change, unless a definite accusation be laid."
"But Messer Baudichon may have one to make," Blondel said proudly. "In that case, let him speak."
Baudichon breathed hard, and seemed to be on the point of pouring forth a torrent of words. But he said nothing. Instinct told him that his enemy was not to be trusted, but he had the wit to discern that Blondel had forestalled him, and had drawn the sting from his charges. He could have wept in dull, honest indignation; but for accusations, he saw that the other held the game, and he was silent. "Fat hog!" the man had called him. "Fat hog!" A tear gathered slowly in his eye as he recalled it.
Fabri gave him time to speak; and then with evident relief, "He has none to make, I am sure," he said.
"Let him understand, then," Blondel replied firmly, "let all understand, that while I will do my duty I am no longer in the position to guard against sudden strokes, in which I should have been, had I been allowed to go my own way. If a misfortune happen, it is not on me the blame must rest." He spoke solemnly, laughing in his sleeve at the cleverness with which he was turning his enemy"s petard against him. "All that man can do in the dark shall be done," he continued. "And I do not--I am free to confess that--antic.i.p.ate anything while the negotiations with the President Rochette are in progress."
"No, it is when they are broken off, they will fall back on the other plan," one of the councillors said with an air of much wisdom.
"I think that is so. Nor do I think that anything will be done during the present severe weather."
"They like it no better than we do!"
"But the roads are good in this frost," Fabri said. "If it be a question of moving guns or wagons----"
"But it is not, by your leave, Messer Fabri, as I am informed," the man who had spoken before objected; supporting his opinion simply because he had voiced it, a thing seen every day in such a.s.semblies. Fabri replied on him in the other sense: and presently Blondel had the satisfaction of listening to a discussion in which the one party said a dozen things that he saw would be of use to him--some day.
One only said not a word, and that was Pet.i.tot. He listened to all with a puzzled look. He resented the insult which Blondel had flung at his friend Baudichon, but he saw all going against them, and no chance of redress; nay, capital was being made out of that which should have been a disadvantage. Worst of all, he was uneasy, fancying--he was very shrewd--that he caught a glimpse, under the Fourth Syndic"s manner, of another man: that he detected signs of emotion, a feverishness and imperiousness not quite explained by the circ.u.mstances.
He got the notion from this that the Fourth Syndic had learned more from Basterga than he had disclosed. His notion, even so, went no further than the suspicion that Blondel was hiding knowledge out of a desire to reap all the glory. But he did not like it. "He was always for risking, for risking!" he thought. "This is another case of it. G.o.d grant it go well!" His wife, his children, his daughters, rose in a picture before him, and he hated Blondel, who had none of these. He would have put him to death for running the t.i.the of a risk.
When the council broke up, Fabri drew Blondel aside. "The bird is flown, but what of the nest?" he asked. "Has he left nothing?"
"Between you and me," Blondel replied under his breath, as his eyes sought the other"s, "I hope to make him speak yet. But not a word!"
"Ah!"
"Not a word! But there is just a chance. And it will be everything to us if I can induce him to speak."
"I see that. But the house? Could you not search it?"
"That would be to scare him finally."
"You have made no perquisition there?"
"None. I have heard," Blondel continued, hesitating as if he had not quite made up his mind to speak, "some things--strange things in respect to the house. But I will tell you more of that when I know more."
He was too clever to state that he held the house in suspicion for sorcery and kindred things. Charges such as that spread, he knew, upwards from the lower cla.s.ses, not downwards to them. The poison, disseminated as he had known how to disseminate it, by hints and innuendoes dropped among his officers and ushers, was already in the air, and would do its work. Fabri, a man of sense, might laugh to-day, and to-morrow; but the third day, when the report came to him from a dozen quarters, mainly by women"s mouths, he would not laugh. And presently he would shrug his shoulders and stand aside, and leave the matter in more earnest hands.