"He has the Grand Duke"s protection," the Syndic answered smoothly, "and to touch him without clear proof might cause much trouble to the State."
"And for that you suffer him," Claude exclaimed, his voice trembling.
"You suffer him to work his will? You suffer him----"
"I must follow the law," Blondel answered, shaking his head. He looked warily round; the dark ramparts were quiet. "I act but as a magistrate.
Were I a mere man and knew him, as I know him now, for what he is--a foul magician weaving his spells about the young, ensnaring, with his sorceries, the souls of innocent women, corrupting--but what is it, young man?"
"He is within?"
"No; he left the house a minute or so before you arrived. But what is it?" Seizing the young man"s arm he restrained him. "Where are you going?"
"To his room!" Claude answered between his set teeth. "Be he man or devil--to his room!"
"You dare?"
"I dare and I will!" Resisting the Syndic"s feigned efforts to hold him back, he strode towards the door. "That spell shall not be his another hour."
But Blondel terrified by his sudden success, and loth, now the time was come, to put all on a cast, kept his hand on him. "Stay! Stay!" he babbled, dragging him back. "Do not be rash!"
"Stay, and leave him to ruin her!"
"Still, listen! Whatever you do, listen!" the Syndic answered; and insisted, clinging to him. His agitation was such, that had Claude retained his powers of observation, he must have found something strange in this anxiety. "Listen! If you find the casket, on your life touch nothing in it! On your life!" Blondel repeated, his hands clinging more tightly to the other"s arm. "Bring it entire--touch nothing! If you do not promise me I will raise the alarm here and now! To open it, I warn you, is to risk all!"
"I will bring it!" Claude answered, his foot on the steps, his hand on the latch. "I will bring it!"
"Ay, but you do not know what hangs on it! You will bring it as you find it?"
His persistence was so strange, he clung to the young man"s arm with so complete an abandonment of his ordinary manner, that, with the latch half raised, Claude looked at him in wonder. "Very well, I will bring it as I find it!" he muttered. Then, notwithstanding a movement which the Syndic made to restrain him, he pushed the door.
It was not locked, and, in a moment, he stood in the living-room which he had left little more than an hour before. It was untenanted, but not in darkness; a rushlight, set in an earthen vessel on the hearth, flung long shadows on the walls and ceiling, and gave to the room, so homely in its every-day aspect, a sinister look. The door of Gentilis" room was shut; probably he was asleep. That at the foot of the staircase was also shut. Claude stood a moment, frowning; then he crossed the floor towards the staircase door. But though his mind was fixed, the spell of the other"s excitement told on him: the flicker of the rushlight made him start; and half-way across the room a sound at his elbow brought him up as if he had been stabbed. He turned his head, expecting to find the big man"s eyes bent on him from some corner. He found instead the Syndic, who had stolen in after him, and with a dark anxious face was standing like a shadow of guilt between him and the door.
The young man resented the alarm which the other had caused him. "If you are going, go," he muttered. "And if you will do it yourself, Messer Syndic, so much the better." He pointed to the door of the staircase.
The Syndic recoiled, his beard wagging senilely. "No, no," he babbled.
"No, I will go back."
It was no longer the formal magistrate, but a frightened man who stood at Claude"s elbow. And this was so clear that superst.i.tion, which is of all things the most infectious, began to shake the young man"s resolution. Desperately he threw it off, and went to open the door. Then he reflected that it would be dark upstairs, he must have a light; and re-crossing the floor he brought the rushlight from the hearth. Holding it aloft he opened the creaking door and began to ascend the stairs.
With every step the awe of the other world grew on him; while the shadow, which he had found at his elbow below, followed him upwards.
When he paused at the head of the flight the Syndic"s face was on a level with his knee, the Syndic"s eyes were fixed on his.
Claude did not understand this; but the man"s company was welcome now; and the sight of Basterga"s door, not three paces from the place where he stood, diverted his thoughts. He had not been above stairs since the day of his arrival, but he knew that Basterga"s room was the nearest to the stairs. That was the door then; behind that door the Italian wrought his devilish spells!
His light, smoky and wavering, cast black shadows on the walls of the pa.s.sage as he moved. The air seemed heavy, laden with some strange drug; the house was still, with the stillness which precedes horror. Not many men of his time, suspecting what he suspected, would have opened that door, or at that hour of the night would have entered that room. But Claude, though he feared, though he shuddered, though unearthly terrors pressed upon him, possessed a charm that supported his courage: the memory of the scene in the room below, of the scalding drops falling on the white skin, of the girl looking at him with that face of pain. The devil was strong, but there was a stronger; and in the strength of love the young man approached the door and tried it. It was locked.
Somehow the fact augmented his courage. "Where the devil is, is no need of locks," he muttered, and he felt above the door, then, stooping, groped under it. In the latter place he found the key, thrust out of sight between door and floor, where doubtless it was Basterga"s custom to hide it. He drew it out, and with a grim face set it in the lock.
"Quick!" muttered a voice in his ear, and turning he saw that the Syndic was trembling with eagerness. "Quick, quick! Or he may return!"
Claude smiled. If he did not fear the devil he certainly did not fear Basterga. He was about to turn the key in the lock when a sound stayed his hand, ay, and rooted him to the spot. Yet it was only a laugh--but a laugh such as his ears had never caught before, a laugh full of ghastly, shrill, unearthly mirth. It rang through the pa.s.sage, through the house, through the night; but whence it proceeded, whether from some being at his elbow, or from above stairs, or below, it was impossible to say; and the blood gone from his face, Claude stood, peering over his shoulder into the dark corners of the pa.s.sage. Again that laugh rose, shrill, mocking, unearthly; and this time his hand fell from the lock.
The Syndic, utterly unmanned, leant sweating against the wall. He called upon the name of his Maker. "My G.o.d!" he muttered. "My G.o.d!"
"_There is no G.o.d!_"
The words, each syllable of them clear, though spoken in a voice shrill and cracked and strange, and such as neither of them had ever heard before, were beyond doubt. Close on them followed a shriek of weird laughter, and then the blasphemy repeated in the same tone of mockery.
The hair crept on Claude"s head, the blood withdrew to his heart. The key which he had drawn out of the lock fell from the hand it seemed to freeze.
With distended eyes he glared down the pa.s.sage. The words were still in the air, the laughter echoed in his brain, the shadows cast by the shaking rushlight danced and took weird shapes. A rustling as of black wings gathered about him, unseen shapes hovered closer and closer--was it his fancy or did he hear them?
He tried to disbelieve, he strove to withstand his terror; and a moment his fort.i.tude held. Then, as the Syndic, shaking as with the palsy, tottered, with a hand on either wall down the stairs, and moaning aloud in his terror, felt his way across the room below, Claude"s courage, too, gave way; not in face of that he saw, but of that which he fancied.
He turned too, and with a greater show of composure, and still carrying the light, he stumbled down the stairs and into the room below.
There, for an instant sense and nerve returned, and he stood. He turned even, and made as if he would re-ascend the staircase. But he had no sooner thrust his head into it, and paused an instant to listen ere he ventured, than a faint echo of the same mirthless laughter reached him, and he turned shuddering, and fled--fled out of the room, out of the house, out of the light, to the same spot under the trees whence he had started with so bold a heart a few minutes earlier.
The Syndic was there before him--or no, not the Syndic, but a stricken man, clinging to a tree; seized now and again with a fresh fit of trembling. "Take me home," he babbled. "There is no hope! There is no hope. Take me home!"
His house was not far off, and Claude, when he had a little recovered himself, a.s.sented, gave the tottering man his arm and supported him--he needed support--until they reached the dwelling in the Bourg du Four.
Still a wreck Blondel was by this time a little more coherent. He foresaw solitude, and dreaded it; and would have had the other enter and pa.s.s the night with him. But the young man, already ashamed of his weakness, already doubting and questioning, refused, and would say no more than that he would return on the morrow. With an aspect apparently composed, he insisted on taking his leave, turned from the door and retraced his steps to the Corraterie. But when he came to the house, he lacked, brave as he was, the heart to enter; and pa.s.sing it, he spent the time until daybreak, in walking up and down the rampart within hearing of the sentries.
His mind grown somewhat calmer, he set himself to recall, precisely and exactly, the thing that had happened. But recall it as he might, he could not account for it. The words of blasphemy that had scorched his ears as the key entered the lock, had been uttered, he was sure, in no voice known to him; nay more, in no voice of human intonation. How could he explain them? How account for them save in one way? How defend his cowardice save on one ground? He shuddered, gazing at the house, and murmuring now a prayer, and now a word of exorcism. But the day had come, the sky was red, and the sun was near its rising before he took courage and dared to cross the threshold.
CHAPTER IX.
MELUSINA.
Even then, with the daylight about him, he crept into the house under a weight of awe and dread. He left the door ajar that the daylight might enter with him and dispel the shadows: and when he had crossed the threshold it was with a pale and frowning face that he advanced to the middle of the floor, and stood peering round the deserted living-room.
No one was stirring above or below, the house and all within it slept: the rushlight stand, its wick long extinguished, remained where he had set it down in the panic of his flight.
With that exception--he eyed it darkly--no trace of the mysterious event of the night was visible. The room wore, or minute by minute a.s.sumed, its daylight aspect. Nor had he stood long gazing upon it before he breathed more freely and felt his heart lightened. What was to be thought, what could be thought in the circ.u.mstances, he was not prepared to say. But the panic of the night was gone with the darkness; and with it all thought--if in the depths he had really sunk so low--of relinquishing the woman he loved to the powers of evil.
To the powers of evil! To a fate as much worse than death as the soul and the mind are higher than the body! Was he really face to face with that? Was this house, so quiet, so peaceful, so commonplace, in reality the theatre of one of those manifestations of Satan"s power which were the horror of the age? His senses affirmed it, and yet he doubted. Such things were, he did not deny it. Few men of the time denied it. But presented to him, brought within his experience, they shocked him to the point of disbelief. He found that from the thing which he was prepared to admit in the general, he dissented fiercely and instinctively in the particular.
What, the woman he loved! Was he to believe her delivered, soul and body, to the power of Satan? Never! All that was sane and wholesome and courageous in the man rebelled against the thought. He would not believe it. The pots and pans on the hearth, the simple implements of work and life, on which his eyes alighted wherever he turned them, and to none of which her hand was stranger, his memory of the love that was between her and her mother, his picture of the sacred life led by those two above stairs, all gave the lie to it! Her subjection to Basterga, her submission to contumely and to insult--there must be a reason for these, a natural and innocent reason could he hit on it. The strange occurrences of the night, the blasphemous words, the mocking laughter, at the worst they might not import a mastery over her. He shuddered as he recalled them, they rang in his ears and brain, the vividness of his memory of them was remarkable. But they might not have relation to her.
He stood long in moody thought, but his ears never for an instant relaxed their vigil, their hearkening for he knew not what. At length he pa.s.sed into his bedcloset, and cooled his hot face with water and repaired his dress. Coming out again, he found the house still quiet, the door as he had left it, the daylight pouring in through the aperture. No one was moving, he was still safe from interruption; and a curiosity to visit the pa.s.sage above and learn if aught abnormal was to be seen, took possession of him. It was just possible that Basterga had not returned; that the key still lay where he had dropped it!
He opened the door of the staircase and listened. He heard nothing, and he stole half-way up the flight and again stood. Still all was silent.
He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top--whence, turning his head a little, he could command the pa.s.sage--when a sound arrested him. It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved along the pa.s.sage towards him.
She did not see him, and he could have escaped unnoticed, had he retired at once. But he stood fixed to the spot by something in her appearance; a something that, as she moved slowly towards him, fancying herself alone, filled him with dread, and with something worse than dread--suspicion.
For if ever woman looked as if she had come from a witch"s Sabbath, if ever girl, scarce more than child, walked as if she had plucked the fruit of the Tree and savoured it bitter, it was the girl before him.
Despair--it seemed to him--rode her like a hag. Dejection, fear, misery, were in her whole bearing. Her eyes looked out from black hollows, her cheeks were pallid, her mouth was nerveless. Three sleepless nights, he thought, could not have changed a woman thus--no, nor thrice three; and he who had seen her last night and saw her now, gazed fascinated and bewildered, asking himself what had happened, what it meant.