Читать книгу Turbulent Tales - Raphael Sabatini - Страница 6

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THE uneasiness that had been disturbing Gaspard de Putanges ever since the King had visited the wounded Admiral de Coligny reached a climax that night when he found his way barred by armed men at the Porte St Denis, and a password was demanded of him.

"Password!" cried that Huguenot gentleman in amazement. "Is a password necessary before a man can leave Paris? And why, if you please? Are we suddenly at war?"

"Those are the orders," the officer stiffly answered.

"Whose orders?" M. de Putanges was impatient.

"I owe you no account, sir. You will give me the word of the night, or you may return home and wait until morning."

Perforce he must turn his horse about, and, with his groom at his heels, ride back by the way that he had come. The vexation which at any time he must have felt at this unwarranted interference with his movements was now swollen by misgivings.

He was one of the host of Huguenot gentlemen brought to Paris for the nuptials of the King of Navarre with the sister of the King of France, a marriage which the pacifists of both parties had hoped would heal the feud between the Catholic and Protestant factions. But the Guisard attempt upon the life of Coligny, the great Huguenot leader, had now rudely dashed this hope. M. de Putanges had been one of that flock of Huguenot gentlemen who that day had thronged the wounded Admiral's antechamber, when the epileptic King and the sleepy-eyed Queen Mother came to pay their visit of sympathy. He had listened with misgivings to the braggart threats of his co-religionists; with increased misgivings he had observed the open hostility of their bearing towards Catherine de' Medici what time she stood amongst them with Anjou, whilst the King her son was closeted with his dear gossip, M. de Coligny. These hot-headed fools, he felt, were fanning a fire that might presently blaze out to consume them all. Already the Hotel de Guise was in a state of fortification, filled with armed men ripe for any mischief, whilst others of the Guisard faction were abroad exciting public feeling with fantastic stories of the Huguenot peril, stories which gathered colour from the turbulent, thrasonical bearing of these Huguenots, enraged by the attempt upon their leader's life.

And now, finding the gates of Paris barred for no apparent reason, it seemed to M. de Putanges that the danger he had been apprehending was close upon them, though in what form he could not yet discern.

It was therefore as well that he should be forced to postpone his journey into the country, however necessary, and that he should remain to watch over his wife.

Now this was a consideration in which M. de Putanges discovered a certain humour. He was a thoughtful gentleman with a lively sense of irony, and it amused him after a certain bitter fashion to observe his own mechanical obedience to his sense of duty towards the cold, arrogant, discontented lady who bore his name. You know, of course, of the beautiful Madame de Putanges and of the profound impression which her beauty and wit had made upon the Court of France upon this her first appearance there. It is even rumoured—and not at all difficult to believe—that amongst those who prostrated themselves in worship before her was the very bridegroom Henri of Navarre himself. But at least the lady was virtuous—her one saving grace in her husband's eyes—and of a mind that was not to be discomposed by the flattery of even a royal wooing. It is not without humour that the only quality M. de Putanges could find to commend in her was that same cold aloofness which so embittered him. It was a paradox upon which he had found occasion to comment to his friend and cousin Stanislas de la Vauvraye.

"The gods who cast her in a mould so fair have given her for heart a stone."

That was the formula in which habitually he expressed it to Stanislas, conscious that it sounded like a line from a play.

"I curse her for the very quality that makes my honour safe; because this quality that in another woman would be a virtue, is almost a vice in her."

And Stanislas, the gay trifler who turned all things to cynical jest, had merely laughed. "Be content, Gaspard, with a blessing denied most husbands."

Yet however little M. de Putanges might count himself blessed as a husband, he was fully conscious of a husband's duty, and his first thought now that he suspected trouble was for his wife.

He made his way to the Veau qui Tète, where his horses were stabled and his grooms were housed, and, having dismounted there, set out for the small house he temporarily occupied close by, in the Rue Bellerose. The summer night had closed down by then, but there was a fair moon that rendered the use of flambeaux unnecessary. As he stepped out into the street he came upon a man bent double under a load of pikes. It was an odd sight and M. de Putanges stood arrested by it, watching the fellow as he staggered down the narrow street until he was absorbed by the shadows of the night. Yet even as he vanished a second man similarly laden came stumbling past. M. de Putanges fell into step beside the fellow.

"Whither are you carrying that arsenal?" he demanded.

The perspiring hind looked up from under his sinister load, to answer this brisk authoritative questioner.

"It is for the entertainment at the Louvre, Monsieur."

As a gentleman in the train of the King of Navarre, M. de Putanges was bidden to all court functions. Yet here was one of which he had not so much as heard, and well might he ask himself what entertainment was this that was being kept so secret and in which pikes were to be employed. It was difficult to suppose that their purpose could be festive.

With ever-mounting uneasiness M. de Putanges lengthened his stride for home. But at the corner, where the Rue Bellerose cuts across the more important Rue St Antoine, he ran into a group of men on the threshold of an imposing house that was all in darkness. At a glance he perceived that all were armed beyond the habit of peaceful citizens. Headpiece and corselet glinted lividly in the moonlight, and as he approached he caught from one on a note of sinister laughter the word "Parpaillots"—the nickname bestowed on members of the Huguenot party.

That was enough for M. de Putanges. Boldly—he was a man who never lacked for boldness—he mingled with the little throng. Others were joining it at every moment and already some were passing into the house, so that his coming was hardly observed; it would be assumed that he was one of themselves, bidden like them to this assembly. Perceiving this, and overhearing from one of those beside him the boast that by morning there would not be a whole heretic skin in Paris, M. de Putanges determined to push on and obtain more complete knowledge of what might be preparing. Heedless, then, of risks, he thrust forward to the threshold and attaching himself to a little knot of gentlemen in the act of entering, he went in with them, and up a broad, scantily lighted staircase. At the stair-head the foremost of the company knocked upon a double door. One of its leaves was half opened and there ensued between someone within and each of those who sought admittance a preliminary exchange of confused murmurs. M. de Putanges pushed nearer, straining his ears, and at last from one whose mutter was louder than the others he caught the words: "France and the Faith." A moment later he was giving the same countersign.

He won through into a spacious gallery that was tolerably lighted by four great girandoles, and already thronged by men from every walk of life. All were armed and all were excited. From what he observed, from what was said to him even—for there was none here to recognize this gentleman of Béarn, or to suppose him other than one of themselves—he quickly came to understand that the thing preparing was no less than a massacre of the Huguenots in Paris.

Anon, when the room was filled almost to the extent of its capacity and the doors were closed, a lean, fiery-eyed preaching friar, in the black and white habit of St Dominic, mounted a table and delivered thence at length what might be called a "sermon of the faith", a fierce denunciation of heresy.

"Hack it down, branch by branch, tear it up by the roots; extirpate from the land this pestilential growth, this upas tree that poisons the very air we breathe. About it, my children! Be stern and diligent and unsparing in this holy work!"

Those terrible final words of incitement were ringing in his ears when M. de Putanges quitted at last that chamber, with its physically and morally mephitic atmosphere, and was borne out upon a brawling, seething human torrent, into the clean air of early dawn. The human mass broke into packs which turned away in one direction and another to the cry—fierce and menacing as the baying of hounds upon a scent—of "Parpaillots! Parpaillots! Kill! Kill!"

He won free of them at length, forearmed at least by knowledge of what to expect—by knowledge and something more. In that chamber, whilst the sermon had been preaching, someone had tied a strip of white calico to his left arm and set in his hat a cross made of two short pieces of white ribbon. These were the insignia of the slayers and in themselves would have afforded him immunity in the open streets, but that upon an impulse of unreasoning disgust he tore one and the other from him and flung them in the kennel. This as he plunged at last down the Rue Bellerose towards home.

In a measure as the sounds of his late companions receded from him, ahead of him grew an ominous rumble, coming from the quays and the neighbourhood of the river; and then, a crackling volley of musketry rang out abruptly from the direction of the Louvre.

M. de Putanges stood still and wondered a moment whether the faint flush in the sky was a herald of the early summer dawn or the reflection of fire. He became suddenly aware that the Rue Bellerose was astir with flitting shadows. He came upon a man setting a mark in chalk upon a door, and, peering, beheld another similarly engaged on the opposite side of the street. He understood the meaning of it, and doubting if he would be alive by morning, he considered almost dispassionately—for he was a dispassionate man despite his southern blood—that it but remained him to seek his wife and await his fate beside her. If they had never known how to conduct their joint life becomingly, at least he hoped they would know how to die becomingly together.

In this frame of mind he reached his own threshold to find one of the doorposts bearing the chalk sign that marked the inmates down for slaughter. How well informed were these cursed papegots, he thought; how well considered and well organized was their bloody work! With his sleeve he rubbed out the sign of doom. So much, at least, he could do in self-defence. And then he stood arrested, with pulses faintly quickening. Within the shadows of the deep porch something stirred, and at the same moment upon the deep-set inner door fell a triple knock three times repeated.

M. de Putanges stepped forward. Instantly the thing within the porch swung about and sprang to meet him, taking definite shape. It was a tall cowled figure in the white habit and black scapulary of a brother of St Dominic. M. de Putanges realized that he came no more than in time, if, indeed, he did not already come too late. He felt his heart tightening at the thought, tightening with icy dread for the cold termagant he loved. And then, to increase his fears, the friar pronounced his name and so proclaimed that he was not there by chance nor attracted by the mark of doom upon the doorpost, but with sure knowledge of the house's inmates.

"Monsieur de Putanges..." the man exclaimed, and got no further, for utterance and breath were abruptly choked by the iron angers that locked themselves about his throat.

The fellow writhed and struggled, thrusting out a leg to trip his aggressor, clawing fiercely at the hands that were crushing out his life, and tearing them with his nails. But tear as he might, those hands would not relax their deadly grip. Soon his struggles weakened; soon they became mere twitchings. His body sagged together like an empty sack. He went down in a heap, dragging his assailant with him, and lay still at last.

M. de Putanges stood over the fallen friar, breathing hard; the beads of sweat upon his brow resulted partly from the exertion, partly from horror of a thing done in such a cold, relentless fashion. Mastering himself at last, he went forward towards the door. To his surprise he found it open, and remembered then that the friar had knocked upon it a moment ago. The latch was worked by a cord from the floor above and must have been so worked in answer to that knock.

M. de Putanges paused in the act of entering. It was not well—particularly considering that his house had been marked—to leave that thing in the porch where it might be discovered. He went back and, taking the limp body by the arms, he dragged it across the threshold into the hall. And then the instinct of self-preservation that had guided him so far urged yet another step. In that papegot livery it was possible that he might find safety for himself and his wife from the perils that were so obviously closing round them. The faintly reflected radiance of the moon afforded sufficient light for the simple task. In a moment he had unknotted the man's girdle and relieved him of habit and scapulary. Over his own clothes he donned the Dominican's loose white habit, and drew the cowl over his head. Then he closed the door, and set foot upon the narrow stairs, even as from the street outside a sudden shrieking of women was silenced by a fusillade. The massacre, he perceived, was in full swing already.

Overhead a light gleamed faintly; looking up from the darkness that encompassed him, he beheld in the feeble aureole of a candle, which she was holding, the face of Madame de Putanges. She was peering down, seeking with her glance to pierce the darkness of the staircase. He must speak at once, lest the sight of his monkish figure should alarm her. But even as he conceived the thought her silvery voice, strained now on an anxious note, forestalled him.

"How late you are, Stanislas!" she said.

In the gloom of the staircase, Gaspard de Putanges stood petrified, whilst through his mind that welcome meant for another echoed and re-echoed: "How late you are, Stanislas!"

After a moment our gentleman's wits resumed their wonted function, sharpened now perhaps beyond their usual keenness. He scarcely needed to ask himself who could be this Stanislas for whom she mistook him. It could be none other than his dear friend and cousin, that gay trifler and libertine Stanislas de la Vauvraye. And she was expecting him at a time when she must suppose M. de Putanges already far from Paris. Was it possible, he asked himself, that he had thus by chance stumbled upon the explanation of her cold aloofness towards himself? Was Stanislas the Judas who simulated friendship in order that he might the more conveniently betray? In a flash a score of trifling incidents were suddenly remembered and connected to flood the mind of M. de Putanges with the light of revelation.

"Stanislas! Why don't you answer?" rang the impatient voice he knew so well.

Whence this absolute assurance of hers that he was the man she expected? He bethought him of that curious triple knock thrice repeated with which the friar had sought admittance, and in response to which the door-latch had been so promptly lifted from above. It was a signal, of course. But, then, the friar...

On a sudden suspicion amounting almost to certainty, M. de Putanges stepped back.

"Stanislas!" came again Madame de Putanges' call.

"A moment," he answered to quiet her. "I am coming."

He ran his fingers swiftly over the face and head of the man he had choked. Here was no tonsure; no shaven cheeks. The hair of the head was full and crisp; moustachios bristled on the lip, and a little peaked beard sprouted from the chin: there was a jewel in the left ear which, like the rest, was as it should be with Stanislas de la Vauvraye. The garments were soft and silken—a slashed doublet and the rest. No doubt remained. All that remained was the mystery of how Stanislas should have come to be muffled in that monkish robe. That, however, could wait. It mattered little in comparison with all the rest. In his cursory examination of the body, M. de Putanges had ascertained that the man still breathed. He had not quite choked out his life. It was perhaps as well.

He locked the street-door and pocketed the key; then he went up the stairs with a step that was as firm and steady as his purpose.

When at last his cowled monkish figure came within the circle of light of the waiting woman's candle, she started back.

"Why, what is this? Who are you, sir?" Then remembering the covenanted knock to which she had opened, she partly explained the monkish travesty. "Why do you come thus, Stanislas?"

"That," was the quiet answer, "we may ask presently of Stanislas himself."

She staggered at the sound of her husband's voice, and a deathly pallor overspread her face. Her dark eyes opened wide in terror: her lips parted, but instead of speech they uttered a mere inarticulate sound of fear and horror, almost piteous to hear. Then she recovered, as he flung back his cowl and smiled upon her, grim, and white-faced as herself.

"You!" she gasped.

He observed that she was dressed for travelling, cloaked and hatted, and that a valise stood beside her at the stair-head.

"I thought you were gone to Poldarnes," she said stupidly, a mere uncontrolled utterance of her mind.

"I am sorry, madame, to discompose you by so inopportune a return. Circumstances compelled it, as I will presently explain."

Then at last the termagant in her recovered the sway momentarily extinguished by surprise.

"It needs no explanation, sir," she answered with angry scorn, and angry unreason. "You returned to spy upon me."

"O fie, madame! To accuse me of that! But how unjust, how foolishly unjust! Had you but honoured me with your confidence, had you but informed me of your intent to elope with my dear friend and kinsman, I should have left you a clear field. I am too fond of you both to attempt against you so cruel a frustration of your designs."

"You mean that you would have been glad to be rid of me!" was her fierce reproach.

M. de Putanges laughed his bitter amusement that even in such a situation she must make her own the grievance.

"Not glad, perhaps: but fortunate, madame," said he. "Once the hurt and humiliation of it were overcome, I might have seen in my dear kinsman Stanislas my best of friends."

She fastened swiftly upon this admission. "That is why I am leaving you."

"But, of course. Do I not perceive it? I have, madame, a more sympathetic understanding than you have ever done me the justice to suppose."

She answered by no more than an inarticulate expression of contempt.

"I shall hope to prove it to you tonight, madame," he insisted. "You may come to account it as fortunate for yourself as it is unfortunate for me that I returned. If you will be so good as to step into the salon, I will fetch my dear cousin Stanislas."

This was to arouse her alarms afresh. "You will fetch him!" she gasped. "Where...where is he?"

"He is below."

She was suddenly suspicious, glaring, fierce as a tigress. "What have you done to him?"

"Oh, be reassured!—no permanent injury. He is a little...out of breath, shall we say? But that will pass."

"Let me go to him."

He barred her way. "It is not necessary. He shall come to you. In no case can you depart just now. The streets are not safe. Listen!" Vague, hideous sounds of the foul business that was afoot penetrated the silence in which they stood, and filled her with wonder and some dread. He enlightened her. "They are murdering the Huguenots in Paris tonight. That is what brought me back, supposing you would need protection, never dreaming that you would have the dear, brave Stanislas so near at hand."

He took advantage of her amazement to add: "If you will forgive the impertinence of the question, how long has M. de la Vauvraye been your lover, madame?"

She flushed to her eyes. "Why must you insult me?"

"You are susceptible then to insult?"

Her anger, goaded by his cold mockery, raced on. "Should I have stayed a single moment under your roof after taking a lover?" she demanded passionately. "Do you think me capable of that?"

"I see," said M. de Putanges, and sighed. "You possess a casuist's mind, madame. You swallow camels yet strain at gnats."

"Maybe. But I am honest, monsieur."

"After your own fashion, madame; strictly after your own fashion."

"After my own fashion, if you will. You have a great gift for mockery, monsieur."

"Be thankful, madame. The man who does not know how and when to laugh, sometimes does very foolish and very painful things. And so, you were saying that you are honest..."

"I think I prove it. Having taken my resolve, I am leaving your house tonight. I am going away with M. de la Vauvraye."

She was defiant. He bowed to her will.

"Why, so you shall, for me. It remains to take measures for your safety, considering what is happening in the street. Be so good as to wait in the salon, whilst I fetch this dear Stanislas."

He took the candle from her limp hand and went down the stairs again. He found his kinsman sitting up in bewilderment—a bewilderment which the sight of M. de Putanges transmuted into stark fear.

But M. de Putanges was of a reassuring urbanity. "Be good enough to step up to the salon with me, my dear cousin. Henriette desires a word with you, whereafter you may carry out or not your fond intentions. That will depend. Meanwhile, be thankful that I have returned in time, as I gather from what madame tells me. If the harm were already beyond repair I should for my honour's sake be compelled to renew, and this time to complete, the strangling of you. That would be a painful matter for us both, for I have a horror of violence, as you know, my dear Stanislas. Fortunately the affair may still be amicably decided. The circumstances of the night are particularly propitious. Be so good, then, as to come up with me."

M. de la Vauvraye, his mind benumbed by this extraordinary turn of what should have been so simple and delightful an adventure, followed his kinsman up the stairs with an obedience of such utter helplessness as to be almost entirely mechanical.

In the salon they found Madame awaiting them. She stood by the heavy, carved table of dark oak well in the light of the dozen tapers that burned in a gilded candlebranch. Her beautiful face was pale and haggard, yet neither so pale nor so haggard as that of the lover she now confronted in circumstances so vastly different from all that she had expected of this night.

She had declared to him but yesterday that it was to be the most fateful night of her life, and in that, indeed, she appeared to have been a true prophet.

Of the three, the only one at ease—outwardly at least—was M. de Putanges. Tall, erect, virilely handsome, a man in the very flower of his age, bronzed, intrepid and aquiline of countenance, he made the golden-headed trifler la Vauvraye seem so sickly and effeminate by contrast that it was difficult to discern how any woman could have come to prefer him.

"Be seated, pray." Suavity itself, M. de Putanges waved each in turn to a chair. "I shall not keep you long."

La Vauvraye, under the woman's eyes, realizing that he was in danger of cutting a poor, unheroic figure, summoned impudence to his aid. "You relieve my fears, monsieur." With a shrug and a half-laugh he sank to an armchair. He was not as successful as he thought, for his crumpled ruff and dishevelled hair lent him an appearance which dignity but made the more ridiculous.

"Your fears?" quoth M. de Putanges.

"Of being wearied by futile recriminations. Weariness is the thing in life that I most dread."

"Reassure yourself. You are in no danger of it. Indeed, the night should bring a surfeit of excitement even to such a glutton for high adventure."

La Vauvraye stifled a yawn. "If you will but explain," he begged on a half plaintive note.

"Of course. But first a question: How came you by this Dominican frock in which I found you?"

"Oh, that!" M. de la Vauvraye was casual. "You will know by now what is afoot tonight. I, too, discovered it as I was coming here. At the end of the Rue Bellerose I came upon a shaveling I had met once or twice at Court. Unfortunately for him, he knew me too, and calling me by name threatened me with a heretic's doom. It was rash. I had a dagger...I silenced that too garrulous friar, and left him in a doorway."

"Possessing yourself of his habit?"

"Why, yes. I realized that on such a night his scapulary would possess the virtues that are claimed for scapularies, would be a panoply against all perils. You would seem to have been of the same mind yourself when, taking me unawares, you became possessed of it and donned it in your turn."

"And then, dear cousin? Continue, pray."

"What more is there to tell?"

"Why, that you counted upon the frock to shield not only yourself but this Huguenot lady with whom you had planned an elopement for tonight."

"Oh, that, of course." The nonchalance was almost overdone.

"It was my notion, too. Since we are both agreed as to its excellence, there is no reason not to act upon it."

The affected languor passed from M. de la Vauvraye's eyes. They became alert and keen to the point almost of anxiety. M. de Putanges proceeded to explain himself.

"Madame de Putanges must be saved," he said quietly. "That, you will realize, is the paramount consideration. She must be carried out of reach of this bloodshed before it is too late. Escorted by a brother of St Dominic the thing is easy. We have but to determine which of us shall assume the frock and take her hence, which shall remain behind to die nobly for her sake. Since we both love her, the decision should be easy, for neither of us should hesitate to remain. Rather do I fear a generous emulation as to which shall go." He dealt so delicately in irony that neither of his listeners could be certain that he was ironical.

With blanched cheeks and bulging eyes, M. de la Vauvraye stared at his cousin, waiting. The handsome woman seated in the high-backed chair looked on with parted lips, her breathing quickened, and waited, too.

M. de Putanges resumed: "But for what is taking place in Paris tonight, my dear cousin, it might be necessary to choose some other way of resolving this painful situation. As it is, our common concern for Madame de Putanges points the way clearly. One of us goes. The other stays behind to die. Ideal and complete solution. It but remains to determine our respective parts." He paused and the silence within that room was tense and heavy. Outside was uproar—the baying of the fanatical mob, the crash of shivered timbers and the screams of luckless victims.

M. de la Vauvraye moistened his parched lips with his tongue.

"And how...how is that to be determined?" he asked in a quavering, high-pitched voice that cracked on the last word.

"What way but one could gallantry conceive? It is for Madame de Putanges to choose." He bowed deferentially, as he consigned into her hands that monstrous decision.

M. de la Vauvraye expressed in a gasp his immense relief, never doubting Madame's choice, never observing the stark horror that distorted her lovely face, nor how that horror deepened at the sound he made.

But M. de Putanges had something yet to add. He was being extremely subtle, where neither of his listeners suspected subtlety.

"Thus, madame, you shall have at last the choice that should have been yours at first. It is in your power tonight to repair the injustice that was done you three years ago when, unconsulted, you were driven into a wedlock of arrangement." He sighed. "Perhaps had I wooed you first and wed you afterwards all might have been well with us. I realize tonight the profound mistake of reversing that natural course of things, and I am almost glad of the opportunity to correct it, by giving you now, late though it be, the choice that is a woman's right. So pronounce, madame. Determine of your own free will which of us shall assume the frock and bear you hence, which shall remain to die."

On that he ended, looking with solemn inscrutable glance deep into the eyes that stared at him out of his wife's white, horror-stricken face. He knew—unless he knew nothing of human nature—that the woman did not live who could take upon her conscience the responsibility of such a choice: and upon that knowledge he was boldly trading.

To help him to his deep end, came the bleating voice of his foolish rival, urgent with an obvious meaning that he dared not actually express in words. "Henriette! Henriette!"

M. de Putanges observed her shrink and cringe before that appeal, as if conscious only of the meanness and cowardice that inspired it. Upon something of that kind, too, had he counted. He intended to compel her tonight to look, as she had never yet troubled to look, into his soul. And he intended no less to lay bare the little soul of the trifler for whom she would have left him. She should have the free choice he offered her; but first there should be full revelation to guide her in her choice.

"Well, madame?" He loosened the girdle of his monkish habit, as if to stress his readiness for renunciation at her bidding. "Which of us shall wear the frock, the scapulary of salvation—more potently protecting tonight than any consecrated prophylactic?"

And again from M. de la Vauvraye—now half risen—came the appeal—"Henriette!"

Madame de Putanges looked with the glance of a hunted creature from one to the other of those men. Then a shudder ran through her; she twisted and untwisted the fingers of her interlocked hands, and faintly moaned.

"I cannot! I cannot!" she cried out at last. "No—no! I cannot have the blood of either of you on my soul."

M. de la Vauvraye flung himself back in his chair, his lip in his teeth, his hands clenched, whilst M. de Putanges smiled with wistful understanding.

"Yet consider, madame," he urged her, "that unless you choose we are likely all three of us to perish here together."

"I can't! I can't! I will not choose. It is monstrous to demand it of me," she cried.

"Demand?" echoed M. de Putanges. "Oh, madame, I do not demand; I invite. But to spare your feelings, since you prove so tender in this matter, it shall be determined otherwise; and that I must deplore, because in no other way could your future happiness be assured. Still..." He broke off, and flung the Dominican frock and scapulary, of which he had now divested himself, upon the table; then he turned to a tall press that stood against the wall, and took from one of its drawers a dice-box. Rattling the cubes in their leathern container, he looked across at his kinsman.

"Come, cousin. You love a hazard. Here is one in which the stakes are something rare: love and life are here for one of us."

M. de la Vauvraye, who had risen, shrank back in fear. If he loved hazards, he loved them not quite so hazardous.

"No, no," he cried, thrusting out his hands in a violent gesture of denial. "This is a horror."

"What else remains?" asked M. de Putanges. "Come, man. I'll lead the way."

He threw recklessly as he spoke, thereby committing the other to the adventure. The three cubes scattered and rattled to a standstill on the polished oaken board. Madame's glittering eyes followed them and remained expressionless when the throw was revealed—two aces and a deuce.

M. de Putanges laughed softly, bitterly. "That is my luck," said he. "You should have known that I was not to be feared, Stanislas. You'll scarce hesitate now to throw against me."

Yet he was pleased enough in the heart of him. Fortune could not have served him better. Now that no risk remained M. de la Vauvraye would be as eager as before he had been hesitant, and so should make yet further self-revelation. And eager he was. It was his turn to laugh as with trembling fingers he gathered up the dice; a hectic flush tinged his cheekbones as he threw—two fives and a four.

"Mine!" he cried, and snatched up the frock in exultation.

M. de Putanges bowed with quiet dignity.

"My congratulations, cousin; and to you, madame, since surely Fortune must have determined as you wish, yet dared not pronounce out of a generous thought for me. For that thought I thank you. What now remains for me will be the easier in the knowledge that it comes not from you, but from Fortune." He became matter-of-fact and brisk. "You had best make haste away. There is danger in delaying."

"Indeed, indeed—he is right," M. de la Vauvraye now urged her, as he shook out the folds of the frock and with trembling fingers knotted the girdle about his middle.

But Madame made no answer to either of them. With eyes of wonder she looked from one to the other, contrasting the noble calm in adversity of this husband she had never known, with the meanly selfish eagerness of the shallow courtier whom she had imagined that she loved. M. de Putanges had promised himself to afford her full revelation; and he had succeeded beyond his hopes.

M. de la Vauvraye took a step towards her. "Come, Henriette," he was beginning, when suddenly she laughed so oddly that he checked. She looked at him with shining eyes and oddly smiling lips.

"Do not wait for me, monsieur. All that it was yours to stake upon the throw was the scapulary that will shield your life. You have won that, and so you may win to safety. But I do not go with the scapulary. Good night and good fortune to you, M. de la Vauvraye."

He stared at her, dumbfounded, stricken in his scanty wits and in his monstrous vanity.

"What?" he cried. "You will remain?"

"With my husband, if you please, monsieur."

Quiet and self-contained in the background beyond the table M. de Putanges looked on and wondered. M. de la Vauvraye rapped out an oath. Then anger bubbled to the surface of his shallow nature. His tone became vicious.

"Good night, madame."

He turned on his heel; but as he reached the door her voice arrested him.

"M. de la Vauvraye!"

He turned again.

"A man in your place would have acted perhaps more generously. A man would have remembered all that is involved. A man would account that my final decision overrides the decision of the dice. He would have proffered the scapulary to the true winner. A man would have done that. But you, it seems, are something less. Since it has been tested, I am the more content to stay."

He looked at her from the depths of the cowl which he had already pulled over his head, so that his face was no longer visible. Without answering her he went out, closing the door with expressive violence. They heard his steps go pattering down the stairs, and then the sound of them was drowned in the uproar from without.

They looked at each other across the table. M. de Putanges sighed as he spoke.

"Did I conceive him worthy of you, madame, I should not have suffered you to have had your way. Even now I doubt—"

"Gaspard," she interrupted him, "I am content. I have chosen, even though I have chosen too late." She held out a hand to him, and he saw that she was weeping. He took the hand and very tenderly stooped to kiss it.

"My dear," he said, "it but remains for us to forgive each other."

As he spoke the air was shaken by a sudden roar, deeper, fiercer, nearer than any that had gone before. She sank against him shuddering in sudden fear. "What is that?"

"Wait." Swiftly he quenched the lights. Then in the darkness he groped to the shutters, opened them and flung the window wide.

Screened by the gloom above, they looked down into the seething, furious mob revealed by torchlight and the breaking day.

In the clutches of a knot of frenzied men, a Dominican friar was struggling wildly.

"Let us look at your face," they were howling. "Let us make sure that you are what you seem—that you are not the villain who murdered Father Gerbier and stole his frock."

The cowl was suddenly torn back, and the livid, distorted face of Stanislas de la Vauvraye was revealed.

"We have found you at last, you murdering heretic!" cried a voice and a pike was swung above the Huguenot's luckless head. A roar arose: "Kill! Kill! Death to the Parpaillot!"

M. de Putanges pulled his wife back and closed the window, and the shutters. She clung to him in the dark.

"My God!" she moaned. "Had he been generous: had I been mad..." She said no more; she fell on her knees to pray.

Through the remainder of that night of St Bartholomew they waited hand in hand for death. It was, they said thereafter, their true nuptial night. But death did not seek them. M. de Putanges, you will remember, had rubbed the sign of doom from the doorpost with his sleeve, and the house was not molested. Three days later, when the reaction had set in, they quietly slipped out of Paris unchallenged, and made their way back to Béarn having found each other.