CLAIRE AGNEW
A long moment they stood gazing at each other, the girl and the Abbe
John. They might have been sister and brother. There was the same dark
clustering hair, close-gripped in love-locks to the head. The same
large, dark, wide-pupilled eyes looked each into each as they stood and
gazed across the dead man.
For a moment nothing was said, but the Abbe John recovered himself
first.
"He knows you are here?" he questioned, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder.
"Who?" The girl flung the question back.
"Our Professor of Eloquence, the Doctor Anatole Long?"
"Aye, surely," said the girl; "he it was brought us hither."
He pointed to the dead man.
"Your father?"
The girl put her hand to her breast and sighed a strange piteous
affirmative, yet with a certain reserve in it also.
"What was he, and how came you here?"
She looked at him. He wore the semi-churchly dress of a scholar of the
University. But youth and truth vouched for him, shining from his eyes.
So, at least, she thought. Besides, the girl was in a great perplexity.
"I am Claire," she said, "the daughter of him who was Francis Agnew,
secret agent from the King of Scots to his brother of Navarre!"
"A heretic, then!" He fell back a step. "An agent of the Bearnais!"
The girl said nothing. She had not even heard him. She was bending over
her father and sobbing quietly.
"A Huguenot," muttered the young Leaguer, "an agent of the Accursed!"
He kept on watching her. There was a soft delicate turn of the chin,
childish, almost babyish, which made the heart within him like water.
"Chut!" he said, "what I have now to do is to get rid of that ramping
steer of a Launay out there. He and his blanket-vending father must not
hear of this!"
He went out quietly, sinking noiselessly to the ground behind the arras
of the door, and emerging again, as into another world, amid the hum and
mutter of professorial argument.
"All this," remarked Doctor Anatole, flapping his little green-covered
pulpit with his left hand, "is temporary, passing. The clouds in the sky
are not more fleeting than----"
"Guise! Guise! The good Guise! Our prince has come, and all will now be
well!"
The street below spoke, and from afar, mingling with scattered shots
which told the fate of some doomed Swiss, he heard the chorus of the
Leaguers' song:
"The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!
We will fight till all be grey--
Put Valois 'neath our feet to-day,
Deep in his grave the Bearnais--
Our chief has come--the Balafre!"
Abbe John recovered his place, unseen by the Professor. He was pale, his
cloak dusty with the wriggling he had done under the benches. He was
different also. He had been a furious Leaguer. He had shouted for Guise.
He had come up the stairs to seek for weapons wherewith to fight for
that Sole Pillar of Holy Church.
"Well?" said Guy Launay, looking sideways at him.
"Well, what?" growled the Abbe John, most unclerically. He had indeed no
right to the title, save that his uncle was a cardinal, and he looked to
be one himself some day--that is, if the influence of his family held.
But in these times credit was such a brittle article.
"Did you get the weapons?" snapped his friend--"the pistol, the
sword-cane? You have been long enough about it. I have worn my pencil to
a stub!"
The Abbe John had intended to lie. But somehow, when he thought of the
clear dark eyes wet with tears, and the dead Huguenot, within
there--somehow he could not.
Instead he blurted out the truth.
"I forgot all about them!" he said.
The son of the ex-provost of the merchants looked at him once,
furiously.
"I think you are mad!" he said.
"So do I!" said the Abbe John, nodding blandly.
"Well, what is the reason of it?" grumbled the other. "What has Old
Blessings-of-Peace got in there--a hidden treasure or a pretty wench? By
the milk-pails o' Mary, I will go and see for myself!"
"Stop," said the Abbe John, with sudden heat, "no more spying! I am sick
of it. Let us go and get weapons at the Hotel of the Duke of Guise, if
you like--but respect the privacy of our master--our good and kind
master!"
Guy Launay eyed his companion a moment murkily.
He gritted his teeth viciously, as if he could gladly have bitten a
piece out of his arm. He showed large flat teeth when angry, for all the
world like a bad-tempered horse.
"Stop and take notes on the comforts of philosophy by yourself," he
said; "I am off to do my duty like a man. You have turned soft at the
moment of action, like all Spaniards--all the breed are alike, you and
your master, the Demon of the South!"
"You lie!"
"And you! But wait till to-morrow!"
"Ah," cried the Abbe John, "like all Frenchmen, you would put off a
fight till to-morrow. Come out now, and I will break your head with a
quarter-staff!"
"Pshaw!" quoth Guy Launay, "quarter-staffs indeed, on the Day of
Barricades. I am off to kill a King's man, or to help spit a Huguenot!"
And the next moment the Professor of Eloquence had but one auditor.