THE PROFESSOR OF ELOQUENCE
"My name," she said, "is Claire Agnew. But since we lived long in
Provence and Spanish Roussillon, my father, being learned in that
speech, called me most often Euphrasia or Euphra, being, as he said,
'the light of his eyes'"!
"Then you are English, and a heretic?" said the young man, while the
Professor, having discharged his papers into the drawer of a cabinet,
already full and running over, bent his ear to the breast of the old
man.
"I am Scottish, and you are the heretic!" said the girl, with spirit.
"I am no heretic--I am of the Faith!" said the young man.
"The Faith of treaty-breakers and murderers!"
She knit her fingers and looked at him defiantly--perhaps, if the truth
must be told, more in anger than in sorrow.
The voice of the Professor of Eloquence broke in upon them.
"Young man," he said, "you have surprised a secret which is not
mine--much less yours. Be off at once to your uncle, the Cardinal
d'Albret, and to your friend's father Launay, the ex-provost of the
merchants. Get three passports--for me, for my daughter Claire,
and--for my nephew----"
"What nephew?" said the youth, rubbing the ear which the Professor had
pulled.
"One I have adopted recently!" said the Professor gravely, "a certain
worthless loon, who came up hither seeking what was not his--a
sword-cane and a pistol, and who found that which, God knows, belongs to
neither of us--an uncomfortable possession in these days, a Huguenot
maiden with eyes like a flame of fire!"
"They are more like pansies!" said the young man doggedly.
"How do you know? How dare you? Is she not my daughter?"
"Aye, master, she is, of course, your daughter if you say so"--the voice
of the Abbe John was uncertain. He did not like the Professor claiming
so much--and he beginning to be bald too. What have bald pates to do
with pretty young girls? Even thus he growled low to himself.
"Eh, what's that?" the Professor caught him up. "Be off--it is to save
her life, and you are a young blade who should never refuse an
adventure, specially when at last it gives you a chance to be taken for
the relative of a respectable man----"
"And the cousin of this fair maid, your--daughter?"
"Well, and have I not a good right to a daughter of my own? Once on a
day I was married, bonds and bands, parchments and paperings. For ten
years I endured my pain. Well might I have had a daughter, and of her
age too, had it not been my hard lot to wed a woman without
bowels--flint-heart--double-tongue----"
"I wager it was these ten years that taught him his eloquence!" said the
young man under his breath. But aloud he answered otherwise, for the
young girl had withdrawn into the small adjacent piece, leaving the men
to talk.
"And this?" said the Abbe John, indicating the dead man--"what are we to
do with this?"
The face of the Professor of Eloquence cleared.
"Luckily we are in a place where such accidents can easily be accounted
for. In a twinkle I will summon the servitors. They will find League
emblems and holy crosses all about him, candles burning at his head and
feet. The fight still rumbles without. It is but one more good Guisard
gone to his account, whom I brought hither out of my love for the Cause,
and that the Sorbonne might not be compromised."
Almost for the first time the student looked at his master with
admiration.
"Your love for the Cause----" he said. "Why, all the world knows that
you alone voted against the resolution of the assembled Sorbonne that it
was lawful to depose a king who refused to do his duty in persecuting
heretics!"
"I have repented," said the Professor of Eloquence--"deeply and sorely
repented. Surely, even in the theology of the Sorbonne, there is place
for repentance?"
"Place indeed," answered the young man boldly, "but the time is,
perhaps, a little ill-chosen."
However the Professor of Eloquence went on without heeding him.
"And in so far as this girl's goodwill is concerned, let that be your
part of the work. Her father, though a heretic, must be interred as a
son of the Church. It is the only course which will explain a dead man
among the themes in my robing-room. He has been in rebellion against the
King--but there is none to say against which king! It does not need
great wisdom to know that in Paris to-day, and especially in the
Sorbonne, to die fighting against the Lord's Anointed, and for the Duke
of Guise, is to receive the saint's aureole without ever a devil's
advocate to say you nay!"
"It is well known," commented the youth, "that you were ever of the
King's party--a Politique! It was even spoken of in the Council of the
Sixteen."
"Do you go seek your cousin, sirrah," said the Professor of Eloquence,
"and with her be very politic indeed!"
The Abbe John accepted the duty indicated with brisk alertness.
"Mind you, no love-making," said Dr. Anatole. "That would be not only
misplaced, but also exceedingly ill-suited to your ecclesiastical
pretensions."
"Hear me before we go farther," cried the Abbe John; "I am a good
Leaguer and a good Catholic, but I will not have it said that I am a
churchman just because my uncle is!"
The Professor paid no heed. Instead, he went to a corner cupboard of
ornate Spanish mahogany carved into dragons and gargoyles, and from it
he took the medal of the League, the portraits of the Duke of Guise and
of the King of Spain. Then, tying a white armlet of Alencon lace about
the dead man's wrist, he bade the Abbe John summon the servants.
The Abbe John stood opened-mouthed watching the preparations.
"I had always thought----" he began.
"Of course you had--of course you did. You all do, you half-baked
babies! You always take your instructors for ancient innocents,
purblind, adder-deaf mumblers of platitudes. But you are wrong--you and
Guy Launay, and all your like. A good professor is a man who has been a
good student, who remembers the tricks of the animal, and is all ready
fixed for them before the whisper has run along Bench One! I will
conduct this necessary funeral in person. Please do you, since you can
be of no other use, make it your business to explain matters to your
cousin!"
The servants of the Sorbonne, Leaguers to a man, at last appeared,
trickling upstairs half reluctantly. The Professor of Eloquence met them
at the door with a grave face.
"This man has been slain--accidentally," he began, "I believe by the
King's Swiss. I have brought him here myself. It will be as well for the
Sorbonne that these matters go no further--good for you, as well as for
myself, and for all the college of the Doctors, after the resolution of
which we know. Let Father Gontier be called, and the dead man interred
with all due ceremony in the private sepulchre of the faculty."
When the servitors of the Sorbonne had seen the half-hidden wristlet of
the good Leaguer, the medals of the two great chiefs, they understood.
After all, the King might win--and then--men might stay or flee, Guises
rise and set, but it was clearly the destiny of the Sorbonne to go on
for ever, if only to afford them a means of livelihood.
They were men with families, and the advantage of keeping a still tongue
in each several head had often been pointed out to them. It was, indeed,
a condition of their service at Sorbonne.
So the funeral of Francis the Scot took place in the strictest secrecy.
As a mourner, close beside the bier, knelt the niece of good Dr.
Anatole, the Professor of Eloquence. It was not thought unusual, either
that Doctors of the Sorbonne should have nieces, or that they should be
overcome at the sight of war and dead men. Grave doctors' nieces were
almost proverbially tender-hearted. The Abbe John, a cousin by the
mother's side, and near relative of the great Leaguer Cardinal, ordered,
explained, and comforted, according as he had to do with Sorbonne
servitors, Jesuit fathers, or weeping girls.
He found himself in his element, this Abbe John.