LITTLE COLETTE OF COLLIOURE
While the Abbe John was gone to seek the passports from his uncle, and
from what remained of royal authority in a city now wholly given over to
the League, Anatole Long, college professor, explained matters to his
new charge.
"You saw but little of your father, I take it?" he began gently. The
Sorbonnist was a large-framed, upstanding man, with an easy-going face,
and manners which could be velvet soft or trampling, according to
circumstances. They were generally the former.
"There is no use in wasting good anger," he would say, "at least, on a
pack of cublings."
He was referring to the young men of his class, who thought themselves
Platos for wisdom and Kings of Navarre in experience. For though they
cursed "the Bearnais" in their songs and causeway-side shoutings, in
their hearts they thought that there was none like him in the world--at
once soldier, lover, and man.
"My father," said Claire Agnew, looking the Professor in the face, "was
a brave gentleman. He owed that to his race. But he had long been in
this service of politics, which makes a man's life like a precious glass
in the hands of a paralytic. One day or another, as he takes his
medicine, it will drop, and there is an end."
"You speak bitterly?"
The Professor's voice was very soft. It was a wonder that he had never
married again, for all knew that his youth had been severely accidented.
"Bitterly," said the girl; "indeed, I may speak truly and yet without
honey under my tongue. For my father made himself a hunted hare for the
cause that was dear to him. Yet the King he served left him often
without a penny or a crust. When he asked for his own, he was put off
with fair words. He spent his own estate, which was all my portion, like
water. Yet neither from King James of Scots, nor from Elizabeth of the
English, did he get so much as a 'thank you' for the travail of years!"
"And from Henry of Navarre?" said the Professor of the Sorbonne.
"Why," said Claire Agnew, "I am shamed to own it. But though never a man
needed money more than the King of Navarre, it is on his bounty that we
have been living these four years. He is great and generous!"
"I have heard something less than that said of the Bearnais," answered
the Professor; "yet he is a true Frenchman of the Gascon breed, great to
men, generous to women, hail-fellow-well-met with all the world. But he
loves the world to know it! And now, little lady," said Professor
Anatole, "I must conduct you elsewhere. It is not seemly that a pretty
one like you should be found in this dingy parchment den, counting the
sparrows under the dome of the Sorbonne. Have you any friends in Paris
to whose care I can commit you for the time being?"
"Not one!" cried the girl fiercely; "it is a city of
murderers--Leaguers--our enemies!"
"Gently--fairly, little one," the Professor spoke soothingly; "there
are good men and bad in Paris, as elsewhere; but since you have no
friends here, I must conduct you to Havre de Grace, where we will surely
find a captain biding for a fair wind to take him through Queen Bess's
Sleeve into the North Sea, far on the way for Scotland."
The girl began to cry bitterly, for the first time.
"I have no friends in Scotland, not any more than in France," she said.
"My father was a true man, but of a quick high temper, and such friends
as he had he quarrelled with long ago. It began about his marrying my
mother, who was a little maid out of Roussillon, come to Paris in the
suite of the wife of some Governor of Catalonia who had been made
Spanish ambassador. It was in the Emperor's time, when men were men--not
fighting machines--and priests. My father, Francis Agnew, was
stiff-necked and not given to pardon-asking, save of his Maker. And
though little Colette Llorient softened him to all the world else, she
died too soon to soften him towards his kinsfolk."
The Professor meditated gravely, like one solving a difficult problem.
"What?" he said--"no, it cannot be. Your mother was never little Colette
of the Llorients of Collioure?"
"I have indeed always believed so," said the girl; "but doubtless in my
father's papers----"
"But they are Catholics of the biggest grain, those Llorients of
Collioure, deep-dyed Leaguers, as fierce as if Collioure were in the
heart of Lorraine!"
Claire bent her head and nodded sadly.
"Yes," she said, "for my father's sake my mother embroiled herself with
her relatives. She became a Huguenot, a Calvinist like him. Then they
had a family meeting about her. All the black brothers, mailed and
gauntleted, they say, sat round a table and swore that my poor mother
should be no more of their family!"
"Yes, I can fancy it--I see them; there was huge Bernard, weasel-faced
Giles, subtle Philippe----"
"How," cried the girl, surprised in her turn; "you know them--my
mother's people?"
"Well, I ought," said the Professor of the Sorbonne, with a young look
flushing back into his face, "seeing that my mother has held a 'mas'
from the family of Llorient of Collioure for more years than I can
remember. When I was a lad going to the collegiate school at Elne, I
remember your mother, Mademoiselle Colette, as a little maid, playing by
herself among the sand-dunes. I looked up from my Greek grammar to watch
her, till the nurse in the flat Limousin cap shook her fist at me,
stopping her nursing to do it."
Here the Professor seemed to rouse himself as from a dream.
"That rascal John should be getting back by now," he said, "unless he
has elbowed a way into the crowd to fight or fall for his great Duke!"
"You do not love the Duke of Guise?" said the girl.
"I have not your reasons for hating him," the Professor of Eloquence
answered. "I am no Huguenot, by family or feeling. But I think it is a
poor day for France when the valet chases the master out of house and
home. The King is the King, and all the Guises in the world cannot alter
that. Also, since the King has departed, and I have been left, alone
loyal of all the faculty of the Sorbonne, it is time that I too made my
way to see my mother among the sand-hills of Collioure. Ah, John, you
rascal, what has kept you so long?"
"The porter at my uncle's would give me no satisfaction--swore I had
come again to borrow money. A manifest falsehood! As, indeed, I proved
on the spot by pulling him out of his lodge and thumping him well. A
varlet--to dare to suppose, because a gentleman comes twice to borrow
money from a rich and loving relative, that he has returned a third time
upon the same errand! But I got the passports, and they are
countersigned and stamped by Merlan at the Secretary's office, which
will do no harm if we come across King's men!"
"As for the Bearnais and his folk," said the Professor to Claire, "I
suppose you have your father's papers safe enough?"
The girl blushed and murmured something indefinite. As a matter of fact,
she had made sure of these while he yet lay on the ground, and the Royal
Swiss were firing over her head. It was the instinct of her hunted life.
They left the Sorbonne together, all cloaked and hooded "like three
carrion crows," said the Abbe John. None who saw them would have
supposed that a young maid's face lurked beneath the sombre muffling.
Indeed, beneath that of the Abbe John, curls of the same hue clustered
just as tightly and almost as abundantly.
The street were silent all about the quarter of the University. But
every hundred yards great barricades of barrels and paving-stones, earth
and iron chains, had to be passed. Narrow alleys, the breadth of a man
and no more, were generally left, zig-zagging among the defences. But
almost as often the barricades had to be surmounted, after discovery of
identity, by the aid of friendly pushes and hauls. In all cases,
however, the examination was strict.
At every barricade they were stopped and called upon to declare their
mission. However, the Doctor Anatole was generally recognised by some
scapegrace runaway student, at scrambling horse-play among the pavement
cobbles. At any rate, the Abbe John, who had been conspicuous at the
meetings of the Elect Leaguers as the nephew of the great Cardinal
d'Albret, was universally hailed with favour.
He was also constantly asked who the lady in the hood might be, whom he
was convoying away so secretly. He had but one reply to gentle and
simple.
"Give me a sword, come down hither, and I will afford any three men of
you satisfaction on the spot!"
For, in spite of the Abbe John's peaceful cognomen, his credit as a
pusher of the unbuttoned foil was too good for any to accept his
proposition. They laughed instead.
One of the Duke Guise's "mud-porters" called the pair an ugly name. But
it was (happily) in the Latin quarter, and a score of eager hands
propelled him down into the gutter, where, after having his nose rubbed
in the mire, he was permitted (and even assisted) to retire to the rear.
He rubbed himself as he went and regretted mournfully that these things
had not happened near the street of Saint Antoine.
Altogether they escaped well. The Sorbonne, a difficult place to get
into, is easy to get out of--for those who know how. And so the three,
guided by the Abbe John, slipped into the great Rue St. Jacques by the
little port St. Benoit, which the students and even the professors found
so necessary, whenever their errands were of such a private nature as to
disqualify them from crossing the square of the Sorbonne, with its rows
on rows of enfilading windows.
It was up the narrow stair of the Abbe John's lodgings that they found a
temporary shelter while the final arrangements were being made. Horses
and a serving-man (provided for in the passports) were the most pressing
of these.
It was in connection with the serving-man that Claire Agnew first found
a tongue.
"I know a lad," she said, "a Scot, seemingly stupid, but cunning as a
fox, who may be of service to us. His apparent simplicity will be a
protection. For it will be evident that none bent on escaping would
burden themselves with such a 'Cabbage Jock.' He is of my father's
country and they were ofttimes in close places together. His name
is----"
"No matter for his name--we will call him Cabbage Jock," cried the Abbe
John. "Where is this marvel to be found?"
"Not far away, as I judge," said the girl, taking a silver whistle, such
as ladies wore at that time to call their waiting-maids, from about her
neck. She blew lightly upon it, first two long and then two short notes.
And from the street corner, prompt as if he had been watching (which,
indeed, he had been), came running the strangest object ever seen in a
civilised land. He gave one glance at the window at which Claire's head
appeared. Then, diving under the low door like a rat making for a hole,
he easily evaded the shouting concierge, and in a moment more stood
before them.