THE THREE SONS OF MADAME AMELIE
They went back, keeping step together, tall Claire with hand fearlessly
placed on the shoulder of her Professor, who straightened his bowed
student-back at the light touch.
As he went he meditated deeply, and Claire waited for him to speak.
Treading lightly by his side, she smelled the honeysuckle scent of the
sweet alison which she had carried idly away in her hand.
"If the Queen-Mother be dead," said the Professor, "that is one more
stone out of the path of the Bearnais. The Valois loves a strong man to
lean upon. For that reason he clings to D'Epernon, but some day he will
find out that Epernon is only a man of cardboard. There is but one in
France--or, at least, one with the gift of drawing other strong men
about him."
"The Bearnais?" queried Claire, playing with the sweet alison; "I wonder
where he has his camp now?"
She asked the question in a carelessly meditative way, and quite
evidently without any reference to the fact that a certain John d'Albret
(once called in jest the Abbe John) was the youngest full captain in
that enthusiastic, though ill-paid array. But the Professor did not hear
her question. His mind was set on great matters of policy, while Claire
wondered whether the Abbe John looked handsome in his accoutrements of
captain. Then she thought of the enemy trying to kill him, and it seemed
bitterly wicked. That John d'Albret was at the same time earnestly
endeavouring to kill as many as possible of the enemy did not seem to
matter nearly so much.
"Yes," said the Professor, "Henry of Valois has nothing else for it. The
Leaguers are worse than ever, buzzing like a cloud of hornets about his
head. They hold Paris and half the cities of France. He must go to the
King of Navarre, and that humbly withal!"
"It will be well for him then," said Claire, "if our Jean-aux-Choux has
no more visions, with 'Remember Saint Bartholomew' for an over-word!"
"Ah," said the Professor, "make no mistake. A man may be brave and
politic as well. 'I am excellent at taking advice, when it is to my own
liking,' said the Bearnais, and he will teach Master Jean to see visions
also to his liking!"
At which Claire laughed merrily.
"I am with him there!" she cried; "so as you hope for influence with me,
good sir, advise me in the line of my desires. But, ah! yonder is your
mother."
And clapping her hands, she picked up her skirts and ran as hard as she
could up the path towards a trellised white house with a wide balcony,
over which the vines clambered in summer. It was the house of La Masane,
which looks down upon Collioure.
Madame Amelie, or, more properly, the Senora, was a little,
quick-moving, crisp-talking woman, with an eye that snapped, and a
wealth of speech which left her son, the Professor of Eloquence, an
infinite distance behind. She had with her in the house two other sons,
the elder of whom was Alcalde of the little town of Collioure, and
therefore intimately linked with the great house of the Llorients, whose
turreted castle stood up grimly midway between St. Elne and La Masane.
The Alcalde of Collioure was a staid man of grave aspect, a grinder of
much corn during his hours of work, the master of six windmills which
creaked and groaned on the windy slopes above the sea-village. In his
broad hat-brim and in the folds of his attire there was always more or
less of the faint grey-white dust which hall-marks the maker of the
bread of men.
The Alcalde of Collioure thought in epigrams, explaining his views in
wise saws, Catalan, Castilian, and Provencal. French also he had at
call, though, as a good subject of King Philip, he thought, or affected
to think, little of that language. His brother, the lawyer of Elne,
attached to the bishopric by his position, was a politician, and never
tired of foretelling that before long Roussillon would be, even as Bearn
and Navarre, a part of a great and united France. The Bearnais would
hold the Pyrenees from end to end.
These three old bachelors, each according to his ability, did their best
to spoil Claire. And it was a nightly battle of words, to be settled
only by the Senora, who should sit next her at supper. With a twinkle in
his eye the Professor argued his seniority, the Mayor of Collioure his
official position, while the notary brazenly declared that being the
youngest and the best-looking, it was no less than right and just that
he should be preferred.
Madame Amelie miscalled them all for foolish old bachelors, who had
wasted their time cosseting themselves, till now no fair young maid like
Claire would look at any one of them.
"For me," she would say, "I was married at sixteen, and now my Anatole
owns to more than fifty years and is growing bald. Jean-Marie there
waxes stout and is a corn-miller, while as for you, Monsieur the Notary,
you are a fox who rises too late in the morning to catch many roosting
fowls!"
Claire had now been a month in the quiet of the Mas of La Masane, yet
she only now began to understand that Roussillon was a detached part of
the dominions of King Philip of Spain--though it was nevertheless _tras
los montes_, and under a good governor at Perpignan enjoyed for the
moment a comparative immunity.
But dark shadows loomed upon the favoured province.
The Demon of the South wanted money. Moreover, he wanted his land
cleansed of heresy. Rich men in Roussillon were heretics or the children
of heretics. Philip was fighting the Church's quarrel abroad in all
lands, on all waters--against Elizabeth of England, against the bold
burghers of the Low Countries, the Protestant princes of Germany,
against the Bearnais, and (but this secretly) against the King of
France.
Far away where the hills of the Gaudarrama look down upon Madrid, and
where in the cold wind-drift from their snows the life of a man goes out
while the flame of a candle burns steadily, sat a little wizened figure,
bent and seared, spinning spiders' webs in a wilderness of stone, in the
midst of a desert wherein no man dwelt. He spun them to an accompaniment
of monks' chanting and the tolling of bells, but every hour horsemen
went and came at full gallop across the wild.
The palace in the wilderness was the Escurial, and the man Philip II. of
Spain, known all over Europe by the terrible name of "The Demon of the
South."
For him there was no truce in this war. He moved slowly, as he himself
boasted, with a foot of lead, but hitherto surely. Of his own land he
was absolutely secure, save perhaps in that far corner of ever-turbulent
Catalonia which is called Roussillon.
The inhabitants considered that province almost a part of France. The
Demon of the South, however, thought otherwise--that little man at the
desk whose was the League, who moved Guise and all the rest as concealed
clockwork moves the puppets when the great Strasburg horologe strikes
twelve--whose was the Armada and the army of Parma, camped out on the
Flemish dunes. He held that Roussillon was for him a kind of gold mine.
And his black tax-gatherers were the familiars of the Holy Office, that
mystery of mysteries, the Inquisition itself.
Nevertheless, for the moment, there was peace--peace on Collioure, peace
on the towered feudalism of the castle thereof, peace on the alternate
fish-tailed sapphire and turquoise of its sleeping sea, and most of all
peace on La Masane, over against the high-perched fortress of St. Elne.
The Senora's two maidens served the evening meal in the wide,
seaward-looking room, the windows of which opened like doors upon the
covered terrace. Though the spring was not yet far advanced the air was
already sweet and scented with juniper and romarin, lavender, myrtle,
and lentisque--growths which, like the bog-myrtle of Scotland, smell
sweet all the year.
The three men saluted their house-guest sedately by kissing Claire on
the forehead. To the Professor, as to an older friend with additional
privileges, she presented also her cheek. From the head of the table,
which was hers by right, Madame Amelie surveyed tolerantly yet sharply
this interchange of civilities.
"Have done, children," she said, "the soup waits."
And as of all things the soup of the Mas of Collioure must not be kept
waiting, all made haste to bring themselves to their places. Then the
Senora, glancing about to see that all were in a fit and reverent frame
of mind, prepared to say grace. "_Bene_----Don Jordy!" she interrupted
sharply, "you may be a good man of the law, and learned in Papal bulls
and seals, but the Grace of God is scant in you. You are thinking more
of that young maid than of your Maker! Cross yourself reverently, Don
Jordy, or no spoonful of soup do you eat at my table to-night."
Don Jordy (which is, of course, to say George) did as his mother bade
him. For the little black-eyed old lady was a strict disciplinarian, and
none crossed her will in the Mas of Collioure. Yes, these three
grey-headed men, each with a man's work in the world behind him, as soon
as they crossed the threshold became again all of an age--the age their
mother wished them to be, when she had them running like wild goats
among the flocks and herds of La Masane. Happy that rare mother whose
sons never quite grow up.
After the first deep breathings, and the sigh of satisfaction with which
it was the custom to pay homage to the excellent pottage of Madame
Amelie, the second brother, Jean-Marie, Alcalde of Collioure, a quiet
smile defining the flour dust in the wrinkles of his grave countenance
(it was not his day for shaving), looked across at Claire Agnew and
said, "I thought mayhap you might have come to see me to-day. I was down
at the Fanal Mill, and----"
"There are finer things to be seen at Elne," interrupted the Bishop's
notary, "to wit, cloisters, an organ, and fine pictured books on
vellum."
"Pshaw!" cried his brother, "it is better in the mills--what with
whirling sails, the sleepy clatter of the wheels, and the grinding
stones, with the meal pouring down its funnel like a mine of gold."
"Ah," sighed the lawyer, "but I wearied to-day among my parchments. The
sight of you has spoilt us. A day without you is as long as one of Count
Ugolino's!"
"What was that?" demanded the miller, interested.
"A day without bread!" said the notary.
"Silence, Don Jordy," cried the Senora to her favourite son, "that
tongue of yours may plead well in a court, or for aught I know speak the
best of Latin before the wise of the earth, but that is no reason why
here, in this my house, it should go like the hopper of the Fanal Mill!"
"_Architae crepitaculum!_" said the notary, "you are right, mother
mine--the truly eloquent man, like our Sir Professor, keeps his
eloquence to practise on young maids by the sea-beach! But I have not
observed him fill his mouth with pebbles like his master."
"You are indeed but young things," said Claire, smiling at the Senora;
"I would not take any one of you from your mother--no, not at a gift."
"They are slow--slow, my sons," said the Senora, well pleased; "I fear
me they will be buried ere they be wed."
"Then we shall have small chance," cried the ruddy Don Jordy, "for
according to what I hear my betters say over yonder at the Bishop's
palace, in the place whither we are bound there is neither marrying nor
giving in marriage!"
"Good brother," said the Professor of Eloquence sententiously, "if you
do not mend your ways, you may find yourself where you will have little
time and less inclination for such like gauds!"
Meanwhile, without heeding their persiflage, the Senora pursued the even
tenor of her meditation. "Slow--slow," she said, "good lads all, but
slow."
"It was not our fault, but yours, that we are Long," declared that
hardened humorist, Don Jordy; "you married our father of your own free
will, as is the good custom of Roussillon. Blame us not then that we are
like Lambin."
"Lambin," cried his mother, "who was he? Some monkish rascal runagate
over there at the palace?"
"Nay, no runagate; he goes too slow ever to run," said Don Jordy. "Have
you never heard of Lambin our barber episcopal?
'Lambin, the barber, that model of gravity,
Shaving the chins of myself and my brother;
Handles his blade with such reverend suavity,
That ere one side is smooth--lo, 'tis rough on the other!'"
"And I," said the Mayor of Collioure, "have been this day with one who
goes fast enough, though perhaps he goes to the devil."
They looked at the miller in astonishment. It was but seldom that he
served himself with words so strong.
"A cousin of yours, my little lady," he added, looking at Claire.
"Raphael Llorient!" cried the remaining two brothers; "is he then home
again?"
"Aye, indeed he is!" said a voice from the doorway. The figure they saw
there was that of a man clad in black velvet, fitting his slender,
almost girlish figure like a glove. Only a single decoration, but that
the order of the Golden Fleece, hung at his neck from a red ribbon. He
was lithe and apparently young, but Claire could not see his face
clearly. He remained obstinately against the light, but she could see
the points of a slender moustache, and distinguish that the young man's
eyebrows met in a thick black bar on his forehead.
"Don Raphael," said the Mayor of Collioure, "you are welcome to this
your house. This is my brother Anatole, Professor of Eloquence at the
Sorbonne----"
"Ah, the Parisian!" said the young man, bowing slightly; "so you have
killed King Guise after crowning him? We in Madrid ever thought him a
man of straw for all his strutting and cock-crowing. He would have none
of our great King Philip's advice. And so--and so--they used him for
firewood in the guard-room at Blois! Well, every dog has his day. And
who may this be--I ask as lord of the manor and feudal superior, while
warming myself by your fire as a friend--this pretty maid with the
downcast eyes?"
"I believe," said the Professor gravely, "that the lady is your own
cousin-german. Her name is Claire Agnew, and that of her mother was
Colette Llorient of Collioure."