THE WAY OF THE SALT MARSHES
The shore road from Perpignan to Collioure is a pass, dark and perilous,
even on an August night. But Jean-aux-Choux trod it with the assured
foot of one to whom the night is as the day. He had, as the people of
Collioure asserted, been assuredly witch-born. Now to be "witch-born"
may induce spiritual penalties hereafter, but, from all purely earthly
points of view, it is a good thing. For then you have cat's eyes and can
walk through black night as though it were noonday. Concerning this,
however, Jean did not trouble himself. He considered himself well-born,
well-baptised, one of the elect, and, therefore, perfectly prepared--a
great thing when it is your lot to walk in the midst of many sudden
deaths--for whatever the future might bring. He was turning over in his
mind ways and means of getting Claire across the frontier--not very
greatly troubled, because, first of all, there was the ten days' grace,
and though the Inquisition would doubtless have watchers posted about
the house, he, Jean-aux-Choux, could easily outwit them.
So he traversed the desolate flats between Perpignan and Elne, across
which wild bulls were then permitted to range. Indeed, they came at
times right up to the verge of the vineyards, which cultivators were
just beginning to hedge from their ravages with the strange spike-leaved
plant called the Fig of the Moors. But Jean-aux-Choux had no fear of
anything that walked upon four feet. He carried his long shepherd's
staff with the steel point to it, trailing behind him like a pike. And
though, rounding the salt marshes and _etangs_ or "stanks," there came
to his ears the crooning of the herds, muttering discontentedly in their
sleep with bovine noises, the sharp click of horns that tossed and
interlocked in their effort to dislodge the mosquitoes, the sludgy
splash of broad hooves in the wallows, the crisp snap of the salt crust,
like thin ice breaking--for all which things Jean-aux-Choux cared
nothing. Of course, his trained ear took in all these noises,
registering, classifying, and drawing deductions from them. But he never
once even raised his pointed staff, nor changed his direction. Perhaps
the shepherd's cloak deceived the animals, or more likely the darkness
of the night. For ordinarily it is death to venture there, save on
horseback, and armed with the trident of Camargue. Once or twice he
shouldered two or three bulls this way and that, pushing them over as
one who grooms horses in their stalls after the labours of the day.
But all the time his thoughts were on the paths by which he would carry
off his master's daughter, Claire Agnew, and set her in safety on the
soil of free, if stormy, France, where the Inquisition had no power--nor
was likely to have so long as the Bearnais lived, and the old-time
phalanx of the Calvinists, D'Aubigne, Rosny, Turenne, and the rest stood
about him.
Once or twice he thought, with some exultation, of the dead Valois. For,
if Guise had been the moving spirit and bloody executioner of Saint
Bartholomew, this same Henry of Valois, who had died at St. Cloud, had
been the chief plotter--rather, say, the second--for Catherine, his
mother, the Medicean woman, had assuredly been the first. For all he
had done personally, Jean had no care, no remorse. As to the deed of
Jacques Clement, he himself would not have slain an ally of the
Bearnais. But, after all, it was justice, that the priest should slay
the priest-ridden, and that the fanatic monk should slay the founder of
the Order of the Penitents.
Altogether, Jean-aux-Choux had a quiet mind as he went. Above him, and
somewhat to his left hand, hung a black mass, which was the rock-set
town of Elne on its look-out hill. Highest of all loomed the black,
shadowy mass of its cathedral, with the towers cutting a fantastic
pattern against the skies.
Then came again the cultivated fields, hedges, ditches, the spiked
_agave_ dykes, over which he swung, using his long staff for a
leaping-pole--again the salt marshes, and lastly, the steep shingle and
blown sand of the sea.
Here the waves fell with a soft and cooling sound. Twenty miles of
heavy, grey-black salt water, the water of the Midland sea, statedly
said "Hush" to the stars.
Jean stopped and listened. There was no need for haste. Ten days, and
the task would need thinking over--how to get her, by Salses, to
Narbonne, where there was good French authority, and the protection of
the great lords of his own party. But he would succeed. He knew it. He
had never failed yet.
So Jean was at peace. The stars looked down, blinking sleepily through
various coloured prisms. The sea said so. You heard the wavelet run
along the shore, and the "Hush" dying out infinitesimally, as the
world's clamour dies into the silence of space.
But Jean-aux-Choux would have been a little less at ease, and put a
trifle more powder into his heels, had he known that the warrant of the
Holy Office which he carried in his pocket was only a first draft, and
that the actual document was already in the hands of the familiars, to
be executed at their peril. Also, that in this there was no question of
days, either of ten or any other number. The acolytes of the Black Robe
had a free hand.
* * * * *
The morning was coming up, all peach and primrose, out of the East,
reddening the port-waters of Collioure, and causing the white house of
La Masane, up on its hill, to blush, when Jean-aux-Choux leaped the wall
of his own sheepfold, and came suddenly upon a figure he knew well.
He saw a young man, bare of head, his steel cap, velvet-covered and
white-plumed, resting on a low turf dyke. He had laid aside his weapons,
all except his dagger, and with that he was cultivating and cherishing
his finger-nails. His heel was over the knee of his other leg, in that
pose which the young male sex can only attain with grace between the
ages of twenty and twenty-five.
"Hallo, Jean-aux-Choux!" he cried. "Here have I been waiting you for
hours and hours unnumbered. Is this the way you keep your master's
sheep? If I were that most scowling nobleman of the castle down there, I
would soon bid you travel. If it had not been for me, your sheep would
have been sore put to it for a mouthful, and the nursing ewes certainly
dead of thirst. Where have you been all these three days?"
"The Abbe John--the little D'Albret!" cried Jean-aux-Choux, thoroughly
surprised for once in his life; "how do you come here?"
"I have been on my master's business," answered the Abbe John
carelessly, "and now I am waiting to do a little on my own account. But
there have been so many suspicious gentry about, that I hesitated to go
down till I had seen you. Now tell me all that has happened. That SHE is
safe, I know; I have seen her every day--from a distance!"
"She--who?" asked Jean, though he knew very well.
"Who--why Claire, of course," said the cousin of the Bearnais; "you do
not suppose I came so far to see the little old woman in the blue
pinafore, who walks nodding her head and rattling her keys? Or you, you
great, thick-skulled oaf of Geneva, or the Sorbonnist with the bald head
and the eyes that look and see nothing? What should a young man come so
far for, and risk his life to see, if not a fair young girl? Answer me.
What did John Calvin teach you as to that?"
"Only this," said Jean-aux-Choux solemnly; "'From the lust of the flesh,
from the lust of the eye, from the pride of life, good Lord deliver
me!'"
The young man looked up from his nail-polishing, sharply and keenly.
"Aye--so," he said. "Well--and did He?"
For a moment, but only for a moment, Jean-aux-Choux stood nonplussed.
Then he found his answer, and this time it was John Stirling, armiger,
scholar in divinity, who spoke.
"The God of John Calvin has delivered me from all thought of self in the
matter of this maid, my master's daughter. What might have grown up in
my heart, or even what may once have been in my heart, had I been aught
but a battered masque of humanity, an offence to the beauty of God's
creation--that is not your business, nor that of any man!"
The young fellow dropped his knife, and rising, clasped Jean-aux-Choux
frankly about the neck.
"Jean--Jean--old friend," he cried, "wherefore should I hurt you? Why
should you think it of me? Not for the world--you know that well.
Forgive an idle word."
But Jean-aux-Choux was moved, and having the large heart, when once the
waves tossed it, the calm returned but slowly.
"Sir," he said, "it is only a few months since you first saw Claire
Agnew. Yet you have, as I judge from your light words, admired her after
your kind. But I--I have loved her as my own maid--my sole thought, my
only--ever since her father gathered me up, a lame and bleeding boy, on
the morning after the Bartholomew. And ever since that day I have loved
much, showed little, and said nothing at all. Yet I have kept keen
guard. Night and day I have gone about her house, like a faithful dog
when the wolves are howling in the forests. Now, if you love this girl
with any light love, take your way as you came--for you shall have to
reckon with me!"
The Abbe John dropped back on the round stone which served equally as
seat and rubbing-post in the sheepfold. The oil off many woolly backs
had long since rendered it black and glistening. He resumed the
polishing of his nails with his dagger-edge.
Grave and stem, Jean-aux-Choux stood before him, his hand on the weapon
which had slain the Guise. The Abbe John rubbed each finger-nail
carefully on the velvet of his cap as he finished it, breathed on it,
rubbed again, and then held it up to the light.
"Ah, Jean," he said at last, "I may not go about her house howling like
a wolf, nor yet do any great thing for her. As you say, our acquaintance
has not been long. But if you can love her more than I, or serve her
better, or are willing to give your life more lightly for her sake than
I--why then, Jean, my friend, you are welcome to her!"
Jean-aux-Choux did not answer, but D'Albret took no heed. He went on:
"'By their deeds ye shall know them. They taught you that at Geneva, I
warrant. Well, from what I have seen these past three days, Claire Agnew
is far from safe down there. I have watched that black-browed master of
yours conferring with certain other gentlemen of singularly evil
physiognomy. There has been far too much dodging into coppices and
popping heads round stone walls. And then, as often as the maid comes to
the door with the little old woman in the stomacher of blue--click--they
are all in their holes again, like a warren-full of rabbits when you
look over the hedge and clap your hands! I do not like it,
Jean-aux-Choux!"
Neither did Jean-aux-Choux--so little, indeed, that he decided to take
this light-minded young gentleman, of good family and few ambitions,
into his confidence--which, perhaps, was the wisest thing he could have
done. From his blouse he drew the parchment he had lifted off the table
of the Inquisition in the Street of the Money, and thrust it silently
into the other's hand.
This was all Jean-aux-Choux's apology, but, for the Abbe John, it was
perfectly sufficient.