SAVED BY SULKS
When the so-called uncle of Valentine la Nina, Mariana the Jesuit, found
that even his acute ears could distinguish no sound within the darkened
parlour of his niece, he did what he had often done before. He opened
the door with the skill of an evil-doer, and peered through the crack.
The evening sun struck on a spray of scattered blooms which Valentine
had thrown down in her haste--grenadine flowers, red as blood--upon a
broidery frame, the needle stuck transversely, an open book of devotion,
across which the shadows of the window bars slowly passed, following, as
on a dial of illuminated capitals, the swift westering of the sun. But
he heard no sound save the flick-flick of the leaves of the Judas tree
against the window, in the light airs from the Canigou, already damp
with the early mist of the foot-hills.
The Jesuit listened, carefully opened the door a little more widely, and
listened again, holding his hand to his lips. Still only the stirring
air and the leaves that tapped. Mariana drew a long breath and stepped
within. The room was empty.
Then he brought his hand hard down on his thigh, and turned as if to cry
a hasty order. He stopped, however, before the words found vent.
"She has freed him--fled with him, the jade," he murmured; "she was
playing to me also--what a woman--ah, what a woman!"
Then admiration took and held possession of him--a kind of connoisseur's
envy in the presence of a masterpiece of guile. The great Jesuit felt
himself beaten at his own weapons.
"Used for sanctified ends," he murmured, "what a power she would be!"
And again, "What a woman!"
But the order did not leave his lips. He felt that it were better to
leave the matter as it was. If only he could find Valentine la Nina, no
one would know of her part in the prisoner's escape. It could be put
down to the carelessness of the watchers. The principal familiars were
at their work deep in the caves of the Inquisition. The eyes in the
prisoner's cell were painted eyes only--their effect merely moral. None
had seen John d'Albret go into the summer parlour of Valentine. None had
heard her interview, stormy as it was, with her uncle. They had other
things to do in the House of the Street of the Money. If only, then, he
could find La Nina. All turned on that.
"Ah," he thought suddenly, "the key! She has the key of the little door
giving upon the ancient bed of the Tet."
And, hastening down the passage by which, a few minutes before,
Valentine la Nina had led the Abbe John, he stumbled upon his niece,
fallen by the gate, her white dress and white face sombre under the dusk
of vine-leaves, which clambered over the porch as if it had been a
lady's bower.
But the key was not in her hand. With the single flash of intuition he
showed in the matter, John d'Albret had thrown it away, and it now
reposed in the bed of the Tet, not half a mile from the lost seal of the
Holy Office which, some time previously, his friend Jean-aux-Choux had
so obligingly disposed of there.
The Jesuit, in order to keep up his credit in the house of his friends,
was obliged to carry his niece to her summer bower, and leave her there
to recover in the coolness and quiet. Then he put on his out-of-doors
soutane, and passed calmly through the main portal to dispatch a
messenger of his own Order to the frontier with a description of a
certain John d'Albret, evaded from the prison of the Holy Office in the
Street of the Money at Perpignan--who, if caught, was by no means to be
returned thither, but to be held at the disposition of Father Mariana,
chief of the Order of the Gesu in the North of Spain, and bearing
letters mandatory to that effect from the King himself.
"For the present he is gone and lost," he murmured, as he went back;
"the minx has outwitted me"--here he chuckled, and all the soft childish
dimples came out--"yet why should I complain? It was I who taught her.
Or, rather, to say the truth, I outwitted myself--I, and that
incalculable something in women which wrecks the wisdom of the wisest
men!"
And, comforting himself with these reflections, Mariana returned alone
to the House of the Holy Office in the Street of the Money, which, of
necessity, he entered by the main door.
Now that buzzed like a hive, which had been silent and deserted enough
when he went out. The Jesuit stood in apparent bewilderment, his lips
moving as if to ask a question. He could hear Dom Teruel storming that
he would burn every assistant, every familiar in the building, from roof
to cellar, while Frey Tullio and Serra, the huge Murcian, made
tumultuary perquisition into every chamber in search of the runaway.
"Hold there--I will open for you," commanded Mariana, as he saw that
they were approaching the door within which lay Valentine; "I will go
in, and you can follow. But let no one dare to disturb the repose of the
lady, my niece. Or--ye know well the seal and mandate of the King
concerning her!"
Mariana went softly in, not closing the door, and having satisfied
himself that all was well, he beckoned the inquisitors to approach.
Valentine la Nina lay on the oaken settle, her head on the pillow,
exactly as he had placed her, but thanks to the few drops from the phial
which he had compelled her to swallow, she was now sleeping peacefully,
her bosom rising and falling with her measured breathing.
The men stood a moment uncertain, perhaps a little awestruck. Serra
would have retreated, but the suspicious Neapolitan walked softly across
and tested the bars of the window. They were firmly and deeply enough
sunk in the stone to convince even Frey Tullio.
* * * * *
So it chanced that while the messenger of the Gesu sped northward to the
frontier with orders to arrest one Jean d'Albret, a near relative of the
Bearnais, clad in frayed court-suit of pale blue, and even while the
couriers of the Holy Office posted in the same direction seeking a
criminal whom it was death to shelter or succour, the Abbe John, looking
most abbatical in his decent black cloak, passed out of the city by the
empty bed of the Tet, the same which it had occupied before the straight
cut known as the Basse led it to southward of the town. Then--marvel of
marvels--the hunted man turned to the south and made across the hills in
the direction of the House of La Masane upon the slopes of the hills
behind Collioure.
And as he went he communed with himself.
"I will show her!" affirmed the Abbe John grimly (for there was a hot
and lasting temper under that light exterior, perhaps that of the
aboriginal Bourbon, who to this day "never learns and never forgives").
"I will show her! If I loved her as an ordinary man, I would hasten to
follow and overtake her! But she is safe and has no need of me. If she
has any thought for me--any care (he did not say 'any love'), it will be
none the worse for keeping. I will go back to Jean-aux-Choux. He was to
return and care for all that remained at La Masane. Well, surely he is
no braver than I. What he does I can do. I will go and help him. Also, I
shall be able to keep an eye on that rascal, Raphael Llorient!"
And so, with these excellent intentions he turned his face resolutely to
the south--a determination which completely threw his pursuers off the
scent. For it was a natural axiom in Spanish Roussillon, that whosoever
embroiled himself with the powers-that-were in that province made
instantly, by sea or by land, for the nearest French border.
Thus was John d'Albret saved by the Bourbon blood of his mother, or by
his own native cross-grained temper. In short, he sulked. And for the
time being, the sulking saved his neck.