It was very warm in the inn room, but it was so much warmer outside, in
the waning flames of the late September evening, that the dark room
seemed veritably cool to those who escaped into its shelter from the
fading sunlight outside. A window was open to let in what little air was
stirring, and from that window a spectator with a good head might look
down a sheer drop of more than thirty feet into the moat of the Castle of
Caylus. The Inn of the Seven Devils was perched on the lip of one rock,
and Caylus Castle on the lip of another. Between the two lay the gorge,
which had been partially utilized to form the moat of the castle, and
which continued its way towards the Spanish mountains. Beyond the castle
a bridge spanned the ravine, carrying on the road towards the frontier.
The moat itself was dry now, for war and Caylus had long been
disassociated, and France was, for the moment, at peace with her
neighbor, if at peace with few other powers. A young thirteenth Louis, a
son of the great fourth Henri, now sat upon the throne of France, and
seemingly believed himself to be the ruler of his kingdom, though a newly
made Cardinal de Richelieu held a different opinion, and acted according
to his conviction with great pertinacity and skill.
Inside the Inn of the Seven Devils, on this heavy day of early autumn,
seven men were sitting. It was an odd chance, and the men had joked about
it heavily--there was one man for each devil of the Inn's name. Six of
these men were grouped about a table furnished with flagons and beakers,
and were doing their best to alleviate the external heat by copious
draughts of the rough but not unkindly native wine which Martine, the
plain-faced maid of the Inn, dispensed generously enough from a ruddy
earthenware pitcher. A stranger entering the room would, at the first
glance, have taken the six men seated around the table for soldiers, for
all were stalwart fellows, with broad bodies and long limbs, bronzed
faces and swaggering carriage, and behind them where they sat six great
rapiers dangled from nails in the wall, rapiers which the revellers had
removed from their sides for their greater ease and comfort. But if the
suppositious stranger were led to study the men a little more closely, he
would be tempted to correct his first impression. The swaggering carriage
of the men lacked something of the stiffness inevitably to be associated
with military training in the days when the levies of the Sun-King were
held, or at least held themselves to be, the finest troops in Europe, a
cheerful opinion which no amount of military misfortune could dissipate.
Each of the drinkers of the inn had his own individuality of swagger, his
truculent independence of mien, which suggested a man by no means
habitually used either to receive commands or to render unquestioning
obedience. Each of the men resembled his fellows in a certain flamboyant
air of ferocity, but no one of them resembled the others by wearing that
air of harmonious training with other men which links together a company
of seasoned soldiers. With their long cloaks and their large hats and
their high boots, with their somewhat shabby garments stained with age
and sweat and wine, in many places patched and in many places tattered,
with their tangled locks and ragged mustachios, the revellers had on
closer study more the appearance of brigands, or at least of guerillas,
than of regular troops. As a matter of fact, they were neither soldiers
nor brigands, though their way of life endowed them with some of the
virtues of the soldier and most of the vices of the brigand.
There was not a man in that room who lacked courage of the fiercest kind;
there was but one man in the room with intelligence enough to appreciate
the possibility of an existence uncoupled with the possession of courage
of the fiercest kind. There was not a man in the room who had the
slightest fear of death, save in so far as death meant the cessation of
those privileges of eating grossly, drinking grossly, and loving grossly,
which every man of the jack-rascals prized not a little. There was not a
man in the room that was not prepared to serve the person, whoever he
might be, who had bought his sword to strike and his body to be stricken,
so long as the buyer and the bought had agreed upon the price, and so
long as the man who carried the sword felt confident that the man who
dandled the purse meant to meet his bargain.
These were the soldierly virtues. But, further, there was not a man in
the room who would have felt the smallest compunction in cutting any
man's throat if he had full pockets, or shaming any woman's honor if she
had good looks. These were their brigand's vices. Fearless in their
conduct, filthy in their lives, the assembled rogues were as ugly a bunch
of brutalities as ever sprawled in a brothel, brawled in a tavern, or
crawled from some dark corner to cut down their unsuspicious prey.
The six fellows that sat around the wine-stained, knife-notched table of
the Inn of the Seven Devils had little in them to interest a serious
student of humanity, if such a one had chanced, for his misfortune, to
find his way to that wicked wine-house on that wicked evening. There were
differences of nationality among the half-dozen; that was plain enough
from their features and from their speech, for though they all talked, or
thought they talked, in French, each man did his speaking with an accent
that betrayed his nativity. As the babbling voices rose and fell in
alternations of argument that was almost quarrel, narrative that was
sometimes diverting, and ribaldry that was never wit, it would seem as if
the ruffianism of half Europe had called a conference in that squalid,
horrible little inn. Guttural German notes mixed whimsically with
sibilant Spanish and flowing Portuguese. Cracked Biscayan--which no
Spaniard will allow to be Spanish--jarred upon the suavity of Italian
accents, and through the din the heavy steadiness of a Breton voice could
be heard asserting itself. Though every man spoke in French, for the
purposes of the common parliament, each man swore in his own tongue; and
they all swore briskly and crisply, with a seemingly inexhaustible
vocabulary of blasphemy and obscenity, so that the foul air of that inn
parlor was rendered fouler still by the volley of oaths--German, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, Biscayan, and Breton--that were fired into its
steaming, stinking atmosphere. So much for the six men that sat at the
table.
The seventh man in the room, although he was of the same fellowship, was
curiously unlike his fellows. While the others were burly, well-set-up
fellows, who held their heads high enough and thrust out their chests
valiantly and sprawled their strong limbs at ease, the seventh man was a
hunchback, short of stature and slender of figure, with a countenance
whose quiet malignity contrasted decisively with the patent brutality of
his comrades. The difference between the one and the others was
accentuated even in dress, for, while the swashbucklers at the table
loved to bedizen themselves with an amount of ferocious finery, and
showed in their sordid garments a quantity of color that likened them to
a bunch of faded wild flowers, the hunchback was clad soberly in black
that was well-worn, indeed, and grizzled at the seams, but neatly
attended. He sat in the window, reading intently in a little volume, and,
again unlike his associates, while he read he nursed between his knees a
long and formidable rapier. Those at the table paid him no heed; most of
them knew his ways, and he, on his side, seemed to be quite undisturbed
in his studies by the noise and clamor of the drinking-party, and to be
entirely absorbed in the delights of literature.
But if the hunchback student was quite content to let his companions be,
and to find his pleasures in scholarship of a kind, it came about that
one of his companions, in a misguided moment, found himself less content
to leave the hunchback student undisturbed. It was the one of the company
that knew least about him--Pinto the Biscayan, newest recruit in that
huddle of ruffians, and therefore the less inclined than his fellows to
let a sleeping dog lie. He had been drinking deeply, for your Biscayans
are potent topers, and in the course of his cups he discovered that it
irritated him to see that quiet, silent figure perched there in the
window with its wry body as still as if it had been snipped out of
cardboard, with its comical long nose poked over a book, with its
colorless puckered lips moving, as if the reader muttered to himself the
meaning of what he read, and tasted an unclean pleasure in so doing. So
Pinto pulled himself to his feet, steadied himself with the aid of the
table edge, and then, with a noiseless dexterity that showed the
practised assassin, whose talent it is to pad in shadows, he crossed the
room and came up behind the hunchback before the hunchback was, or seemed
to be, aware of his neighborhood.
"What are you reading?" he hiccoughed. "Let us have a peep at it." And
before the hunchback could make an answer Pinto had picked the book
quickly from the hunchback's fingers and held it to his own face to see
what it told about.
Now it would have profited Biscayan Pinto very little if he had been
given time to study the volume, at least so far as its text was
concerned, for the little book was a manuscript copy of the _Luxurious
Sonnets_ of that Pietro Aretino whom men, or rather some men, once called
"The Divine." The book was illustrated as well, not unskilfully, with
sketches that professed to be illuminative of the text in the manner of
Giulio Romano. These might have pleased the Biscayan, for if he had no
Italian, and could, therefore, make nothing of the voluptuousness of the
Scourge of Princes, he could, at least, see as well as another savage the
meaning of a lewd image. But the privilege was denied him. Scarcely had
he got the book in his fingers when it was plucked from them again, and
thereafter, while with his left hand the hunchback slipped the booklet
into the breast of his doublet, with his right hand he dealt Pinto such a
buffet on the side of his head as sent him reeling across the floor, to
bring up with a dull thud at the table against the backs of his nearest
companions.
Instantly all was tumult. Pinto, black with anger, screamed Biscayan
maledictions and struggled to get at his sword where it hung against the
wall, while his comrades, clinging to him and impeding him, were trying
in every variety of bad French to dissuade him from a purpose which they
were well enough aware must needs end disastrously for him. For they all
knew, what the raw Biscayan did not know, how strong was the arm and how
terrible the sword of the hunchback whose studies Pinto had so rudely and
so foolishly interrupted. As for the hunchback himself, he stood quietly
by his chair, with his hands resting on the pommel of his rapier, and a
disagreeable smile twisting new hints of malignity into features that
were malign enough in repose. Now it may be that the sight of that
frightful smile had its effect in cooling the hot blood of the Biscayan,
for, indeed, the hunchback, as he stood there, so quietly alert, so
demoniacally watchful, seemed the most terrible antagonist he had ever
challenged. At least, in a little while the Biscayan, drinking in swiftly
the warnings of his companions, consented to be pacified, consented even
to be apologetic on a whispered hint, that was also a whispered threat,
from his leader, that there should be no brawling among friends.
"It was only a joke, comrade," he said, sullenly, and flung himself
heavily into his empty seat. The hunchback nodded grimly.
"I like a joke as well as any man," he said, "and can make one myself if
occasion serve."
Therewith he seated himself anew, and, pulling the book from his bosom,
resumed his reading and his silent mouthing, while something of a gloom
brooded over his fellows at the table. It was to dissipate this gloom
that presently the man who sat at the head of the table, a bald and
red-faced fellow who looked a German, and who seemed to exercise some
kind of headship over the others, pushed back his chair a little from the
board and glanced half anxiously and half angrily towards the inn door.
Then he thumped his red fist upon the wood till the flagons clattered and
rattled.
"Why don't the late dogs come to heel?" he grumbled, speaking with a
strong Teutonic accent. "It is long past the hour, and I like
punctuality."
A Spaniard at his right hand, swarthy, not ill-looking, whom his friends
called Pepe el Matador, grinned into the German's face.
"Will not this string of swords serve the turn?" he said, and pointed
with a dirty, well-shaped hand to the six long rapiers that hung against
the wall behind them.
The Italian, Faenza, began to laugh a little, quiet, teasing laugh; the
sullen Biscayan, Pinto, patted el Matador on the back; Joel de Jurgan the
Breton, stared stolidly; and Saldagno the Portuguese, refreshed himself
with a drink. Encouraged by what he conceived to be the sympathy of his
comrades, Pepe renewed the attack. "Come, Staupitz, come," he questioned,
"are not those swords long enough and sharp enough to scare the devil?"
Staupitz struck the table again. "No, no, my children," he said, "not for
this job. Monsieur Peyrolles told me to bring nine of my babies, and nine
we must be, and nine we should be at this moment if our truants were at
hand."
At this moment Saldagno set down his beaker. "I hear footsteps," he said.
In the momentary silence which followed this remark, all present could
hear distinctly enough the tramp of feet outside, and in another instant
the door was flung open and the two men whom Staupitz had been expecting
so impatiently made their appearance.
If the contrast had been marked between the six men who sat at the table
and the seventh man who sat apart, the contrast that existed between the
two new-comers was still more striking. The first to enter was a big,
jovial, red-faced, black-haired man with a huge mustache and a manner
that suggested an ebullient admiration of himself and an ebullient
appreciation of all possible pleasures. He was habited much like his
predecessors, in that he was booted, cloaked, hatted, and sworded as they
were booted, cloaked, hatted, and sworded, but everything with him,
owing, it may be, to his flagrant Gascon nationality, tended to an
extravagance of exaggeration that made him seem almost like a caricature
of the others. His hat was bigger, his cloak more voluminous, his boots
more assertive, his sword longer, his taste for colors at once more
pronounced and more gaudy. If the others might be likened in their
coloring to faded wild flowers, this man seemed to blaze like some
monstrous exotic. He was a swashbuckler whom Callot would have loved to
paint.
While he entered the room with his air of splendid assurance that
suggested that the Inn belonged to him, and greeted those that awaited
him with such a nod as a monarch might accord to his vassals, he was
followed by one that showed in almost every particular his opposite. This
one, that represented an extreme of Norman character as his ally
represented an extreme of Gascon character, this one that seemed to
shelter timidly behind the effulgence of his companion, was a lean,
lanky, pallid fellow, clad wholly in black of a rustier and shabbier kind
than that worn by the reader in the window. From beneath his dingy black
felt hat thin wisps of flaxen hair flowed ridiculously enough about his
scraggy neck. While his Gascon comrade entered the room with the manner
of one who carries all before him, the Norman seemed to creep, or rather
to slink, in with lack-lustre eyes peering apologetically about him
through lowered pink eyelids, while his twitching fingers appeared to
protest apologetically for his intrusion into a society so far above his
deserts. But if in almost every particular he was the opposite to his
friend, in one particular, however, he resembled him, for a long rapier
hung from his side and slapped against his lean calves.
In a further regard, moreover, the two new-comers, however different they
might seem in build of body and in habit of apparel, resembled each other
more closely than they resembled any of the earlier occupants of the Inn
room. There are castes in rascality as in all other trades, classes,
professions, and mysteries, honorable or dishonorable, and this latest
pair of knaves belonged patently to the more amiable caste of
ruffianism--a higher or a lower caste, as you may be pleased to look at
it. In the bold eyes of the gaudily clad Gascon, as in the uneasy eyes of
the sable-coated Norman, there was a quality of candor which might be
sought for in vain among the rogues that greeted them. Certainly neither
the Gascon nor the Norman would have seemed reassuring figures to a timid
traveller on a lonely road, and yet there was, as it were, a kind of
gentility in their composition which would have been obvious to a reader
of men, and would have approved them as, in their way and of their race,
trustworthy. Here, the reader of men would say, are a brace of assassins
who hold a sort of honor in their hearts, who would never skulk in a
corner to stab an enemy in the back, nor wrong a wretched woman who
plainly was unwilling to be wronged--a brace of heroes. And the reader of
men would for once in a way, have been in the right.