By the day and night her sorrows fall
Where miscreant hands and rude
Have stained her pure, ethereal pall
With many a martyr’s blood.
And yearns not her maternal heart
To hear their secret sighs,
Upon whose doubting way apart
Bewildering shadows rise?--KEBLE
It was in the summer twilight that Eustacie, sitting on the doorstep
between the two rooms, with her baby on her knees, was dreamily humming
to her a tune, without even words, but one that she loved, because she
had first learnt to sing it with Berenger and his friend Sidney to the
lute of the latter; and its notes always brought before her eyes the
woods of Montpipeau. Then it was that, low and soft as was the voice,
that befell which Noemi had feared: a worn, ragged-looking young man,
who had been bargaining at the door for a morsel of bread in exchange
for a handkerchief, started at the sound, and moved so as to like into
the house.
Noemi was at the moment not attending, being absorbed in the study of
the handkerchief, which was of such fine, delicate texture that an
idea of its having been stolen possessed her; and she sought the corner
where, as she expected, a coat-of-arms was embroidered. Just as she was
looking up to demand explanation, the stranger, with a sudden cry of
‘Good heavens, it is she!’ pushed past her into the house, and falling
on his knee before Eustacie, exclaimed, ‘O Lady, Lady, is it thus that I
see you?’
Eustacie had started up in dismay, crying out, ‘Ah! M. l’Abbe, as you
are a gentleman, betray me not. Oh! have they sent you to find me? Have
pity on us! You loved my husband!’
‘You have nothing to fear from me, Lady,’ said the young man, still
kneeling; ‘if you are indeed a distressed fugitive--so am I. If you have
shelter and friends--I have none.’
‘Is it indeed so?’ said Eustacie, wistfully, yet scarce reassured. ‘You
are truly not come from my uncle. Indeed, Monsieur, I would not doubt
you, but you see I have so much at stake. I have my little one here, and
they mean so cruelly by her.’
‘Madame, I swear by the honour of a nobleman--nay, by all that is
sacred--that I know nothing of your uncle. I have been a wanderer for
many weeks past; proscribed and hunted down because I wished to seek
into the truth.’
‘Ah!’ said Eustacie, with a sound of relief, and of apology, ‘pardon
me, sir; indeed, I know you were good. You loved my husband;’ and she
reached out her hand to raise him, when he kissed it reverently. Little
_bourgeoise_ and worn mendicant as they were in dress, the air of the
Louvre breathed round them; and there was all its grace and dignity as
the lady turned round to her astonished hosts, saying, ‘Good sir, kind
mother, this gentleman is, indeed, what you took me for, a fugitive for
the truth. Permit me to present to you, Monsieur l’Abbe de Mericour--at
least, so he was, when last I had the honour to see him.’
The last time HE had seen her, poor Eustacie had been incapable of
seeing anything save that bloody pool at the foot of the stairs.
Mericour now turned and explained. ‘Good friends,’ he said courteously,
but with the _fierete_ of the noble not quite out of his tone, ‘I beg
your grace. I would not have used so little ceremony, if I had not been
out of myself at recognizing a voice and a tune that could belong to
none but Madame---’
‘Sit down, sir,’ said Noemi, a little coldly and stiffly--for Mericour
was a terrible name to Huguenots ears; ‘a true friend to this lady must
needs be welcome, above all if he comes in Heaven’s name.’
‘Sit down and eat, sir,’ added Gardon, much more heartily; ‘and forgive
us for not having been more hospitable--but the times have taught us to
be cautious, and in that lady we have a precious charge. Rest; for you
look both weary and hungry.’
Eustacie added an invitation, understanding that he would not sit
without her permission, and then, as he dropped into a chair, she
exclaimed, ‘Ah! sir, you are faint, but you are famished.’
‘It will pass,’ he said; ‘I have not eaten to-day.’
Instantly a meal was set before him, and ere long he revived; and as
the shutters were closed, and shelter for the night promised to him by a
Huguenot family lodging in the same house, he began to answer Eustacie’s
anxious questions, as well as to learn from her in return what had
brought her into her present situation.
Then it was that she recollected that it had been he who, at her cousin
Diane’s call, had seized her when she was rushing out of the palace
in her first frenzy of grief, and had carried her back to the women’s
apartments.
‘It was that day which brought me here,’ he said.
And he told how, bred up in his own distant province, by a pious and
excellent tutor, he had devoutly believed in the extreme wickedness of
the Reformers; but in his seclusion he had been trained to such purity
of faith and morals, that, when his brother summoned him to court to
solicit a benefice, he had been appalled at the aspect of vice, and had,
at the same time, been struck by the pure lives of the Huguenots; for
truly, as things then were at the French court, crime seemed to have
arrayed itself on the side of the orthodox party, all virtue on that of
the schismatics.
De Mericour consulted spiritual advisers, who told him that none but
Catholics could be truly holy, and that what he admired were merely
heathen virtues that the devil permitted the Huguenots to display in
order to delude the unwary. With this explanation he had striven to be
satisfied, though eyes unblended by guilt and a pure heart continued to
be revolted at the practices which his Church, scared at the evil
times, and forgetful of her own true strength, left undenounced in her
partisans. And the more that the Huguenot gentlemen thronged the court,
and the young Abbe was thrown into intercourse with them, and the more
he perplexed himself how the truth, the faith, the uprightness, the
forbearance, the purity that they evinced could indeed be wanting in
the zeal that made them acceptable. Then came the frightful morning when
carnage reigned in every street, and the men who had been treated as
favourite boon companions were hunted down like wild beasts in every
street. He had endeavoured to save life, but would have speedily been
slaughtered himself except for his soutane; and in all good faith he
had hurried to the Louvre, to inform royalty of the horrors that, as he
thought, a fanatic passion was causing the populace to commit.
He found the palace become shambles--the King himself, wrought up to
frenzy, firing on the fugitives. And the next day, while his brain still
seemed frozen with horror, he was called on to join in the procession of
thanksgiving for the King’s deliverance from a dangerous plot. Surely,
if the plot were genuine, he thought, the procession should have
savoured of penance and humiliation rather than of barbarous exultation!
Yet these might be only the individual crimes of the Queen-mother, and
of the Guises seeking to mask themselves under the semblance of
zeal; and the infallible head of the visible Church would disown the
slaughter, and cast it from the Church with loathing as a blood-stained
garment. Behold, Rome was full of rejoicing, and sent sanction and
commendation of the pious zeal of the King! Had the voice of Holy Church
become indeed as the voice of the bloodhound? Was this indeed her call?
The young man, whose life from infancy had been marked out for the
service of the Church--so destined by his parents as securing a wealthy
provision for a younger son, but educated by his good tutor with more
real sense of his obligations--felt the question in its full import.
He was under no vows; he had, indeed, received the tonsure, but was
otherwise unpledged, and he was bent on proving all things. The gaieties
in which he had at first mingled had become abhorrent to him, and he
studied with the earnestness of a newly-awakened mind in search of true
light. The very face of study and inquiry, in one of such a family as
that of his brother the Duke de Mericour, was enough to excite suspicion
of Huguenot inclinations. The elder brother tried to quash the folly of
the younger, by insisting on his sharing the debaucheries which, whether
as priest or monk, or simply as Christian man, it would be his duty to
abjure; and at length, by way of bringing things to a test, insisted
on his making one of a party who were about to break up and destroy a
Huguenot assembly. Unable, in his present mood, to endure the thought
of further cruelty, the young Abbe fled, gave secret warning to the
endangered congregation, and hastened to the old castle in Brittany,
where he had been brought up, to pour out his perplexities, and seek the
counsel of the good old chaplain who had educated him. Whether the kind,
learned, simple-hearted tutor could have settled his mind, he had no
time to discover, for he had scarcely unfolded his troubles before
warnings came down that he had better secure himself--his brother, as
head of the family, had obtained the royal assent to the imprisonment of
the rebellious junior, so as to bring him to a better mind, and cure
him of the Huguenot inclinations, which in the poor lad were simply
undeveloped. But in all the Catholic eyes he was a tainted man, and
his almost inevitable course was to take refuge with some Huguenot
relations. There he was eagerly welcome; instruction was poured in on
him; but as he showed a disposition to inquire and examine, and needed
time to look into what they taught him, as one who feared to break
his link with the Church, and still longed to find her blameless and
glorious, the righteous nation that keepeth the truth, they turned on
him and regarded him as a traitor and a spy, who had come among them on
false pretences.
All the poor lad wanted was time to think, time to examine, time to
consult authorities, living and dead. The Catholics called this treason
to the Church, the Huguenots called it halting between two opinions; and
between them he was a proscribed, distrusted vagabond, branded on one
side as a recreant, and on the other as a traitor. He had asked for a
few months of quiet, and where could they be had? His grand-mother had
been the daughter of a Scottish nobleman in the French service, and he
had once seen a nephew of hers who had come to Paris during the time of
Queen Mary’s residence there. He imagined that if he were once out of
this distracted land of France, he might find respite for study, for
which he longed; and utterly ignorant of the real state of Scotland,
he had determined to make his way to his kindred there; and he had
struggled on the way to La Rochelle, cheated out of the small remains
of his money, selling his last jewels and all the clothing that was
not indispensable, and becoming so utterly unable to pay his passage to
England, that he could only trust to Providence to find him some means
of reaching his present goal.
He had been listened to with kindness, and a sympathy such as M.
Gardon’s large mind enable him to bestow, where his brethren had been
incapable of comprehending that a man could sincerely doubt between them
and Rome. When the history was finished, Eustacie exclaimed, turning
to Maitre Gardon, ‘Ah! sir, is not this just what we sought? If this
gentleman would but convey a letter to my mother-in-law---’
M. Gardon smiled. ‘Scotland and England are by no means the same place,
Lady,’ he said.
‘Whatever this lady would command, wherever she would send me, I am at
her service,’ cried the Abbe, fervently.
And, after a little further debate, it was decided that it might really
be the best course, for him as for Madame de Ribaumont, to become the
bearer of a letter and token from her, entreating her mother-in-law to
notify her pleasure whether she should bring her child to England. She
had means enough to advance a sufficient sum to pay Mericour’s passage,
and he accepted it most punctiliously as a loan, intending, so soon as
her despatches were ready, to go on to La Rochelle, and make inquiry for
a ship.
Chance, however, seemed unusually propitious, for the next day there
was an apparition in the streets of La Sablerie of four or five
weather-beaten, rollicking-looking men, their dress profusely adorned
with ribbons, and their language full of strange oaths. They were well
known at La Sablerie as sailors belonging to a ship of the fleet of the
Count de Montgomery, the unfortunate knight whose lance had caused the
death of King Henry II., and who, proscribed by the mortal hatred of
Catherine de Medicis, had become the admiral of a piratical fleet in the
Calvinist interest, so far winked at the Queen Elizabeth that it had its
head-quarters in the Channel Islands, and thence was a most formidable
foe to merchant vessels on the northern and eastern coasts of France;
and often indulged in descents on the coast, when the sailors--being in
general the scum of the nation--were apt to comport themselves more like
American buccaneers than like champions of any form of religion.
La Sablerie was a Huguenot town, so they used no violence, but only
swaggered about, demanding from Bailli La Grasse, in the name of their
gallant Captain Latouche, contributions and provisions, and giving him
to understand that if he did not comply to the uttermost it should be
the worse for him. Their ship, it appeared, had been forced to put into
the harbour, about two miles off, and Maitre Gardon and the young Abbe
decided on walking thither to see it, and to have an interview with the
captain, so as to secure a passage for Mericour at least. Indeed Maitre
Gardon had, in consultation with Eustacie, resolved, if he found things
suitable, to arrange for their all going together. She would be far
safer out of France; and, although the Abbe alone could not have
escorted her, yet Maitre Gardon would gladly have secured for her
the additional protection of a young, strong, and spirited man; and
Eustacie, who was no scribe, was absolutely relieved to have the voyage
set before her as an alternative to the dreadful operation of composing
a letter to the _belle-mere_, whom she had not seen since she had been
seven years old, and of whose present English name she had the most
indistinct ideas.
However, the first sight of the ship overthrew all such ideas. It was a
wretched single-decked vessel, carrying far more sail than experienced
nautical eyes would have deemed safe, and with no accommodation fit
for a woman and child, even had the aspect of captain or crew been more
satisfactory--for the ruffianly appearance and language of the former
fully rivaled that of his sailors. It would have been mere madness to
think of trusting the lady in such hands; and, without a word to each
other, Gardon and Mericour resolved to give no hint even that she and
her jewels were in La Sablerie. Mericour, however, made his bargain with
the captain, who understood to transport him as far as Guernsey, whence
he might easily make his way to Dorsetshire, where M. Gardon knew that
Berenger’s English home had been.
So Eustacie, with no small trouble and consideration, indited her
letter--telling of her escape, the birth of her daughter, the dangers
that threatened her child--and begging that its grand-mother would give
it a safe home in England, and love it for the sake of its father. An
answer would find her at the Widow Noemi Laurent’s, Rue des Trois
Fees, La Sablerie. She could not bring herself to speak of the name of
Eserance Gardon which had been saddled upon her; and even M. de Mericour
remained in ignorance of her bearing this disguise. She recommended him
to the kindness of her mother-in-law; and M. Gardon added another letter
to the lady, on behalf of the charge to whom he promised to devote
himself until he should see them safe in friendly hands. Both
letters were addressed, as best they might be, between Eustacie’s
dim comprehension of the word Thistlewood, and M. Gardon’s notion of
spelling. ‘Jadis, Baronne de Ribaumont’ was the securest part of the
direction.
And for a token, Eustacie looked over her jewels to find one that would
serve for a token; but the only ones she knew would be recognized, were
the brooch that had fastened the plume in Berenger’s bloody cap, and the
chaplet of pearls. To part with the first, or to risk the second in the
pirate-ship, was impossible, but Eustacie at last decided upon detaching
the pear-shaped pearl which was nearest the clasp, and which was so
remarkable in form and tint that there was no doubt of its being well
known.