The Long Night by Stanley Weyman (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📖

and at last came to him. He cringed low, wondering what he had done amiss.

"I know your face," Blondel said, fixing him with a penetrating look. "Do you not lodge, my lad, in a house in the Corraterie? Near the Porte Tertasse?"

"Yes, Messer Syndic," Louis answered, overpowered by the honour of the great man's address, and still wondering what evil was in store for him.

"The Mere Royaume's?"

"Yes, Messer Syndic."

"Then you can do me--or rather"--with an expression of growing severity--"you can do the State a service. Step this way, and listen to me, young man!" And his asperity increased by the fear that he was taking an unwise step, he told the youth, in curt stiff sentences, such facts as he thought necessary.

The young student listened thunderstruck, his mouth open, and an expression of fatuous alarm on his face. "Letters?" he muttered, when the Syndic had come to a certain point in the story he had decided to tell.

"Yes, papers of importance to the State," the Syndic replied weightily, "of which it is necessary that possession should be taken as quietly as possible."

"And they are----"

"They are in the steel box chained to the wall of his apartment. Be it your task, young man, to bring the box and the letters unread and untouched to me. Opportunities of securing them in Messer Basterga's absence cannot but occur," he continued more benignly. "Choose one wisely, use it boldly, and the care of your fortunes will be in better hands than yours! A word to Basterga, on the other hand," Blondel continued slowly, and with a deadly look--he had not failed to notice that Louis winced at the name of Basterga--"and you will find yourself in the prison of the Two Hundred, destined to share the fate of the conspirators."

The young man began to shake. "Conspirators?" he cried faintly. The word brought vividly before him the horrors of the scaffold and the wheel. "Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Why did I go to that house to lodge?"

"Do your duty," the Syndic said, "and you need fear nothing."

"But if I cannot--do it?" the youth stammered, his teeth chattering. He to penetrate to Basterga's room unbidden! He to rob the formidable man and perhaps be caught in the act! He to deceive him and meet his eye at meals! Impossible! "But if I cannot--do it?" he repeated, cowering.

"The State knows no such word!" the Syndic returned grimly. "Cannot," he continued slowly, "means will not. Do your duty and fear nothing. Do it not, pause, hesitate, breathe but a syllable of that which I have told you, and you will have all to fear. All!"

He saw too late that it was he himself who had all to fear; that in taking the lad before him into his confidence, he had placed himself in the hands of a craven. But he had done it. He had gone too far, moved by the foolish impulse of the moment, to retreat. His sole chance lay in showing the lad on which side danger pressed him most closely; on frightening him completely. And when Louis did not reply:--

"You do not answer me?" Blondel said in his sternest tones. "You do not reply? Am I to understand that you decline? That you refuse to perform the task which the State assigns to you? In that case be sure you will perish with those whom the Two Hundred know to be the enemies of Geneva, and for whom the rack and the wheel are at this moment prepared."

"No!" Louis cried passionately; he almost fell on his knees in the open street. "No, no! I will go anywhere, do anything, Messer Syndic! I swear I will; I am no enemy! No conspirator!"

"You may be no enemy. But you must show yourself a friend!"

"I will! I will indeed."

"And no syllable of this will pass your lips?"

"As I live, Messer Syndic! Nothing! Nothing!"

When he had repeated this several times with the earnestness of extreme terror, and appeared to have laid to heart such particulars as Blondel thought he should know, the Syndic dismissed him, letting him go with a last injunction to be silent and a last threat.

By mere force of habit the lad would have gone forward and entered the College; but on the threshold he felt how unfit he was to meet his fellows' eyes, and he turned and hastened as fast as his trembling limbs would carry him towards his home. The streets, to his excited imagination, were full of spies; he fancied his every movement watched, his footsteps counted. If he lingered they might suppose him lukewarm, if he paused they might think him ill-affected. His speed must show his zeal. His poor little heart beat in his breast as if it would spring from it, but he did not stay nor look aside until the door of the house in the Corraterie closed behind him.

Then within the house there fell upon him--alas! what a thing it is to be a coward--a new fear. The fear was not the fear of Basterga, the bully and cynic, whom he had known and fawned on and flattered; but of Basterga the dark and dangerous conspirator, of whom he now heard, ready to repay with the dagger the least attempt to penetrate his secrets! On his entrance he had flung himself face downward on his pallet in the little closet in which he slept; but at that thought he sprang up, suffocated by it; already he fancied himself in the hands of the desperadoes whom he had betrayed, already he pictured slow and lingering deaths. But again, at the remembrance of the task laid upon him, he flung himself prostrate, writhing, and cursing his fate, and shedding tears of panic. He to beard Basterga! He to betray him! Impossible! Yet if he failed, the rack and the wheel awaited him. Either way lay danger, on either side yawned torture and death. And he was a coward. He wept and shuddered, abandoning himself to a very paroxysm of terror.

When his door was pushed open a minute later, he did not hear the movement; with his head buried in the pillow he did not see the face of wonder, mingled with alarm, which viewed him from the doorway. He had forgotten that it was Anne Royaume's custom to attend to the young men's rooms during their absence at the afternoon lecture; and when her voice, asking in startled accents what was amiss and if he were ill, reached his ears, he sought, with a smothered shriek, to cover his head with the bedclothes. He fancied that Basterga was upon him!

"What is the matter?" she repeated, advancing slowly to the side of the bed. Then, getting no answer, she dragged the coverlet off him. "What is it? Don't you know me?"

He sat up then, saw who it was and came gradually to himself, but with many sighs and tears. She stood, looking down on him with contempt. "Has some one been beating you?" she asked, and searched with hard eyes--he had been no friend to her--for signs of ill-treatment.

He shook his head. "Worse," he sobbed. "Far worse! Oh, what will become of me? What will become of me? Lord, have mercy upon me! Lord, have mercy upon me!"

Her lip curled. Perhaps she was comparing him with another youth who had spoken to her that morning in a different strain.

"I don't think it matters much," she said scornfully, "what becomes of you."

"Matters?" he exclaimed.

"If you are such a coward as this! Tell me what it is. What has happened? If it is not that some one has beaten you, I don't know what it is--unless you have been doing something wrong, and they have put you out of the University? Is it that?"

"No!" he cried fretfully. "Worse, worse! And do you leave me! You can do nothing! No one can do anything!"

She had her own troubles, and to-day was almost sinking under them. But this was not her way of bearing them. She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. "Very well," she said, "I will go if I can do nothing."

"Do?" he cried vehemently. "What can you do?" And then, in the act of turning from him, she stood; so startling was the change, so marvellous the transformation which she saw come over his face. "Do," he repeated, trembling violently, and speaking in a tone as much altered as his expression. He rose to his feet. "Do? Perhaps you--you can do something--still. Wait. Please wait a minute! I--I was not quite myself." He passed his hand across his brow. She did not know that behind his face of frightened stupor his mind was working cunningly, following up the idea that had occurred to him.

She began to think him mad. But though she held him in distaste, she had no fear of him; and even when he closed the door with a cringing air, and a look that implored indulgence, she held her ground. "Only, you need not close the door," she said coldly. "There is no one in the house except my mother."

"Messer Basterga?"

"He has gone out. Is it of him," in sudden enlightenment, "that you are afraid?"

He nodded sullenly. "Yes," he said; and then he paused, eyeing her in doubt if he could trust her. At last, "It is, but, if you dared do it, I know how I could draw his teeth! How I could"--with the cruel grin of the coward--"squeeze him! squeeze him!" and he went through the act with his nervous, shaking fingers. "I could hold him like that! I could hold him powerless as the dog that would bite and dare not!"

She stared at him. "You?" she said; it was hard to say whether incredulity or scorn were written more plainly on her face. "You?"

"I! I!" he replied, with the same gesture of holding something. "And I know how to put him in your power also!"

"In my power!"

"Ay."

Her face grew hard as if she too held her enemy passive in her grip. Then her lip curled, and she laughed in scorn. "Ay! And what must I do to bring that about? Something, I suppose, you dare not, Louis?"

"Something you can do more easily than I," he answered doggedly. "A small thing, too," he continued, clasping his hands in his eagerness and looking at her with imploring eyes. "A nothing, a mere nothing!"

"And yet it will do so much?"

"I swear it will."

"Then," she retorted, eyeing him shrewdly, "if it is so easy to do why were you undone a minute ago? And puling like a child in arms?"

"Because," he said, flushing under her eyes, "it--it is not easy for me to do. And I did not see my way."

"It looked like it."

"But I see it now if you will help me. You have only to take a packet of letters from his room--and you go there when you please--and he is yours! While you have the letters he dare not stir hand or foot, lest you bring him to the scaffold!"

"Bring him to the scaffold?"

"Get the letters, give them to me, and I will answer for the rest." Louis' voice was low, but he shook with excitement. "See!" he continued, his eyes at all times prominent, almost starting from his head, "it might be done this minute. This minute!"

"It might," the girl replied, watching him coldly. "But it will not be done