It was indeed the Grandjean cottage, as he now observed, groaning. But why was no one else disturbed? Why did nothing move on the earth or in the houses? He told himself that there had been an accident, a careless flame on the hearth, a fallen candle as the girl had climbed upstairs to bed. But his peasant’s prescience and awareness denied this. He knew something frightful was afoot.
He reached the cottage. It stood far apart from the others, in its large gardens and trees. Now those trees were a cave of crimson light, in which the cottage was burning fiercely. The distant houses were still shrouded in ominous darkness. He heard a roaring. This roaring came from the flames, but there was another and indefinable sound with it, as from a kindred roaring at a considerable distance—a human sound.
He leapt over the gate, not waiting to unfasten it. The windows of the cottage were scarlet with the shadow of the flames inside. He burst open the door, shouting loudly. The smoke and heat stung his eyes; water ran from them. For some moments he could not see.
Then, as he stumbled about in that inferno, he fell over something. The flames flared up. He saw that the old man, François, and Cecile lay at his feet, huddled together in one heap.
His mind tottered with his horror. With his great strength, he seized both of them, dragged them from the fiery pit which momentarily appeared about to engulf them. He carried them far from the house, deposited them on the grass, whose dew sparkled like quivering rubies in the reflection of the flames. He shouted, again and again, looking backwards desperately at the silent houses at a little distance. But no one answered his shouts.
The girl was moaning. Crequy saw that a wound had been dealt her on the head, and that it was bleeding profusely. He bent over the old man. François’ gaping empty eyes stared upwards at the moon. His mouth had dropped open, and no breath came from it. A terrible wound oozed on his forehead, which appeared crushed in deeply. Crequy knew that the old man was dead.
Loud tearing sobs came from Crequy’s throat. He shouted frantically, over and over. Still, no one came. Then, seeing the serious condition of the girl, he lifted her in his arms and started back to his own home. Her blood dripped on his hands. She had ceased to moan; she lay in his arms like one already dead.
He had almost reached his tavern, weaving and running desperately, when he became conscious of a prolonged and savage roaring. He looked towards the château.
And then, he halted in his tracks, gaping idiotically, the girl sagging in his arms. For the walls of the château were leaping with rosy flames. And around the grounds Crequy could see the black dancing shadows of a countless number of men. He could hear a far distant screaming.
And then it was that he knew. He did not think, as a more civilized and urban man might have done, that this was all an accident, that the men leaping about the château were endeavoring to save it. He did not deceive himself frenziedly as would have done that more civilized and urban man. Aware, naturally, of the vileness and ferocity of the human mind, he understood at once.
He flung himself in the shadows along the trees and the houses. Now he raced towards his tavern with numbed legs. His groaning breath tore at his throat. He dashed into his house, closed the door after him, and bolted it. Roselle, hearing that precipitous entry, appeared at the doorway of her chamber, in her shift. She had a candle in her hand. When she saw her uncle, and his burden, she swayed and cried aloud. But he brushed by her, carrying the unconscious girl to his niece’s bed, and laying her upon it with trembling arms. Then he turned to Roselle, and spoke hoarsely:
“See you, my child, listen closely. Old Grandjean has been murdered by these foul animals. They thought they had murdered this little one, also. They then set fire to their cottage, thinking to hide their murder. Do not swoon, or I shall thrash you violently! Take care of this child, hide her. Let no one enter this house. See, there is my pistol on the fireplace, Keep it with you. I shall return in a short time.”
The girl did not scream. Crequy, with one last longing look at the pistol, ran from the house, hastened towards the château. He had but one thought: to rescue the Comte de Vitry. As he rushed headlong, his slow peasant mind was red with his fury. He understood it all. Like a foul phantom face, the countenance of the priest flickered before him, smiling darkly and subtly.
But when he arrived at the château, he saw it was useless. He would only be murdered, if he attempted to reach the Comte, and then what would happen to his little cabbage, Roselle, and Cecile? Nevertheless, he slunk about the burning château, seeking, like a wild animal, for some means of carrying out his desperate hope. Some one shouted in his ear, and he paused, dazed:
“Ha, now, Crequy, you have your revenge on this monster, this heretic! Have you not always hated him? Behold him, then, on his balcony. Laugh you in his face, Crequy!”
Crequy lifted his streaming eyes. He saw Paul de Vitry on his balcony, looking down at his seething, red-stained gardens.
Crequy gazed at the Comte, and the Comte gazed at him, over the sea of writhing and leaping heads. For a long time, they gazed like this, in the light of the devouring fire.
Then Crequy raised his hand, slowly, terribly, as though taking an oath. The Comte did not move. But in his eyes there appeared a strange and mournful pleading. Crequy shook his head, with a frightful expression.
Crequy turned away. He slipped stealthily from the throng of maddened faces.
He made his way to the priest’s house. He knocked, softly. There was no answer. Crequy pushed open the door. The house was in darkness. Softly, moving on the balls of his feet, Crequy searched the house. Then a howl broke from him. The priest had escaped! He was gone.
Crequy rushed from the house. He glanced about him, like a wild thwarted beast. On what road had the priest fled? The road to Paris was beyond the house of Grandjean. He, Crequy, had seen no horse, no carriage, no man on foot. His glittering eyes plunged about him in the dark. He saw the gleaming cross on the church.
He began to run towards the church, his club in his hand. Now he knew that in that sanctuary the priest was hidden. But he was not entirely sure of it until he attempted to open the ancient doors. They were locked. A deep savage shout burst from him, primitive and full of blood-lust.
His strength was great, heightened by his insane fury. He broke down the doors in a few moments, and plunged into the deep black vault of the church. Nothing stirred under the curved arches. The tops of the old pillars were silver with moonlight, but all below was in profound silence and darkness.
Silent now, like a stalking animal, Crequy crept towards the altar. The flickering red light was like a malignant eye. He fumbled on the altar for a candle, found the short thick stub of one. He reached up and lit that candle from the eternal flame of the altar.
Then, inch by inch, holding the wavering taper high, he searched the little church. But he did not find the priest.
Now that long savage howl, frustrated, burst from him again. It rang back in dreadful echoes from the groined roof and the crowding pillars. The light of the taper glanced back from the ancient walls like the dancing shadows of demons.
Again, he searched the church, peering behind the altar. And so it was that he found the small sunken door.
He stopped there, glaring at it, smiling evilly. He examined the lock. The key was not in it. He pushed against the door. It did not stir under his hand.
Then he spoke softly, his mouth near the wooden door, and his voice was wheedling and horrible:
“Ah, now, father, there is a suppliant here, a sinner, who would confess to you, dear father! Will you not come out and listen to him? Will you not join him in confession, good father in Christ? While he tells you of his sins, will you not tell him how you murdered a poor old man, and the Comte de Vitry? Ah, father, do not be deaf to this miserable suppliant! Come forth and confess to him, before you descend into hell and meet your master face to face.”
His dreadfully soft voice came back to him in muffled echoes from the walls and the ceiling. The
altar flame leapt up once, then seemed to cower. The darkness crept nearer, seemed filled with unseen but terrible faces.
Crequy knocked gently on the door. His wheedling voice was frightful to hear. “Ah, now, sweet father, you cannot be asleep? Not while the Comte is being murdered? Not while a suppliant pleads with you?”
Grinning madly, he pressed his ear to the door. Was that a faint gasping stir behind its wooden panels? Was that a caught breath, a shuffling, a descending, a creeping away?
Crequy began to laugh, at first gently, then with rising power, until all the church echoed back in broken and thunderous sounds that inhuman laughter. The pillars seemed to tremble in it. The walls appeared to groan and quiver.
Crequy set down his candle carefully. Then he applied his shoulder to the door. But, set in its aperture, it did not move. Again and again streaming with sweat, he assaulted it. Now his flesh was broken and bleeding. His great brow and bald skull were wrinkled like an ape’s. His lips were drawn back over his teeth. He bent his head, straining at the door. All his life, his heart, his spirit, were concentrated in that assault. He appeared to be leaning against it, like an exhausted man. But that was deceptive. For now a faint splintering and squealing sound came from the tortured wood.
Moment after moment passed away, and Crequy did not appear to move. But the muscles of his neck and arm and back turned purple, became black with the congested blood. Veins sprang out over his brow and mighty crimson cheeks. His legs bent forward, and the muscles sprang out like huge rocks under the straining cloth of his britches and his hose. And now there was no sound at all in the church, except that dim groaning of the strong door.
Then, all at once, the hinges gave way. The door fell inward with a deafening crash. It thudded down the wet and stony steps leading into the crypt. Crequy, having picked up his candle again, stood on the threshold, peering into the gloom. He was gasping aloud, his lungs laboring. His body shook like a tree in a storm.
Now he was smiling again. With slow dainty steps he descended holding the candle high.
He found himself in a tiny crypt. The old stone walls ran with moisture. A lizard, and other noisome small creatures, sprang across his feet, disappeared in the darkness. The floor of the crypt was slimy, running with thin snakes of black water. And, in a far corner, huddling on his knees, was the priest.
Now, never before in his life, had the thought of personal death occurred vitally to Monseigneur Antoine de Pacilli. Like all men, of powerful good or evil, death had appeared to him to be a swamp which sucked under others, but could never engulf himself. It had been an academic idea to this priest, but not one of such importance as to demand pondering or reflection. It was something which stealthily attacked lesser men, but none such as those of supreme intellect, cold egotism and superhuman endowments. In fact, it had something vulgar in it, and shameful and humiliating. This calamity which destroyed rats and canaille had naught to do with such as Monseigneur Antoine de Pacilli.
Now, he was face to face with this detestable, this degrading, this contemptible, but all-powerful enemy.
So it was that Crequy, when directing the full candle-light on the white face of the staring priest, saw no fear upon it, no Whimpering dread, but an all-pervading horror and repudiation. That delicate carved countenance, those almond eyes, that sleek dark head, seemed to vibrate before him in an aura of its own. Even in that dread moment, the aristocrat was there, fallen to his knees from exhaustion, and not from fright.
Crequy laughed aloud, rocking on his heels. The candlelight leapt upon the walls, the low ceiling, the floor. But de Pacilli did not move. His face became narrower and whiter than ever, as if in cold and intellectual denial.
“Ah, now, sweet father, why so silent, so pale?” cried Crequy. “Why have you ignored a suppliant? Or have you been so engrossed in your foul prayers that you did not hear my voice? Or have you been listening to the murdered soul of the Comte de Vitry, whispering its last confession in your ears?”
The priest was silent. His tilted black eyes glittered like the eyes of some evil serpent, watchful, unmoving, expressionless.
Crequy carefully laid his candle on the floor. He stretched out his hands; he grinned; he carefully examined, then curved, his great murderous fingers. He looked at the priest again, and licked his lips. Now an obscene and inhuman light danced, flickered, blazed in his little starting eyes. Slowly, inch by inch, he crept across the cracked streaming floor towards the priest, his hands extended, his lips uttering strange gibberish. The priest did not move. He watched the approach of death with no change of expression. He might have been a dead man, waiting.
Crequy reached him. He paused for a moment, and executioner and victim stared at each other in the uncertain candlelight.
Then Crequy howled again, and it was a wolfish, a tigerish, sound. He reached down. He seized the priest by the throat, dragged him to his feet. De Pacilli did not resist. He hung from Crequy’s hands like a narrow black sheath topped by a white fixed face.
Crequy drew that face so close to his own that they almost touched.
“Pray now, dog, pray now, sweet father, for in five instants you shall see the face of Satan,” he whispered. He shook the limp body by the throat, so that it swayed in his grip.
Then, his hands closed tighter about that slender throat. He felt his hands sink through the flesh to the bone. He felt muscle and vein crush and dissolve under his grasp. The priest did not struggle; his arms hung slackly at his side.
Slowly, that white narrow face turned red, purple, then black. The eyes had fixed themselves, even in their rolling upwards, upon Crequy’s fiendish countenance. Now, they fastened there, as he died.
But, to the last, those eyes did not flicker or close. The horror only increased, as if transfixed by a most frightful and appalling vision.
CHAPTER XLII
There was one man at the Court of Louis the Thirteenth to whom the powerful Catholic reaction and the liberal Protestant drive towards liberty, enlightenment and justice meant little or nothing. At the most strenuous, he was vaguely amused; at the least, he found it all excessively tedious. He was a very young man at this time, vivacious, heedless, irresponsible and gay, full of light malice and high humor. He found every one ridiculous to a lesser or greater degree, and it was not unusual for him to burst out laughing even in the face of the Cardinal.
Once, with the most imperturbable gravity, he had addressed the ambitious Cardinal, in the very midst of an illustrious assemblage, as “your Majesty.” Then, as the Cardinal paled, and his tiger eyes glittered ominously, and those about caught their breath and glanced at each other, the young man had hastily amended with a mockery of a confused bow: “I implore your pardon, your Eminence: I meant—lèse majesté.”
This appalling witticism had gone the whole length and breadth of France, and had aroused fury, laughter, applause and admiration, depending upon the audience and its political or religious affiliations.
The witticism rose from the fact that the Cardinal, by his pressure on the Queen Mother, had induced her to arrange a marriage between this young man and Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a young lady of great family and enormous wealth, whom the youth loathed. By his insistence and arrangement of this marriage, the Cardinal had usurped truly royal privilege. Hence, the witticism. It had been a personal and narrow jest of the young man’s, and he was too lighthearted and superficial to have meant any larger implication. But the larger implication was applied to it by all Frenchman, and the young man received the reputation of being exceedingly subtle and sinister, a conclusion which would have astonished and amused him.
Nevertheless, in his whistling, careless, jesting way, he had no mean intelligence. He never lost an opportunity to bait the Cardinal. To the casual observer, this young man was only an amusing and powerless nonentity, for all his royal birth. Only the few who were his intimates knew of his true ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and sleepless hatred for the Cardinal.
This young man was Gas
ton, younger brother of the young King. He was in high contrast to his brother, for he had gifts of tongue, person and personality which humiliatingly dwarfed the sullen, morose and silent Louis. Gaston was also the darling of the Queen Mother, who had personal reasons for hating the Cardinal. There was nothing which the wheedling Gaston could not accomplish when appealing to Marie de Medici, especially if it had something to do with disconcerting either the Cardinal or the King.
As if the projected marriage was not sufficient to annoy young Gaston, another and more serious matter had arisen, which had turned him from light malice against the Cardinal to iron hatred.
He had had, as his tutor, one old and artistocratic Corsican, Marshal Ornano, who was devoted to his pupil, and to the Queen Mother. Seeing the young man’s repugnance to the marriage to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, he had urged him to refuse the young lady. The matter became not only a skirmish in the royal household, but an affair of national, and international importance, to those who wished to break the power of the Cardinal and the King. Mesdames de Conde and de Chevreuse joined in the conspiracy. Conde, Soissons, and Nevers came surging with secret offers of help. The young man’s powerful and illegitimate brothers, Vendome Governor of Brittany, and Vendome the Grand Prior, enthusiastically joined the tumult. England, Savoy and Spain hastened eagerly forward to observe the proceedings and join in the plotting. All the disaffected magnates of France gathered together in secret session. At length, it was decided that Gaston was to conquer and hold some frontier province. In the meantime, his adherents were to murder the Cardinal, and rid France forever of that gigantic and looming shadow of power.
However, the Cardinal’s spies were only too efficient. Ornano, the devoted and ancient Corsican, was seized and thrown into the prison of Vincennes, where he was later poisoned at the command of the Cardinal. Gaston, brokenhearted, thrown at last out of his light-hearted and indifferent malice into a fury of hatred, grief and lust for vengeance, appealed to his brother, who refused to see him. He rushed to the Cardinal, broke through his advisers and intimidated guards, forced his way to the bed-chamber of his Eminence, and, leaning over the gold and scarlet bed, struck the priest violently in the face, over and over. When he had done this, he raised his fist, uttered slow and dreadful imprecations, and vowed that he would never sleep until he had avenged the death of his beloved tutor.