Crack – crack! Bang!
The windows rattled.
"Hurrah for the People's Duke! Down with the King! Death to the Huguenots! – to the Barbets! – to the English! Death! Death! Death!"
"Lively down there – I wish we were up and away!" mourned the son of the ex-provost of the merchants, "but without arms and ammunition, what can fellows do?"
"As sayeth the Wise Man" – the voice of the Professor of Eloquence began to quicken into its stride – "'all her main roads are pleasant roads; and her very by-paths, her sentiers, lead to peace!'"
"If we could only get at those pistols and things!" murmured Guy Launay. "I wager you a groat that the old man is mistaken! Oh, just hearken to them outside there, will you? Peace is a chafing-dish. War is the great sport!"
"Down with the King! Bring along those chains for the barricade! Students to the rescue!"
Then came up to their ears the blithe marching song, the time strongly marked:
"The Guises are good men, good men,
The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!
And we'll fight till all be grey —
The Valois at our feet to-day,
And in his grave the Bearnais —
Our chief has come – the Balafré!"
"Keys of Sainted Peter!" moaned Guy Launay, "I cannot stand this. I am going down, though I have no better weapon than a barrel-stave."
And he hummed, rapping on the inscribed and whittled bench with his fingers, the refrain of the famous League song:
"For we'll fight till all be grey —
The Valois at our feet to-day,
In his deep grave the Bearnais —
Our chief has come – the Balafré!"
But Professor Anatole did not hear. He was in the whirl of his exposition of the blessings of universal peace. The Church had always brought a sword, and would to the end. But Philosophy, Divine Philosophy, which was what Solomon meant – peace was within her walls, prosperity, etc.
And by this time the Spaniard, otherwise the Abbé John, was crawling stealthily towards the locked door. Guy Launay, on the contrary, was breathing hard, rustling leaves, taking notes for two, both elbows working. The Master was in the full rush of his discourse. He saw nothing, knew nothing. He had forgotten the robing-room in the affirmation that, "In the midst of turmoil, the truly philosophic may, and often does, preserve the true peace – the truest of all, peace of mind, peace of conscience."
Bang!
There was a tremendous explosion immediately under the window.
"The King's men blowing up a barricade!" thought the Abbé John, with his hand on the great flat key, but drawing back a little. "If that does not wake him up, nothing will."
But the gentle, even voice went on, triumphing – the periods so familiar to the lecturer ringing out more clearly than ever. "Wars shall cease only when Wisdom, which is God, shall prevail. Philosophy is at one with Religion. The Thousand Years shall come a thousand times over and on the earth shall reign – "
The key gritted in the lock. The Abbé John disappeared behind the heavy curtain which hid the door of the robing-room.
The next moment he found himself in the presence of a man, lying rigidly on the Professor's table, all among the books and papers, and of the fairest young girl the Abbé John had ever seen, gently closing eyes which would never more look out upon the world.
Within, the Professor's voice droned on, discoursing of peace, righteousness, and eternal law. The great Day of the Barricades rattled and thundered without. Acrid blasts of sulphurous reek drove into the quiet room, and the Abbé John, speechless with amazement, looked into the wet eyes of this wonderful vision – the purest, the loveliest, the most forlorn maid in France.
CHAPTER II.
CLAIRE AGNEW
A long moment they stood gazing at each other, the girl and the Abbé John. They might have been sister and brother. There was the same dark clustering hair, close-gripped in love-locks to the head. The same large, dark, wide-pupilled eyes looked each into each as they stood and gazed across the dead man.
For a moment nothing was said, but the Abbé John recovered himself first.
"He knows you are here?" he questioned, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
"Who?" The girl flung the question back.
"Our Professor of Eloquence, the Doctor Anatole Long?"
"Aye, surely," said the girl; "he it was brought us hither."
He pointed to the dead man.
"Your father?"
The girl put her hand to her breast and sighed a strange piteous affirmative, yet with a certain reserve in it also.
"What was he, and how came you here?"
She looked at him. He wore the semi-churchly dress of a scholar of the University. But youth and truth vouched for him, shining from his eyes. So, at least, she thought. Besides, the girl was in a great perplexity.
"I am Claire," she said, "the daughter of him who was Francis Agnew, secret agent from the King of Scots to his brother of Navarre!"
"A heretic, then!" He fell back a step. "An agent of the Bearnais!"
The girl said nothing. She had not even heard him. She was bending over her father and sobbing quietly.
"A Huguenot," muttered the young Leaguer, "an agent of the Accursed!"
He kept on watching her. There was a soft delicate turn of the chin, childish, almost babyish, which made the heart within him like water.
"Chut!" he said, "what I have now to do is to get rid of that ramping steer of a Launay out there. He and his blanket-vending father must not hear of this!"
He went out quietly, sinking noiselessly to the ground behind the arras of the door, and emerging again, as into another world, amid the hum and mutter of professorial argument.
"All this," remarked Doctor Anatole, flapping his little green-covered pulpit with his left hand, "is temporary, passing. The clouds in the sky are not more fleeting than – "
"Guise! Guise! The good Guise! Our prince has come, and all will now be well!"
The street below spoke, and from afar, mingling with scattered shots which told the fate of some doomed Swiss, he heard the chorus of the Leaguers' song:
"The Cardinal, and Henry, and Mayenne, Mayenne!
We will fight till all be grey —
Put Valois 'neath our feet to-day,
Deep in his grave the Bearnais —
Our chief has come – the Balafré!"
Abbé John recovered his place, unseen by the Professor. He was pale, his cloak dusty with the wriggling he had done under the benches. He was different also. He had been a furious Leaguer. He had shouted for Guise. He had come up the stairs to seek for weapons wherewith to fight for that Sole Pillar of Holy Church.
"Well?" said Guy Launay, looking sideways at him.
"Well, what?" growled the Abbé John, most unclerically. He had indeed no right to the title, save that his uncle was a cardinal, and he looked to be one himself some day – that is, if the influence of his family held. But in these times credit was such a brittle article.
"Did you get the weapons?" snapped his friend – "the pistol, the sword-cane? You have been long enough about it. I have worn my pencil to a stub!"
The Abbé John had intended to