A smile of surprising humor played on the soldier's face. "Nay, but you knew him!" he retorted, pointing upwards with his hand. "Trust me, young sir," he added significantly, "I am less inclined to mount now than I was before."
The clerk intervened before Felix could resent the insult. "Steady," he said; "I will go up and do it."
"Not so!" Felix rejoined, pushing him aside in turn. And he ran up the ladder. But near the top he paused, and began to descend again. "I have no knife," he said shamefacedly.
"Pshaw! Let me come!" cried the stranger. "I see you are both good comrades. I trust you. Besides, I am more used to this ladder work than you are, and time is everything."
He ran up as he spoke, and standing on the highest round but one he grasped the bar above his head, and swung himself lightly up, so as to gain a seat on it. With more caution he wormed himself along it until he reached the rope. Fortunately there was a long coil of it about the bar; and warning his companions in a whisper, he carefully, and with such reverence as the time and place allowed, let down the body to them. They received it in their arms; and were loosening the noose from the neck when an outburst of voices and the noise of footsteps at the nearer end of the street surprised them. For an instant the two stood in the gloom, breathless, stricken, still, confounded. Then with a single impulse they lifted the body between them, and huddled blindly to the door. It opened at their touch, they stumbled in, and it fell to behind them. The foremost of the party outside had been within ten paces of them. A narrow escape!
Yet they had escaped. But what next? What of their companion? The moment the door shut behind them they would have rushed out again, ay, to certain death, so strongly had the soldier's trust appealed to their confidence. But they had the body in their arms; and by the time it was laid on the stairs, a score of men had passed. The opportunity was over. They could do nothing but listen. "Heaven help him!" fell from the clerk's quivering lips. Pulling the door ajar, they stood, looking each moment to hear a challenge, a shot, the clash of swords. But no. They did hear the party halt under the gallows, and pass some brutal jest, and go on. And that was all.
They could scarcely believe their ears; no, nor even their eyes, when a few minutes later the street being now quiet, they passed out, and stood in it shuddering. For there still swung the corpse dimly outlined above them! There! Certainly there! The clerk seized his companion's arm and drew him back. "It was the fiend!" he stammered. "See, your father is still there! It was the fiend who helped us!"
But suddenly the figure they were watching became agitated; another instant and it slid gently to the ground. It was the soldier. "O ye gods!" he cried, bent double with silent laughter. "Saw you ever such a trick? How I longed to kick if it were but my toe at them, and I forbore! Fools that they were! Did man ever see a body hung in its sword? But it was a good trick, eh?" appealing to them with a simple pride in his invention. "I had the rope loose in my hand when they came, and I drew it twice round my neck-and one arm trust me-and swung off gently. It is not every one who would have thought of that, my children."
It was odd. They still shook with fear, and he with laughter. He did not seem to give a thought to the danger he had escaped. Pride in his readiness and a keen sense of the humorous side of the incident entirely possessed him. At the very door of the house he still chuckled from time to time; muttering between the ebullitions, "Ah, I must tell Diane! Diane will be pleased!"
Once inside, however, he acted with more delicacy than might have been expected. He stood aside while the other two carried the body upstairs; and himself waited patiently in the bare room below, which showed signs of occasional use as a stable. Here the clerk Adrian presently found him, and murmured some apology. Mistress Marie, he said, had fainted.
"A matter which afflicts you, my friend," the soldier replied with a grimace, "about as much as your master's death. Pooh, man, do not look fierce! Good luck to you. Only if-but this is no house for gallantry to-night-I had spruced myself, you had had to look to your ewe lamb!"
The clerk turned pale and red by turns. This man seemed to read his thoughts as if he had indeed been the fiend. "What do you wish?" he stammered.
"Only shelter until the early morning when the streets are most quiet; and a direction to the Rue des Lombards."
"The Rue des Lombards?"
"Yes, why not?" But though the soldier still smiled, the lines of his mouth hardened suddenly. "Why not to the Rue des Lombards?"
"I know no reason why you should not be going there," replied the clerk boldly. "It was only that the street is near; and a friend of my late master's lives in it."
"His name?"
The clerk started; the question was put so abruptly, and in a tone so imperious. "Nicholas Toussaint," he answered involuntarily.
"Ay?" replied the other, raising his hand to his chin meditatively and glancing at Adrian with a look that for all the world reminded him of an old print of the eleventh Louis, which hung in a room at the Hôtel de Ville. "Your master, young man, was of the moderate party-a Politique?"
"He was."
"A good man and a Catholic? one who loved France? A Leaguer only in name?" he continued with vividness.
"Yes, that is so."
"But his son? He is a Leaguer out and out-one who would rise to fortune on the flood tide of the mob? A Sorbonnist? The priests have got hold of him? He would do to others as they have done to his father? A friend of Le Clerc and Boucher?"
Adrian nodded reluctantly. This strange man confounded and yet fascinated him: this man so reckless and gay one moment, so wary the next: exchanging in an instant the hail of a boon companion for the tone of a noble.
"And is your young master also a friend of this Nicholas Toussaint?" was the next question.
"No," said Adrian, "he has been forbidden the house. M. Toussaint does not approve of his opinions."
"Ha! That is so, is it," rejoined the stranger with his former gayety. "And now enough: where will you lodge me until morning?"
"If my closet will serve you," Felix answered with a hesitation he would not have felt a few minutes before, "it is at your will. I will bring some food there at once, and will let you out if you please at five." And Adrian added some simple directions, by following which his guest might reach the Rue des Lombards without difficulty.
An hour later if the thoughts of those who lay sleepless under that roof could have been traced, some strange contrasts would have appeared. Was Felix Portail thinking of his dead father, or of his sweetheart in the Rue des Lombards, or of his schemes of ambition? Was he blaming the crew of whom until to-day he had been one, or sullenly cursing those factious Huguenots as the root of the mischief? Was Adrian thinking of his kind master, or of his master's daughter? Was the guest dreaming of his narrow escape? or revolving plans beside which Felix's were but the schemes of a rat in a drain? Perhaps Marie alone-for Susanne slept a child's sleep of exhaustion-had her thoughts fixed on him, who so few hours before had been the centre of the household.
But such is life in troubled times. Pleasure and pain come mingled together, and men snatch the former even from the midst of the latter with a trembling joy; knowing that if they wait to go a pleasuring until the sky be clear, they may wait until nightfall.
When Adrian called his guest at cock-crow the latter rose briskly and followed him down to the door. "Well, young sir," he said on the threshold, as he wrapped his cloak round him and took his sheathed sword in his hand, "I am obliged to you. When I can do you a service, I will."
"You can do me one now," replied the clerk bluntly, "It is ill work having to do with strangers in these days. You can tell me who you are, and to which side you belong."
"Which side? I have told you-my own. And for the rest," continued the soldier, "I will give you a hint." He brought his lips