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Updated: June 11, 2025
Claude took his cap and prepared to withdraw, well content with himself and the line he had taken. But he did not leave the house until his ears assured him that the two who had ascended the stairs together had actually repaired to Basterga's room on the first floor, and there shut themselves up.
Blondel's thin lips were warrant to such of the world as had eyes to see that in the ordinary things of life he would have been one of the last to put faith in a man of Basterga's stamp: and one of the first, had the case been other than his own, to laugh at the credulity he was displaying.
But as he set his foot on the lowest stair, Anne, held as she was against Basterga's breast, and almost stifled by the arm which covered her mouth, managed to clutch the Syndic by his skirts, and, once having taken hold, held him with the strength of despair.
He turned to the others, generous wrath in his face. "Shame on you to torture a woman so a woman alone! And you three to one!" Basterga's face grew dark. "You are right! We are three," he muttered, his hand slowly seeking a weapon in the corner behind him. "You speak truth there, we are three to one! And " "You maybe twenty, I will not suffer it!" the lad cried gallantly. "You may be a hundred "
Near the water's edge the projecting upper floor of a granary promised shelter from the rain; under this the stranger halted, and turning, lowered with a brusque gesture his cloak from his face. Alas, the eager "Why, Messer Blondel " that leapt to Basterga's lips died on them. He stood speechless with disappointment, choking with chagrin. The stranger noted it and laughed.
Claude did not understand this; but the man's company was welcome now; and the sight of Basterga's door, not three paces from the place where he stood, diverted his thoughts. He had not been above stairs since the day of his arrival, but he knew that Basterga's room was the nearest to the stairs. That was the door then; behind that door the Italian wrought his devilish spells!
And in his thoughts he passed again over the road he had travelled since his first visit to Basterga's room, since the hour when the scholar had unrolled before him the map of the town he called "Aurelia," and had told him the story of Ibn Jasher and the Physician of Aleppo. "No, I am not well," he answered.
What inward monition had spoken to her, what she had seen, what she had heard, besides that note of triumph in Basterga's voice, matters not. Her mind was changed. "No!" she cried. "You do not go up! No!" "You will not let us see her?" Basterga exclaimed. "No!" Her breast heaving, she confronted them without fear.
With a sickening thud Grio's knife sank between the shoulders, a moment the body writhed in Basterga's herculean grip, then it sank lifeless to the floor. "Had you struck him, fool," Basterga muttered wrathfully, wiping a little blood from his sleeve, "as you wanted to strike him, he had squealed like a pig! Now 'tis the same, and no noise. Ha! Seize him!" He spoke too late.
If he had been sincere in that attempt on Basterga's secrets, which Madame's delirious words had frustrated, was he sincere now? Was his object now as then the suppression of the devilish practices of which he had warned Claude, and in the punishment of which he had threatened to include the girl with her tempter?
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