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Updated: June 11, 2025
Basterga asked, his brow contracting. "No, downstairs." "Did they get the box or the bottle?" There was a dangerous note in Basterga's voice; and a look in his eyes that scared the lad. Louis, as his instinct was, lied again, fleeing the more pressing peril. "Not to my knowledge," he said. "And you?" The scholar eyed him with bland suavity. "You had nothing to do with all this, I suppose?"
For a week and more after the thought occurred to him, he dared not approach the scholar's lodging, or be seen in the neighbourhood, so great was his fear of arousing Basterga's suspicions and setting him on his guard. At the end of a fortnight or so, the choice of ways was presented to him in a concrete form; and with an abruptness which placed him on the edge of perplexity.
"No, I mean at all!" "I want to know," Baudichon added the parrot phrase began to carry to Blondel's ears the note of fate "what you know about him." This time a pause betrayed Blondel's hesitation. Should he admit that he had been to Basterga's lodging; or dared he deny a fact that might imply an intimacy greater than he had acknowledged?
She was thinking, he guessed, of the hundred insults she had undergone at Basterga's hands, of the shame-compelling taunts to which she had been forced to listen, of the loathed touch she had been forced to bear. If there was aught in her mind beyond this, any motive deeper or more divine, he did not perceive it; enough, that he saw that she wavered, and he pressed her.
"Went something farther than that!" the Syndic struck in with a meaning nod, twice repeated. "It was whispered, and more than whispered I had it from my father that he raised the devil here, Messer Blondel; the very same that at Louvain strangled one of Agrippa's scholars who broke in on him before he could sink through the floor." Basterga's face took on an expression of supreme scorn.
For the most part it was she who talked. She had so much to tell him of the long nightmare, the nightmare of months, that had oppressed her; of her prayers, and fears and fits of terror; of Basterga's discovery of the secret and the cruel use he had made of it; of the slow-growing resignation, the steadfast resolve, the onward look to something, beyond that which the world could do to her, that had come to be hers.
Perhaps the fact that the latter feeling ceased to vex him before he had been a minute in the room, was the best testimony to Basterga's tact we could desire. Not that the scholar was either effusive or abject. It was rather by a frank address which took equality for granted, and by an easy assumption that the visit had no importance, that he calmed Messer Blondel's nerves and soothed his pride.
Speedily the Italians regained the ground they had lost, and with the tall form of their champion fighting in the van, began to sweep the towns-folk back into the Rue de la Cité. But arrived at the meeting of the ways, Basterga's followers paused, hesitating to expose their flank by entering this second street.
The young man's eyes were bright, his colour high. "You will not go up!" he said, a mocking note of challenge, replying to Basterga's tone, in his voice. "You will not go up." "Fool! Will you prevent us?" "You will not go up! No!" In the very act of falling on the lad, Basterga recoiled. Claude had not been idle while the others disputed.
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!
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