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Updated: June 23, 2025
If he could do this and enter with them, even though he lost half his men, he might save the city. But the Savoyards, though they gave back, gave back slowly. Within twenty paces of the gate the advance wavered, stopped, hung an instant. Of that instant Basterga took advantage. He had moved on undetected, with the rearmost burghers: now he saw his opportunity and seized it.
"That is what you are, with all your boasting! A coward! Afraid of why, man, of what are you afraid? Basterga?" "It may be," Claude answered sullenly. "Basterga? Why " But on the word Blondel stopped; and over his face came a startling change. The rage died out of it and the flush; and fear, and a cringing embarrassment, took the place of them.
The big man spoke with his eyes on the floor. Had he turned them on the Syndic he must have seen that he was greatly agitated. Beads of moisture stood on his brow, his face was red, he swallowed often and with difficulty. At length, with an effort at composure, "Possibly your product is not, after all, the same as Ibn Jasher's?" he said. "I tested it in the same way," Basterga answered quietly.
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.
And for the third time, drawing himself up to his full height, he tapped his brow. "Do you doubt its power?" For answer Grio shrugged his shoulders, his manner sullen and contemptuous. "You do?" "I don't see how it works, Messer Basterga," the veteran muttered. "I say not you have not good wits. You have, I grant it. But the best of wits must have their means and method.
Claude, at the first sign of peril, had put himself between Anne and the door; and, had not the fear which seized the girl at the sight of Basterga robbed her of the power to think, she must have thrilled with a new and delicious sensation. She, who had not for years known what it was to be sheltered behind another, was now to know the bliss of being protected.
Claude answered gently. He was radiant. He would not have exchanged his position for a crown. She was looking, and he was going to fight. "You fool," Basterga returned, "we have but to call the watch from the Tertasse and you will be haled to the lock-up, and jailed and whipped, if not worse! And that jade with you! Stultus es? Do you hear? Messer Syndic, will you be thwarted in this fashion?
Finally he awoke to the knowledge of place and time with a name ringing in his ears; a name so fixed in his waking thoughts that, before he knew where he was or what he was doing, he repeated it in a tone that drew all eyes upon him. "Basterga!" Some knew he had slept and smiled; more had not noticed it, and turned, struck by the strange tone in which he echoed the name.
He closed it all but too late. All but too late, if the thought sent cold shivers down his back if Basterga had returned. With an air almost as furtive as that of the lad before him, he signed to him to approach. Louis crossed the room with a show of caution the more strange as the early December sun was shining and all without was cheerful. "Has he come back?" Blondel whispered. "Claude?"
Again, with a ring of exultation in her voice, "I have proved it!" she cried. "How?" "There was in the box a drug, he told me, possessed of an almost miraculous power over disease of body and mind; so rare and so wonderful that none could buy it, and he knew of but this one dose, of which Messer Basterga had possessed himself. He begged me to take it and to give it to him.
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