TWICE IN TIME

CHAPTER V The Most Awful Vision

A day before, Nostradame had defied stoutly the assault of two men-at-arms as formidable as Lady Olande's servitors, but he had been armed. Here, as Lady Olande reminded him, her power was all but absolute, and undoubtedly there were other men within call.

He turned briefly toward the door, but the page stood there with a savage grin, hand on dagger. Nostradame turned to his captor.

"Have you stopped to think," he said, "that I am not a simple nobody of peasant blood? I am known in the town and elsewhere, and my family is as good, perhaps, as yours. I doubt if you can kill me out of hand and not answer for it."

"I will answer, and have spent some hours in readying the answer," replied the lady. "You have been sent for to come and prescribe for me—your servant can testify as much, if he overheard my page speak to you. Well, sir, you have come, and instead of honest medicines you offer incantations and spells from the very floor of hell. We of la Fornaye are honest folk, and none will blame us for punishing you with death. I can and will abide any questioning successfully."

She looked as if she was confident of herself and her servants. Nostradame reflected again on his own misfortune in giving voice to the whisper that had come, only that morning, of this resolute lady's future. How had it gone? No more love for her, no more travel. A death close at hand. He fixed her with his eyes.

"I, who see the future for others, cannot see it for myself," quoth he, "yet I have it in mind that I will see your death, and not you mine."

"How that?" said the page, coming to his elbow. "You're saucy, you man of physic, in your last hour."

Nostradame gazed upon him with a deep, searching air.

"I pity you, springald. Your limbs should have many years of life. Yet—yes, I will say it—you shall die before this proud and cruel mistress of yours, which means you must die very soon indeed. This very night, mayhap."

"Eh, by Saint Denis," growled one of the men-at-arms, "this wizard sets curses upon us all."

"I set no curses, friend," Nostradame told him. "I do not see your death, for instance. You will live long, to repent your part in this foul work, mere dog though you be of Olande de la Fornaye."

"I do not stand and hear insults in my own hall. Bring him to the chamber beyond."

The men-at-arms came to either side of Nostradame, and, unarmed as he was, he suffered them to conduct him through the archway, along a corridor and to an inner chamber. After them swept Lady Olande, and the page, bearing a stand of burning tapers.

It was such a small nook of a room as the rich homes of the period afforded for chance private consultations. There was a settee of heavy dark wood, a small table, and a chair. The page set the lights on the table, where they illuminated an open book. Nostradame, glancing at the exposed pages, drew back and made the sign of the cross.

"That is an evil work and a forbidden," he said. "Spells for the raising of Satan himself—it merits to be burned."

Lady Olande laughed. "Yet you know it and what it is, which argues your own evil knowledge. I myself have never bothered to read in it—reading is to me a vain burden. But it has been in the house, and now it will convict you. The authorities, when they question, will learn how you opened it to read—how I sensed the nearness in the air of imps and goblins, blackest and foulest, and how I, in terror and anger, called my servants to slay you before you did ill with your knowledge of it. Seat him at the table, and bury your swords in his body."

"Sit," the page said to Nostradame, who turned upon him to blazing a stare that the pert youngster gave back.

"Order me no orders, youth," said Nostradame. "Lady Olande, you are determined upon my death. I prefer to die standing."

"So be it," she said, and motioned to the two.

Nostradame had never stood in fear of death. Yet now he sighed over the shortening of life, as one might sigh over the close of a happy banquet, or a gay pageant where one holds a pleasant seat. In moments it would be over, did the Lady Olande have her will. He would not know the form of her false evidence, nor how soon authorities would search his house for what they would find… .

Suddenly he drew himself tense. Death he did not fear, no; only dying in vain. Would they destroy his papers, as the vile records of one who worshipped the devil? All his verses of the times to come, the hope he had of warning whole races and nations yet unborn? Could he not protest that, at least fight against it? The man who had spoken in the main hall slid his sword from its sheath.

"This is in a way your own doing, sir," he said, a little diffidently, to Nostradame. "You told me that I would live without hurt after this matter is done."

"Not quite did I say that," demurred Nostradame. "You will live, yes; but you forget that I said you would live to repent, and repentance comes through suffering and sorrow." * * *

As he spoke he had sidled, as though timid of the swordpoint, toward the nearest wall. There hung a tapestry worth, perhaps, a hundred gold nobles. Now he shot out his arm, and with a quick clutch and pull wrenched the hanging free. He half-wadded the fabric, and received in it the thrust of the sword. A moment later he had come in close, gripped the guard of the weapon, and torn it from the man's grasp. His other fist, big and brawny as a smith's, darted a heavy buffet, and the man-at-arms fell with a heavy sigh, as though struck by a hammer.

Possessing himself of the captured weapon, Nostradame fell upon the remaining armed servitor, who at the second engage knew that he had met his master in fence. He ran out of the room, and after him the Lady Olande flung a curse so foul that the lowest guard-room of a mercenary company could scarce have matched it.

"Run!" she called to the page. "Run, and summon every male retainer! I'll have this devil hewn in pieces." And she faced Nostradame with eyes in which death stood up. "As for you, with your sleights and subtleties, you fear at least this book which I shall make evidence against you. Hear, while I read something to stun your ears."

She was at the table, picking up the volume. "Here is something, in the name of hell's legions, to confound an enemy! In the very language of demons, sir! I read it upon you—Sator, Arepos, Tenet—"

"I could not ask a self-conviction neater and more complete," said a sneering voice that Nostradame knew.

In walked a figure in black. It was Hippolyte Gigny, the witch-finder. In the corridor behind him lingered not a pair of sword-bearing retainers, but half a dozen. The page was struggling among them, and cried out once, then fell bleeding. His death, so lately foretold, had caught up with him.

"As I am the king's servant, I suspected this at the beginning," quoth Gigny. "For a lady to be so glib about witchcraft in charging a neighbor, she herself must be versed in it. When the man she accused stood innocent—well, innocent of wizardry—my suspicion grew. And there came to me now a certain word of what you wrought here, Olande de la Fornaye. I find you at your witch work, book in hand and a black spell upon your lips."

She still clutched the book, and glared defiance at Gigny.

"You would dare charge me with that? I am a noblewoman, the peer of any save the king—"

"And I am the king's servant, speaking with his mouth. Take the book, one of you, and handle it gingerly lest hell blast you. It shall be given to the judges. Another of you, place her under arrest." Gigny spoke to Nostradame. "She was vomiting a curse of hell upon you, and I forestalled her. Are we quits now, sir? This service of mine tonight cancels the false charge of mine today?"

"More than quits," said Nostradame.

"Then I give you good-night."

And Nostradame left the raided home of Olande de la Fornaye, for whom waited a grim judgment and a death of agony under the law that suffered not a witch to live.* * *

He entered his modest home, and there waited Anne.

"It was you, of course, who saved me again," he said to her.

"Yes. I heard her plan it, as before, and the matter of the false accusation she perfected. When I was too late to tell you, I sought out the witch-finder in his lodging. He went readily to her home." She sighed. "In some way I must think of what I will do hereafter. She was my only kin, and I hers. I have no shelter—"

"If you and she were only kin, then you stand her heir after she is slain by law. Broad lands, wealth, servants." He bowed before her. "My Lady Anne."

"Not yet, not yet," she pleaded. "I cannot go there at once. Suffer me to stay here the night. We are friends—perhaps even— "

"Short hours ago, we were friends and equals. Now you will be of the noblesse, and I am a physician, of small means and simple repute. Lady Anne, my thanks for your kind and saving service twice in a day's space, and I shall live and die your debtor—"

"Oh, have done!" she cried at him, in something of a temper. "You make the gaining of fortune an ill and cold thing. We shall go on as we began—comradely and happy—or I will not touch of Olande de la Fornaye's estate one copper sou."

"Think, child," he bade her. "Think, and then decide. I will leave you to yourself for a space."

He bowed, and withdrew to the study beyond.

The driving urge was upon him, and quickly he groped in the dark for his robe and rod. Dampening the fringe, he sat on the tripod. He remembered the vision that had been interrupted, and the words that had come out of the mist. "Atoma divisa… ." In a moment, he would know what was meant by that strange paradox in two classical languages.

In the front room, Anne stirred with housewifely care the fire on the open hearth. Obediently she thought as Nostradame had bade her, and her thoughts held not one iota of plan for any drawing apart from him. She was going to be rich—well. Noble—well. Influential—well. Those qualities would do for him what he modestly would not do for himself. He and his gifts would be called to the attention of the king. In his time he would be great and honored, and in all other times remembered, until the end of—

Then she started up, for from the study had come a scream of mortal terror, the awful cry of a man who, brave and strong, is undone by a horror too great for his courage to compass.

She ran, throwing open the door. The light streamed through the doorway, and she saw Nostradame, half fallen from his tripod stool, on one knee, an arm lifted across his face as though to hide in its shadow.

"Atoma divisa—the atom divided!" he cried brokenly. "I have seen its division, and surely the world is shattered by that dividing!"

She ran to him, and knelt at his side. She, whom lately he had so loftily called a child, put her arms around him as a mother might.

"The riving of the atom," he quavered. "It strikes a city, and the city crumbles to powder—a people is wiped out—surely these horrors shake the walls of heaven itself, and I have seen the last awful hour of the world!"

"Do not look," Anne begged him, and held him close. "Do not look."

His eyes opened and met hers, and it was as if he had wakened from a dream of inferno and saw paradise.