No distance breaks the ties of blood,
Brothers are brothers evermore.'
KEBLE.
IN the meantime, other guests had come out upon the balcony, and were observing, not without amusement, the frank delight of the reunited brothers. Armand, who was the first to notice' this, whispered to his brother:
‘Let us come away to some place where we can talk in quiet.'
‘With all my heart. But whither? '
A question not very easy to answer. Our ancestors did not understand, as we do, the charms of privacy, especially in domestic arrangements; and if they had done so, the enormous crowds which were then in Constance would have rendered privacy almost unattainable.
There would have been little quiet for the brothers in the lodgings where the Duke of Burgundy's gentlemen lounged and drank wine, and played games of hazard, whilst they imagined they were watching his interests, or protecting his agents at the Council. It would have been still worse in the house which had been hired for the Chancellor of Paris, in St. Paul's Street, next to the lodging of the Greek archbishop, —where Hubert slept in an attic, at the foot of the junior chaplain's bed.
But Armand solved the difficulty by a bribe to the host of the Golden Lion large enough to procure them, even there and then, a private room with lights and supper. Established here, the brothers first indulged in a long, earnest gaze at each other. Both were well pleased with the result. Hubert looked into the fair, ingenuous face of a gallant youth, almost a boy in years, and perhaps no more in mind, to whom his own large heart went out at once in brotherly protecting tenderness. Armand saw a more stalwart frame, a taller figure, and a face far more full of power and character. Hubert's brow was broad and high, the crisp locks that curled about it chestnut-brown, the eyes deep blue, but with hidden fire in their depths such as blue eyes seldom have; and very firm were the lines of the finely-molded mouth, round which, in student fashion, the hair had been allowed to grow. Almost before he was aware of it, Armand spoke out his thoughts":
‘It is you who should have been the knight and warrior, Hubert, and not I.'
‘We should both have been what our fathers were,' said Hubert. ‘So, at least, I used to think,' he added. ‘But now that I have come to serve the chancellor, things look a little different. Armand, have you heard that Guillaume le Ferro is dead? '
‘I do not even know who Guillaume le Ferro may be. Have you no recollection of the dear old seneschal at Clairville, who was so kind to us children?'
‘You forget I was but three years old. My earliest remembrances only take me back to the duke's castle, and the toys and sweetmeats given me by the ladies there.'
‘I have the advantage of you by at least two years. I remember well our father—that is, your father—and our mother, and the day she died. But as for Guillaume—good old man—I had gifts and messages from him several times. I think he must have been nearly ninety when he died. Some time ago he sent me a chest containing a few things which belonged to our mother. They ought to be shared with you, Armand. I have left them in Paris—at the chancellor's house.'
‘They can wait,' said Armand indifferently. In the bright, varied life of the present he had little thought to spare for the past, and little care about it.
‘I have one thing with me, however, which you will like to have, and certainly you have the best right to it; it is a Book of Hours, belonging to your father. There were two books—that, and a smaller one, which was my father's; that also I have here. It contains certain Psalms in Latin, and bears an inscription in the English tongue, which a scholar from Oxford, whom I knew in Paris, translated for me, It says the book was given to Sir Hubert Bohun, knight, by his good friend, Master John Wickliffe, Vicar of Lutterworth. A fine fright I was in when I heard that! I showed it at once to the chancellor.'
‘A fright? What about, prithee?’ asked Armand, who knew as little of John Wickliffe as he did of Guillaume le Ferro.
‘Can you ask? I thought everybody knew that Wickliffe is a great heretic—was, rather, for he is dead. One of the most important affairs before the Council is the condemnation of his doctrines. I could not bear to think that the good knight, my father, had called such a man his friend. Nevertheless, the chancellor says that my little book, being only a part of the Psalter, has no harm in it, and I may keep it.'
Armand laughed.
‘I will give thee the best of my gold chains,' he said, ‘an' thou wilt keep the chancellor out of thy talk for ten phrases together. I thought I was a good and loyal man to my lord; but thou dost beat me in that, as, no doubt, in other things. Leave the chancellor alone, and tell me how thou hast fared thyself all these years. How hast the churchmen used thee? And what wind has blown thee hither? '
‘How am I to answer that,' returned Hubert, laughing also, ‘without naming the chancellor, since I have come here upon his business? If you do not want to hear of him, you must tell me your story instead.'
So it happened that Armand's story was told first. There was not much in it, after all; and a few words about it may suffice at present. The Duke of Burgundy's little protégé had been kindly cared for by the ladies of his court, until, at ten years old, he entered the Service' as a page. He was trained carefully in all manly and knightly exercises; and at fourteen became an esquire. Since then he had taken part with credit in two or three small affairs ' with the Armagnacs; had chosen a young lady of his patron's court (much older than himself), as the object of his chivalrous adoration; and generally had behaved as young gentlemen of his age and station were wont to do. He was very proud of being amongst the duke's gentlemen who were chosen to accompany his agents to Constance. Of the chief of these agents; the Bishop of Arras—successor to Hubert's first patron—Armand spoke with esteem and liking. But the second, a canon, named Pierre Cauchon, he despised and detested, calling him a true cochon, or hog, fit for nothing but the mire, and a very bad companion. ‘However,' he said, the duke himself intends to come by-and-by, to look after his own affairs at the Council, and then all will be right.'
Hubert's tale was less easily told. Not, indeed, that he cared to linger over his boyhood; he was not yet far enough removed from it to look back without shame upon its numerous sins and delinquencies. ‘They sent me to school,' he said, ‘to the Franciscan House in Rouen; and a pleasant life I led those unfortunate friars! I can afford to pity them now, though I do not remember that anyone pitied me, and I am sure I needed it—a poor fatherless and motherless child, who thought all the people about him were his enemies, and that he was theirs. It was a cruel wrong, thought I, to send me to a monastery, and destine me for the Church, when I should have been a soldier like my father. I wanted—in so far as I wanted anything, save pure fun and mischief—to show that it was no use, that no power on earth should make a scholar of me. I grew up a determined young rebel, and finally I ran away. I meant to go and fight for France against the English; for, in spite of my English blood, I reckoned—and I reckon myself still—a Frenchman. But they caught me and brought me back again. Then the old sub-prior said to me—the first sensible word I remember hearing from any man—"My son, be reasonable. Submit to discipline, and learn your Humanities. Then, in a year or two we will send you to the great college in Paris; and you will be your own master, and can do what you please." ‘Overjoyed at even a distant prospect of liberty, I took the hint; and so at last, in a happy day, I found myself at the Sorbonne, entered as student of theology in the College of Navarre. Fervently did I thank my patron, St. Hubert the hunter, for my deliverance.'
‘Ay; but I suppose that scholars, like squires, are still under discipline?’ said Armand.
‘Of a sort; but we had plenty of liberty. What I did that first year at the Sorbonne, and what pranks I played, I am not going to tell you now,' said Hubert, shaking his head. ‘It would only corrupt your manners, my good brother the esquire. There were some hundreds of us, all brimming over with life and spirits; and-if say it I must-with a strong touch of ferocity. It was well for us, on the whole, that we had the Cabochiens to fight with, and could give them broken heads and limbs at our pleasure.'
‘Take care what you say, brother. The Cabochiens are our people, partisans of Burgundy.'
‘Little cared we whose partisans they were: and little cause you have to be proud of them,' returned Hubert. But it is true that the city rabble, headed by butchers, skinners, and the like, and especially by that gallows-bird Caboche, were all Burgundians, while we of the Sorbonne were good Armagnacs, to a man. So we had plenty of free fights, which, perchance, kept us out of worse mischief. I know that my luck never failed me until, in some passing truce with the Cabochiens, it came into my foolish head to attack the doctors.'
At this the squire, used to discipline, made a grimace. ‘That is as if I were to show insolence to the master of the horse, or even to the duke himself;’ he said.
‘But I trow the duke would not have provoked you by small tyrannies, as the doctors did us. We could not stab them with swords, or beat them with clubs, as we did the Cabochiens; so we betook ourselves to arms of another kind. We caricatured and lampooned them all—rectors, deans, doctors, and masters-without mercy. I was foremost in the work, and, coming off scatheless once and again, I grew bolder. At last I posted a notice on the great gate of the Sorbonne: De part is Roi. A messieurs les Docteurs de la Sorbonne. Il est defendu—’ Then followed a string of nonsense, turning all their doings into ridicule. Amongst other things, they were forbidden to let their finger-nails grow, a scandalous story being current of a fight between a scholar and a doctor, in which both had made use of their natural weapons. I thought that piece of insolence would have been laughed at and forgotten, like all the rest. But it was taken seriously, and became the subject of a grave investigation. I was suspected, and no wonder. They put me under arrest, and then—I am not ashamed to tell you, Armand, that for the first time in my life I learned the meaning of that word fear. Punishments are cruel in Paris. Many of the students—for whom such sights had a fascination I could never share—used to haunt the Place de Greve, and tell of the wretches whom they saw there, scourged, branded, tortured. Once a man was burned there—burned alive. It was horrible, oh—that cry! But, then, he was a parricide.'
‘But,' said Armand, ‘they could not surely do any of those dreadful things to you, for a mere jest.'
‘They could have done worse than—at least than hanging. It was quite possible my ears might have paid for my insolence; while as for the scourge—but that degradation I would not have borne—I would have killed myself first. The doctors were all in a terrible rage; it was treason against the king, they said; they would make an example of the delinquent. I determined to confess nothing; no, not if they put me to the Question, as like enough they would. So I was brought before the chancellor. It was enough to freeze a man's blood in his veins. There he sat, in the great hall of council, with all the doctors round him, he looking the gravest and sternest of them all. When asked, I was so much of a coward that I said, "Not guilty," laying, indeed, this salve to my conscience, that though I had done the thing, yet there was no guilt in the thing done.'
‘And where was the harm?’ asked Armand, who had been listening intently.
Hubert did not heed the question. He went on: ‘I do not know how it might have ended, if some too zealous friend of mine had not come forward to defend me by casting the blame upon another. He would have it that the culprit was Bontemps—that same luckless lad who had begun the stir by returning the doctor's blow, and fighting it out with him. Of course, I could not allow an innocent man to suffer.'
‘Do you mean to say you confessed?' cried Armand with emotion. ‘Oh, Hubert! I could not have done that.'
‘Why, what else could I do?’ asked Hubert, staring. ‘When things had gone so far, there was nothing left for me but to say, "Gentlemen, it was I. I throw myself on your mercy."'
“That was brave—splendid of you, Hubert!’
‘Brave? Splendid? Is that the way you squires talk? A man is not brave because he misses a villainy by a hair's-breadth. Of course, you would have done just the same. Then my lord the chancellor spoke stern and awful words about law and order, and the sin of violating them. I think my heart stood still the while. But when he came to pronounce the sentence, behold! it was neither scourging, nor branding, nor torture, nor even imprisonment—nothing but a simple fine! My heart beat again, and sent the blood throbbing through my head and ears, and every vein in my body. But in another moment the relief passed away, and the fainting of heart came back. I cried out despairingly, "But, my good lord, I have not a denier in the world!”
‘“Remove the prisoner," quoth he, as stern as Minos.
‘Removed I was; and you may think what a night I spent in my cell, wondering what they would do with me, since I had nothing to pay. But the next morning early the chancellor sent for me again. This time he was alone. I stood trembling, as far off as I might, but he motioned me to come near him. "Hubert Bohun," he said, and his voice was low and gentle, though his face wore still that stern sad look which, indeed, it ever wears—"Hubert Bohun, you are free.”
He waited for me to speak; and I, confused and bewildered as I was, at last contrived to stammer out, "Am I forgiven, my lord?”
‘“No," saith he, "not forgiven of grace, but released of right, because the fine is paid," and this time a grave smile softened the sternness of his look. From that smile I knew the truth, and my heart went out to him as it had never done yet to living man. I was on my knees before him in a moment. What I said I know not, but this I think it was: “My lord, you have saved me. Nay, more, you have bought me. I am your man forever." But he bade me rise. And then he spoke words which even to thee, my brother, I can scarcely tell. He said I was worth saving, and he added ' —Hubert paused, crossed himself, then went on in a changed and softened voice He added, that I must not think of what he had done for me—that was little; but rather think of One who, though He was my judge, had paid for me a debt infinitely greater. "By His death He has bought thee in very deed. My son, serve and thank Him all thy life."'
Armand looked at his brother as if he was speaking to him in a tongue he could not understand. ‘But at least,' he said, ‘you were grateful to the chancellor. Else were you no brother of mine.'
‘Grateful? Yes; but I could find no way of showing it then, save by flinging myself head foremost into school Latin and school theology, which last I took to be the meaning of his words 'about serving our Lord. At first I had far rather have flung myself alone into a mob of Cabochiens; but very soon I came to like it really.'
Armand made an incredulous grimace. ‘You never know what you can do until you are tried,' Said Hubert. ‘And, indeed, the fine fencing, the clever cut and thrust of the schools, have a charm and a pleasure of their own. There is joy in knowing your blade is sharper than any other man's, and in training eye and hand to deal the neatest of strokes with it. I am more proud of my thesis against the Realists, and my refutation therein of the heretical doctrine of the Universalia a parte rei, than of any fray I fought out yet with the Cabochiens.'
‘What doctrine are you talking about?' asked Armand, puzzled.
‘That foolish imagination of the Realists, who maintain that Universals have existence apart from the substance of which they are the attributes.'
Every particle of intelligence faded out of the face of Armand, leaving it as blank as his hat. ‘But what are Universals?’ he asked at last, in a bewildered way.
‘Universal ideas, of course. Such as courage, faith, virtue.'
‘I am sure I wish they were universal,' said Armand, with a dawn of returning sense. ‘How can any man be expected to understand such jargon? Still, I hope your chancellor appreciated your devotion. I am bound to acknowledge he deserved it.'
‘That and much more,' said Hubert. ‘But, fortunately, I was able afterward to show my gratitude in another way. Last year the Cabochiens got the town almost all into their hands, and fine disorders we had then! They were worse than the wolves in winter, who used to think nothing of coming into the streets after dark, and snapping up a belated burgher. I had a fight with them now and then, by way of keeping myself warm, when snow was deep and wood was dear. The rascals—I mean the Cabochiens, not the wolves—had the audacity to attack and plunder the chancellor's house. He took refuge in the vaults of Noter Dame, where he lived for some time, reading and writing, and giving himself to devotion, after his wont. Some of us banded together, mounted guard over his house, and saved what we could from pillage. Especially, we saved the books. And so, what with one thing and what with another, I think he trusts me. It is a great honor that he has chosen me to come with him here, and he says I shall write for him in the Council.'
‘If you write as well as you strike, he will have no cause to complain of you,' said Armand.
After that, their talk wandered into other channels, and did not come to an end until the host of the Golden Lion, appearing at the door with an armful of bed coverings, politely informed them that two Spanish gentlemen had engaged the room as a sleeping apartment.