CHAPTER XIII.

AVAUNT, EVIL SPIRIT.

About a week had passed since the private conversation to which we last listened. The Jesuit during this time had not left the prisoner to himself. He was seen to enter Messenius' room every day, under the pretext of medical attendance, and spent some hours with him. He was too acute to rely upon the prisoner's promise. No one in the castle knew what they did together, and the Governor was unsuspicious. The remote situation of Kajajneborg, far from the rest of the world, had lulled Wernstedt into security; he rather found pleasure in the society of the learned and experienced foreign doctor.

There was one, however, who with a constant and vigilant eye followed every motion of the stranger, and this was Lucia Grothusen, Messenius' wife. A Catholic by education and conviction, she had always strengthened her husband in his faith; the Jesuit well knew this, and therefore felt sure of her co-operation, although he carefully avoided confiding his plans to the mercy of female gossip. But the most artful plans are often frustrated by those hidden springs and motives in the human heart, especially in a woman's heart, which work in quite a different direction from that of cold reason. The Jesuit, in spite of his astuteness, was mistaken in our Lucia. He did not know that when the fanaticism in her mind shouted, push on! love cried still louder in her heart, hold back! and love in women always gets the upper hand.

Lucia was a very penetrating person; she had looked through the Jesuit before he knew it. She saw the ruinous inward strife which raged in Messenius; a struggle for life and death between fanaticism on the one hand, which bade him sacrifice fame and posterity for the victory of the Church, and ambition on the other, which continually pleaded to him not to sacrifice with his own hand his whole life's work? "Will you," it said, "blindly desecrate the sanctuary of history? Will you expose to contempt the brilliant name, which in the night of captivity still constitutes your wealth and pride?"

Lucia saw all this with the discernment of love; she saw that the man for whom she lived an entire life of self-denial and restraint, would sink under this terrible internal battle, and she resolved to save him with a bold and decisive stroke.

Late one evening the lamp still burned on Messenius' writing-table, where he and the Jesuit had been working together ever since the morning. Lucia had received permission to retire to her bed, which stood at the other end of the room near the door, and pretended to be asleep. The two men had finished their work, and were conversing together with low voices, in Latin, which Lucia well understood.

"I am satisfied with you, my friend," said the Jesuit approvingly. "These documents, which bear the stamp of truth, will be sufficient to prove the conversion of King Gustaf Vasa and King Carl, and this preface, signed by you, will further confirm their veracity. I will now return to Germany through Sweden, and have these prayers printed, through our adherents in Stockholm, or if that is impossible, in Lübeck or Leyden."

Messenius involuntarily stretched out his hand, as if to snatch back a precious treasure from a robber's hands.

"Holy father," he exclaimed with visible consternation, "is there no reprieve? My name ... my reputation ... have mercy upon me, holy father, and give me back my name!"

The Jesuit smiled.

"Do I not give you a name," he said, "far greater and more abiding than the one you lose--a name in the chronicles of our holy order; a name among the martyrs and benefactors of the Church; a name which may one day be counted amongst the saints?"

"But, in spite of all this, a name without honour, a liar's, a forger's name!" burst out Messenius, with the despair of a condemned man, who is shown the glory of Heaven obscured by the scaffold.

"Weak, vain man, you do not know that great aims are never won by the fear or praise of humanity!" said the Jesuit in a contemptuous tone. "You might have taken back your word and forfeited your claims to the gratitude of all Christendom. But happily it is now impossible. These documents"--and he extended his hand triumphantly with the papers--"are now in a hand which will know how to keep them, and, against your will, use them for the glory of the Church, the victory of the faith, and your soul's eternal welfare."

Father Hieronymus had hardly uttered these words when a hand behind him swiftly and suddenly seized the papers, which he had so elatedly waved, crumpled them together, tore them in a hundred pieces, and strewed the bits over the floor. This move was so unlooked for, and the Jesuit was so far from divining anything of the kind, that he lost his usual presence of mind for a moment, and thus gave the daring hand time to complete its work of destruction. When the fragments lying around convinced him of the reality of his loss, he bit his lips with rage, raised his arms aloft, and with the ferocity of a wild beast, fell upon the presumptuous being who had dared to extinguish his plans at the very moment of consummation.

Lucia--for she owned the intruding hand--met the monk's outbreak of fury with the great courage which distinguishes a woman when she struggles for the holiest she possesses. In her youth she had been one of those who could take a man by the collar; and this more than womanly strength of arm had gained practice during her constant squabbles with the rude soldiers of the castle. She hastily clasped her sinewy fingers around the monk's outstretched arms, and held them fast as in a vice.

"Well," she said in a mocking tone, "three paces from death, sir; what do you wish?"

"Mad woman!" screamed the Jesuit, foaming with rage, "you do not know what you have done! Miserable thief, you have stolen a kingdom from your Church, and Paradise from your husband."

"And from you I have stolen your booty; his secure prey from the wolf; is it not so?" replied Lucia, whose voice began to glow with the fire of her hasty temper. "Monk," she added, violently shaking the eminent Jesuit, who in vain tried to escape, "I know a vile thief, who, in the sheep's clothing of the Church, comes to steal the fame of a great man; also the history of a nation; and from a poor, forsaken woman, her sole pride; her husband's peace, honour, and life. Tell me, holy and pious monk, what punishment such a thief deserves? Would not Ämmä fall be shallow enough for his body, and the eternal fires cool enough for his soul?"

The Jesuit looked out of the window with a hasty movement towards the mighty torrent which descended with a terrible roar in the winter's night.

"Ha!" exclaimed Lucia with a bitter smile, "you fear me, you, the powerful one, who rules kingdoms and consciences. You fear lest I conceal a man's arm under my grey frock, which could hurl you into the cataract's abyss. Be reassured. I am only a woman, and fight with a woman's arms. You see ... I do not throw you out of the window ... I will be content with chaining up the wild beast. Tremble, monk, I know you! Lucia Grothusen has followed your steps; you are betrayed, and she has done this."

"Betrayed!" echoed the Jesuit; he well realised what this statement meant. At a time so full of hate, when two great religions fought for worldly and spiritual supremacy, when the plots of the Jesuits irritated the Swedes to the highest extent, a member of this order, discovered in disguise, in the kingdom, was lost beyond redemption. But the dire peril restored the equilibrium of this powerful character.

"My daughter, betrayed by you," he said once more, as his arms relaxed, and his features assumed an expression of doubt and mild grief. "That is impossible."

Lucia regarded him with hate and suspicion.

"I your daughter!" she exclaimed, as she pushed the monk from her with repulsion. "Falsehood is your daughter, and deceit your mother. These are thy relatives."

"Lucia Grothusen," said the Jesuit with much suavity, "when you were a child, and followed your father, Arnold Grothusen, who was expelled with King Sigismund, you came one day as an exile in need, and surrounded by enemies, to a peasant's hut. They refused you a refuge, and threatened to deliver you up. Then your youthful eyes discovered an image of the Virgin in a corner of the hut, a relic from former times, and now profaned as a plaything for children. You took the image and kissed it; you held it up before the harsh inmates of the hut, and said to them, 'See, the Virgin Mary is here, she will succour us!'"

"Well, what then?" said Lucia reluctantly in a softer voice.

"Your childish trust ... no, what do I say? The Holy Virgin moved the stern peasants, they gave you shelter, and placed you all in security. Still more, they gave you the image, which you have carefully preserved as your guardian angel, and there it hangs on your wall. What you formerly said, you still say: 'The Virgin Mary is here, she will protect me!'"

Lucia tried in vain to struggle against her emotions. She bit her lip and made no reply.

"You are right," continued the astute monk. "I am a Catholic like you; persecuted like you; if they penetrated my disguise they would kill me. My life is in your hands; denounce me; I flee not; I die for my faith, and I forgive you my death."

"Fly from here," said Lucia, half vanquished; "I give you till to-morrow, but only on condition that you do not see my husband again."

"Well, then," said the Jesuit sadly, "I fly and leave behind my beautiful dream of a glorious future. Ah, I had imagined that the great Messenius and his noble wife would reinstate the Catholic Church in the North; I saw the time when millions of people would say: we were in darkness and blindness, until the historical light of the great Messenius revealed to us the falseness of the Reformation."

"If it could be done without injury to the truth," exclaimed Lucia, whose ardent spirit was more and more elevated by the future, which the Jesuit so skilfully placed before her in perspective.

"The truth!" repeated the Jesuit persuasively. "Oh, my friend, truth is our faith, falseness is the heretic's faith. If you are convinced that I ask only the truth itself from your husband, will you assist instead of trying to destroy your Church?"

"Yes, I will!" answered Lucia warmly and earnestly.

"Then listen..." added the Jesuit, but was just then interrupted by Messenius, who, hitherto stunned and crestfallen, now seemed to awaken from a horrible dream.

"_Abi, male spiritus!_" he frantically exclaimed, as if he feared that the Jesuit's serpent tongue would once more triumph. "_Abi, Abi!_ you are not a human being, you are the prince of lies himself, you are the tempter in Paradise! Get ye gone, ye foul spirit, to the eternal fire, your abiding place, to the kingdom of lies, your realm!" he said in Latin. And with this he pushed the Jesuit towards the door, without Lucia's making the least attempt to prevent it.

"_Insanit miser!_" ("the miserable raver") muttered the Jesuit as he disappeared.

"Thanks, my dear!" said Lucia, with a lightened heart, as if freed from a dangerous spell.

"Thanks, Lucia!" replied Messenius, with a milder manner than he had for a long time assumed towards his wife.