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Transcriber's Notes:

   1. Page scan source:
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   2.  The diphthong oe is represented by [oe]






                         THE ABBESS OF VLAYE






                         By STANLEY J. WEYMAN

                              *   *   *

THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF. A Romance. With Frontispiece and Vignette.
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                              *   *   *

                  New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.






[Illustration: "HE HAD DISMOUNTED, AND HAD HIS HAT IN HIS HAND"]
                                                    [_Page_ 113]






                              THE ABBESS
                               OF VLAYE




                                  BY

                          STANLEY J. WEYMAN

      _Author of "Under the Red Robe," "A Gentleman of France,"
              "My Lady Rotha," "The Red Cockade," "Count
                  Hannibal," "The Castle Inn," etc_.





                       LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
                   91 and 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
                          LONDON AND BOMBAY
                                 1904






                         Copyright, 1903, by
                          STANLEY J. WEYMAN.

                              *   *   *

                         Copyright, 1904, by
                          STANLEY J. WEYMAN.

                              *   *   *

                        _All rights reserved_.





                 ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK.






                                  TO

                         HUGH STOWELL SCOTT,

          IN REMEMBRANCE OF LONG SUMMER DAYS SPENT WITH HIM

                 AMID THE SCENES WHICH SUGGESTED IT,

                            THIS STORY IS

               AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY HIS FRIEND.






                              CONTENTS.


   CHAP.

            INTRODUCTION--A King in Council.

         I. Villeneuve-l'Abbesse.

        II. The Tower Chamber.

       III. Still Waters Troubled.

        IV. The Dilemma.

         V. The Captain of Vlaye.

        VI. In the Hay-field.

       VII. A Soldiers' Frolic.

      VIII. Father Angel.

        IX. Speedy Justice.

         X. Midnight Alarms.

        XI. The Chapel by the Ford.

       XII. The Peasants' Camp.

      XIII. Hostages.

       XIV. Saint and Sinner.

        XV. Fears.

       XVI. To Do or Not to Do?

      XVII. The Heart of Cain.

     XVIII. Two in the Mill.

       XIX. The Captain of Vlaye's Condition.

        XX. The Abbess Moves.

       XXI. The Castle Of Vlaye.

      XXII. A Night by the River.

     XXIII. The Bride's Dot.

      XXIV. Fors l'Amour.

       XXV. His Last Ride.






                         THE ABBESS OF VLAYE.




                            INTRODUCTION.

                          A KING IN COUNCIL.


Monsieur des Ageaux was a man of whom his best friends could not say
that he shone, or tried to shine, in the pursuit of the fair sex. He
was of an age, something over thirty, when experience renders more
formidable the remaining charms of youth; and former conquests whet
the sword for new emprises. And the time in which he lived and
governed the province of Perigord for the King was a time in which the
favour of ladies, and the good things to be gained thereby, stood for
much, and morality for little. So that for the ambitious the path of
dalliance presented almost as many chances of advancement as the more
strenuous road of war.

Yet des Ageaux, though he was an ambitious man and one whose appetite
success--and in his degree he had been very successful--had but
sharpened, showed no inclination to take that path, or to rise by
trifling. Nay, he turned from it; he shunned if he did not dislike the
other sex. Whether he doubted his powers--he was a taciturn, grave
man--or he had energy only for the one pursuit he loved, the
government of men, the thing was certain. Yet he was not unpopular
even at Court, the lax Court of Henry the Fourth. But he was known for
a thoughtful, dry man, older than his years and no favourite with
great ladies; of whom some dubbed him shy, and some a clown, and
all--a piece of furniture.

None the less, where men were concerned, he passed for a man more
useful than most; or, for certain, seeing that he boasted no great
claims, and belonged to no great family, he had not been Governor of a
province. Governors of provinces in those days were of the highest;
cousins of the King, when these could be trusted, which was rare;
peers and Marshals of France, great Dukes with vast hereditary
possessions, old landed Vicomtes, and the like. Only at the tail of
the list came some half-dozen men whom discretion and service, or the
playfulness of fortune had--_mirabile dictum_--raised to office. And
at the tail of all came des Ageaux; for Perigord, his province, land
of the pie and the goose liver, was part of the King's demesne, the
King was his own Governor in it, and des Ageaux bore only the title of
"Lieutenant for the King in the country of Perigord."

Yet was it a wonderful post for such a man, and many a personage, many
a lord well seen at Court, coveted it. All the same the burden was
heavy; a thing not to be dismissed in a moment. The King found him no
money, or little; no men, or few. Where greater Governors used their
own resources he had to use--economy. And to make matters worse the
man was just; it was part of his nature, it was part of his passion,
to be just. So where they taxed not legally only, but illegally, he
scrupled, he held his hand. And, therefore, though his dignity was
almost as high as office could make it, and his power in his own
country not small, no man who ever came to Court went with less
splendour in the streets of Paris, or with a smaller following.
Doubtless, as a result of this, a few despised him; a few even, making
common cause with the Court ladies, and being themselves semi-royal,
and above retort, flouted him as a thing negligible.

But, on the whole, he passed, though dry and grave, for a man to be
envied, the ladies notwithstanding. And he held his own tolerably, and
his post handsomely until a certain day in the summer of 1595, when
word came to the young Governor to cross half France to meet the King
at Lyons; where, in the early part of that year, Henry the Fourth lay,
and was ill-content with a world which, on the surface, seemed to be
treating him well.

But on the surface only. The long wars of religion, midway in which
the Massacre of Bartholomew stands up, like some drear gibbet landmark
in a waste, were, indeed, virtually over. Not only had Henry come to
the throne, but Paris, his capital, was his at last; had he not bought
it eighteen months before by that mass, that abjuration of Protestant
errors, of which the world has heard so much? And not Paris only.
Orleans and Bourges, and this good city of Lyons, and Rouen, all were
his now, and in their Notre-Dames or St.-Etiennes had sung their _Te
Deums_, and more or less heartily cried "God save the King!" At last,
after six years of fighting, of wild horse forays, that flamed across
the Northern corn-lands, after a thousand sleepless nights and as many
days of buying and bartering--at last the lover of Gabrielle, who was
also the most patient and astute of men, was King of France and of
Navarre, lord of all this pleasant realm.

Or, not lord; only over-lord, as six times a day they made him know.
Nor even that, of all. For in Brittany a great noble still went his
own way. And in Provence a great city refused to surrender. And
north-eastwards Spain still clung to his border. Nevertheless it was
none of these things filled Henry, the King, with discontent. It was
at none of these things that he swore in his beard as he sulked at the
end of the long Council Table this June morning; while des Ageaux,
from his seat near the bottom of the board, watched his face.

In truth Henry was discovering, that, having bought, he must pay; that
so great was the mortgage he had put on his kingdom, the profits
belonged to others. Overlord he was--lord, no; except perhaps in Lyons
where he lay, and where for that reason the Governor had to mind his
manners. But in smiling Provence to south of him? Not a whit. The Duke
of Epernon ruled the land of Roses, and would rule until the young
Duke of Guise, to whom His Majesty had given commission, put him out;
and then Guise would rule. In Dauphiny the same. In Languedoc, the
great middle province of the south, Montmorency, son to the old
Constable, was King in fact; in Guienne old Marshal Matignon. In
Angoumois--here Epernon again; so firmly fixed that he deigned only to
rule by quarterly letters from his distant home. True in Poitou was an
obedient Governor, but the house of Tremouille from their red castle
of Thouars outweighed his governorship. And in rocky Limousin the
Governor could keep neither the King's peace nor his own.

So it was everywhere through the wide provinces of France; and Henry,
who loved his people, knew it, and sulkily fingered the papers that
told of it. Not that he had need of the papers. He knew before he cast
eye on them in what a welter of lawlessness and disorder, of private
feud and public poverty, thirty years of civil war had left his
kingdom. One province was in arms, torn asunder by a feud between two
great houses. Another laboured in the throes of a peasant rising, its
hills alight night after night with the flames of burning farmsteads.
A third was helpless in the grip of a gang of brigands, who held the
roads. A fourth was beset by disbanded soldiers. The long wars of
religion had dissolved all ties. Everywhere monks who had left their
abbeys and nuns who had left their convents swarmed on the roads, with
sturdy beggars, homeless peasants, broken gentry. Everywhere, beyond
the walls of the great cities, the law was paralysed, the great
committed outrage, the poor suffered wrong, the excesses of war
enured, and, in this time of fancied peace, took grimmer shape.

He whom God had set over France, to rule it, knew these things and sat
hopeless, brooding over the papers; hampered on the one side by lack
of money, on the other by the grants of power that in evil days had
bought a nominal allegiance. He began to see that he had won only the
first bout of a match which must last him his life. Nor would it have
consoled him much to know that in the college of Navarre that day
played a little lad, just ten years old, whose frail white hand would
one day right these things with a vengeance.

His people cried to him, and he longed to help them and could not.
From a thousand market-places, splayed wooden shelters, covering each
its quarter-acre of ground, their cry came up to him: "Give us peace,
give us law!" and he could not. No wonder that he brooded over the
papers, while the clerks looked askance at him, and the great lords
who had won what he had lost whispered or played tric-trac at the
board. Those who sat lower, and among these M. des Ageaux, were less
at their ease. They wondered where the storm would break, and feared
each for his own head.

Presently M. de Joyeuse, one of the great nobles, precipitated the
outburst. "You have heard," said he, twiddling a pen between his
delicate fingers, "what they call these peasants who are ravaging
Poitou, sire?"

Before the King could answer the Governor of Poitou protested from his
place lower down the table. "They are none of mine," he said. "It is
in the Limousin next door to me that they are at work. I wash my hands
of them!"

"They are as bad on your side as on mine!" he of the barren Limousin
retorted.

"They started with you!" Poitou rejoined. "Who kindles a fire should
put it out."

The King raised his hand for silence. "No matter who is responsible,
the fact remains!" he said.

"But you have not heard the jest, sire," Joyeuse struck in. His thin
handsome face, pale with excess, belied eyes thoughtful and dreamy,
eyes that saw visions. He had been a King's favourite, he had spent
years in a convent, he had come forth again, now he was head of the
great Joyeuse house, lord of a third of Languedoc. By turns "Father
Angel"--for he had been a noted preacher--and Monseigneur, there were
those who predicted that he would some day return to the cloister and
die in his hood. "They call them the Tards-Avises," he continued,
"because they were foolish enough to rise when the war was over."

"God pity them!" the King said.

"_Morbleu!_ Your Majesty is pitiful of a sudden!" The speaker was the
Constable de Montmorency. He was a stout, gruff, choleric man, born,
as the Montmorencys were, a generation too late.

"I pity them!" the King answered a trifle sharply. "But you"--he spoke
to the table--"neither pity them nor put them down."

"You are speaking, sire," one asked, "of the Crocans?" It was so; from
the name of a village in their midst, they called these revolted
peasants of the Limousin of whom more will be said.

"Yes."

"They are not in my government," the speaker replied. "Nor in mine!"

"Nor mine!" And so all, except the Governor of the Limousin and the
Governor of Poitou, who sat sulkily silent.

Another of the great ones, Marshal Matignon, nodded approval. "Let
every man shoe his own ass," he said, pursing up his lips. He was a
white-haired, red-faced, apoplectic man of sixty, who thought that in
persuading the Estates of Bordeaux to acknowledge Henry he had earned
the right to go his own way. "Otherwise we shall jostle one another,"
he continued, "and be at blows before we know it, sire! They are in
the Limousin; let the Governor put them down. It is his business and
no other's."

"Except mine," the King replied, with a frown of displeasure. "And if
he cannot, what then?"

"Let him make way, sire, for one who can," the Constable answered
readily. "Your Majesty will not have far to look for him," he
continued in a playful tone. "My nephew, for instance, would like a
government."

"A truce to jesting," Henry said. "The trouble began, it is true,
in the Limousin, but it has spread into Poitou and into the
Angoumois"--he looked at Epernon's agent, for the Duke of Epernon was
so great a man he had not come himself. "Gentlemen," the King
continued, sitting back in his great chair, "can you not come to some
agreement? Can you not mass what force you have, and deal with them
shortly but mercifully? The longer the fire burns, the more trouble
will it be to extinguish it, and the greater the suffering."

"Why not let it burn out, sire?" Epernon's agent muttered with thinly
veiled impudence. "It will then burn the more rubbish, with your
Majesty's leave!"

But, the words said, he quailed. For, under his aquiline nose, the
King's mustaches curled with rage. There were some with whom he must
bear, lords