Before the coming of the Maid, that is to say more than fifty years before Stephen La Mothe gave himself the heartache over his misreadings of the most read chapter in the book of nature, there stood upon the banks of the Loire, about a mile from Amboise, the flour mill of one Jean Calvet. For six generations it had passed from a Calvet to a Calvet, son succeeding father as Amurath an Amurath, and the Moulin FlÈche d'Or was as well known to the countryside as Amboise itself. The kirkyard or the grinding stones; humanity must needs find its way to both.

When harvests were fat, and corn plentiful, its stones hummed from daylight to dark to the blent music of the creaking wheel and the splash-splash of the water which drove it. In lean years, when war or famine was abroad, and thanks to England these years were not few, the sluice was lifted, and in place of the hoarse murmur and complaint of the grinding stones and lumbering wheel there was the soft purr of the millrace, and the Calvet of his generation lived, like a turtle, on his own fat, waiting for better days. And sooner or later these always came, and with their coming grew the prosperity of the Golden Arrow. Corn and the human heart must needs be ground while the world lasts, and perhaps it is as much out of the grinding of the latter as the former that life is strengthened. Then came a day which brought an end to more than the prosperity of Jean Calvet the sixth.

Some clocks wear out, running down with little spurts of life and longer intervals of dumbness; others end with a sudden crashing of the pendulum while in its full swing, and a wild, convulsive whirr of the jarred wheels. One moment the sober tick tells that all is well, the next—silence. So was it with Calvet's mill.

In the fortune, or misfortune, of war an Englishman, one Sir John Stone, riding that way with his band of marauders, little better than licensed brigands, found Amboise too tough a nut for his teeth, and harried the Calvets in pure wantonness. Over the tree-tops the garrison of Amboise could see the smoke of the burning, but they were too weak to venture succour.

Calvet must fend for himself lest Calvet and Amboise both end in the one ruin. There was little defence, but that little was grimly in earnest and yet more grim the revenge of the attack. For that generation both pity and mercy had fled France. Jean Calvet the younger, he who should have been the seventh of his line, was coursed in the open like a hare, but turned at the last and died at bay as a wolf dies. Behind the barred door were Jean the sixth, his two younger sons, and the dead man's wife. The woman, grey-faced but tearless, fought as the men fought, using her Jean's cross-bow from the narrow upper windows. All that rage, desperation, and hate could do was done, and when the door fell in with a crash Jean the younger had been avenged four times over. John Stone took as little by his wantonness as he deserved.

Then came the end. There was a rush up the stone stairway, a brief struggle to gain the upper level, a minute's surging back and forth, a briefer, fiercer fury of strife among the cranks and meal-bags, a few rough oaths, a woman's scream, and then silence, or what by contrast passed for silence, since the sudden quiet was only broken by deep breathing and the sucking of air into dry throats. England had gained an ignoble victory.

Fire followed as naturally as the spark follows the jar of flint and steel, and with a hundred and fifty years to dry its beams, its cobwebbed walls hung with mouldy dust from the grinding of as many harvests, its complex wooden troughs and grain-shoots parched to tinder, the old mill was a ready prey. All that could burn burnt like a pile of dry shavings. But the walls, the stairway, and the upper floor were of stone, and stood; and but for one thing the peace which followed the coming of the Maid might have set the waterwheel creaking afresh. That one thing, typical of the times, forbade the thought. When the men of Amboise cleared away the rubbish they found the bones of Jean Calvet the sixth piled in a grim derision upon his own millstones, and so these stones never turned again. Who could eat bread of their making?

But the blackened shell was one of the Dauphin's favourite haunts, nor could a better stage for one of those plays of make-believe which had called down the old King's bitter irony have been well devised. So far as possible the mill had been restored to its old condition. The rubbish had been cleared from the ancient watercourse; the tough old wheel, freed from the weeds and soil which bound it, was set running as in the past, and a palisade of stout pickets erected to fence out the curious. The side furthest from the roadway, with its clumps of hazels, alder thicket, and chestnut wood in the distance was left open. Here, amid surroundings which lent a sombre realism to the pretence, Charlemagne could carve out a kingdom, Roland sound the horn of Roncesvalles, or the Maid herself win back to France the crown the boy's forefather had lost.

But, dearer even than these, he best loved to reproduce in little the tragedy which had laid the mill desolate, and it was La Mothe's participation in that mock combat which had aroused Commines' contempt. What boy of imagination has not revelled in such sport, living a glorious hour beyond his age? And not a few of every nation have, in their turn, made the glory real at the call of the country that the blood of new generations may take fire. And Stephen La Mothe saw no shame in such a play; saw, rather, a stimulus and an uplifting whose effects might not altogether pass away when the play ended. So he was France or England as the Dauphin bade him, and by turns died valiantly or fought victoriously.

But chiefly, and to La Mothe it had its significance, the Dauphin played the part of Jean Calvet. All children, and not children only, love to be upon the winning side, and it told something of the trend of the boy's deeper nature that he would rather die for France than live for England. So would it have been the afternoon of the day La Mothe had followed his own course to his own disaster had not Charles once more proved the truth of Villon's observation. The dull eyes saw more than men supposed.

"You and Ursula have quarrelled," he said, with all a boy's blunt power of making the truth a terror. "All the way from Amboise you have not spoken a word to each other; and you will quarrel still more if I shut you up in the mill together. Do you be Stone, with Blaise and Marcel, while I and Monsieur La Follette and Hugues will keep the stairs." Then a gleam of unaccustomed humour flickered across his face; a sense of humour was rarely a Valois characteristic. "No, I am wrong. Do you be Calvet; I want a real battle to-day, and you will fight all the better with Ursula looking on." As for Ursula de Vesc, she drew her skirts together and ran up the unprotected flight of stairs humming an air—not Stephen La Mothe's triolet, you may be sure—as if she had not a care in the world.

So the forces arrayed themselves, Charles and the two lads from the stables behind the clump of bushes which always served as an ambush, and La Mothe at the doorless entrance to the mill, where he was to give the alarm and then retreat to the upper floor where La Follette and Hugues were posted. La Follette, who had been a lover in his day, would have kept watch below and taken Hugues with him, but Ursula de Vesc, in the upper room, told them tartly that the Dauphin would be displeased if the usual plan were departed from, and so, in no very playful humour any of them, they waited the attack.

Presently it came. Out from his ambush, a hundred yards away, raced the Dauphin, Marcel and Blaise at his heels, their stout wooden swords bared for the grim work of slaughter. "The English! the English!" shouted La Mothe. "Frenchmen, the enemy are upon us!" But as he turned to gain the upper floor there came a cry which was not part of the play, a cry of fear and despairing rage, "The Dauphin! the Dauphin! Monsieur La Mothe, save the Dauphin," and midway on the stairs Hugues dashed past him.

"Hugues, what is it?"

"An ambush. The Dauphin; they will murder the Dauphin——" and Hugues was through the doorway with La Mothe and La Follette following, and Ursula de Vesc, white and trembling, at the stair-head, more in surprise than any realization of danger. But only for an instant, then she ran to the narrow window where Hugues had waited, watching.

Midway from their hiding-place, confused by the sudden outcry, stood the Dauphin and the two lads, and towards them ran Hugues with all his speed, La Mothe not far behind. La Follette waited at the door, uncertain and bewildered. But from a further covert, the thicket of more distant alder, a troop of ten or a dozen horsemen had burst, galloping at the charge, nor could there be any doubt of their sinister purpose. It was a race for the boy, with the greater distance to neutralize the greater speed, but they rode desperately, recklessly, as men who ride for their lives.

"Run, Monseigneur, run," cried Hugues, panting. "See, behind—behind," and almost as he shouted the words he and La Mothe, younger and more active, reached the group. "Out of the way, fools," he gasped, shouldering the stable lads aside; then to La Mothe, "Take the other arm," and again there was a race of desperation, but this time with the mill as the goal. Nearer and nearer thundered the hoofs, out from his scattered following forged their leader, his spurs red to the heel, his teeth set hard in the shadow of the mask which hid his face. "Faster, for God's sake faster," groaned Hugues, "Faster, faster," shouted La Follette from the doorway, and Ursula de Vesc, at her point of vantage, hardly dared to breathe as she knit her hands so closely the one into the other that the fingers cramped. Then the chase passed out of sight, and she ran to the stair-head, waiting for she knew not what. It was just there that Calvet the younger had died, and now there was as little mockery in the tragedy. Beyond the doorway she heard a "Thank God!" from La Follette, then shadows darkened it, and the Dauphin was thrust in, staggering. On the instant La Follette followed, paused, glancing backward as if in hesitation. But one duty was imperative. Catching the boy in his arms, he half carried, half forced him up the stairway, while in the open space below La Mothe and Hugues, letting Blaise and Marcel slip between them, turned side by side to face whatever was without. What that was she knew, and as she watched him in the gap an instant, before hastening to the Dauphin's aid, the girl's heart went out to Stephen La Mothe in the agony of a bitter repentance. If death pays all debts surely the darkening of the shadows brings forgiveness for all offences?