perhaps among the thousands who had witnessed their last agony,
one man hidden in the crowd, had vainly closed ears and eyes, one man
had died a hundred deaths in one.

CHAPTER X.

AUCTIO FIT: VENIT VITA.

In his spacious chestnut-panelled parlour, in a high-backed oaken chair
that had throned for centuries the Abbots of Bellerive, Messer Blondel
sat brooding with his chin upon his breast. The chestnut-panelled
parlour was new. The shields of the Cantons which formed a frieze above
the panels shone brightly, the or and azure, gules and argent of their
quarterings, undimmed by time or wood-smoke. The innumerable panes of
the long heavily leaded windows which looked out on the Bourg du Four
were still rain-proof; the light which they admitted still found
something garish in the portrait of the Syndic--by Schouten--that formed
the central panel of the mantelpiece. New and stately, the room had not
its pair in Geneva; and dear to its owner's heart had it been a short, a
very short time before. He had anticipated no more lasting pleasure,
looked forward to no safer gratification for his declining years, than
to sit, as he now sat, surrounded by its grandeur. In due time--not at
once, lest the people take alarm or his enemies occasion--he had
determined to rebuild the whole house after the same fashion. The plans
of the oaken gallery, the staircase and dining-chamber, prepared by a
trusty craftsman of Basle, lay at this moment in the drawer of the
bureau beside his chair.

Now all was changed. A fiat had gone forth, which placed him alike
beyond the envy of his friends, and the hatred of his foes. He must
die. He must die, and leave these pleasant things, this goodly room,
that future of which he had dreamed. Another man would lie warm in the
chamber he had prepared; another would be Syndic and bear his wand. The
years of stately plenty which he had foreseen, were already as last
year's harvest. No wonder that the sheen of portrait and panel, the
pride of echoing oak, were fled; or that the eyes with which he gazed on
the things about him were dull and lifeless.

Dull and lifeless at one moment, and clouded by the apathy of despair;
at another bright with the fierce fever of revolt. In the one phase or
the other he had passed many hours of late, some of them amid the
dead-sea grandeur of this room. And he had had his hours of hope also. A
fortnight back a ray of hope, bright as the goblin light which shines
the