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Title: The timeless tomorrow

Author: Manly Wade Wellman

Release date: December 28, 2022 [eBook #69652]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1947

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIMELESS TOMORROW ***





                         THE TIMELESS TOMORROW

                          A Complete Novelet

                         By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1947.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                               CHAPTER I

                             _He Who Sees_


Blessed or cursed, the moment of sight was coming again.

The light was stealing back into his room curtained so thickly against
the coming dawn, stealing back, blue and ghostly from wherever that
strange light shone. His twoscore experiences of it were not enough to
quiet his trembling. Familiarity with the fringes of that strange land
of the soul bred anything but contempt. He could barely hold the two
forks of the laurel rod in the tight grip of his hands. His eyes felt
wide and strained, as though their lids were bereft of power to open or
close.

The mist thinned, so that figures could be seen stirring in it, first
dim shadows and then sharp silhouettes. Two horsemen faced each other
some yards apart. He caught the gleam of metal. They were armored
jousters, on chargers richly mailed and caparisoned.

Beyond them a master-at-arms sat his own mount, with a baton lifted
ready to signal, and still beyond him sat spectators in a gallery. It
was a tournament of great folk.

The horseman nearest his point of view wore on his surcoat the device
of a lion, and his tilting helmet's lowered visor gleamed like fire-new
gold. The opponent wore a lion, too, but in a different heraldic pose,
and his armor was less ornate. He was of gentrice, perhaps nobility,
but not equal in rank with the gold-visored one. That gold visor meant
royalty.

Voices made themselves heard, barely, as if from a distance. Ladies
were cheering, and the voice of the master-at-arms rang out. He lifted
his baton. The two powerful mailed steeds sprang forward at each other,
the lances of the opponents dipped their blunt points into position,
the armed riders settled their shields into place. Then--

A splitting crash, as of broken timber. The less gaudy rider's tilting
lance broke on his adversary's shield and glancing upward, drove its
splintered end full into and through the golden visor. A moment later
the stricken man spun writhing to the ground. More cries, of dismay.

The victorious rider sprang from his saddle and flung up his own visor.
His young face showed dark and concerned as it bent above the fallen
one. He loosened the clasps of the gilded helmet and pulled it clear
of a bloody, bearded face, more mature than his, with gleaming teeth
clenched in pain and the eyes terribly torn away.

Then the mists were gone, and the witness sat alone in the dark,
remembering who he was, and where he was, and what he had been doing.

Rising, he dropped upon his brazen tripod stool the robe of strange
embroidery with its dampened fringe. Carefully he laid on his desk the
forked rod of laurel, and stepped back out of the faint fumes, acrid
with strange herbs, that rose from the basin. He went to a window and
pulled aside the tapestry that hid it. Dawn was gray out there, and
he would be given no more visions tonight. The sun of southern France
would be up betimes, warm and cheerful. But he, Michel de Nostradame,
physician of Provence, had meditations of the gloomiest.

What had he seen? The face of the young victor in that shadowy
tourney-scene was familiar to him--from another vision. Where and when
had these things happened--or were they still to happen?

He should burn his books, he told himself. Even if scrying and spying
into the future were lawful--and throughout France of this year of 1547
it was a hanging, burning felony--he did not feel that he could endure
much more. Better to apply himself to his profession of medicine. Since
his visit earlier that year to Lyon, he had come home to little Salon
de Craux to find he had lost in popularity, with fewer patients and
silver coins than before.

Even a solitary man, with one servant, needs work and money. Michel de
Nostradame remembered the days when he was not alone, remembered the
wife and children who had died so young in Agen. Too, he remembered
his friend, Caesar Scaliger, poet and doctor, who had loved him like
a brother and then on a trifling argument grown to hate him like an
enemy.

The solitary life here in Salon was a breeder perhaps, of the deep
thoughts and the wandering dreams that impelled his spirit across the
misty fringe of another time, showing him the wonders and terrors that
are not lawful for men to know.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sitting at his desk, he laid out a sheet of white paper, and dipped
a quill pen into ink. He began to frame a verse, quickly but
thoughtfully, to record his glimpse. That tag of a joust he had seen:

    The younger lion shall overcome the old,
    In single combat on a field of war.
    He will destroy the eyes through a cage of gold--
    Two thrusts will bring a cruel death and dour.

He shook sand upon the little quatrain to dry the ink, and slid it
under a sheaf of other verses.

An inner door opened, and his old servant brought him breakfast. He ate
a roll of bread and drank from a cup of mingled white wine and water.
When he was finished, the servant returned to say that two ladies
waited in his front chamber.

Patients, perhaps wealthy. Nostradame hoped so. He washed his hands
and glanced at his face in a polished metal mirror. It was a pleasant
enough face, with brilliant eyes, a brow wide and high, ruddy cheeks
and a firm jaw showing through a fine brown beard.

He walked into the front chamber, a sturdy but not ungraceful figure in
his long physician's gown. He bowed to the two ladies who sat there in
his best two chairs.

"Messire Nostradamus," the taller and older of the pair greeted him.

Nostradamus--that was his title as a scholar or author, not as a simple
man of medicine. He bowed again, studying her quickly. She did not
seem in need of healing. Almost as tall as he, with a fine full figure
in lordly plum-colored velvet and black hair elaborately dressed and
coifed beneath her cap, she looked like a duchess, or perhaps like an
ambitious wealthy commoner's wife seeking to be taken for a duchess.

"Madame?" he prompted her.

She smiled in a way she must have known well to be pleasant.

"Messire Nostradamus should know my name without my telling. I know
your reputation, fair sir, from my kinsman, the Sire de Lorinville, who
entertained you two years back."

"De Lorinville, yes," he remembered. "In Lorraine, he holds the chateau
at Faim. I was there at dinner, yes."

"Modest!" she cried, and turned to her companion. "You hear, Anne?
Here's a very apostle of humility. He was at dinner with my kinsman,
and says so--but nothing of the wonders he did by his magical mind."

So overwhelming was the personality of the taller lady, so insistent
her manner, that Nostradame had not found the time to look, even at
the smaller. Now he turned his head and met the gaze of her eyes, wide
and gray in a thin, earnest face under a dark hood. Her cloak she kept
draped effacingly about her, but Nostradame, the trained anatomist and
physician, diagnosed through its folds a slim little body, with such
bones as connoisseurs then took to mean good and gentle blood; with not
half an ounce of spare flesh, but such flesh as there was was sweet and
tender. She was young, and becomingly restrained, but her eyes wanted
him for a friend.

"Madame is kind," said Nostradame, "and I would study to deserve such
kindness. But her kinsman's tale is no marvel. He but asked what would
befall a certain pig in his pens. I said it would make our dinner, and
so it fell out."

"Modest!" cried the tall lady again. "Thus was the miracle, Anne, as
all Lorraine tells. When de Lorinville heard Messire Nostradamus say
that a certain pig would be at the dinner table, he privily bade his
cook slay and roast another of the herd--a pig that our soothsayer
foretold would be eaten by a wolf. But in the kitchen was a tame wolf
cub which gnawed on the pork brought thither, and going for another pig
the cook chose the one which Messire Nostradamus had said would be at
dinner." She broke off, and smiled on the doctor. "But I am behind-hand
in courtesy. I am the Lady Olande de la Fornaye--"

"Enchanted," said Nostradame politely. He had heard of this noblewoman,
twice wed and twice widowed, holder of great estates above the town,
and storied for her charm and pride.

"And this is my little cousin, the Demoiselle Anne Poins Genelle," said
Lady Olande, gesturing with graceful condescension at the maiden in the
hood.

"Enchanted," said Nostradame again, musing this time that he could
learn to mean it. "Now, which has an ailment and of what sort?"

"I," said Lady Olande, "and my ill is curiosity, of the saddest and
sorest. You, sir, shall say my fate for me."

"Your fate?" echoed Nostradame, and fixed her eyes with his. He sat
down suddenly. "You ask to know--"

"What will befall me in years to come. My next marriage--"

"My lady," said Nostradame, rapidly and assuredly, "you will not marry
again."

"Hélas!" she cried. "Then a sad and pitiful love affair--"

"Nor that. No love affair, sad or glad, is in your future."

"No love affair!" The Lady Olande's voice was strident with protest.
"By heaven's gate, am I not made for love, and for love of the best
knights in Christendom?"

"I tell you your future, as you bid me. You will live without husband
or lover."

"Perhaps to travel through France and to other lands--"

"Your travels are over. Madame, your life is not long to run. I
foretell as I glimpse it, and not as you must wish."

"Sir, sir, you are a churl and a charlatan." Lady Olande was sweeping
to the door. "If you dare expect pay for--"

"Not a stiver for so unwelcome a service," Nostradame said.

"Come, Anne."

They went out together, the little maid glancing back once. Alone,
Nostradame smiled to himself, a smile of gentle pity. Perhaps he had
done wrong to obey at all that sudden impulse to speak of Lady Olande's
fate--it had been no more than a whisper to his inner ear. But he had
done so, had angered her. Let her anger be her own reward for insisting.

Others came to his house. An old drover with an infected toe cursed as
the doctor's lancet pained him, then called down the blessings of the
saints when he was able to set the drained and bandaged foot to earth
again. The wife of the town's saddler brought her fevered little boy,
and gaped uncomprehendingly as Nostradame advised rest, a liquid diet,
and frequent bathing. A blind beggar tapped and whined for alms, and
Nostradame gave him a denier and a merry word.

It was almost noon when the door burst suddenly open. Anne Poins
Genelle burst rather than stepped in. Her cloak fluttered, her hood had
fallen from her disordered brown hair.

"Sir, sir," she gasped, "there is danger--I could not but warn you, for
that I saw you at sight to be good and godly--"

"Take breath, child," said he. "There, that is better. Now tell me
calmly to whom the danger turns, and in what way I can serve."

She glanced back through the door that swung half open.

"Saints, for your mercy! It is too late, they come! My cousin, the
Lady Olande, burns with fury at the prophecy you made her. She has
gone to the witch-finder who visits here and named you as sorcerer and
ill-doer and agent of the devil--even now they are at your door!"




                              CHAPTER II

                           _The Time Stream_


Looking past her, Nostradame saw three men striding across the street,
the foremost in a black robe like a friar's, the other two with
steel-faced jerkins and serviceable swords dangling at their belts.

"Into my study, child," he bade his visitor, pointing to the door.
"Thence go into the kitchen and so out the back way to safety. If these
are witch-finders indeed, and would accuse me, you must not remain,
lest you, too, suffer unjustly."

She hurried where he bade her, and he turned to face the three as they
entered.

"And well, masters?" he prompted them genially.

The man in black, for all his clerical-cut robe, had a fierce sharp
face and a fiercer, sharper eye.

"To business," he said. "I am Hippolyte Gigny, commissioned by church
and king to seek out the rogues and destroyers who, not having the fear
of God before their eyes, traffic with the fiend and do sorcery and
witchcraft."

"Yours is a good trade," nodded Nostradame. "And how may I, a doctor of
medicine, help you to your findings?"

One of the men-at-arms cleared his throat, and Hippolyte Gigny sneered.

"Here's a cool one, and shrewd! How if I say that I know you yourself
are a wizard, and as such gallow's-meat in this world and hell's-meat
in the next?"

"I would say back that you are sadly wrong," said Nostradame, "and that
the layer of the information is sadly a liar."

Gigny's teeth and eyes gleamed mockingly. "You mischief your case when
thus you insult the informant--"

"Who is the Lady Olande de la Fornaye," finished Nostradame for him.

"You know, and a demon's voice must have told you, for but now did
she accuse you," cried Gigny. "Knave, you are undone. Now shall we
search your house. If you prove to have books of black art, charms and
instruments--"

He took a step toward the study door, beyond which Nostradame had all
three of the articles Gigny had named as damaging. Nostradame shifted
position to bar the witch-finder's way, and when Gigny would have
persisted, shoved him back so that he staggered and almost fell.

"I am a scholar and a person of gentle blood," said Nostradame. "I will
not be treated like a rabbit-poacher or a thief of handkerchiefs. Bring
a writ of law before you think to search here."

"My writs of law are of steel," snarled Gigny. "Aho, you two! Draw on
this saucy challenger."

The men-at-arms drew, and Nostradame leaped quickly to the wall where
hung his own straight sword with its cross hilt and brass mountings.

[Illustration: The men-at-arms drew their swords.]

"Lies the wind at that door?" he said, with sudden gaiety. "Come, then,
both of you. I ask only a fair stage and no favor."

His own blade rasped out of its sheath. In a trice he had parried the
stroke of the first man to reach him, then a darting threat from his
point caused the second to give back. At once the pair saw that they
had their hands full--Michel de Nostradame had been a strong swordsman
from his student days at Montpellier, and had not let his skill rust
for want of exercise.

A little of the stout German cut-and-thrust was in his method, and more
than a little of the Italian school, which makes the blade both attack
and defense. Two though they were against him, and mailed where he was
but gowned, they strove their best and could no more than hold him in
check.

But Gigny had rushed past the three battlers, to the door from which
Nostradame had thrust him. He tore it open and stepped through. A
moment more, and he yelled aloud in coarse laughter, then turned to
emerge.

"Cease!" he cried. "A truce, a truce! Put up swords, I pray!"

Obediently his servants gave back, lowering their points, but
Nostradame remained on guard. His brilliant eyes were hard and angry.

"God's wounds, I see now this gentleman's wizardry, and would we all
could learn from him," sniggered Gigny. "Messire Nostradame--that is
your name? You had all good reason to deny us our searching. I have
been precipitate here, and a little offending--"

"More than a little," growled Nostradame.

"Then I cry pardon, and do you cry forgiveness." As Nostradamus, too,
grounded his sword-point, Gigny came close, nudging the doctor as
though to say they shared a pleasant secret. "I am a man of the world,
sophisticated--I can see why the charge was placed. One lovely lady
ousted from your favor by another--forgive me, I beg again, and also
again--send us all such wizard powers, and eke such familiar spirits!"

And he walked out, with a last leer over his shoulder, waving his
servants along with him. Nostradame leaned a trifle on his sword, so
that the good steel bent springily, and frowned. Then he turned toward
the open study door, to see what matter had so changed the tune of the
witch-finder.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of his books, the bronze tripod stool, the water-basin, the forked
rod of laurel, his robe with the strange symbols, nothing showed.
These had been gathered under his desk, over which had been thrown
the cloak of Anne Poins Genelle. And on a couch in a corner she half
reclined, the low-cut collar of her gown twitched down so as to reveal
a bare shoulder--slim but not bony, Nostradame saw at once. She was
the picture, most skilfully posed, of a luresome lady surprised in an
intrigue.

"From my heart's depth do I thank you, child," said Nostradame
earnestly. "They are gone--"

She rose, twitching her gown into place again.

"It was all I could think to do in that short time. To hide the things
they must not find, and to appear to be your reason for secrecy. You
are not angry with me?"

"I dread only that you may have brought undeserved shame on yourself.
As God is my judge, I am no wizard or devil-companion. But how could
you know, and be moved to help my helplessness?"

"That." She pointed to the sword he still gripped. "Its hilt--a cross,
and set with a holy name. I read it cut upon the brass as it hung on
your wall. And in here--" She pointed again, to the crucifix on the
wall, the Madonna on a shelf. "In the presence of the true faith, how
could black magic work? Surely, messire, you seek knowledge, but not
evil. If you work miracles indeed, right so did the holy saints. I
would be your friend."

"You are my friend and my rescuer." He laid the sword on the couch, and
stooped to kiss her little hand. In France of 1547 that was a gesture
no more than well-bred and admiring, but her fingers stirred in his.
The heart of Nostradame, mature and mentalized scholar, was touched.
"And how," he continued, "may I serve you in some small way to pay in
part my great debt?"

"Be only what you are," she said.

"What do you know of what I am?"

"Perhaps," murmured Anne Poins Genelle, "I, too, have more senses than
five. Perhaps I am aware of things beyond this small space and time in
which we huddle."

"Child!" In his sudden blaze of feeling, he clutched her forearms. They
were small in his grasp, like the forks of the ceremonial laurel rod.
"Are you telling me that you, too, know the hour of sight?"

The suddenness of his cry and movement made her shrink in his clutch,
and he let go and stepped back.

"Indeed, I cannot say what I meant," she said, recovering. "I only felt
what you tried to say to my cousin, Lady Olande, and could understand
when she could not or would not. I'll stay a moment, if you talk to me,
messire."

He smiled at her. He had not felt so comradely toward anyone in years.
Standing over her in his gown of dignity, he was taller than one might
think, so broad was his body and so easily did he carry its breadth.

"I think the more, and speak little," he temporized. "Would that speech
were as free as thought. Some day it may come to that."

"A prophecy."

"A hope." He led her to the desk, and lifted from it her mantle. There
lay his papers. "You deserve my trust, Lady Anne. And, faith, perhaps I
need one to listen and believe and understand. Here. Read this first of
my quatrains."

He handed the sheet to her. She read aloud, softly:

    Seated within my study-room at night
    Alone upon a tripod stool of brass,
    I saw from out the silent dark a light
    That mirrored magic scenes as in a glass....

"That explains how visions come to me," he told her. "Thus I begin
my record. How came I thus to study and work? Perhaps by way of my
fathers--my grandfather read white magic, and urged me to the like.
When I went to Montpellier, to the university founded long ago by
fugitive wise Arabs, I learned foreign languages and foreign arts,
along with medicine. Books of wisdom did I con in the library--Roger
Bacon of England, Albertus Magnus, and certain scrolls by Eastern magi.
Yet I did hesitate over their teachings. I think," and he sighed, as if
weary a little, "that the hour of sight forced itself upon me."

"It came whether or no?" she suggested; and when he nodded, "When?"

"Within this year. I had returned from my last intention at public
honors--I had been invited to Lyon, as once before to Aix, where I did
some service during the plague year. Coming back, I thought to consider
worldly wealth and fame a vanity, and to live and study quietly. Then,
it began. By chance, or by another will than mine, I did as the verse
tells, after the manner of the soothsayers of the ancient Brancchi."

He explained that classical formula of action--the forked rod, the
basin redolent of herbs, the moistening of the robe's hem, the tripod
stool such as once accommodated the oracle at Delphi.

"By heaven, the ancients knew rare and curious things. Who can say that
this wonder is not science? We once would have thought printing sheer
magic, and eke gun-powder. Five hundred years gone, my medical studies
would have seemed witchcraft. In any case, a vision came, of another
time and place. Then others--but read."

       *       *       *       *       *

He handed her another quatrain:

    The coffin sinks within the iron tomb
    Where dead and still the King's seven children lie,
    While ancient ghosts rise from the hellish gloom
    And weep to see their withered fruit thus die.

"A dubious mystery," said Anne, giving the paper back.

"Because I dare not set down plain what I see, or how," he replied.
"What would be my shrift, if witch-finders like that vagabond Gigny
should read a true account? I made the verse for my vision of an
iron-grilled tomb, marked with a lion for coat-of-arms--"

"The lion of the Valois," said Anne at once. "Of our comely king, the
Second Henry. I have been to court with my cousin, only three months
gone, at his coronation. Henry is a stout rider and weaponer. He tilted
bravely against the best of his nobles, wearing the lion upon his
surcoat, and on his head a gold-visored helmet--"

"Gold visor!" interrupted Nostradame in his turn. "Heaven's grace, it
is what I saw, and indeed only the king may wear such brave armor. Lady
Anne, read this. I saw it at the dawn just past."

She read the quatrain he had written that day, and he told her more
fully what the mist had drawn away to show him. Anne's slim young face
was grave.

"Now, here's a sad wonder," said she when he had done. "It was foretold
the king in his childhood that he would die in a duel. His mother
scorned the word, for who would dare challenge a royal prince? But if
it falls out as you say, in a joust or tourney--when will this happen?"

"I cannot tell. The visions come not in any order of time, though I
see and set down things that help me decide. Perhaps the stars in the
heavens are shown me, or I hear a word. For this one, I should say the
king seemed older than now--a good forty years turned."

"And he is twenty-eight," supplied Anne. "Twelve years hence, or
thereon. The year of 1589? And your other vision was of the death of
his house of Valois. Will you tell him these sad things?"

"I would need to know him well before making so baleful a prophecy.
Remember your cousin's rage at me. I have no fame or position--"

"But you will gain both," Anne told him, with an earnestness so great
that it seemed to take her breath.

"You have prophecy for me."

"No, only faith. It is you who see everything and of every time. I am
not skilled nor wise in magic. But I feel sure of your future."

"Child, your words make me feel sure, too." He took her hand, in an
honest impulse of inspired comradeship. "Happy the man whom you love."

"I love none, messire. My father was gentle, but poor. On his death I
came to live with the Lady Olande. Think you she listens to any talk of
love save for herself?"

That was enough to sketch for him the life-picture of a poor relation
in the home of a woman who ruled her dependents like a tyrant. Pitying
Anne, Nostradame spoke of other glimpses he had caught into the future,
and of what they seemed to tell of the world to come. Her interest was
for France, and he spoke of the rise and fall of powers, of rebellions
and defeats and triumphs; in particular of a strange little ruler, a
sturdy short man who wore a great three-cornered hat, who for a time
would hold all Europe but whose bloody rule would bring the world into
arms against him, and finally cause his downfall.

"You speak of other centuries? How clearly do you see distant times?"

"Clearly. Too clearly. Child, it is a horror to see the wars of that
far future. Fire from heaven, wasting away cities, the march of great
engines and vehicles, guns as large as giant trees, the advance and
retreat of armies as numerous as the generations. Hélas, that man
cannot learn!"

"Man shall learn," said Anne, with her air of confidence. "Your
prophecies shall teach them."

"How? The future is as rigidly set out as the past."

"Is it so? Perhaps you see but moments, and if men take warning they
will be able to change other future moments, for the better."

The two of them could have talked for many hours, but Anne feared
what her absence at the house of her cousin might bring. She told him
good-day, and again he kissed her hand, which this time did not tremble
but squeezed his. And when she was gone, the house and the study seemed
to tremble in an afterglow of her presence.

Nostradame grinned ruefully in his beard. Was he falling in love, and
with a slender girl, little more than a child? He had thought himself
past such things, since the death of his wife. He had mourned her
sincerely, that lost wife. She had been kind, loyal and loving, for all
she had not once shown interest or even curiosity over his studies of
magic and future-reading. Anne Poins Genelle, in two brief hours, had
proven herself more understanding and sympathetic.

The afternoon occupied him with another series of patients. He fared
out to visit two sick merchants, and found one of them surly, the other
depressingly quiet and complaining. He came home to a simple evening
meal, and with the fall of night repaired to his study. From the hiding
into which the Lady Anne had thrust them he dragged stool, basin,
divining rod and robe. Quickly he made preparations for the hour of
sight.

He confessed himself weary from the day's adventures. Indeed, he sagged
rather than sat on the tripod, but a vision was coming. In his ears
rang a faint cry, the cry of a child, and then he saw Anne, as she
might be a year or two older, holding in her arms a swaddled infant.
She smiled and whispered, and the cries ceased. Then she turned her
face upward, and lifted the baby to show it to someone. A figure
stood beside her chair, and bent tenderly over mother and child. It
was himself, in his doctor's gown and his mood of happiness--he,
Nostradame, with a hand out to Anne's child in the gesture of a father,
proud and joyous--

He started. That had been a dream, not a vision, for he had dozed on
the tripod. For an instant he pondered that the ancients had found
truth in dreams, too. And then the forked rod was trembling in his
hands, and his every fiber grew taut and tense as, in the darkness, a
screen of mist made itself.

This time he heard before he saw, a voice muttering a single word,
muttering it again. He spoke the word in his turn--"_Atoma...._"
Greek, ancient Greek. _Atoma_ signifies that which does not
divide. But the voice spoke again, adding another word, this time Latin:

"_Atoma divisa...._"

The mist was clearing, and Nostradame shuddered with a prescience of
terror, he knew not what. And then it was gone, mist and voice and all,
before completion. His mind had been snatched back to his study by the
loud staccato of a knock from the front of the house.

Quickly he rose, doffing robe and laying down rod, and walked into his
consulting chamber and to the front door.




                              CHAPTER III

                        _Pattern of the Future_


Anne Poins Genelle was at the door, smiling from her hood.

"I am no soothsayer," said Nostradame. "You are the last person I
thought to see."

"Because I am here on your concern. Your second sight is for
others--not yourself." He opened the door for her to come in. "I am
thought to be in my bed, but a cook in Lady Olande's kitchen is my
trusty friend, and I left by the back door. Messire, my head has rung
and whirled all this day with the things you told me."

"About days to come?"

"Aye, that. How think you manage? Are you there indeed, in a time
unborn?"

They sat, and he frowned over her question.

"More than anything, it is this: I move, by some great power, past a
border or fringe. My sight and hearing are not clear. I see as one is
said to see dead ghosts!"

"For example," said Anne, pushing back her hood, "did you make one of
the company at the joust where the king died--where he will die, twelve
years hence? Did none look at you?"

He shook his head. "Indeed, had I been visible, would any have eyes for
me, when they saw their sovereign lord so sadly stricken?"

"Then you do not know."

"I cannot know. Those moments are full of wonder and dread. I speak to
none, and none speaks to me."

"Sir," she said, "how if you had a comrade in those moments? One you
can know and trust?" She was eager and shy in the same mood. But again
he shook his head.

"I have not dared tell any, save only you."

"Then take me for your fellow--into the times to come."

It was his turn to be mystified.

"How that, child? I have told you how difficult and strange is the
ancient ceremony--"

"Could not two perform it as well as one--better? Think!" Now she
was bold, insistent. "It is an exploration more wondrous than any
in history--more than Marco Polo, more than John Mandeville, than
Christopher Columbus himself. Have you read the poems of Dante?"

"Aye, that. He saw amazements in hell and heaven, were he to be
believed. But he was guided by Virgil."

"They were friends together. Two may prosper where one dare only linger
on the threshold," she rose. "Come."

She led him to the study, as if it were her study and he was the guest.
There Nostradame, converted to the spirit of her wish, rummaged in the
closet and found for her another brass tripod stool like his, and a
figured robe which he had discarded for its tatters a year before. From
a laurel branch in a corner he cut a forked stick and showed her how to
hold it.

"Now," he said.

They sat facing each other across the herb-fuming basin. He showed her
how to moisten the fringe of the robe. Leaning across, he blew out the
taper on the desk. They sat in silent darkness.

"I see light," she whispered, "or is it my fancy--"

"Hush," he bade her, his own eyes fixed on the faint glow that
betokened the gathering of the mist.

For once his hands did not tremble, he did not feel the touch of fear.
He would have glanced at Anne to see if she, too, faced the adventure
with courage, but feared to break the spell. Through the haze came
strange noises, a rhythmic clatter of metal and something like a deep,
long shout, but also with something of metal in it, like the blast of a
great horn. Would this glimpse grant the solution to that two-tongued
paradox, _atoma divisa_?... The mist was clearing.

He saw a platform, lighted brilliantly but artificially, for it was
distantly walled and loftily roofed, a great shed that would house an
army. To either side of where he seemed to stand ran a strange metal
affair the purpose of which he could not guess--parallel bars of
bright iron or steel, in pairs and running into dark arched tunnels
at a distance. Each pair of bars was supported upon a series of stout
timbers, set crosswise and close together. And foggy figures began to
make themselves clear, moving on the platform opposite him, amid a
jabber of many voices, shrill and excited and with no joyous note to
them.

"Children," said Anne's soft voice beside him. "See to them, herded
like cattle. Are they prisoners?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Her voice helped in some way to clarify the scene. They were indeed
children, dressed in the outlandish fashion that Nostradame had learned
to recognize as of the far future. They huddled and stared with the
blank woeful faces of youth in misery. There were adults, too--two
gray-clad women with red crosses on their arms and in the fronts of
their caps, and some men in brown, who moved and spoke with authority.

To one side, a woman hugged and kissed two of the smallest and urged
them into the group. The children were mounting by steps into a series
of long structures with glass windows, structures that stood not upon
foundations but upon round wheels that fitted their hollowed rims to
the parallel bars of metal.

"Prisoners?" echoed Nostradame. "No, their mothers urge them forward.
But this is a sad thing. They weep, the poor little ones, and their
parents withal."

"Surely the brown-clad men are soldiers. They wear weapons at their
belts," said Anne. "It is war, and the children are somehow being taken
to safety. Heavens mercy, look to the little girl! She runs, weeping."

A child of six had scampered away along the platform, for the moment
overlooked by those in charge. Impulsively Anne moved forward, and
Nostradame saw her meet the child, not as a watcher from another time,
but as an actor in the scene itself. Anne caught the little fugitive
in her arms, and spoke insistently, soothingly, tenderly. The girl
answered her back, and was comforted, and turned back to join the
group. The children were herded aboard the wheeled structures, and some
of the adults with them. There was another deep horn-blast, a rush of
smoke from somewhere, and the laden train moved away on the tracks.
Then Nostradame and Anne were sitting in the dark, the vision gone from
them.

"Ah," sighed Anne, as Nostradame rekindled the light. "She spoke
another language than I, but she trusted me and lost her fear."

"I heard her speech, and I know some words of it," replied Nostradame.
"It was English, but not like the English of our time. She called
you 'angel'--she thought you a friend come to her from heaven."
Thoughtfully he stroked his bearded chin. "A friend from heaven you
are, Anne. To that poor youngling, and to me."

Sitting at his desk, he chose a pen. "I must set it down. There will be
a woeful war threatening the islands of England, and the children must
be sent to the country in those huge cars, lest the destruction of the
cities overwhelm them."

Quickly he wrote:

    Within the Isles the children are transported,
    The most of them despairing and forlorn,
    Upon the soil their lives will be supported,
    While hope shall flee....

"But I was there with them, among them," said Anne. "I spoke to the
child, touched her. You have not told me of doing that."

"Because I have never done it," replied Nostradame, pausing in his
rhyme. "I have been frightened."

"As I was not."

"As you were not. Child," and he laid down the pen, "you bring me
greatness and open new gates of the world to come. How if we try again,
and both walk and speak in that strangeness?"

"Do it," she begged. "Here, at once."

"Child--" began Nostradame again.

"Must you call me that? Not that you mean harm, but have I not proven
myself a woman grown?"

"Far more than that," he agreed gravely. "As the little English one
named you, you are an angel proven. But never have I sought the moment
of sight twice in a single sitting. You cannot guess the horrors shown
me. Wars, the perishing of races, prisoners burned and drowned, rains
of fire from heaven--"

"But if we can walk there as well as look there? If we ease an ill,
prevent a death, comfort a sorrow?"

"How, in this present time, change a future one?"

"I did it," she reminded him stubbornly. "You saw. The little girl ran,
perhaps toward danger. I met her, persuaded her to turn back. A small
matter? But next time it may be a great matter. Come with me, Michel de
Nostradame. Who can say the future is as unchangeable as was the past?
Not I, not you--come!"

He bowed his agreement, and they sought their tripods again. Darkness,
silence....

The mist cleared to a scene gorgeous and exotic. The two of them saw,
as it were, from the corner of a great open porch of a public hall or
palace. Beyond was a square, and beyond that lifted domes and minarets.

"The infidel East?" Anne suggested.

"I think not. Though I never saw Russia, this I know to be their
way of architecture. But look! Soldiers--from the west, and come as
conquerors."

       *       *       *       *       *

The streets were full of them, hard-faced, ready-looking veterans,
with long guns that bore stabbing irons fixed to their muzzles. In
disciplined ranks and details they ranged the curbs and cowed the
staring, thronging townfolks.

Closer, on the steps of the porch itself, gathered a group of men who
by the glitter and decoration of their uniforms were surely the high
officers of this stranger army. One of them, burly and arrogant, stood
listening to a civilian of the town, probably an official, whose high
cheek-bones and deep, brilliant eyes showed him to be of the true
Russian blood. They conversed, and Nostradame and Anne caught no words
but tones of voices; the official was pleading, the foreign general
disdainfully telling him to wait.

"I know these invaders, and what they do here," muttered Nostradame.
"Terms must be made with the master of Europe--aye, here he swaggers
now."

"I thought they were speaking French," suggested Anne. "This master of
Europe of whom you tell is a Frenchman, perhaps?"

"Not he," and Nostradame shook his head. "A foreigner of poor descent,
he rises to rule all of Western Europe by might, and now he moves to
swallow Russia also. See to him."

A strutting figure approached, neither tall, graceful nor very
dignified. He wore a uniform less gaudy than the simplest of the aides
who followed at a respectful distance, but he would have dominated the
scene had he been in rags. Nor was it his nobility, for he had none;
every motion, every feature, bespoke a greed and ruthlessness for power
that bristled from him like an aura.

This master of Europe stood commandingly before the Russian official,
who bowed timidly and spoke again. Into his speech cut the master's
curt replies, sweeping aside suggestions and setting his own terms,
with no hint of wishing to hear arguments or appeals. Quickly,
unfeelingly, the interview was completed. The pleader moved fearfully
away, and the master waved for his lieutenants to follow him. As he
entered the building arrogant and assured, he uncovered his head. A
lock of hair fell across his brow, dark against the pale skin. His face
was set tensely, his eyes gleamed like battle lanterns on a ship's
bulwark.

"He is evil," said Anne.

"And all Europe of his day fears him and his plan to rule the world."

"How if we prevent this swaggerer from realizing his dream?"

"Impossible!" exclaimed Nostradame.

Anne glanced at the evening sky, gray and dull. "Surely it is late in
the year, with cold weather at hand. And this, you say, is Russia, the
land of hard winters. Even if invaders drive back Russian armies, must
not they in turn retreat from Russian snows?"

"The master of Europe plans to shelter in this captured town."

"But if it is not left to shelter him? If it be destroyed about
him--what, you do not see how? Come, come!"

She moved to and through a great open window that extended from
floor to ceiling. Inside was a meeting-chamber, and around a table
were crowded the chiefs of invasion, listening while their master
harangued them. His shrill commands and statements were emphasized with
full-armed gestures and thumpings upon a great map unrolled. The scene
was lighted by lamps hung in brackets along the walls, and at one place
stood a tall basket full of crumpled and torn paper scraps.

"Thus we deprive the invader of his shelter against the cold," said
Anne, and put her hand to the nearest lamp. "Into the basket--"

It did not move. It did not even tremble, though she tugged and
struggled.

"Am I then only a shadow?" she demanded over her shoulder. "But the
little English girl--"

"Wiser are children than their elders, and clearer-sighted," said
Nostradame. "We waste our time here."




                              CHAPTER IV

                           _Time Travelers_


They left the hall, and moved down a side-street. One of the townsfolk,
a simple-faced fellow with a beard and a loose coat, almost bumped
headlong into them--then started aside, staring. His big hands twitched
up, crossing himself. Nostradame smiled and signed himself in turn
with the cross, whereat the fellow stared the more widely, and all but
dropped to his knees. They went past him hurriedly.

"And so we are seen, of simple folk at least," said Anne.

"Simple folk?" repeated Nostradame. "Say rather of those whose wisdom
is the greater because they do not muddle it with plans for oppression
or deceit. Look ahead of us."

It was dusk by now, and lights gleamed from the windows of wooden
houses, shabby and old, along the middle distance of the street.

"We enter a quarter of poor men," said Nostradame. "Here we shall be
seen, perhaps heard--"

"And these houses will burn like tinder," finished Anne for him. "Look
to the building with the dome and spire. Surely it is a church of the
Russian kind, and in the little cottage beyond must dwell the priest."

Some children on a doorstep, too concerned at the coming of the invader
to play or chatter, watched the pair as they passed. They were too
small to wonder or dread, but they were plainly and honestly curious.
Anne and Nostradame gained the cottage by the church.

"His door is open, good man," said Nostradame. "He may be a poor
priest, but he is a wise one. We will go in."

The priest sat at a table among stacks of old volumes with the strange
Russian character, and his walls were hung with icons. He was simply
robed and his beard was long, thick and gray as iron. Up he started as
the two appeared on his threshold.

"Who are you appearances?" he demanded, or seemed to demand in his
tongue they did not understand.

Remembering the citizen on the street, Nostradame made the sign of the
cross.

"Do you speak French or Latin, good father?" he asked.

"French--a little." The words were slow and accented, but
understandable. The priest's eyes were wide, but the fear in them was
under control. "Ghosts--I see through you, to the wall beyond. Yet no
evil can you do in this holy place. Have the fear of God before your
eyes, and return to your graves!"

"Father," said Anne, "indeed we are not dead ghosts, but messengers
sent--it is too long to say how--for your help against the ill-come
foreigners."

A moment of silence, and the greater preoccupation overrode the lesser.
The priest shrugged his shoulders--they were broad, peasant shoulders
beneath his gown--and lifted his hands to heaven.

"Nay," he said. "What can be done? They have taken our city for their
base of war--"

"How if there be not a city?" broke in Anne. "If it be burnt--"

"I know you are devils, both of you," the priest broke in, "or you
would not council the ruin of this holy place, ancient beyond--"

"Reflect, Father," interrupted Nostradame in his turn. "Holy you call
your town, but its ways and buildings are fouled by the tyrant. Holding
it for his base, he may win over all Russia. Left without it, he must
fall back, lest he freeze."

The priest was on his knees, praying. Then he looked up, his eyes wide,
but this time joyous.

"It is true!" he cried. "Your words are wise and blessed! Say, are you
saints or angels?"

"We are as common folk as your good self," said Nostradame. "But haste
to what you must do."

The priest was on his feet again. He strode to the open fire and caught
from it a brand that blossomed with tongues of flame. Back to the
wall, he stripped from it the icons, and caught up such books as the
crook of his big arm could hold. Then he held the fire to the hangings
at the window. There was a hungry leap of orange flame. The dry wood
of the sill caught. A moment more, and the priest was in the street,
waving his torch and shouting in Russian. People ran to listen, and he
exhorted them, and they answered him with shouts of wild approval and
enthusiasm.

"Hark to them," said Anne to Nostradame. "Are they not Russians,
Muscovites? Loving their land before all things--"

"Leave this doorway," urged Nostradame. "The cottage burns, and its
blaze spreads to the church."

They gained the street, and looked back to the red glow in the windows
of the priest's home.

A patrol of the invader troops was hurrying up the street. Its leader
gained the door they had left, but shrank back before a great puff of
smoke.

"Already the fire is too great," said Anne. "Ha, hear the tall soldier
curse, his fingers were scorched. And see to the Russians--that one in
the smock catches a brand from the burning and runs to fire his own
house. And others also!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps the time of the vision hurried for them. It was as though they
saw in moments what might normally take hours. The row of houses blazed
up in a score of places. Shouting citizens, inspired to grim action,
carried torches elsewhere. A great stable was aflame, horses ran from
it. From a public square rose a swirl of conflagration like the throat
of a volcano.

"Nought can quench it now," said Anne. "It is brighter than day, though
the night darkens. My eyes cannot see--"

And the shouting died, the bustling figures faded. Again the two were
in Nostradame's study. Anne sagged on her tripod, and Nostradame took
her elbow and led her into the lighted front room.

Gravely, softly, they spoke of what they had known together.

"'Twas done," Anne said shakily, again and again. "We, from this our
Sixteenth Century, went to another time and place, and did a small
thing that grew to a great thing--I tremble!"

She sat on the couch, and recovered enough to smile. "I would be an ill
comrade to faint now, when--was I not brave?"

"As the archangels are brave," Nostradame assured her.

"You say you know that false master of Europe, with his strut and his
forelock. Let the winter not comfort him unsheltered! How is he named?"

Nostradame gestured the query aside. "A name of no account, by descent
or virtue. I do not give it, even by implication or anagram, in my
writings. See these quatrains, for other visions of him." And he
brought them from his study.

    Deep in the heart of Europe's Western land
    A child of poorest parents shall be sprung,
    Whose tongue shall sway and rule great troops and grand
    Until his fame to Earth's last land is sung.

"And here," said Nostradame, offering another, "is my glimpse of his
end."

    By thunderbolts his flag is driven low,
    He shall be struck while shouting in his pride,
    His haughty nation yields before the foe,
    His deeds shall be avenged when he has died.

"And now we know how he will fall from the point of his highest rise,"
went on Nostradame. "To think that we--you and I--were the instruments
for that fall! I must record it at once."

He sought writing materials, improvising aloud:

    "Through Slavic lands a horde moves, dire and great,
    But falls the town to which the raider came.
    He shall see all the country desolate,
    Nor knows he how to stem the burning flame--"

"Do as you will," Anne begged, "leave his name out of your writings,
but tell it to me."

"Why not, child, if you are curious? He will be called Napoleon
Bonaparte, and when Moscow burns about his ears, the beginning of his
end is upon him...."

It was the next night, and Nostradame sat alone in a house that seemed
triply lonely and empty because Anne had been there, and was elsewhere
now.

She must not, he had told her, endanger her relationship with the proud
and dictatorial Lady Olande by slipping away night after night. They
would find a way to communicate in days to come, and meanwhile he would
scan the future alone. Of that he was stubbornly sure. Anne had almost
swooned with the experience. She was not strong enough in body to match
her brave spirit.

But, though he would not take her exploring in time again, she had
shown him a thing he could do. Here and there he might be revealed
to the best men of those coming times, to help them with a word--or
revealed, perhaps, to the worst men, and frighten them as a ghost can
frighten. And some time he would dare to publish his records, as a
warning to the world that would be. Meanwhile, again the strange phrase
was groping in his mind ... "_Atoma divisa...._"

       *       *       *       *       *

A knock at his door. So late--was Anne disdaining his sober council and
coming back? He went and opened.

A slender prankling youngster stood there, the very ideal of a great
lady's saucy page. He wore doublet and hose of rich purple, with a gay
plumed hat set rakishly upon his carefully combed ringlets.

"Young sir?" said Nostradame, concealing his dislike of the
interruption.

"I am from the Lady Olande, worthy doctor," said the page. "At her home
I am her most trusted retainer, and by me she sends you a message."

"Give it me," and Nostradame held out his big hand, but the page made a
graceful gesture of negation.

"Nay, this message is by word of mouth. The Lady Olande bids me say
that she was hasty and ill-mannered early yesterday. She cries your
mercy for what she sought to do you in harm, and swears that she
rejoices it came to nought."

"And what beside?" demanded Nostradame. "For such talk presages the
asking of a favor."

"You are wise as well as worthy, messire. The Lady Olande is taken of
an illness--surely, she bids me say, it is a punishment for her sins to
you. And she begs you put out your hand to heal her."

"Ill, is she?" Nostradame, the doctor, could not refuse such an appeal
from his most deadly foe. "What form doth the illness take?"

"Nay, I know not. You must diagnose and prescribe."

"Wait." Nostradame returned to his study, stowing his gear of mystery
away. Into a sachel he put phials and parcels of such remedies as
might, one or another, be of service. Rejoining the page, he emerged
into the street, where two horses were tied. The page held one for him
to mount, then vaulted into the saddle of the other. A moon was coming
up, light enough to show them the road to the estate of the Lady Olande
de la Fornaye.

The manor house of la Fornaye was a square-built structure of stone,
forthright enough in its outer appearance. As they gained its front
entry, a dog barked from somewhere, and someone came forward to take
the horses. The page opened the heavy door for Nostradame, ushering
him into a pleasant hall, its floor carpeted richly and its walls
tapestried gaily. There was an open fire against the chill, and a long
table on which stood a wine service and a silver bowl of fruits.

From an arched inner doorway came the Lady Olande, dressed as for a
ball in a gown of cramoisie, snugly fitted to her torso and bosom but
full in the sleeves and the skirt. Jewels gleamed in her hair, at her
throat, and on the hand she held out as in welcome.

"Madame, you are better," said Nostradame at once. "I had expected to
find you in sorry case."

"True, I am better," she replied, "and now that you are here I am about
to be eased forever of my torment."

"What is it?" he asked.

"A grave illness," she said, and her smile was of radiant mockery. "For
a whim, perhaps, I made an enemy of you. To have such as you for enemy
is such a malaise as one might perish of, sir."

There was a heavy clank behind him. The page had bolted the door. From
the arch behind Lady Olande came two armed men.

"Thank you for coming to my request," said the woman. "Here upon mine
own lands, I am supreme and peer of all save the King himself. It is my
right to dispense the high justice, the middle, and the low. I can kill
if so I wish, and at present, Messire Michel de Nostradame, I wish to
kill you."




                               CHAPTER V

                        _The Most Awful Vision_


A day before, Nostradame had defied stoutly the assault of two
men-at-arms as formidable as Lady Olande's servitors, but he had
been armed. Here, as Lady Olande reminded him, her power was all but
absolute, and undoubtedly there were other men within call.

He turned briefly toward the door, but the page stood there with a
savage grin, hand on dagger. Nostradame turned to his captor.

"Have you stopped to think," he said, "that I am not a simple nobody of
peasant blood? I am known in the town and elsewhere, and my family is
as good, perhaps, as yours. I doubt if you can kill me out of hand and
not answer for it."

"I will answer, and have spent some hours in readying the answer,"
replied the lady. "You have been sent for to come and prescribe for
me--your servant can testify as much, if he overheard my page speak
to you. Well, sir, you have come, and instead of honest medicines you
offer incantations and spells from the very floor of hell. We of la
Fornaye are honest folk, and none will blame us for punishing you with
death. I can and will abide any questioning successfully."

She looked as if she was confident of herself and her servants.
Nostradame reflected again on his own misfortune in giving voice to
the whisper that had come, only that morning, of this resolute lady's
future. How had it gone? No more love for her, no more travel. A death
close at hand. He fixed her with his eyes.

"I, who see the future for others, cannot see it for myself," quoth he,
"yet I have it in mind that I will see your death, and not you mine."

"How that?" said the page, coming to his elbow. "You're saucy, you man
of physic, in your last hour."

Nostradame gazed upon him with a deep, searching air.

"I pity you, springald. Your limbs should have many years of life.
Yet--yes, I will say it--you shall die before this proud and cruel
mistress of yours, which means you must die very soon indeed. This very
night, mayhap."

"Eh, by Saint Denis," growled one of the men-at-arms, "this wizard
sets curses upon us all."

"I set no curses, friend," Nostradame told him. "I do not see your
death, for instance. You will live long, to repent your part in this
foul work, mere dog though you be of Olande de la Fornaye."

"I do not stand and hear insults in my own hall. Bring him to the
chamber beyond."

The men-at-arms came to either side of Nostradame, and, unarmed as
he was, he suffered them to conduct him through the archway, along a
corridor and to an inner chamber. After them swept Lady Olande, and the
page, bearing a stand of burning tapers.

It was such a small nook of a room as the rich homes of the period
afforded for chance private consultations. There was a settee of heavy
dark wood, a small table, and a chair. The page set the lights on the
table, where they illuminated an open book. Nostradame, glancing at the
exposed pages, drew back and made the sign of the cross.

"That is an evil work and a forbidden," he said. "Spells for the
raising of Satan himself--it merits to be burned."

Lady Olande laughed. "Yet you know it and what it is, which argues your
own evil knowledge. I myself have never bothered to read in it--reading
is to me a vain burden. But it has been in the house, and now it will
convict you. The authorities, when they question, will learn how you
opened it to read--how I sensed the nearness in the air of imps and
goblins, blackest and foulest, and how I, in terror and anger, called
my servants to slay you before you did ill with your knowledge of it.
Seat him at the table, and bury your swords in his body."

"Sit," the page said to Nostradame, who turned upon him so blazing a
stare that the pert youngster gave back.

"Order me no orders, youth," said Nostradame. "Lady Olande, you are
determined upon my death. I prefer to die standing."

"So be it," she said, and motioned to the two.

Nostradame had never stood in fear of death. Yet now he sighed over
the shortening of life, as one might sigh over the close of a happy
banquet, or a gay pageant where one holds a pleasant seat. In moments
it would be over, did the Lady Olande have her will. He would not know
the form of her false evidence, nor how soon authorities would search
his house for what they would find....

Suddenly he drew himself tense. Death he did not fear, no; only dying
in vain. Would they destroy his papers, as the vile records of one who
worshipped the devil? All his verses of the times to come, the hope he
had of warning whole races and nations yet unborn? Could he not protest
that, at least fight against it? The man who had spoken in the main
hall slid his sword from its sheath.

"This is in a way your own doing, sir," he said, a little diffidently,
to Nostradame. "You told me that I would live without hurt after this
matter is done."

"Not quite did I say that," demurred Nostradame. "You will live, yes;
but you forget that I said you would live to repent, and repentance
comes through suffering and sorrow."

       *       *       *       *       *

As he spoke he had sidled, as though timid of the sword-point, toward
the nearest wall. There hung a tapestry worth, perhaps, a hundred gold
nobles. Now he shot out his arm, and with a quick clutch and pull
wrenched the hanging free. He half-wadded the fabric, and received
in it the thrust of the sword. A moment later he had come in close,
gripped the guard of the weapon, and torn it from the man's grasp. His
other fist, big and brawny as a smith's, darted a heavy buffet, and the
man-at-arms fell with a heavy sigh, as though struck by a hammer.

Possessing himself of the captured weapon, Nostradame fell upon the
remaining armed servitor, who at the second engage knew that he had met
his master in fence. He ran out of the room, and after him the Lady
Olande flung a curse so foul that the lowest guard-room of a mercenary
company could scarce have matched it.

"Run!" she called to the page. "Run, and summon every male retainer!
I'll have this devil hewn in pieces." And she faced Nostradame with
eyes in which death stood up. "As for you, with your sleights and
subtleties, you fear at least this book which I shall make evidence
against you. Hear, while I read something to stun your ears."

She was at the table, picking up the volume. "Here is something, in the
name of hell's legions, to confound an enemy! In the very language of
demons, sir! I read it upon you--_Sator, Arepos, Tenet_--"

"I could not ask a self-conviction neater and more complete," said a
sneering voice that Nostradame knew.

In walked a figure in black. It was Hippolyte Gigny, the witch-finder.
In the corridor behind him lingered, not a pair of sword-bearing
retainers, but half a dozen. The page was struggling among them, and
cried out once, then fell bleeding. His death, so lately foretold, had
caught up with him.

"As I am the king's servant, I suspected this at the beginning,"
quoth Gigny. "For a lady to be so glib about witchcraft in charging a
neighbor, she herself must be versed in it. When the man she accused
stood innocent--well, innocent of wizardry--my suspicion grew. And
there came to me now a certain word of what you wrought here, Olande
de la Fornaye. I find you at your witch work, book in hand and a black
spell upon your lips."

She still clutched the book, and glared defiance at Gigny.

"You would dare charge me with that? I am a noblewoman, the peer of any
save the king--"

"And I am the king's servant, speaking with his mouth. Take the book,
one of you, and handle it gingerly lest hell blast you. It shall be
given to the judges. Another of you, place her under arrest." Gigny
spoke to Nostradame. "She was vomiting a curse of hell upon you, and I
forestalled her. Are we quits now, sir? This service of mine tonight
cancels the false charge of mine today?"

"More than quits," said Nostradame.

"Then I give you good-night."

And Nostradame left the raided home of Olande de la Fornaye, for whom
waited a grim judgment and a death of agony under the law that suffered
not a witch to live.

       *       *       *       *       *

He entered his modest home, and there waited Anne.

"It was you, of course, who saved me again," he said to her.

"Yes. I heard her plan it, as before, and the matter of the false
accusation she perfected. When I was too late to tell you, I sought
out the witch-finder in his lodging. He went readily to her home." She
sighed. "In some way I must think of what I will do hereafter. She was
my only kin, and I hers. I have no shelter--"

"If you and she were only kin, then you stand her heir after she is
slain by law. Broad lands, wealth, servants." He bowed before her. "My
Lady Anne."

"Not yet, not yet," she pleaded. "I cannot go there at once. Suffer me
to stay here the night. We are friends--perhaps even--"

"Short hours ago, we were friends and equals. Now you will be of the
noblesse, and I am a physician, of small means and simple repute. Lady
Anne, my thanks for your kind and saving service twice in a day's
space, and I shall live and die your debtor--"

"Oh, have done!" she cried at him, in something of a temper. "You
make the gaining of fortune an ill and cold thing. We shall go on as
we began--comradely and happy--or I will not touch of Olande de la
Fornaye's estate one copper sou."

"Think, child," he bade her. "Think, and then decide. I will leave you
to yourself for a space."

He bowed, and withdrew to the study beyond.

The driving urge was upon him, and quickly he groped in the dark for
his robe and rod. Dampening the fringe, he sat on the tripod. He
remembered the vision that had been interrupted, and the words that had
come out of the mist. "_Atoma divisa...._" In a moment, he would
know what was meant by that strange paradox in two classical languages.

In the front room, Anne stirred with housewifely care the fire on the
open hearth. Obediently she thought as Nostradame had bade her, and
her thoughts held not one iota of plan for any drawing apart from him.
She was going to be rich--well. Noble--well. Influential--well. Those
qualities would do for him what he modestly would not do for himself.
He and his gifts would be called to the attention of the king. In his
time he would be great and honored, and in all other times remembered,
until the end of--

Then she started up, for from the study had come a scream of mortal
terror, the awful cry of a man who, brave and strong, is undone by a
horror too great for his courage to compass.

She ran, throwing open the door. The light streamed through the
doorway, and she saw Nostradame, half fallen from his tripod stool, on
one knee, an arm lifted across his face as though to hide in its shadow.

"_Atoma divisa_--the atom divided!" he cried brokenly. "I have
seen its division, and surely the world is shattered by that dividing!"

[Illustration: "_Atoma divisa_--the atom divides, to shake the
walls of heaven itself!"]

She ran to him, and knelt at his side. She, whom lately he had so
loftily called a child, put her arms around him as a mother might.

"The riving of the atom," he quavered. "It strikes a city, and the city
crumbles to powder--a people is wiped out--surely these horrors shake
the walls of heaven itself, and I have seen the last awful hour of the
world!"

"Do not look," Anne begged him, and held him close. "Do not look."

His eyes opened and met hers, and it was as if he had wakened from a
dream of inferno and saw paradise.



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