V. A ROUGH WOOING
The young man had caught the delirium that was abroad that night. The rage of the trapped beast was in his heart, his hand held a sword. To strike blindly, to strike without question the first who withstood him was the wild-beast instinct; and if Count Hannibal had not spoken on the instant, the Marshal's brother had said his last word in the world.
Yet as he stood there, a head above the crowd, he seemed unconscious alike of Tignonville and the point that all but pricked his breast. Swart and grim-visaged, his harsh features distorted by the glare which shone upon him, he looked beyond the Huguenot to the sea of tossing arms and raging faces that surged about the saddles of the horsemen. It was to these he spoke.
"Begone, dogs!" he cried, in a voice that startled the nearest, "or I will whip you away with my stirrup-leathers! Do you hear? Begone! This house is not for you! Burn, kill, plunder where you will, but go hence!"
"But 'tis on the list!" one of the wretches yelled. "'Tis on the list!" And he pushed forward until he stood at Tignonville's elbow.
"And has no cross!" shrieked another, thrusting himself forward in his turn. "See you, let us by, whoever you are! In the King's name, kill! It has no cross!"
"Then," Tavannes thundered, "will I nail you for a cross to the front of it! No cross, say you? I will make one of you, foul crow!"
And as he spoke, his arm shot out; the man recoiled, his fellow likewise. But one of the mounted archers took up the matter.
"Nay, but, my lord," he said--he knew Tavannes--"it is the King's will there be no favour shown to-night to any, small or great. And this house is registered, and is full of heretics."
"And has no cross!" the rabble urged in chorus. And they leapt up and down in their impatience, and to see the better. "And has no cross!" they persisted. They could understand that. Of what use crosses, if they were not to kill where there was no cross? Daylight was not plainer.
Tavannes' face grew dark, and he shook his finger at the archer who had spoken. "Rogue," he cried, "does the King's will run here only? Are there no other houses to sack or men to kill, that you must beard me? And favour? You will have little of mine, if you do not budge and take your vile tail with you! Off! Or must I cry 'Tavannes!' and bid my people sweep you from the streets?"
The foremost rank hesitated, awed by his manner and his name; while the rearmost, attracted by the prospect of easier pillage, had gone off already. The rest wavered; and another and another broke away. The archer who had put himself forward saw which way the wind was blowing, and he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, my lord, as you will," he said sullenly. "All the same I would advise you to close the door and bolt and bar. We shall not be the last to call to-day." And he turned his horse in ill-humour, and forced it, snorting and plunging, through the crowd.
"Bolt and bar?" Tavannes cried after him in fury. "See you my answer to that!" And turning on the threshold, "Within there!" he cried. "Open the shutters and set lights, and the table! Light, I say; light! And lay on quickly, if you value your lives! And throw open, for I sup with your mistress tonight, if it rain blood without! Do you hear me, rogues? Set on!"
He flung the last word at the quaking servants; then he turned again to the street. He saw that the crowd was melting, and, looking in Tignonville's face, he laughed aloud. "Does Monsieur sup with us?" he said. "To complete the party? Or will he choose to sup with our friends yonder? It is for him to say. I confess, for my part," with an awful smile, "their hospitality seems a trifle crude, and boisterous."
Tignonville looked behind him and shuddered. The same horde which had so lately pressed about the door had found a victim lower down the street, and, as Tavannes spoke, came driving back along the roadway, a mass of tossing lights and leaping, running figures, from the heart of which rose the screams of a creature in torture. So terrible were the sounds that Tignonville leant half swooning against the door-post; and even the iron heart of Tavannes seemed moved for a moment.
For a moment only: then he looked at his companion, and his lip curled. "You'll join us, I think?" he said with an undisguised sneer. "Then, after you, Monsieur. They are opening the shutters. Doubtless the table is laid, and Mademoiselle is expecting us. After you, Monsieur, if you please. A few hours ago I should have gone first, for you, in this house"--with a sinister smile--"were at home! Now, we have changed places."
Whatever he meant by the gibe--and some smack of an evil jest lurked in his tone--he played the host so far as to urge his bewildered companion along the passage and into the living-chamber on the left, where he had seen from without that his orders to light and lay were being executed. A dozen candles shone on the board, and lit up the apartment. What the house contained of food and wine had been got together and set on the table; from the low, wide window, beetle-browed and diamond-paned, which extended the whole length of the room and looked on the street at the height of a man's head above the roadway, the shutters had been removed--doubtless by trembling and reluctant fingers. To such eyes of passers-by as looked in, from the inferno of driving crowds and gleaming weapons which prevailed outside--and not outside only, but throughout Paris--the brilliant room and the laid table must have seemed strange indeed!
To Tignonville, all that had happened, all that was happening, seemed a dream: a dream his entrance under the gentle impulsion of this man who dominated him; a dream Mademoiselle standing behind the table with blanched face and stony eyes; a dream the cowering servants huddled in a corner beyond her; a dream his silence, her silence, the moment of waiting before Count Hannibal spoke.
When he did speak it was to count the servants. "One, two, three, four, five," he said. "And two of them women. Mademoiselle is but poorly attended. Are there not"--and he turned to her--"some lacking?"
The girl opened her lips twice, but no sound issued. The third time, "Two went out," she muttered in a hoarse, strangled voice, "and have not returned."
"And have not returned?" he answered, raising his eyebrows. "Then I fear we must not wait for them. We might wait long!" And turning sharply to the panic-stricken servants, "Go you to your places! Do you not see that Mademoiselle waits to be served?"
The girl shuddered and spoke.
"Do you wish me," she muttered, in the same strangled tone, "to play this farce--to the end?"
"The end may be better, Mademoiselle, than you think," he answered, bowing. And then to the miserable servants, who hung back afraid to leave the shelter of their mistress's skirts, "To your places!" he cried. "Set Mademoiselle's chair. Are you so remiss on other days? If so," with a look of terrible meaning, "you will be the less loss! Now, Mademoiselle, may I have the honour? And when we are at table we can talk."
He extended his hand, and, obedient to his gesture, she moved to the place at the head of the table, but without letting her fingers come into contact with his. He gave no sign that he noticed this, but he strode to the place on her right, and signed to Tignonville to take that on her left. "Will you not be seated?" he continued. For she kept her feet.
She turned her head stiffly, until for the first time her eyes looked into his. A shudder more violent than the last shook her. "Had you not better--kill us at once?" she whispered. The blood had forsaken even her lips. Her face was the face of a statue--white, beautiful, lifeless.
"I think not," he said gravely. "Be seated, and let us hope for the best. And you, sir," he continued, turning to Carlat, "serve your mistress with wine. She needs it."
The steward filled for her, and then for each of the men, his shaking hand spilling as much as it poured. Nor was this strange. Above the din and uproar of the street, above the crash of distant doors, above the tocsin that still rang from the reeling steeple of St. Germain's, the great bell of the Palais on the island had just begun to hurl its note of doom upon the town. A woman crouching at the end of the chamber burst into hysterical weeping, but, at a glance from Tavannes' terrible eye, was mute again.
Tignonville found voice at last. "Have they--killed the Admiral?" he muttered, his eyes on the table.
"M. Coligny! An hour ago."
"And Teligny?"
"Him also."
"M. de Rochefoucauld?"
"They are dealing with M. le Comte now, I believe," Tavannes answered. "He had his chance, and cast it away." And he began to eat.
The man at the table shuddered. The woman continued to look before her, but her lips moved as if she prayed. Suddenly a rush of feet, a roar of voices surged past the window; for a moment the glare of the torches which danced ruddily on the walls of the room, showed a severed head borne above the multitude on a pike. Mademoiselle, with a low cry, made an effort to rise, but Count Hannibal grasped her wrist and she sank back half fainting. Then the nearer clamour sank a little, and the bells, unchallenged, flung their iron tongues above the maddened city. In the east the dawn was growing; soon its grey light would fall on cold hearths, on battered doors and shattered weapons, on hordes of wretches drunk with greed and hate.
When he could be heard, "What are you going to do with us?" the man asked hoarsely.
"That depends," Count Hannibal replied after a moment's thought.
"On what?"
"On Mademoiselle de Vrillac."
The other's eyes gleamed with passion. He leaned forward. "What has she to do with it?" he cried. And he stood up and sat down again in a breath.
Tavannes raised his eyebrows with a blandness that seemed at odds with his harsh visage. "I will answer that question by another question," he replied. "How many are there in the house, my friend?"
"You can count."
Tavannes counted again. "Seven?" he said.
Tignonville nodded impatiently.
"Seven lives?"
"Well?"
"Well, Monsieur, you know the King's will?"
"I can guess it," the other replied furiously. And he cursed the King, and the King's mother, calling her Jezebel.
"You can guess it?" Tavannes answered; and then with sudden heat, as if that which he had to say could not be said even by him in cold blood, "Nay, you know it! You heard it from the archer at the door. You heard him say, 'No favour, no quarter for man, for woman, or for child. So says the King.' You heard it, but you fence with me. Foucauld, with whom his Majesty played to-night, hand to hand and face to face--Foucauld is dead! And you think to live? You?" he continued, lashing himself into passion. "I know not by what chance you came where I saw you an hour gone, nor by what chance you came by that and that"--pointing with accusing finger to the badges the Huguenot wore. "But this I know! I have but to cry your name from yonder casement, nay, Monsieur, I have but to stand aside when the mob go their rounds from house to house, as they will go presently, and you will perish as certainly as you have hitherto escaped!"
For the second time Mademoiselle turned and looked at him. "Then," she whispered, with white lips, "to what end this--mockery?"
"To the end that seven lives may be saved, Mademoiselle," he answered, bowing.
"At a price?" she muttered.
"At a price," he answered. "A price which women do not find it hard to pay--at Court. 'Tis paid every day for pleasure or a whim, for rank or the entree, for robes and gewgaws. Few, Mademoiselle, are privileged to buy a life; still fewer, seven!"
She began to tremble. "I would rather die--seven times!" she cried, her voice quivering. And she tried to rise, but sat down again.
"And these?" he said, indicating the servants.
"Far, far rather!" she repeated passionately.
"And Monsieur? And Monsieur!" he urged with stern persistence, while his eyes passed lightly from her to Tignonville and back to her again, their depths inscrutable. "If you love Monsieur, Mademoiselle, and I believe you do----"
"I can die with him!" she cried.
"And he with you!"
She writhed in her chair.
"And he with you?" Count Hannibal repeated, with emphasis; and he thrust forward his head. "For that is the question. Think, think, Mademoiselle. It is in my power to save from death him whom you love; to save you; to save this canaille, if it so please you. It is in my power to save him, to save you, to save all; and I will save all--at a price! If, on the other hand, you deny me that price, I will as certainly leave all to perish, as perish they will, before the sun that is now rising sets to-night!"
Mademoiselle looked straight before her, the flicker of a dreadful prescience in her eyes. "And the price?" she muttered. "The price?"
"You, Mademoiselle."
"Yes, you! Nay, why fence with me?" he continued gently. "You knew it, you have said it. You have read it in my eyes these seven days."
She did not speak, move, or seem to breathe. As he said, she had foreseen, she had known the answer. But Tignonville, it seemed, had not. He sprang to his feet. "M. de Tavannes," he cried, "you are a villain!"
"Monsieur?"
"You are a villain! But you shall pay for this!" the young man continued vehemently. "You shall not leave this room alive! You shall pay for this insult!"
"Insult?" Tavannes answered in apparent surprise; and then, as if comprehension broke upon him, "Ah! Monsieur mistakes me," he said, with a generous sweep of his hand. "And Mademoiselle also, perhaps? Oh! be content, she shall have bell, book, and candle; she shall be tied as tight as Holy Church can tie her! Or, if she please, and one survive, she shall have a priest of her own church--you call it a church? She shall have whichever of the two will serve her better. 'Tis one to me! But for paying me, Monsieur," he continued with irony in voice and manner; "when, I pray you? In Eternity! For if you refuse my offer, you have done with time. Now? I have but to sound this whistle"--he touched a silver whistle which hung at his breast--"and there are those within hearing will do your business before you make two passes. Dismiss the notion, sir, and understand. You are in my power. Paris runs with blood, as noble as yours, as innocent as hers. If you would not perish with the rest, decide! And quickly! For what you have seen are but the forerunners, what you have heard are but the gentle whispers that predict the gale. Do not parley too long; so long that even I may no longer save you."
"I would rather die!" Mademoiselle moaned, her face covered. "I would rather die!"
"And see him die?" he answered quietly. "And see these die? Think, think, child!"
"You will not do it!" she gasped. She shook from head to foot.
"I shall do nothing," he answered firmly. "I shall but leave you to your fate, and these to theirs. In the King's teeth I dare save my wife and her people; but no others. You must choose--and quickly."
One of the frightened women--it was Mademoiselle's tiring-maid, a girl called Javette--made a movement, as if to throw herself at her mistress's feet. Tignonville drove her to her place with a word. He turned to Count Hannibal. "But, M. le Comte," he said, "you must be mad! Mad, to wish to marry her in this way! You do not love her. You do not want her. What is she to you more than other women?"
"What is she to you more than other women?" Tavannes retorted in a tone so sharp and incisive that Tignonville started, and a faint touch of colour crept into the wan cheek of the girl, who sat between them, the prize of the contest. "What is she more to you than other women? Is she more? And yet--you want her!"
"She is more to me," Tignonville answered.
"Is she?" the other retorted, with a ring of keen meaning. "Is she? But we bandy words and the storm is rising, as I warned you it would rise. Enough for you that I do want her. Enough for you that I will have her. She shall be the wife, the willing wife, of Hannibal de Tavannes--or I leave her to her fate, and you to yours!"
"Ah, God!" she moaned. "The willing wife!"
"Ay, Mademoiselle, the willing wife," he answered sternly. "Or no man's wife!"
VI. WHO TOUCHES TAVANNES?
In saying that the storm was rising Count Hannibal had said no more than the truth. A new mob had a minute before burst from the eastward into the Rue St. Honore; and the roar of its thousand voices swelled louder than the importunate clangour of the bells. Behind its moving masses the dawn of a new day--Sunday, the 24th of August, the feast of St. Bartholomew--was breaking over the Bastille, as if to aid the crowd in its cruel work. The gabled streets, the lanes, and gothic courts, the stifling wynds, where the work awaited the workers, still lay in twilight; still the gleam of the torches, falling on the house-fronts, heralded the coming of the crowd. But the dawn was growing, the sun was about to rise. Soon the day would be here, giving up the lurking fugitive whom darkness, more pitiful, had spared, and stamping with legality the horrors that night had striven to hide.
And with day, with the full light, killing would grow more easy, escape more hard. Already they were killing on the bridge where the rich goldsmiths lived, on the wharves, on the river. They were killing at the Louvre, in the courtyard under the King's eyes, and below the windows of the Medicis. They were killing in St. Martin and St. Denis and St. Antoine; wherever hate, or bigotry, or private malice impelled the hand. From the whole city went up a din of lamentation, and wrath, and foreboding. From the Cour des Miracles, from the markets, from the Boucherie, from every haunt of crime and misery, hordes of wretched creatures poured forth; some to rob on their own account, and where they listed, none gainsaying; more to join themselves to one of the armed bands whose business it was to go from street to street, and house to house, quelling resistance, and executing through Paris the high justice of the King.
It was one of these swollen bands which had entered the street while Tavannes spoke; nor could he have called to his aid a more powerful advocate. As the deep "A bas! A bas!" rolled like thunder along the fronts of the houses, as the more strident "Tuez! Tuez!" drew nearer and nearer, and the lights of the oncoming multitude began to flicker on the shuttered gables, the fortitude of the servants gave way. Madame Carlat, shivering in every limb, burst into moaning; the tiring-maid, Javette, flung herself in terror at Mademoiselle's knees, and, writhing herself about them, shrieked to her to save her, only to save her! One of the men moved forward on impulse, as if he would close the shutters; and only old Carlat remained silent, praying mutely with moving lips and a stern, set face.
And Count Hannibal? As the glare of the links in the street grew brighter, and ousted the sickly daylight, his form seemed to dilate. He stilled the shrieking woman by a glance. "Choose! Mademoiselle, and quickly!" he said. "For I can only save my wife and her people! Quick, for the pinch is coming, and 'twill be no boy's play."
A shot, a scream from the street, a rush of racing feet before the window seconded his words.
"Quick, Mademoiselle!" he cried. And his breath came a little faster. "Quick, before it be too late! Will you save life, or will you kill!"
She looked at her lover with eyes of agony, dumbly questioning him. But he made no sign, and only Tavannes marked the look. "Monsieur has done what he can to save himself," he said with a sneer. "He has donned the livery of the King's servants; he has said, 'Whoever perishes, I will live!' But--"
"Curse you!" the young man cried, and, stung to madness, he tore the cross from his cap and flung it on the ground. He seized his white sleeve and ripped it from shoulder to elbow. Then, when it hung by the string only, he held his hand.
"Curse you!" he cried furiously. "I will not at your bidding! I may save her yet! I will save her!"
"Fool!" Tavannes answered--but his words were barely audible above the deafening uproar. "Can you fight a thousand? Look! Look!" and seizing the other's wrist he pointed to the window. The street glowed like a furnace in the red light of torches, raised on poles above a sea of heads; an endless sea of heads, and gaping faces, and tossing arms which swept on and on, and on and by. For a while it seemed that the torrent would flow past them and would leave them safe. Then came a check, a confused outcry, a surging this way and that; the torches reeled to and fro, and finally with a dull roar of "Open! Open!" the mob faced about to the house and the lighted window.
For a second it seemed that even Count Hannibal's iron nerves shook a little. He stood between the sullen group that surrounded the disordered table and the maddened rabble, that gloated on the victims before they tore them to pieces. "Open! Open!" the mob howled: and a man dashed in the window with his pike.
In that crisis Mademoiselle's eyes met Tavannes' for the fraction of a second. She did not speak; nor, had she retained the power to frame the words, would they have been audible. But something she must have looked, and something of import, though no other than he marked or understood it. For in a flash he was at the window and his hand was raised for silence.
"Back!" he thundered. "Back, knaves!" And he whistled shrilly. "Do what you will," he continued in the same tone, "but not here! Pass on! Pass on!--do you hear?"
But the crowd were not to be lightly diverted. With a persistence brutal and unquestioning they continued to howl "Open! Open!" while the man who had broken the window the moment before, Jehan, the cripple with the hideous face, seized the lead-work, and tore away a great piece of it. Then laying hold of a bar, he tried to drag it out, setting one foot against the wall below.
Tavannes saw what he did, and his frame seemed to dilate with the fury and violence of his character. "Dogs!" he shouted, "must I call out my riders and scatter you? Must I flog you through the streets with stirrup-leathers? I am Tavannes, beware of me! I have claws and teeth and I bite!" he continued, the scorn in his words exceeding even the rage of the crowd, at which he flung them. "Kill where you please, rob where you please, but not where I am! Or I will hang you by the heels on Montfaucon, man by man! I will flay your backs. Go! go! I am Tavannes!"
But the mob, cowed for a moment by the thunder of his voice, by his arrogance and recklessness, showed at this that their patience was exhausted. With a yell which drowned his tones they swayed forward; a dozen thundered on the door, crying, "In the King's name!" As many more tore out the remainder of the casement, seized the bars of the window, and strove to pull them out or to climb between them. Jehan, the cripple, with whom Tignonville had rubbed elbows at the rendezvous, led the way.
Count Hannibal watched them a moment, his harsh face bent down to them, his features plain in the glare of the torches. But when the cripple, raised on the others' shoulders, and emboldened by his adversary's inactivity, began to squeeze himself through the bars, Tavannes raised a pistol, which he had held unseen behind him, cocked it at leisure, and levelled it at the foul face which leered close to his. The dwarf saw the weapon and tried to retreat; but it was too late. A flash, a scream, and the wretch, shot through the throat, flung up his hands, and fell back into the arms of a lean man in black who had lent him his shoulder to ascend.
For a few seconds the smoke of the pistol filled the window and the room. There was a cry that the Huguenots were escaping, that the Huguenots were resisting, that it was a plot; and some shouted to guard the back and some to watch the roof, and some to be gone. But when the fumes cleared away, the mob saw, with stupor, that all was as it had been. Count Hannibal stood where he had stood before, a grim smile on his lips.
"Who comes next!" he cried in a tone of mockery. "I have more pistols!" And then with a sudden change to ferocity, "You dogs!" he went on. "You scum of a filthy city, sweepings of the Halles! Do you think to beard me? Do you think to frighten me or murder me? I am Tavannes, and this is my house, and were there a score of Huguenots in it, you should not touch one, nor harm a hair of his head! Begone, I say again, while you may! Seek women and children, and kill them. But not here!"
For an instant the mingled scorn and brutality of his words silenced them. Then from the rear of the crowd came an answer--the roar of an arquebuse. The ball whizzed past Count Hannibal's head, and, splashing the plaster from the wall within a pace of Tignonville, dropped to the ground.
Tavannes laughed. "Bungler!" he cried. "Were you in my troop I would dip your trigger-finger in boiling oil to teach you to shoot! But you weary me, dogs. I must teach you a lesson, must I?" And he lifted a pistol and levelled it. The crowd did not know whether it was the one he had discharged or another, but they gave back with a sharp gasp. "I must teach you, must I?" he continued with scorn. "Here Bigot, Badelon, drive me these blusterers! Rid the street of them! A Tavannes! A Tavannes!"
Not by word or look had he before this betrayed that he had supports. But as he cried the name, a dozen men armed to the teeth, who had stood motionless under the Croix du Tiroir, fell in a line on the right flank of the crowd. The surprise for those nearest them was complete. With the flash of the pikes before their eyes, with the cold steel in fancy between their ribs, they fled every way, uncertain how many pursued, or if any pursuit there was. For a moment the mob, which a few minutes before had seemed so formidable that a regiment might have quailed before it, bade fair to be routed by a dozen pikes.
And so, had all in the crowd been what he termed them, the rabble and sweepings of the streets, it would have been. But in the heart of it, and felt rather than seen, were a handful of another kidney; Sorbonne students and fierce-eyed priests, with three or four mounted archers, the nucleus that, moving through the streets, had drawn together this concourse. And these with threats and curses and gleaming eyes stood fast, even Tavannes' dare-devils recoiling before the tonsure. The check thus caused allowed those who had budged a breathing space. They rallied behind the black robes, and began to stone the pikes; who in their turn withdrew until they formed two groups, standing on their defence, the one before the window the other before the door.
Count Hannibal had watched the attack and the check, as a man watches a play; with smiling interest. In the panic, the torches had been dropped or extinguished, and now between the house and the sullen crowd which hung back, yet grew moment by moment more dangerous, the daylight fell cold on the littered street and the cripple's huddled form prone in the gutter. A priest raised on the shoulders of the lean man in black began to harangue the mob, and the dull roar of assent, the brandished arms which greeted his appeal, had their effect on Tavannes' men. They looked to the window, and muttered among themselves. It was plain that they had no stomach for a fight with the Church, and were anxious for the order to withdraw.
But Count Hannibal gave no order, and, much as his people feared the cowls, they feared him more. Meanwhile the speaker's eloquence rose higher; he pointed with frenzied gestures to the house. The mob groaned, and suddenly a volley of stones fell among the pikemen, whose corselets rattled under the shower. The priest seized that moment. He sprang to the ground, and to the front. He caught up his robe and waved his hand, and the rabble, as if impelled by a single will, rolled forward in a huge one-fronted thundering wave, before which the two handfuls of pikemen--afraid to strike, yet afraid to fly--were swept away like straws upon the tide.
But against the solid walls and oak-barred door of the house the wave beat, only to fall back again, a broken, seething mass of brandished arms and ravening faces. One point alone was vulnerable, the window, and there in the gap stood Tavannes. Quick as thought he fired two pistols into the crowd; then, while the smoke for a moment hid all, he whistled.
Whether the signal was a summons to his men to fight their way back--as they were doing to the best of their power--or he had resources still unseen, was not to be known. For as the smoke began to rise, and while the rabble before the window, cowed by the fall of two of their number, were still pushing backward instead of forward, there rose behind them strange sounds--yells, and the clatter of hoofs, mingled with screams of alarm. A second, and into the loose skirts of the crowd came charging helter-skelter, pell-mell, a score of galloping, shrieking, cursing horsemen, attended by twice as many footmen, who clung to their stirrups or to the tails of the horses, and yelled and whooped, and struck in unison with the maddened riders.
"On! on!" the foremost shrieked, rolling in his saddle, and foaming at the mouth. "Bleed in August, bleed in May! Kill!" And he fired a pistol among the rabble, who fled every way to escape his rearing, plunging charger.
"Kill! Kill!" cried his followers, cutting the air with their swords, and rolling to and fro on their horses in drunken emulation. "Bleed in August, bleed in May!"
"On! On!" cried the leader, as the crowd which beset the house fled every way before his reckless onset. "Bleed in August, bleed in May!"
The rabble fled, but not so quickly but that one or two were ridden down, and this for an instant checked the riders. Before they could pass on, "Ohe!" cried Count Hannibal from his window. "Ohe!" with a shout of laughter, "ride over them, dear brother! Make me a clean street for my wedding!"
Marshal Tavannes--for he, the hero of Jarnac, was the leader of this wild orgy--turned that way, and strove to rein in his horse. "What ails them?" he cried, as the maddened animal reared upright, its iron hoofs striking fire from the slippery pavement.
"They are rearing like thy Bayard!" Count Hannibal answered. "Whip them, whip them for me! Tavannes! Tavannes!"
"What? This canaille!"
"Ay, that canaille!"
"Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes!" the Marshal replied, and spurred his horse among the rabble, who had fled to the sides of the street and now strove hard to efface themselves against the walls. "Begone, dogs; begone!" he cried, still hunting them. And then, "You would bite, would you?" And snatching another pistol from his boot, he fired it among them, careless whom he hit. "Ha! ha! That stirs you, does it!" he continued as the wretches fled headlong. "Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes! On! On!"
Suddenly, from a doorway near at hand, a sombre figure darted into the roadway, caught the Marshal's rein, and for a second checked his course. The priest--for a priest it was, Father Pezelay, the same who had addressed the mob--held up a warning hand. "Halt!" he cried, with burning eyes. "Halt, my lord! It is written, thou shalt not spare the Canaanitish woman. 'Tis not to spare the King has given command and a sword, but to kill! 'Tis not to harbour, but to smite! To smite!"
"Then smite I will!" the Marshal retorted, and with the butt of his pistol struck the zealot down. Then, with as much indifference as he would have treated a Huguenot, he spurred his horse over him, with a mad laugh at his jest. "Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes!" he yelled. "Touches Tavannes! On! On! Bleed in August, bleed in May!"
"On!" shouted his followers, striking about them in the same desperate fashion. They were young nobles who had spent the night feasting at the Palace, and, drunk with wine and mad with excitement, had left the Louvre at daybreak to rouse the city. "A Jarnac! A Jarnac!" they cried, and some saluted Count Hannibal as they passed. And so, shouting and spurring and following their leader, they swept away down the now empty street, carrying terror and a flame wherever their horses bore them that morning.
Tavannes, his hands on the ledge of the shattered window, leaned out laughing, and followed them with his eyes. A moment, and the mob was gone, the street was empty; and one by one, with sheepish faces, his pikemen emerged from the doorways and alleys in which they had taken refuge. They gathered about the three huddled forms which lay prone and still in the gutter: or, not three--two. For even as they approached them, one, the priest, rose slowly and giddily to his feet. He turned a face bleeding, lean, and relentless towards the window at which Tavannes stood. Solemnly, with the sign of the cross, and with uplifted hands, he cursed him in bed and at board, by day and by night, in walking, in riding, in standing, in the day of battle, and at the hour of death. The pikemen fell back appalled, and hid their eyes; and those who were of the north crossed themselves, and those who came from the south bent two fingers horse-shoe fashion. But Hannibal de Tavannes laughed; laughed in his moustache, his teeth showing, and bade them move that carrion to a distance, for it would smell when the sun was high. Then he turned his back on the street, and looked into the room.
VII. IN THE AMPHITHEATRE
The movements of the women had overturned two of the candles; a third had guttered out. The three which still burned, contending pallidly with the daylight that each moment grew stronger, imparted to the scene the air of a debauch too long sustained. The disordered board, the wan faces of the servants cowering in their corner, Mademoiselle's frozen look of misery, all increased the likeness; which a common exhaustion so far strengthened that when Tavannes turned from the window, and, flushed with his triumph, met the others' eyes, his seemed the only vigour, and he the only man in the company. True, beneath the exhaustion, beneath the collapse of his victims, there burned passions, hatreds, repulsions, as fierce as the hidden fires of the volcano; but for the time they smouldered ash-choked and inert.
He flung the discharged pistols on the table. "If yonder raven speak truth," he said, "I am like to pay dearly for my wife, and have short time to call her wife. The more need, Mademoiselle, for speed, therefore. You know the old saying, 'Short signing, long seisin? Shall it be my priest, or your minister?"
M. de Tignonville started forward. "She promised nothing!" he cried. And he struck his hand on the table.
Count Hannibal smiled, his lip curling. "That," he replied, "is for Mademoiselle to say."
"But if she says it? If she says it, Monsieur? What then?"
Tavannes drew forth a comfit-box, such as it was the fashion of the day to carry, as men of a later time carried a snuff-box. He slowly chose a prune. "If she says it?" he answered. "Then M. de Tignonville has regained his sweetheart. And M. de Tavannes has lost his bride."
"You say so!"
"Yes. But----"
"But what?"
"But she will not say it," Tavannes replied coolly.
"Why not?"
"Why not?"
"Yes, Monsieur, why not?" the younger man repeated trembling.
"Because, M. de Tignonville, it is not true."
"But she did not speak!" Tignonville retorted, with passion--the futile passion of the bird which beats its wings against a cage. "She did not speak. She could not promise, therefore."
Tavannes ate the prune slowly, seemed to give a little thought to its flavour, approved it a true Agen plum, and at last spoke. "It is not for you to say whether she promised," he returned drily, "nor for me. It is for Mademoiselle."
"You leave it to her?"
"I leave it to her to say whether she promised."
"Then she must say No!" Tignonville cried in a tone of triumph and relief. "For she did not speak. Mademoiselle, listen!" he continued, turning with outstretched hands and appealing to her with passion. "Do you hear? Do you understand? You have but to speak to be free! You have but to say the word, and Monsieur lets you go! In God's name, speak! Speak then, Clotilde! Oh!" with a gesture of despair, as she did not answer, but continued to sit stony and hopeless, looking straight before her, her hands picking convulsively at the fringe of her girdle. "She does not understand! Fright has stunned her! Be merciful, Monsieur. Give her time to recover, to know what she does. Fright has turned her brain."
Count Hannibal smiled. "I knew her father and her uncle," he said, "and in their time the Vrillacs were not wont to be cowards. Monsieur forgets, too," he continued with fine irony, "that he speaks of my betrothed."
"It is a lie!"
Tavannes raised his eyebrows. "You are in my power," he said. "For the rest, if it be a lie, Mademoiselle has but to say so."
"You hear him?" Tignonville cried. "Then speak, Mademoiselle! Clotilde, speak! Say you never spoke, you never promised him!"
The young man's voice quivered with indignation, with rage, with pain; but most, if the truth be told, with shame--the shame of a position strange and unparalleled. For in proportion as the fear of death instant and violent was lifted from him, reflection awoke, and the situation in which he stood took uglier shape. It was not so much love that cried to her, love that suffered, anguished by the prospect of love lost; as in the highest natures it might have been. Rather it was the man's pride which suffered; the pride of a high spirit which found itself helpless between the hammer and the anvil, in a position so false that hereafter men might say of the unfortunate that he had bartered his mistress for his life. He had not! But he had perforce to stand by; he had to be passive under stress of circumstances, and by the sacrifice, if she consummated it, he would in fact be saved.
There was the pinch. No wonder that he cried to her in a voice which roused even the servants from their lethargy of fear. "Say it!" he cried. "Say it, before it be too late. Say you did not promise!"
Slowly she turned her face to him. "I cannot," she whispered; "I cannot. Go," she continued, a spasm distorting her features. "Go, Monsieur. Leave me. It is over."
"What?" he exclaimed. "You promised him?"
She bowed her head.
"Then," the young man cried, in a transport of resentment, "I will be no part of the price. See! There! And there!" He tore the white sleeve wholly from his arm, and, rending it in twain, flung it on the floor and trampled on it. "It shall never be said that I stood by and let you buy my life! I go into the street and I take my chance." And he turned to the door.
But Tavannes was before him. "No!" he said; "you will stay here, M. de Tignonville!" And he set his back against the door.
The young man looked at him, his face convulsed with passion. "I shall stay here?" he cried. "And why, Monsieur? What is it to you if I choose to perish?"
"Only this," Tavannes retorted. "I am answerable to Mademoiselle now, in an hour I shall be answerable to my wife--for your life. Live, then, Monsieur; you have no choice. In a month you will thank me--and her."
"I am your prisoner?"
"Precisely."
"And I must stay here--to be tortured?" Tignonville cried.
Count Hannibal's eyes sparkled. Sudden stormy changes, from indifference to ferocity, from irony to invective, were characteristic of the man. "Tortured!" he repeated grimly. "You talk of torture while Piles and Pardaillan, Teligny and Rochefoucauld lie dead in the street! While your cause sinks withered in a night, like a gourd! While your servants fall butchered, and France rises round you in a tide of blood! Bah!"--with a gesture of disdain--"you make me also talk, and I have no love for talk, and small time. Mademoiselle, you at least act and do not talk. By your leave I return in an hour, and I bring with me--shall it be my priest, or your minister?"
She looked at him with the face of one who awakes slowly to the full horror, the full dread, of her position. For a moment she did not answer. Then, "A minister," she murmured, her voice scarcely audible.
He nodded. "A minister?" he said lightly. "Very well, if I can find one." And walking to the shattered, gaping casement--through which the cool morning air blew into the room and gently stirred the hair of the unhappy girl--he said some words to the man on guard outside. Then he turned to the door, but on the threshold he paused, looked with a strange expression at the pair, and signed to Carlat and the servants to go out before him.
"Up, and lie close above!" he growled. "Open a window or look out, and you will pay dearly for it! Do you hear? Up! Up! You, too, old crop-ears. What! would you?"--with a sudden glare as Carlat hesitated--"that is better! Mademoiselle, until my return."
He saw them all out, followed them, and closed the door on the two; who, left together, alone with the gaping window and the disordered feast, maintained a strange silence. The girl, gripping one hand in the other as if to quell her rising horror, sat looking before her, and seemed barely to breathe. The man, leaning against the wall at a little distance, bent his eyes not on her, but on the floor, his face gloomy and distorted.
His first thought should have been of her and for her; his first impulse to console, if he could not save her. His it should have been to soften, were that possible, the fate before her; to prove to her by words of farewell, the purest and most sacred, that the sacrifice she was making, not to save her own life but the lives of others, was appreciated by him who paid with her the price.
And all these things, and more, may have been in M. de Tignonville's mind; they may even have been uppermost in it, but they found no expression. The man remained sunk in a sombre reverie. He had the appearance of thinking of himself, not of her; of his own position, not of hers. Otherwise he must have looked at her, he must have turned to her; he must have owned the subtle attraction of her unspoken appeal when she drew a deep breath and slowly turned her eyes on him, mute, asking, waiting what he should offer.
Surely he should have! Yet it was long before he responded. He sat buried in thought of himself, and his position, the vile, the unworthy position in which her act had placed him. At length the constraint of her gaze wrought on him, or his thoughts became unbearable, and he looked up and met her eyes, and with an oath he sprang to his feet.
"It shall not be!" he cried, in a tone low, but full of fury. "You shall not do it! I will kill him first! I will kill him with this hand! Or----" a step took him to the window, a step brought him back--ay, brought him back exultant, and with a changed face. "Or better, we will thwart him yet. See, Mademoiselle, do you see? Heaven is merciful! For a moment the cage is open!" His eyes shone with excitement, the sweat of sudden hope stood on his brow as he pointed to the unguarded casement. "Come! it is our one chance!" And he caught her by her arm, and strove to draw her to the window.
But she hung back, staring at him. "Oh, no, no!" she cried.
"Yes, yes! I say!" he responded. "You do not understand. The way is open! We can escape, Clotilde, we can escape!"
"I cannot! I cannot!" she wailed, still resisting him.
"You are afraid?"
"Afraid?" she repeated the word in a tone of wonder. "No, but I cannot. I promised him. I cannot. And, O God!" she continued, in a sudden outburst of grief, as the sense of general loss, of the great common tragedy broke on her and whelmed for the moment her private misery. "Why should we think of ourselves? They are dead, they are dying, who were ours, whom we loved! Why should we think to live? What does it matter how it fares with us? We cannot be happy. Happy?" she continued wildly. "Are any happy now? Or is the world all changed in a night? No, we could not be happy. And at least you will live, Tignonville. I have that to console me."
"Live!" he responded vehemently. "I live? I would rather die a thousand times. A thousand times rather than live shamed! Than see you sacrificed to that devil! Than go out with a brand on my brow, for every man to point at me! I would rather die a thousand times!"
"And do you think that I would not?" she answered, shivering. "Better, far better die than--than live with him!"
"Then why not die?"
She stared at him, wide-eyed, and a sudden stillness possessed her. "How?" she whispered. "What do you mean?"
"That!" he said. As he spoke, he raised his hand and signed to her to listen. A sullen murmur, distant as yet, but borne to the ear on the fresh morning air, foretold the rising of another storm. The sound grew in intensity, even while she listened; and yet for a moment she misunderstood him. "O God!" she cried, out of the agony of nerves overwrought, "will that bell never stop? Will it never stop? Will no one stop it?"
"'Tis not the bell!" he cried, seizing her hand as if to focus her attention. "It is the mob you hear. They are returning. We have but to stand a moment at this open window, we have but to show ourselves to them, and we need live no longer! Mademoiselle! Clotilde!--if you mean what you say, if you are in earnest, the way is open!"
"And we shall die--together!"
"Yes, together. But have you the courage?"
"The courage!" she cried, a brave smile lighting the whiteness of her face. "The courage were needed to live. The courage were needed to do that. I am ready, quite ready. It can be no sin! To live with that in front of me were the sin! Come!" For the moment she had forgotten her people, her promise, all! It seemed to her that death would absolve her from all. "Come!"
He moved with her under the impulse of her hand until they stood at the gaping window. The murmur, which he had heard indistinctly a moment before, had grown to a roar of voices. The mob, on its return eastward along the Rue St. Honore, was nearing the house. He stood, his arm supporting her, and they waited, a little within the window. Suddenly he stooped, his face hardly less white than hers; their eyes met, and he would have kissed her.
She did not withdraw from his arm, but she drew back her face, her eyes half shut. "No!" she murmured. "No! While I live I am his. But we die together, Tignonville! We die together. It will not last long, will it? And afterwards----"
She did not finish the sentence, but her lips moved in prayer, and over her features came a far-away look; such a look as that which on the face of another Huguenot lady, Philippine de Luns--vilely done to death in the Place Maubert fourteen years before--silenced the ribald jests of the lowest rabble in the world. An hour or two earlier, awed by the abruptness of the outburst, Mademoiselle had shrunk from her fate; she had known fear. Now that she stood out voluntarily to meet it, she, like many a woman before and since, feared no longer. She was lifted out of and above herself.
But death was long in coming. Some cause beyond their knowledge stayed the onrush of the mob along the street. The din, indeed, persisted, deafened, shook them; but the crowd seemed to be at a stand a few doors down the Rue St. Honore. For a half-minute, a long half-minute, which appeared an age, it drew no nearer. Would it draw nearer? Would it come on? Or would it turn again?
The doubt, so much worse than despair, began to sap that courage of the man which is always better fitted to do than to suffer. The sweat rose on Tignonville's brow as he stood listening, his arm round the girl--as he stood listening and waiting. It is possible that when he had said a minute or two earlier that he would rather die a thousand times than live thus shamed, he had spoken beyond the mark. Or it is possible that he had meant his words to the full. But in this case he had not pictured what was to come, he had not gauged correctly his power of passive endurance. He was as brave as the ordinary man, as the ordinary soldier; but martyrdom, the apotheosis of resignation, comes more naturally to women than to men, more hardly to men than to women. Yet had the crisis come quickly he might have met it. But he had to wait, and to wait with that howling of wild beasts in his ears; and for this he was not prepared. A woman might be content to die after this fashion; but a man? His colour went and came, his eyes began to rove hither and thither. Was it even now too late to escape? Too late to avoid the consequences of the girl's silly persistence? Too late to----? Her eyes were closed, she hung half lifeless on his arm. She would not know, she need not know until afterwards. And afterwards she would thank him! Afterwards--meantime the window was open, the street was empty, and still the crowd hung back and did not come.
He remembered that two doors away was a narrow passage, which leaving the Rue St. Honore turned at right angles under a beetling archway, to emerge in the Rue du Roule. If he could gain that passage unseen by the mob! He would gain it. With a swift movement, his mind made up, he took a step forward. He tightened his grasp of the girl's waist, and, seizing with his left hand the end of the bar which the assailants had torn from its setting in the window jamb, he turned to lower himself. One long step would land him in the street.
At that moment she awoke from the stupor of exaltation. She opened her eyes with a startled movement; and her eyes met his.
He was in the act of stepping backwards and downwards, dragging her after him. But it was not this betrayed him. It was his face, which in an instant told her all, and that he sought not death, but life! She struggled upright and strove to free herself. But he had the purchase of the bar, and by this time he was furious as well as determined. Whether she would or no, he would save her, he would drag her out. Then, as consciousness fully returned, she, too, took fire. "No!" she cried, "I will not!" and she struggled more violently.
"You shall!" he retorted between his teeth. "You shall not perish here."
But she had her hands free, and as he spoke she thrust him from her passionately, desperately, with all her strength. He had his one foot in the air at the moment, and in a flash it was done. With a cry of rage he lost his balance, and, still holding the bar, reeled backwards through the window; while Mademoiselle, panting and half fainting, recoiled--recoiled into the arms of Hannibal de Tavannes, who, unseen by either, had entered the room a long minute before. From the threshold, and with a smile, all his own, he had watched the contest and the result.
VIII. TWO HENS AND AN EGG
M. de Tignonville was shaken by the fall, and in the usual course of things he would have lain where he was, and groaned. But when a man has once turned his back on death he is apt to fancy it at his shoulder. He has small stomach for surprises, and is in haste to set as great a distance as possible between the ugly thing and himself. So it was with the Huguenot. Shot suddenly into the full publicity of the street, he knew that at any instant danger might take him by the nape; and he was on his legs and glancing up and down before the clatter of his fall had travelled the length of three houses.
The rabble were still a hundred paces away, piled up and pressed about a house where men were being hunted as men hunt rats. He saw that he was unnoted, and apprehension gave place to rage. His thoughts turned back hissing hot to the thing that had happened, and in a paroxysm of shame he shook his fist at the gaping casement and the sneering face of his rival, dimly seen in the background. If a look would have killed Tavannes--and her--it had not been wanting.
For it was not only the man M. de Tignonville hated at this moment; he hated Mademoiselle also, the unwitting agent of the other's triumph. She had thrust him from her; she had refused to be guided by him; she had resisted, thwarted, shamed him. Then let her take the consequences. She willed to perish: let her perish!
He did not acknowledge even to himself the real cause of offence, the proof to which she had put his courage, and the failure of that courage to stand the test. Yet it was this, though he had himself provoked the trial, which burned up his chivalry, as the smuggler's fire burns up the dwarf heath upon the Landes. It was the discovery that in an heroic hour he was no hero that gave force to his passionate gesture, and next moment sent him storming down the beetling passage to the Rue du Roule, his heart a maelstrom of fierce vows and fiercer menaces.
He had reached the further end of the alley and was on the point of entering the street before he remembered that he had nowhere to go. His lodgings were no longer his, since his landlord knew him to be a Huguenot, and would doubtless betray him. To approach those of his faith whom he had frequented was to expose them to danger; and, beyond the religion, he had few acquaintances and those of the newest. Yet the streets were impossible. He walked them on the utmost edge of peril; he lurked in them under the blade of an impending axe. And, whether he walked or lurked, he went at the mercy of the first comers bold enough to take his life.
The sweat stood on his brow as he paused under the low arch of the alley-end, tasting the bitter forlornness of the dog banned and set for death in that sunlit city. In every window of the gable end which faced his hiding-place he fancied an eye watching his movements; in every distant step he heard the footfall of doom coming that way to his discovery. And while he trembled, he had to reflect, to think, to form some plan.
In the town was no place for him, and short of the open country no safety. And how could he gain the open country? If he succeeded in reaching one of the gates--St. Antoine, or St. Denis, in itself a task of difficulty--it would only be to find the gate closed, and the guard on the alert. At last it flashed on him that he might cross the river; and at the notion hope awoke. It was possible that the massacre had not extended to the southern suburb; possible, that if it had, the Huguenots who lay there--Frontenay, and Montgomery, and Chartres, with the men of the North--might be strong enough to check it, and even to turn the tables on the Parisians.
His colour returned. He was no coward, as soldiers go; if it came to fighting he had courage enough. He could not hope to cross the river by the bridge, for there, where the goldsmiths lived, the mob were like to be most busy. But if he could reach the bank he might procure a boat at some deserted point, or, at the worst, he might swim across.
From the Louvre at his back came the sound of gun-shots; from every quarter the murmur of distant crowds, or the faint lamentable cries of victims. But the empty street before him promised an easy passage, and he ventured into it and passed quickly through it. He met no one, and no one molested him; but as he went he had glimpses of pale faces that from behind the casements watched him come and turned to watch him go; and so heavy on his nerves was the pressure of this silent ominous attention, that he blundered at the end of the street. He should have taken the southerly turning; instead he held on, found himself in the Rue Ferronerie, and a moment later was all but in the arms of a band of city guards, who were making a house-to-house visitation.
He owed his safety rather to the condition of the street than to his presence of mind. The Rue Ferronerie, narrow in itself, was so choked at this date by stalls and bulkheads, that an edict directing the removal of those which abutted on the cemetery had been issued a little before. Nothing had been done on it, however, and this neck of Paris, this main thoroughfare between the east and the west, between the fashionable quarter of the Marais and the fashionable quarter of the Louvre, was still a devious huddle of sheds and pent-houses. Tignonville slid behind one of these, found that it masked the mouth of an alley, and, heedless whither the passage led, ran hurriedly along it. Every instant he expected to hear the hue and cry behind him, and he did not halt or draw breath until he had left the soldiers far in the rear, and found himself astray at the junction of four noisome lanes, over two of which the projecting gables fairly met. Above the two others a scrap of sky appeared, but this was too small to indicate in which direction the river lay.
Tignonville hesitated, but not for long; a burst of voices heralded a new danger, and he shrank into a doorway. Along one of the lanes a troop of children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping round something which they dragged by a string. Now one of the hindmost would hurl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go, or whose turn it was to pull and whose to follow. At last they started afresh with a whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of the air. Their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward, and lingered like a thing of life. But it was no thing of life, as Tignonville saw with a shudder when they passed him. The object of their sport was the naked body of a child, an infant!
His gorge rose at the sight. Fear such as he had not before experienced chilled his marrow. This was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong man quailed; the hate of which Mademoiselle had spoken when she said that the babes crossed themselves, at her passing, and the houses tottered to fall upon her!
He paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him; and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed on him. Instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the back of a house, which looked another way. The outer gates of an arched doorway were open, and a loaded hay-cart, touching either side and brushing the arch above, blocked the passage. His gaze, leaving the windows, dropped to this, he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he stiffened. Between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant, then vanished.
Tignonville stared. At first he thought his eyes had tricked him. Then the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable invitation. It is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive has aught to fear, and Tignonville, after casting a glance down the lane--which revealed a single man standing with his face the other way--slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall. He coughed.
A voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the act, and aided him. In a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed between the hay and the roof of the arch. Beside him lay a man whose features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern. But the man knew him and whispered his name.
"You know me?" Tignonville muttered in astonishment.
"I marked you, M. de Tignonville, at the preaching last Sunday," the stranger answered placidly.
"You were there?"
"I preached."
"Then you are M. la Tribe!"
"I am," the clergyman answered quietly. "They seized me on my threshold, but I left my cloak in their hands and fled. One tore my stocking with his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured. They hunted me to the end of the next street, but I lived and still live, and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city."
The sympathy between the Huguenot by faith and the Huguenot by politics was imperfect. Tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger generation, was a Huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. He felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer. "I wish I felt as sure!" he muttered bluntly. "You know that all our people are dead?"
"He can save by few or by many," the preacher answered devoutly. "We are of the few, blessed be God, and shall see Israel victorious, and our people as a flock of sheep!"
"I see small chance of it," Tignonville answered contemptuously.
"I know it as certainly as I knew before you came, M. de Tignonville, that you would come!"
"That I should come?"
"That some one would come," La Tribe answered, correcting himself. "I knew not who it would be until you appeared and placed yourself in the doorway over against me, even as Obadiah in the Holy Book passed before the hiding-place of Elijah."
The two lay on their faces side by side, the rafters of the archway low on their heads. Tignonville lifted himself a little, and peered anew at the other. He fancied that La Tribe's mind, shaken by the horrors of the morning and his narrow escape, had given way. "You rave, man," he said. "This is no time for visions."
"I said naught of visions," the other answered.
"Then why so sure that we shall escape?"
"I am certified of it," La Tribe replied. "And more than that, I know that we shall lie here some days. The time has not been revealed to me, but it will be days and a day. Then we shall leave this place unharmed, as we entered it, and, whatever betide others, we shall live."
Tignonville shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you, you rave, M. la Tribe," he said petulantly. "At any moment we may be discovered. Even now I hear footsteps."
"They tracked me well-nigh to this place," the minister answered placidly.
"The deuce they did!" Tignonville muttered, with irritation. He dared not raise his voice. "I would you had told me that before I joined you, Monsieur, and I had found some safer hiding-place! When we are discovered----"
"Then," the other continued calmly, "you will see."
"In any case we shall be better farther back," Tignonville retorted. "Here, we are within an ace of being seen from the lane." And he began to wriggle himself backwards.
The minister laid his hand on him. "Have a care!" he muttered. "And do not move, but listen. And you will understand. When I reached this place--it would be about five o'clock this morning--breathless, and expecting each minute to be dragged forth to make my confession before men, I despaired as you despair now. Like Elijah under the juniper tree, I said 'It is enough, O Lord! Take my soul also, for I am no better than my fellows!' All the sky was black before my eyes, and my ears were filled with the wailings of the little ones and the lamentations of women. 'O Lord, it is enough,' I prayed. 'Take my soul, or, if it be Thy will, then, as the angel was sent to take the cakes to Elijah, give me also a sign that I shall live.'"
For a moment he paused, struggling with overpowering emotion. Even his impatient listener, hitherto incredulous, caught the infection, and in a tone of awe murmured, "Yes? And then, M. la Tribe!"
"The sign was given me. The words were scarcely out of my mouth when a hen flew up, and, scratching a nest in the hay at my feet, presently laid an egg."
Tignonville stared. "It was timely, I admit," he said. "But it is no uncommon thing. Probably it has its nest here and lays daily."
"Young man, this is new-mown hay," the minister answered solemnly. "This cart was brought here no further back than yesterday. It smells of the meadow, and the flowers hold their colour. No, the fowl was sent. To-morrow it will return, and the next, and the next, until the plague be stayed and I go hence. But that is not all. A while later a second hen appeared, and I thought it would lay in the same nest. But it made a new one, on the side on which you lie and not far from your foot. Then I knew that I was to have a companion, and that God had laid also for him a table in the wilderness."
"It did lay, then?"
"It is still on the nest, beside your foot."
Tignonville was about to reply when the preacher grasped his arm and by a sign enjoined silence. He did so not a moment too soon. Preoccupied by the story, narrator and listener had paid no heed to what was passing in the lane, and the voices of men speaking close at hand took them by surprise. From the first words which reached them, it was clear that the speakers were the same who had chased La Tribe as far as the meeting of the four ways, and, losing him there, had spent the morning in other business. Now they had returned to hunt him down, and but for a wrangle which arose among them and detained them, they had stolen on their quarry before their coming was suspected.
"'Twas this way he ran!" "No, 'twas the other!" they contended; and their words, winged with vile threats and oaths, grew noisy and hot. The two listeners dared scarcely to breathe. The danger was so near, it was so certain that if the men came three paces farther, they would observe and search the hay-cart, that Tignonville fancied the steel already at his throat. He felt the hay rustle under his slightest movement, and gripped one hand with the other to restrain the tremor of overpowering excitement. Yet when he glanced at the minister he found him unmoved, a smile on his face. And M. de Tignonville could have cursed him for his folly.
For the men were coming on! An instant, and they perceived the cart, and the ruffian who had advised this route pounced on it in triumph. "There! Did I not say so?" he cried. "He is curled up in that hay, for the Satan's grub he is! That is where he is, see you!"
"Maybe," another answered grudgingly, as they gathered before it. "And maybe not, Simon!"
"To hell with your maybe not!" the first replied. And he drove his pike deep into the hay and turned it viciously.
The two on the top controlled themselves. Tignonville's face was livid; of himself he would have slid down amongst them and taken his chance, preferring to die fighting, to die in the open, rather than to perish like a rat in a stack. But La Tribe had gripped his arm and held him fast.
The man whom the others called Simon thrust again, but too low and without result. He was for trying a third time, when one of his comrades who had gone to the other side of the lane announced that the men were on the top of the hay.
"Can you see them!"
"No, but there's room and to spare."
"Oh, a curse on your room!" Simon retorted.
"Well, you can look."
"If that's all, I'll soon look!" was the answer. And the rogue, forcing himself between the hay and the side of the gateway, found the wheel of the cart, and began to raise himself on it. Tignonville, who lay on that hand, heard, though he could not see his movements. He knew what they meant, he knew that in a twinkling he must be discovered; and with a last prayer he gathered himself for a spring.
It seemed an age before the intruder's head appeared on a level with the hay; and then the alarm came from another quarter. The hen which had made its nest at Tignonville's feet, disturbed by the movement or by the newcomer's hand, flew out with a rush and flutter as of a great firework. Upsetting the startled Simon, who slipped swearing to the ground, it swooped scolding and clucking over the heads of the other men, and reaching the street in safety scuttled off at speed, its outspread wings sweeping the earth in its rage.
They laughed uproariously as Simon emerged, rubbing his elbow. "There's for you! There's your preacher!" his opponent jeered.
"D----n her! she gives tongue as fast as any of them!" gibed a second. "Will you try again, Simon? You may find another love-letter there!"
"Have done!" a third cried impatiently. "He'll not be where the hen is! Let's back! Let's back! I said before that it wasn't this way he turned! He's made for the river."
"The plague in his vitals!" Simon replied furiously. "Wherever he is, I'll find him!" And reluctant to confess himself wrong, he lingered, casting vengeful glances at the hay. But one of the other men cursed him for a fool; and presently, forced to accept his defeat or be left alone, he rejoined his fellows. Slowly the footsteps and voices receded along the lane; slowly, until silence swallowed them, and on the quivering strained senses of the two who remained behind, descended the gentle influence of twilight and the sweet scent of the new-mown hay on which they lay.
La Tribe turned to his companion, his eyes shining. "Our soul is escaped," he murmured, "even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are delivered!" His voice shook as he whispered the ancient words of triumph.
But when they came to look in the nest at Tignonville's feet there was no egg!
IX. UNSTABLE
And that troubled M. la Tribe no little, although he did not impart his thoughts to his companion. Instead they talked in whispers of the things which had happened; of the Admiral, of Teligny, whom all loved, of Rochefoucauld the accomplished, the King's friend; of the princes in the Louvre whom they gave up for lost, and of the Huguenot nobles on the farther side of the river, of whose safety there seemed some hope. Tignonville--he best knew why--said nothing of the fate of his betrothed, or of his own adventures in that connection. But each told the other how the alarm had reached him, and painted in broken words his reluctance to believe in treachery so black. Thence they passed to the future of the cause, and of that took views as opposite as light and darkness, as Papegot and Huguenot. The one was confident, the other in despair. And some time in the afternoon, worn out by the awful experiences of the last twelve hours, they fell asleep, their heads on their arms, the hay tickling their faces; and, with death stalking the lane beside them, slept soundly until after sundown.
When they awoke hunger awoke with them, and urged on La Tribe's mind the question of the missing egg. It was not altogether the prick of appetite which troubled him, but regarding the hiding-place in which they lay as an ark of refuge providentially supplied, protected and victualled, he could not refrain from asking reverently what the deficiency meant. It was not as if one hen only had appeared; as if no farther prospect had been extended. But up to a certain point the message was clear. Then when the Hand of Providence had shown itself most plainly, and in a manner to melt the heart with awe and thankfulness, the message had been blurred. Seriously the Huguenot asked himself what it portended.
To Tignonville, if he thought of it at all, the matter was the matter of an egg, and stopped there. An egg might alleviate the growing pangs of hunger; its non-appearance was a disappointment, but he traced the matter no farther. It must be confessed that the hay-cart was to him only a hay-cart--and not an ark; and the sooner he was safely away from it the better he would be pleased. While La Tribe, lying snug and warm beside him, thanked God for a lot so different from that of such of his fellows as had escaped--whom he pictured crouching in dank cellars, or on roof-trees exposed to the heat by day and the dews by night--the young man grew more and more restive.
Hunger pricked him, and the meanness of the part he had played moved him to action. About midnight, resisting the dissuasions of his companion, he would have sallied out in search of food if the passage of a turbulent crowd had not warned him that the work of murder was still proceeding. He curbed himself after that and lay until daylight. But, ill content with his own conduct, on fire when he thought of his betrothed, he was in no temper to bear hardship cheerfully or long; and gradually there rose before his mind the picture of Madame St. Lo's smiling face, and the fair hair which curled low on the white of her neck.
He would, and he would not. Death that had stalked so near him preached its solemn sermon. But death and pleasure are never far apart; and at no time and nowhere have they jostled one another more familiarly than in that age, wherever the influence of Italy and Italian art and Italian hopelessness extended. Again, on the one side, La Tribe's example went for something with his comrade in misfortune; but in the other scale hung relief from discomfort, with the prospect of a woman's smiles and a woman's flatteries, of dainty dishes, luxury, and passion. If he went now, he went to her from the jaws of death, with the glamour of adventure and peril about him; and the very going into her presence was a lure. Moreover, if he had been willing while his betrothed was still his, why not now when he had lost her?
It was this last reflection--and one other thing which came on a sudden into his mind--which turned the scale. About noon he sat up in the hay, and, abruptly and sullenly, "I'll lie here no longer," he said; and he dropped his legs over the side. "I shall go."
The movement was so unexpected that La Tribe stared at him in silence. Then, "You will run a great risk, M. de Tignonville," he said gravely, "if you do. You may go as far under cover of night as the river, or you may reach one of the gates. But as to crossing the one or passing the other, I reckon it a thing impossible."
"I shall not wait until night," Tignonville answered curtly, a ring of defiance in his tone. "I shall go now! I'll lie here no longer!"
"Now?"
"Yes, now."
"You will be mad if you do," the other replied. He thought it the petulant outcry of youth tired of inaction; a protest, and nothing more.
He was speedily undeceived. "Mad or not, I am going!" Tignonville retorted. And he slid to the ground, and from the covert of the hanging fringe of hay looked warily up and down the lane. "It is clear, I think," he said. "Good-bye." And with no more, without one upward glance or a gesture of the hand, with no further adieu or word of gratitude, he walked out into the lane, turned briskly to the left, and vanished.
The minister uttered a cry of astonishment, and made as if he would descend also. "Come back, sir!" he called, as loudly as he dared. "M. de Tignonville, come back! This is folly or worse!"
But M. de Tignonville was gone.
La Tribe listened a while, unable to believe it, and still expecting his return. At last, hearing nothing, he slid, greatly excited, to the ground and looked out. It was not until he had peered up and down the lane and made sure that it was empty that he could persuade himself that the other had gone for good. Then he climbed slowly and seriously to his place again, and sighed as he settled himself. "Unstable as water thou shalt not excel!" he muttered. "Now I know why there was only one egg."
Meanwhile Tignonville, after putting a hundred yards between himself and his bedfellow, plunged into the first dark entry which presented itself. Hurriedly, and with a frowning face, he cut off his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist; and this act, by disclosing his linen, put him in possession of the white sleeve which he had once involuntarily donned, and once discarded. The white cross on the cap he could not assume, for he was bareheaded. But he had little doubt that the sleeve would suffice, and with a bold demeanour he made his way northward until he reached again the Rue Ferronerie.
Excited groups were wandering up and down the street, and, fearing to traverse its crowded narrows, he went by lanes parallel with it as far as the Rue St. Denis, which he crossed. Everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible. Near the Rue des Lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. A little further on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair. To obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards--but God knows how long afterwards--a passer-by, more pitiful than his fellows, had put her out of her misery with a spit, which still remained plunged in her body.
M. de Tignonville shuddered at the sight, and at others like it. He loathed the symbol he wore, and himself for wearing it; and more than once his better nature bade him return and play the nobler part. Once he did turn with that intention. But he had set his mind on comfort and pleasure, and the value of these things is raised, not lowered, by danger and uncertainty. Quickly his stoicism oozed away; he turned again. Barely avoiding the rush of a crowd of wretches who were bearing a swooning victim to the river, he hurried through the Rue des Lombards and reached in safety the house beside the "Golden Maid."
He had no doubt now on which side of the "Maid" Madame St. Lo lived; the house was plain before him. He had only to knock. But in proportion as he approached his haven, his anxiety grew. To lose all, with all in his grasp, to fail upon the threshold, was a thing which bore no looking at; and it was with a nervous hand and eyes cast fearfully behind him that he plied the heavy iron knocker which adorned the door.
He could not turn his gaze from a knot of ruffians, who were gathered under one of the tottering gables on the farther side of the street. They seemed to be watching him, and he fancied--though the distance rendered this impossible--that he could see suspicion growing in their eyes. At any moment they might cross the roadway, they might approach, they might challenge him. And at the thought he knocked and knocked again. Why did not the porter come?
Ay, why? For now a score of contingencies came into the young man's mind and tortured him. Had Madame St. Lo withdrawn to safer quarters and closed the house? Or, good Catholic as she was, had she given way to panic, and determined to open to no one? Or was she ill? Or had she perished in the general disorder? Or----
And then, even as the men began to slink towards him, his heart leapt. He heard a footstep heavy and slow move through the house. It came nearer and nearer. A moment, and an iron-grated Judas-hole in the door slid open, and a servant, an elderly man, sleek and respectable, looked out at him.
Tignonville could scarcely speak for excitement. "Madame St. Lo?" he muttered tremulously. "I come to her from her cousin the Comte de Tavannes. Quick! quick! if you please. Open to me!"
"Monsieur is alone?"
"Yes! Yes!"
The man nodded gravely and slid back the bolts. He allowed M. de Tignonville to enter, then with care he secured the door, and led the way across a small square court, paved with red tiles and enclosed by the house, but open above to the sunshine and the blue sky. A gallery which ran round the upper floor looked on this court, in which a great quiet reigned, broken only by the music of a fountain. A vine climbed on the wooden pillars which supported the gallery, and, aspiring higher, embraced the wide carved eaves, and even tapestried with green the three gables that on each side of the court broke the sky-line. The grapes hung nearly ripe, and amid their clusters and the green lattice of their foliage Tignonville's gaze sought eagerly but in vain the laughing eyes and piquant face of his new mistress. For with the closing of the door, and the passing from him of the horrors of the streets, he had entered, as by magic, a new and smiling world; a world of tennis and roses, of tinkling voices and women's wiles, a world which smacked of Florence and the South, and love and life; a world which his late experiences had set so far away from him, his memory of it seemed a dream. Now, as he drank in its stillness and its fragrance, as he felt its safety and its luxury lap him round once more, he sighed. And with that breath he rid himself of much.
The servant led him to a parlour, a cool shady room on the farther side of the tiny quadrangle, and, muttering something inaudible, withdrew. A moment later a frolicsome laugh, and the light flutter of a woman's skirt as she tripped across the court, brought the blood to his cheeks. He went a step nearer to the door, and his eyes grew bright.
X. MADAME ST. LO
So far excitement had supported Tignonville in his escape. It was only when he knew himself safe, when he heard Madame St. Lo's footstep in the courtyard and knew that in a moment he would see her, that he knew also that he was failing for want of food. The room seemed to go round with him; the window to shift, the light to flicker. And then again, with equal abruptness, he grew strong and steady and perfectly master of himself. Nay, never had he felt a confidence in himself so overwhelming or a capacity so complete. The triumph of that which he had done, the knowledge that of so many he, almost alone, had escaped, filled his brain with a delicious and intoxicating vanity. When the door opened, and Madame St. Lo appeared on the threshold, he advanced holding out his arms. He expected that she would fall into them.
But Madame only backed and curtseyed, a mischievous light in her eyes. "A thousand thanks, Monsieur!" she said, "but you are more ready than I!" And she remained by the door.
"I have come to you through all!" he cried, speaking loudly because of a humming in his ears. "They are lying in the streets! They are dying, are dead, are hunted, are pursued, are perishing! But I have come through all to you!"
She curtseyed anew. "So I see, Monsieur!" she answered. "I am nattered!" But she did not advance, and gradually, light-headed as he was, he began to see that she looked at him with an odd closeness. And he took offence.
"I say, Madame, I have come to you!" he repeated. "And you do not seem pleased!"
She came forward a step and looked at him still more oddly. "Oh, yes," she said. "I am pleased, M. de Tignonville. It is what I intended. But tell me how you have fared. You are not hurt?"
"Not a hair!" he cried boastfully. And he told her in a dozen windy sentences of the adventure of the hay-cart and his narrow escape. He wound up with a foolish meaningless laugh.
"Then you have not eaten for thirty-six hours?" she said. And when he did not answer, "I understand," she continued, nodding and speaking as to a child. And she rang a silver handbell and gave an order. She addressed the servant in her usual tone, but to Tignonville's ear her voice seemed to fall to a whisper. Her figure--she was small and fairy-like--began to sway before him; and then in a moment, as it seemed to him, she was gone, and he was seated at a table, his trembling fingers grasping a cup of wine which the elderly servant who had admitted him was holding to his lips. On the table before him were a spit of partridges and a cake of white bread. When he had swallowed a second mouthful of wine--which cleared his eyes as by magic--the man urged him to eat. And he fell to with an appetite that grew as he ate.
By and by, feeling himself again, he became aware that two of Madame's women were peering at him through the open doorway. He looked that way and they fled giggling into the court; but in a moment they were back again, and the sound of their tittering drew his eyes anew to the door. It was the custom of the day for ladies of rank to wait on their favourites at table; and he wondered if Madame were with them, and why she did not come and serve him herself.
But for a while longer the savour of the roasted game took up the major part of his thoughts; and when prudence warned him to desist, and he sat back, satisfied after his long fast, he was in no mood to be critical. Perhaps--for somewhere in the house he heard a lute--Madame was entertaining those whom she could not leave? Or deluding some who might betray him if they discovered him?
From that his mind turned back to the streets and the horrors through which he had passed; but for a moment and no more. A shudder, an emotion of prayerful pity, and he recalled his thoughts. In the quiet of the cool room, looking on the sunny, vine-clad court, with the tinkle of the lute and the murmurous sound of women's voices in his ears, it was hard to believe that the things from which he had emerged were real. It was still more unpleasant, and as futile, to dwell on them. A day of reckoning would come, and, if La Tribe were right, the cause would rally, bristling with pikes and snorting with war-horses, and the blood spilled in this wicked city would cry aloud for vengeance. But the hour was not yet. He had lost his mistress, and for that atonement must be exacted. But in the present another mistress awaited him, and as a man could only die once, and might die at any minute, so he could only live once and in the present. Then vogue la galere!
As he roused himself from this brief reverie and fell to wondering how long he was to be left to himself, a rosebud tossed by an unseen hand struck him on the breast and dropped to his knees. To seize it and kiss it gallantly, to spring to his feet and look about him were instinctive movements. But he could see no one; and, in the hope of surprising the giver, he stole to the window. The sound of the lute and the distant tinkle of laughter persisted. The court, save for a page, who lay asleep on a bench in the gallery, was empty. Tignonville scanned the boy suspiciously; a male disguise was often adopted by the court ladies, and if Madame would play a prank on him, this was a thing to be reckoned with. But a boy it seemed to be, and after a while the young man went back to his seat.
Even as he sat down, a second flower struck him more sharply in the face, and this time he darted not to the window but to the door. He opened it quickly and looked out, but again he was too late.
"I shall catch you presently, ma reine!" he murmured tenderly, with intent to be heard. And he closed the door. But, wiser this time, he waited with his hand on the latch until he heard the rustling of a skirt, and saw the line of light at the foot of the door darkened by a shadow. That moment he flung the door wide, and, clasping the wearer of the skirt in his arms, kissed her lips before she had time to resist.
Then he fell back as if he had been shot! For the wearer of the skirt, she whom he had kissed, was Madame St. Lo's woman, and behind her stood Madame herself, laughing, laughing, laughing with all the gay abandonment of her light little heart. "Oh, the gallant gentleman!" she cried, and clapped her hands effusively. "Was ever recovery so rapid? Or triumph so speedy? Suzanne, my child, you surpass Venus. Your charms conquer before they are seen!"
M. de Tignonville had put poor Suzanne from him as if she burned; and hot and embarrassed, cursing his haste, he stood looking awkwardly at them. "Madame," he stammered at last, "you know quite well that I----"
"Seeing is believing!"
"That I thought it was you!"
"Oh, what I have lost!" she replied. And she looked archly at Suzanne, who giggled and tossed her head.
He was growing angry. "But, Madame," he protested, "you know----"
"I know what I know, and I have seen what I have seen!" Madame answered merrily. And she hummed,
"Ce fut le plus grand jour d'este Que m'embrassa la belle Suzanne!
"Oh, yes, I know what I know!" she repeated. And she fell again to laughing immoderately; while the pretty piece of mischief beside her hung her head, and, putting a finger in her mouth, mocked him with an affectation of modesty.
The young man glowered at them between rage and embarrassment. This was not the reception, nor this the hero's return to which he had looked forward. And a doubt began to take form in his mind. The mistress he had pictured would not laugh at kisses given to another; nor forget in a twinkling the straits through which he had come to her, the hell from which he had plucked himself! Possibly the court ladies held love as cheap as this, and lovers but as playthings, butts for their wit, and pegs on which to hang their laughter. But--but he began to doubt, and, perplexed and irritated, he showed his feelings.
"Madame," he said stiffly, "a jest is an excellent thing. But pardon me if I say that it is ill played on a fasting man."
Madame desisted from laughter that she might speak. "A fasting man?" she cried. "And he has eaten two partridges!"
"Fasting from love, Madame."
Madame St. Lo held up her hands. "And it's not two minutes since he took a kiss!"
He winced, was silent a moment, and then seeing that he got nothing by the tone he had adopted he cried for quarter. "A little mercy, Madame, as you are beautiful," he said, wooing her with his eyes. "Do not plague me beyond what a man can bear. Dismiss, I pray you, this good creature--whose charms do but set off yours as the star leads the eye to the moon--and make me the happiest man in the world by so much of your company as you will vouchsafe to give me."
"That may be but a very little," she answered, letting her eyes fall coyly, and affecting to handle the tucker of her low ruff. But he saw that her lip twitched; and he could have sworn that she mocked him to Suzanne, for the girl giggled.
Still by an effort he controlled his feelings. "Why so cruel?" he murmured, in a tone meant for her alone, and with a look to match. "You were not so hard when I spoke with you in the gallery, two evenings ago, Madame."
"Was I not?" she asked. "Did I look like this? And this?" And, languishing, she looked at him very sweetly after two fashions.
"Something."
"Oh, then I meant nothing!" she retorted with sudden vivacity. And she made a face at him, laughing under his nose. "I do that when I mean nothing, Monsieur! Do you see? But you are Gascon, and given, I fear, to flatter yourself."
Then he saw clearly that she played with him: and resentment, chagrin, pique got the better of his courtesy. "I flatter myself?" he cried, his voice choked with rage. "It may be I do now, Madame, but did I flatter myself when you wrote me this note?" And he drew it out and flourished it in her face. "Did I imagine when I read this? Or is it not in your hand? It is a forgery, perhaps," he continued bitterly. "Or it means nothing? Nothing, this note bidding me be at Madame St. Lo's at an hour before midnight--it means nothing? At an hour before midnight, Madame!"
"On Saturday night? The night before last night?"
"On Saturday night, the night before last night! But Madame knows nothing of it? Nothing, I suppose?"
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled cheerfully on him. "Oh, yes, I wrote it," she said. "But what of that, M. de Tignonville?"
"What of that?"
"Yes, Monsieur, what of that? Did you think it was written out of love for you?"
He was staggered for the moment by her coolness. "Out of what, then?" he cried hoarsely. "Out of what, then, if not out of love?"
"Why, out of pity, my little gentleman!" she answered sharply. "And trouble thrown away it seems. Love!" And she laughed so merrily and spontaneously it cut him to the heart. "No; but you said a dainty thing or two, and smiled a smile; and like a fool, and like a woman, I was sorry for the innocent calf that bleated so prettily on its way to the butcher's! And I would lock you up and save your life, I thought, until the blood-letting was over. Now you have it, M. de Tignonville, and I hope you like it."
Like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of ill-fortune? Like it, when the prospect of her charms had bribed him from the path of fortitude, when for her sake he had been false to his mistress, to his friends, to his faith, to his cause? Like it, when he knew as he listened that all was lost, and nothing gained--not even this poor, unworthy, shameful compensation? Like it? No wonder that words failed him, and he glared at her in rage, in misery, in shame.
"Oh, if you don't like it," she continued, tossing her head after a momentary pause, "then you should not have come! It is of no profit to glower at me, Monsieur. You do not frighten me."
"I would--I would to God I had not come!" he groaned.
"And, I dare say, that you had never seen me--since you cannot win me!"
"That too," he exclaimed.
She was of an extraordinary levity, and at that after staring at him a moment she broke into shrill laughter. "A little more, and I'll send you to my cousin Hannibal!" she said. "You do not know how anxious he is to see you. Have you a mind," with a waggish look, "to play bride's man, M. de Tignonville? Or will you give away the bride? It is not too late, though soon it will be!"
He winced, and from red grew pale. "What do you mean?" he stammered. And, averting his eyes in shame, seeing now all the littleness, all the baseness of his position, "Has he--married her?" he continued.
"Ho, ho!" she cried in triumph. "I've hit you now, have I, Monsieur? I've hit you!" And mocking him, "Has he--married her?" she lisped. "No; but he will marry her, have no fear of that! He will marry her. He waits but to get a priest. Would you like to see what he says?" she continued, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. "I had a note from him yesterday. Would you like to see how welcome you'll be at the wedding?" And she flaunted a piece of paper before his eyes.
"Give it me," he said.
She let him seize it the while she shrugged her shoulders. "It's your affair, not mine," she said. "See it if you like, and keep it if you like. Cousin Hannibal wastes few words."
That was true, for the paper contained but a dozen or fifteen words, and an initial by way of signature. "I may need your shoveling to-morrow afternoon. Send him, and Tignonville in safeguard if he come.--H."
"I can guess what use he has for a priest," she said. "It is not to confess him, I warrant. It's long, I fear, since Hannibal told his beads."
M. de Tignonville swore. "I would I had the confessing of him!" he said between his teeth.
She clapped her hands in glee. "Why should you not?" she cried. "Why should you not? 'Tis time yet, since I am to send to-day and have not sent. Will you be the shaveling to go confess or marry him?" And she laughed recklessly. "Will you, M. de Tignonville? The cowl will mask you as well as another, and pass you through the streets better than a cut sleeve. He will have both his wishes, lover and clerk in one then. And it will be pull monk, pull Hannibal with a vengeance."
Tignonville gazed at her, and as he gazed courage and hope awoke in his eyes. What if, after all, he could undo the past? What if, after all, he could retrace the false step he had taken, and place himself again where he had been--by her side? "If you meant it!" he exclaimed, his breath coming fast. "If you only meant what you say, Madame."
"If?" she answered, opening her eyes. "And why should I not mean it?"
"Because," he replied slowly, "cowl or no cowl, when I meet your cousin----"
"'Twill go hard with him?" she cried, with a mocking laugh. "And you think I fear for him. That is it, is it?"
He nodded.
"I fear just so much for him!" she retorted with contempt. "Just so much!" And coming a step nearer to Tignonville she snapped her small white fingers under his nose. "Do you see? No, M. de Tignonville," she continued, "you do not know Count Hannibal if you think that he fears, or that any fear for him. If you will beard the lion in his den, the risk will be yours, not his!"
The young man's face glowed. "I take the risk!" he cried. "And I thank you for the chance; that, Madame, whatever betide. But----"
"But what?" she asked, seeing that he hesitated and that his face fell.
"If he afterwards learn that you have played him a trick," he said, "will he not punish you?"
"Punish me?"
He nodded.
Madame laughed her high disdain. "You do not yet know Hannibal de Tavannes," she said. "He does not war with women."
XI. A BARGAIN
It is the wont of the sex to snatch at an ell where an inch is offered, and to press an advantage in circumstances in which a man, acknowledging the claims of generosity, scruples to ask for more. The habit, now ingrained, may have sprung from long dependence on the male, and is one which a hundred instances, from the time of Judith downward, prove to be at its strongest where the need is greatest.
When Mademoiselle de Vrillac came out of the hour-long swoon into which her lover's defection had cast her, the expectation of the worst was so strong upon her that she could not at once credit the respite which Madame Carlat hastened to announce. She could not believe that she still lay safe, in her own room above stairs; that she was in the care of her own servants, and that the chamber held no presence more hateful than that of the good woman who sat weeping beside her.
As was to be expected, she came to herself sighing and shuddering, trembling with nervous exhaustion. She looked for him, as soon as she looked for any; and even when she had seen the door locked and double-locked, she doubted--doubted, and shook and hid herself in the hangings of the bed. The noise of the riot and rapine which prevailed in the city, and which reached the ear even in that locked room--and although the window, of paper, with an upper pane of glass, looked into a courtyard--was enough to drive the blood from a woman's cheeks. But it was fear of the house, not of the street, fear from within, not from without, which impelled the girl into the darkest corner and shook her wits. She could not believe that even this short respite was hers, until she had repeatedly heard the fact confirmed at Madame Carlat's mouth.
"You are deceiving me!" she cried more than once. And each time she started up in fresh terror. "He never said that he would not return until to-morrow!"
"He did, my lamb, he did!" the old woman answered with tears. "Would I deceive you?"
"He said he would not return?"
"He said he would not return until to-morrow. You had until to-morrow, he said."
"And then?"
"He would come and bring the priest with him," Madame Carlat replied sorrowfully.
"The priest? To-morrow!" Mademoiselle cried. "The priest!" and she crouched anew with hot eyes behind the hangings of the bed, and, shivering, hid her face.
But this for a time only. As soon as she had made certain of the respite, and that she had until the morrow, her courage rose, and with it the instinct of which mention has been made. Count Hannibal had granted a respite; short as it was, and no more than the barest humanity required, to grant one at all was not the act of the mere butcher who holds the trembling lamb, unresisting, in his hands. It was an act--no more, again be it said, than humanity required--and yet an act which bespoke an expectation of some return, of some correlative advantage. It was not in the part of the mere brigand. Something had been granted. Something short of the utmost in the captor's power had been exacted. He had shown that there were things he would not do.
Then might not something more be won from him? A further delay, another point; something, no matter what, which could be turned to advantage. With the brigand it is not possible to bargain. But who gives a little may give more; who gives a day may give a week; who gives a week may give a month. And a month? Her heart leapt up. A month seemed a lifetime, an eternity, to her who had but until to-morrow!
Yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less brave. To obtain aught from Tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him before that to-morrow which meant so much to her. It was necessary, in a word, to run some risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not hesitate. It might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. In that case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case.
The position of the window, while it increased the women's safety, debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that which their ears afforded them. They had no means of judging whether Tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in the work of murder. Madame Carlat, indeed, had no desire to know anything. In that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. To her, therefore, the notion of sending for Tavannes, or communicating with him, came as a thunderbolt. Was her mistress mad? Did she wish to court her fate? To reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and the men-servants were confined above. Those riders were grim, brutal men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now know.
For it was noon--or a little more--of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth, "a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder." From the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and Tignonville crouched in his haymow--Huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books. In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor--than whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie, seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons. Nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a little later, what matters it?--M. Tignonville's own cousin, Madame d'Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.
Madame Carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. But Mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded.
"If I am to be Monsieur's wife," she said with quivering nostrils, "shall I fear his servants?"
And opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called. The man who answered was a Norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low-browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the embodiment of the women's apprehensions. Moreover, his patois of the cider-land was little better than German to them; their southern, softer tongue was sheer Italian to him. But he seemed not ill-disposed, or Mademoiselle's air overawed him; and presently she made him understand, and with a nod he descended to carry her message.
Then Mademoiselle's heart began to beat; and beat more quickly when she heard his step--alas! she knew it already, knew it from all others--on the stairs. The table was set, the card must be played, to win or lose. It might be that with the low, opinion he held of women he would think her reconciled to her lot; he would think this an overture, a step towards kinder treatment, one more proof of the inconstancy of the lower and the weaker sex, made to be men's playthings. And at that thought her eyes grew hot with rage. But if it were so, she must still put up with it. She must still put up with it! She had sent for him, and he was coming--he was at the door!
He entered, and she breathed more freely. For once his face lacked the sneer, the look of smiling possession, which she had come to know and hate. It was grave, expectant, even suspicious; still harsh and dark, akin, as she now observed, to the low-browed, furrowed face of the rider who had summoned him. But the offensive look was gone, and she could breathe.
He closed the door behind him, but he did not advance into the room. "At your pleasure, Mademoiselle?" he said simply. "You sent for me, I think."
She was on her feet, standing before him with something of the submissiveness of Roxana before her conqueror. "I did," she said; and stopped at that, her hand to her side as if she could not continue. But presently in a low voice, "I have heard," she went on, "what you said, Monsieur, after I lost consciousness."
"Yes?" he said; and was silent. Nor did he lose his watchful look.
"I am obliged to you for your thought of me," she continued in a faint voice, "and I shall be still further obliged--I speak to you thus quickly and thus early--if you will grant me a somewhat longer time."
"Do you mean--if I will postpone our marriage?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"It is impossible!"
"Do not say that," she cried, raising her voice impulsively. "I appeal to your generosity. And for a short, a very short, time only."
"It is impossible," he answered quietly. "And for reasons, Mademoiselle. In the first place I can more easily protect my wife. In the second, I am even now summoned to the Louvre, and should be on my way thither. By to-morrow evening, unless I am mistaken in the business on which I am required, I shall be on my way to a distant province with royal letters. It is essential that our marriage take place before I go."
"Why?" she asked stubbornly.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Why?" he repeated. "Can you ask, Mademoiselle, after the events of last night? Because, if you please, I do not wish to share the fate of M. de Tignonville. Because in these days life is uncertain, and death too certain. Because it was our turn last night, and it may be the turn of your friends--to-morrow night!"
"Then some have escaped?" she cried.
He smiled. "I am glad to find you so shrewd," he replied. "In an honest wife it is an excellent quality. Yes, Mademoiselle; one or two."
"Who? Who? I pray you tell me."
"M. de Montgomery, who slept beyond the river, for one; and the Vidame, and some with him. M. de Biron, whom I count a Huguenot, and who holds the Arsenal in the King's teeth, for another. And a few more. Enough, in a word, Mademoiselle, to keep us wakeful. It is impossible, therefore, for me to postpone the fulfilment of your promise."
"A promise on conditions!" she retorted, in rage that she could win no more. And every line of her splendid figure, every tone of her voice flamed sudden, hot rebellion. "I do not go for nothing! You gave me the lives of all in the house, Monsieur! Of all!" she repeated with passion. "And all are not here! Before I marry you, you must show me M. de Tignonville alive and safe!"
He shrugged his shoulders. "He has taken himself off," he said. "It is naught to me what happens to him now."
"It is all to me!" she retorted.
At that he glared at her, the veins of his forehead swelling suddenly. But after a seeming struggle with himself he put the insult by, perhaps for future reckoning and account. "I did what I could," he said sullenly. "Had I willed it he had died there and then in the room below. I gave him his life. If he has risked it anew and lost it, it is naught to me."
"It was his life you gave me," she repeated stubbornly. "His life--and the others. But that is not all," she continued; "you promised me a minister."
He nodded, smiling sourly to himself, as if this confirmed a suspicion he had entertained. "Or a priest," he said.
"No, a minister."
"If one could be obtained. If not, a priest."
"No, it was to be at my will; and I will a minister! I will a minister!" she cried passionately. "Show me M. Tignonville alive, and bring me a minister of my faith, and I will keep my promise, M. de Tavannes. Have no fear of that. But otherwise, I will not."
"You will not?" he cried. "You will not?"
"No!"
"You will not marry me?"
"No!"
The moment she had said it fear seized her, and she could have fled from him, screaming. The flash of his eyes, the sudden passion of his face, burned themselves into her memory. She thought for a second that he would spring on her and strike her down. Yet though the women behind her held their breath, she faced him, and did not quail; and to that, she fancied, she owed it that he controlled himself. "You will not?" he repeated, as if he could not understand such resistance to his will--as if he could not credit his ears. "You will not?" But after that, when he had said it three times, he laughed; a laugh, however, with a snarl in it that chilled her blood.
"You bargain, do you?" he said. "You will have the last tittle of the price, will you? And have thought of this and that to put me off, and to gain time until your lover, who is all to you, come to save you? Oh, clever girl! clever! But have you thought where you stand--woman? Do you know that if I gave the word to my people they would treat you as the commonest baggage that tramps the Froidmantel? Do you know that it rests with me to save you, or to throw you to the wolves whose ravening you hear?" And he pointed to the window. "Minister? Priest?" he continued. "Mon Dieu, Mademoiselle, I stand astonished at my moderation. You chatter to me of ministers and priests, and the one or the other, when it might be neither! When you are as much and as hopelessly in my power to-day as the wench in my kitchen! You! You flout me, and make terms with me! You!"
And he came so near her with his dark harsh face, his tone rose so menacing on the last word, that her nerves, shattered before, gave way, and, unable to control herself, she flinched with a low cry, thinking he would strike her.
He did not follow, nor move to follow; but he laughed a low laugh of content. And his eyes devoured her. "Ho! ho!" he said. "We are not so brave as we pretend to be, it seems. And yet you dared to chaffer with me? You thought to thwart me--Tavannes! Mon Dieu, Mademoiselle, to what did you trust? To what did you trust? Ay, and to what do you trust?"
She knew that by the movement, which fear had forced from her, she had jeopardised everything. That she stood to lose all and more than all which she had thought to win by a bold front. A woman less brave, of a spirit less firm, would have given up the contest, and have been glad to escape so. But this woman, though her bloodless face showed that she knew what cause she had for fear, and though her heart was, indeed, sick with sheer terror, held her ground at the point to which she had retreated. She played her last card. "To what do I trust?" she muttered with trembling lips.
"Yes, Mademoiselle," he answered, between his teeth. "To what do you trust--that you play with Tavannes?"
"To his honour, Monsieur," she answered faintly. "And to your promise."
He looked at her with his mocking smile. "And yet," he sneered, "you thought a moment ago that I was going to strike you. You thought that I should beat you! And now it is my honour and my promise! Oh, clever, clever, Mademoiselle! 'Tis so that women make fools of men. I knew that something of this kind was on foot when you sent for me, for I know women and their ways. But, let me tell you, it is an ill time to speak of honour when the streets are red! And of promises when the King's word is 'No faith with a heretic!'"
"Yet you will keep yours," she said bravely.
He did not answer at once, and hope which was almost dead in her breast began to recover; nay, presently sprang up erect. For the man hesitated, it was evident; he brooded with a puckered brow and gloomy eyes; an observer might have fancied that he traced pain as well as doubt in his face. At last: "There is a thing," he said slowly and with a sort of glare at her, "which, it may be, you have not reckoned. You press me now, and will stand on your terms and your conditions, your ifs and your unlesses! You will have the most from me, and the bargain and a little beside the bargain! But I would have you think if you are wise. Bethink you how it will be between us when you are my wife--if you press me so now, Mademoiselle. How will it sweeten things then? How will it soften them? And to what, I pray you, will you trust for fair treatment then, if you will be so against me now?"
She shuddered. "To the mercy of my husband," she said in a low voice. And her chin sank on her breast.
"You will be content to trust to that?" he answered grimly. And his tone and the lifting of his brow promised little clemency. "Bethink you! 'Tis your rights now, and your terms, Mademoiselle! And then it will be only my mercy--Madame."
"I am content," she muttered faintly.
"And the Lord have mercy on my soul, is what you would add," he retorted, "so much trust have you in my mercy! And you are right! You are right, since you have played this trick on me. But as you will. If you will have it so, have it so! You shall stand on your conditions now; you shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the pact. But afterwards--afterwards, Madame de Tavannes----"
He did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her petition, Mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden on her arms, had burst into violent weeping. Her hair, hastily knotted up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white. The man stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure. But he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about. First one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he seemed about to add something. But he did not speak. The sentence he had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of orations.
"Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes!"
XII. IN THE HALL OF THE LOUVRE
It is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for Mademoiselle which had seized Count Hannibal be deemed unworthy of the higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one.
As Tavannes, after leaving Mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes, beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the Gothic spires of his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder. He saw Paris as a city sacked; a slaughterhouse, where for a week a masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments, broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. But he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville; Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office.
Probably it was to this that one man hunted through Paris owed his escape that day. He sprang from a narrow passage full in Tavannes' view, and, hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly--as a hare will run when chased--along the street to meet Count Hannibal's company. The man's face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his breath hissed from him as he ran. His pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by Count Hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead. And dead he would have been within thirty seconds had Tavannes played his part. But his thoughts were elsewhere. Either he took the poor wretch for Tignonville, or for the minister on whom his mind was running; at any rate he suffered him to slip under the belly of his horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped the pursuers in their tracks. The quarry slipped into an alley and vanished. The hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed inclined to resent the mistake. But Tavannes smiled; a broader smile lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside.
There are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of others excite pity. Tavannes' lip curled as he rode on through the streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a King twenty-two years old had made of his capital. His lip curled most of all when he came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the Louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication between city and palace cut off. Such a proof of unkingly panic, in a crisis wrought by the King himself, astonished him less a few minutes later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered the courtyard of the fortress.
Within and about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing. The westering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated and restless movements. To a calm eye they seemed like men acting in a nightmare. Their fitful talk and disjointed gestures, their sweating brows and damp hair, no less than the sullen, brooding silence of one here and there, bespoke the abnormal and the terrible. There were livid faces among them, and twitching cheeks, and some who swallowed much; and some again who bared their crimson arms and bragged insanely of the part they had played. But perhaps the most striking thing was the thirst, the desire, the demand for news, and for fresh excitement. In the space of time it took him to pass through them, Count Hannibal heard a dozen rumours of what was passing in the city; that Montgomery and the gentlemen who had slept beyond the river had escaped on horseback in their shirts; that Guise had been shot in the pursuit; that he had captured the Vidame de Chartres and all the fugitives; that he had never left the city; that he was even then entering by the Porte de Bucy. Again that Biron had surrendered the Arsenal, that he had threatened to fire on the city, that he was dead, that with the Huguenots who had escaped he was marching on the Louvre, that----
And then Tavannes passed out of the blinding sunshine, and out of earshot of their babble, and had plain in his sight across the quadrangle, the new facade, Italian, graceful, of the Renaissance; which rose in smiling contrast with the three dark Gothic sides that now, the central tower removed, frowned unimpeded at one another. But what was this which lay along the foot of the new Italian wall? This, round which some stood, gazing curiously, while others strewed fresh sand about it, or after long downward-looking glanced up to answer the question of a person at a window?
Death; and over death--death in its most cruel aspect--a cloud of buzzing, whirling flies, and the smell, never to be forgotten, of much spilled blood. From a doorway hard by came shrill bursts of hysterical laughter; and with the laughter plumped out, even as Tavannes crossed the court, a young girl, thrust forth it seemed by her fellows, for she turned about and struggled as she came. Once outside she hung back, giggling and protesting, half willing, half unwilling; and meeting Tavannes' eye thrust her way in again with a whirl of her petticoats, and a shriek. But before he had taken four paces she was out again.
He paused to see who she was, and his thoughts involuntarily went back to the woman he had left weeping in the upper room. Then he turned about again and stood to count the dead. He identified Piles, identified Pardaillan, identified Soubise--whose corpse the murderers had robbed of the last rag--and Touchet and St. Galais. He made his reckoning with an unmoved face, and with the same face stopped and stared, and moved from one to another; had he not seen the slaughter about "le petit home" at Jarnac, and the dead of three pitched fields? But when a bystander, smirking obsequiously, passed him a jest on Soubise, and with his finger pointed the jest, he had the same hard unmoved face for the gibe as for the dead. And the jester shrank away, abashed and perplexed by his stare and his reticence.
Half way up the staircase to the great gallery or guardroom above, Count Hannibal found his brother, the Marshal, huddled together in drunken slumber on a seat in a recess. In the gallery to which he passed on without awakening him, a crowd of courtiers and ladies, with arquebusiers and captains of the quarters, walked to and fro, talking in whispers; or peeped over shoulders towards the inner end of the hall, where the querulous voice of the King rose now and again above the hum. As Tavannes moved that way, Nancay, in the act of passing out, booted and armed for the road, met him and almost jostled him.
"Ah, well met, M. le Comte," he sneered, with as much hostility as he dared betray. "The King has asked for you twice."
"I am going to him. And you? Whither in such a hurry, M. Nancay?"
"To Chatillon."
"On pleasant business?"
"Enough that it is on the King's!" Nancay replied with unexpected temper. "I hope that you may find yours as pleasant!" he added with a grin. And he went on.
The gleam of malice in the man's eye warned Tavannes to pause. He looked round for someone who might be in the secret, saw the Provost of the Merchants and approached him. "What's amiss, M. le Charron?" he asked. "Is not the affair going as it should?"
"'Tis about the Arsenal, M. le Comte," the Provost answered busily. "M. de Biron is harbouring the vermin there. He has lowered the portcullis and pointed his culverins over the gate and will not yield it or listen to reason. The King would bring him to terms, but no one will venture himself inside with the message. Rats in a trap, you know, bite hard, and care little whom they bite."
"I begin to understand."
"Precisely, M. le Comte. His Majesty would have sent M. de Nancay. But he elected to go to Chatillon, to seize the young brood there. The Admiral's children, you comprehend."
"Whose teeth are not yet grown! He was wise."
"To be sure, M. de Tavannes, to be sure. But the King was annoyed, and on top of that came a priest with complaints, and if I may make so bold as to advise you, you will not----"
But Tavannes fancied that he had caught the gist of the difficulty, and with a nod he moved on; and so he missed the point of the warning which the other had it in his mind to give. A moment and he reached the inner circle, and there halted, disconcerted, nay, taken aback. For as soon as he showed his face, the King, who was pacing to and fro like a caged beast, before a table at which three clerks knelt on cushions, espied him and stood still. With a glare of something like madness in his eyes, Charles raised his hand with a shaking finger and singled him out.
"So, by G--d, you are there!" he cried, with a volley of blasphemy. And he signed to those about Count Hannibal to stand away from him. "You are there, are you? And you are not afraid to show your face? I tell you, it's you and such as you bring us into contempt! so that it is said everywhere Guise does all and serves God, and we follow because we must! It's you, and such as you, are stumbling-blocks to our good folk of Paris! Are you traitor, sirrah?" he continued with passion, "or are you of our brother Alencon's opinions, that you traverse our orders to the damnation of your soul and our discredit? Are you traitor? Or are you heretic? Or what are you? God in heaven, will you answer me, man, or shall I send you where you will find your tongue?"
"I know not of what your Majesty accuses me," Count Hannibal answered, with a scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulders.
"I? 'Tis not I," the King retorted. His hair hung damp on his brow, and he dried his hands continually; while his gestures had the ill-measured and eccentric violence of an epileptic. "Here, you! Speak, father, and confound him!"
Then Tavannes discovered on the farther side of the circle the priest whom his brother had ridden down that morning. Father Pezelay's pale hatchet-face gleamed paler than ordinary; and a great bandage hid one temple and part of his face. But, below the bandage, the flame of his eyes was not lessened, nor the venom of his tongue. To the King he had come--for no other would deal with his violent opponent; to the King's presence! and, as he prepared to blast his adversary, now his chance was come, his long lean frame, in its narrow black cassock, seemed to grow longer, leaner, more baleful, more snake-like. He stood there a fitting representative of the dark fanaticism of Paris, which Charles and his successor--the last of a doomed line--alternately used as tool or feared as master; and to which the most debased and the most immoral of courts paid, in its sober hours, a vile and slavish homage. Even in the midst of the drunken, shameless courtiers--who stood, if they stood for anything, for that other influence of the day, the Renaissance--he was to be reckoned with; and Count Hannibal knew it. He knew that in the eyes not of Charles only, but of nine out of ten who listened to him, a priest was more sacred than a virgin, and a tonsure than all the virtues of spotless innocence.
"Shall the King give with one hand and withdraw with the other?" the priest began, in a voice hoarse yet strident, a voice borne high above the crowd on the wings of passion. "Shall he spare of the best of the men and the maidens whom God hath doomed, whom the Church hath devoted, whom the King hath given? Is the King's hand shortened or his word annulled that a man does as he forbiddeth and leaves undone what he commandeth? Is God mocked? Woe, woe unto you," he continued, turning swiftly, arms uplifted, towards Tavannes, "who please yourself with the red and white of their maidens and take of the best of the spoil, sparing where the King's word is 'Spare not!' Who strike at Holy Church with the sword! Who----"
"Answer, sirrah!" Charles cried, spurning the floor in his fury. He could not listen long to any man. "Is it so? Is it so? Do you do these things?"
Count Hannibal shrugged his shoulders and was about to answer, when a thick, drunken voice rose from the crowd behind him. "Is it what? Eh! Is it what?" it droned. And a figure with bloodshot eyes, disordered beard, and rich clothes awry, forced its way through the obsequious circle. It was Marshal Tavannes. "Eh, what? You'd beard the King, would you?" he hiccoughed truculently, his eyes on Father Pezelay, his hand on his sword. "Were you a priest ten times--
"Silence!" Charles cried, almost foaming with rage at this fresh interruption. "It's not he, fool! 'Tis your pestilent brother."
"Who touches my brother touches Tavannes!" the Marshal answered with a menacing gesture. He was sober enough, it appeared, to hear what was said, but not to comprehend its drift; and this caused a titter, which immediately excited his rage. He turned and seized the nearest laugher by the ear. "Insolent!" he cried. "I will teach you to laugh when the King speaks! Puppy! Who laughs at his Majesty or touches my brother has to do with Tavannes!"
The King, in a rage that almost deprived him of speech, stamped the floor twice. "Idiot!" he cried. "Imbecile! Let the man go! 'Tis not he! 'Tis your heretic brother, I tell you! By all the Saints! By the body of----" and he poured forth a flood of oaths. "Will you listen to me and be silent! Will you--your brother----"
"If he be not your Majesty's servant, I will kill him with this sword!" the irrepressible Marshal struck in. "As I have killed ten to-day! Ten!" And, staggering back, he only saved himself from falling by clutching Chicot about the neck.
"Steady, my pretty Marechale!" the jester cried, chucking him under the chin with one hand, while with some difficulty he supported him with the other--for he, too, was far from sober--
"Pretty Margot, toy with me, Maiden bashful----"
"Silence!" Charles cried, darting forth his long arms in a fury of impatience. "God, have I killed every man of sense? Are you all gone mad? Silence! Do you hear? Silence! And let me hear what he has to say," with a movement towards Count Hannibal. "And look you, sirrah," he continued with a curse, "see that it be to the purpose!"
"If it be a question of your Majesty's service," Tavannes answered. "And obedience to your Majesty's orders, I am deeper in it than he who stands there!" with a sign towards the priest. "I give my word for that. And I will prove it."
"How, sir?" Charles cried. "How, how, how? How will you prove it?"
"By doing for you, sire, what he will not do!" Tavannes answered scornfully. "Let him stand out, and if he will serve his Church as I will serve my King----
"Blaspheme not!" cried the priest.
"Chatter not!" Tavannes retorted hardily, "but do! Better is he," he continued, "who takes a city than he who slays women! Nay, sire," he went on hurriedly, seeing the King start, "be not angry, but hear me! You would send to Biron, to the Arsenal? You seek a messenger, sire? Then let the good father be the man. Let him take your Majesty's will to Biron, and let him see the Grand Master face to face, and bring him to reason. Or, if he will not, I will! Let that be the test!"
"Ay, ay!" cried Marshal de Tavannes, "you say well, brother! Let him!"
"And if he will not, I will!" Tavannes repeated. "Let that be the test, sire."
The King wheeled suddenly to Father Pezelay.
"You hear, father?" he said. "What say you!"
The priest's face grew sallow, and more sallow. He knew that the walls of the Arsenal sheltered men whose hands no convention and no order of Biron's would keep from his throat, were the grim gate and frowning culverins once passed; men who had seen their women and children, their wives and sisters immolated at his word, and now asked naught but to stand face to face and eye to eye with him and tear him limb from limb before they died! The challenge, therefore, was one-sided and unfair; but for that very reason it shook him. The astuteness of the man who, taken by surprise, had conceived this snare filled him with dread. He dared not accept, and he scarcely dared to refuse the offer. And meantime the eyes of the courtiers, who grinned in their beards, were on him. At length he spoke, but it was in a voice which had lost its boldness and assurance.
"It is not for me to clear myself," he cried, shrill and violent, "but for those who are accused, for those who have belied the King's word, and set at naught his Christian orders. For you, Count Hannibal, heretic, or no better than heretic, it is easy to say 'I go.' For you go but to your own, and your own will receive you!"
"Then you will not go?" with a jeer.
"At your command? No!" the priest shrieked with passion. "His Majesty knows whether I serve him."
"I know," Charles cried, stamping his foot in a fury, "that you all serve me when it pleases you! That you are all sticks of the same faggot, wood of the same bundle, hell-babes in your own business, and sluggards in mine! You kill to-day and you'll lay it to me to-morrow! Ay, you will! you will!" he repeated frantically, and drove home the asseveration with a fearful oath. "The dead are as good servants as you! Foucauld was better! Foucauld? Foucauld? Ah, my God!"
And abruptly in presence of them all, with the sacred name, which he so often defiled, on his lips, Charles turned, and covering his face burst into childish weeping; while a great silence fell on all--on Bussy with the blood of his cousin Resnel on his point, on Fervacques, the betrayer of his friend, on Chicot, the slayer of his rival, on Cocconnas the cruel--on men with hands unwashed from the slaughter, and on the shameless women who lined the walls; on all who used this sobbing man for their stepping-stone, and, to attain their ends and gain their purposes, trampled his dull soul in blood and mire.
One looked at another in consternation. Fear grew in eyes that a moment before were bold; cheeks turned pale that a moment before were hectic. If he changed as rapidly as this, if so little dependence could be placed on his moods or his resolutions, who was safe? Whose turn might it not be to-morrow? Or who might not be held accountable for the deeds done this day? Many, from whom remorse had seemed far distant a while before, shuddered and glanced behind them. It was as if the dead who lay stark without the doors, ay, and the countless dead of Paris, with whose shrieks the air was laden, had flocked in shadowy shape into the hall; and there, standing beside their murderers, had whispered with their cold breath in the living ears, "A reckoning! A reckoning! As I am, thou shalt be!"
It was Count Hannibal who broke the spell and the silence, and with his hand on his brother's shoulder stood forward. "Nay, sire," he cried, in a voice which rang defiant in the roof, and seemed to challenge alike the living and the dead, "if all deny the deed, yet will not I! What we have done we have done! So be it! The dead are dead! So be it! For the rest, your Majesty has still one servant who will do your will, one soldier whose life is at your disposition! I have said I will go, and I go, sire. And you, churchman," he continued, turning in bitter scorn to the priest, "do you go too--to church! To church, shaveling! Go, watch and pray for us! Fast and flog for us! Whip those shoulders, whip them till the blood runs down! For it is all, it seems, you will do for your King!"
Charles turned. "Silence, railer!" he said in a broken voice. "Sow no more troubles! Already," a shudder shook his tall ungainly form, "I see blood, blood, blood everywhere! Blood! Ah, God, shall I from this time see anything else? But there is no turning back. There is no undoing. So, do you go to Biron. And do you," he went on, sullenly addressing Marshal Tavannes, "take him and tell him what it is needful he should know."
"'Tis done, sire!" the Marshal cried with a hiccough. "Come, brother!"
But when the two, the courtiers making quick way for them, had passed down the hall to the door, the Marshal tapped Hannibal's sleeve. "It was touch and go," he muttered; it was plain he had been more sober than he seemed. "Mind you, it does not do to thwart our little master in his fits! Remember that another time, or worse will come of it, brother. As it is, you came out of it finely and tripped that black devil's heels to a marvel! But you won't be so mad as to go to Biron?"
"Yes," Count Hannibal answered coldly. "I shall go."
"Better not! Better not!" the Marshal answered. "'Twill be easier to go in than to come out--with a whole throat! Have you taken wild cats in the hollow of a tree? The young first, and then the she-cat? Well, it will be that! Take my advice, brother. Have after Montgomery, if you please, ride with Nancay to Chatillon--he is mounting now--go where you please out of Paris, but don't go there! Biron hates us, hates me. And for the King, if he do not see you for a few days, 'twill blow over in a week."
Count Hannibal shrugged his shoulders. "No," he said, "I shall go."
The Marshal stared a moment. "Morbleu!" he said, "why? 'Tis not to please the King, I know. What do you think to find there, brother?"
"A minister," Hannibal answered gently. "I want one with life in him, and they are scarce in the open. So I must to covert after him." And, twitching his sword-belt a little nearer to his hand, he passed across the court to the gate, and to his horses. The Marshal went back laughing, and, slapping his thigh as he entered the hall, jostled by accident a gentleman who was passing out.
"What is it?" the Gascon cried hotly; for it was Chicot he had jostled.
"Who touches my brother touches Tavannes!" the Marshal hiccoughed. And, smiting his thigh anew, he went off into another fit of laughter.
XIII. DIPLOMACY
Where the old wall of Paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the Seine and the ramparts beyond the Rue St. Pol wore at this date an aspect typical of the troubles of the time. Along the waterside the gloomy old Palace of St. Pol, once the residence of the mad King Charles the Sixth--and his wife, the abandoned Isabeau de Baviere--sprawled its maze of mouldering courts and ruined galleries, a dreary monument of the Gothic days which were passing from France. Its spacious curtilage and dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the Rue St. Antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of the Bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where St. Pol ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall.
This second palace was the Hotel des Tournelles, a fantastic medley of turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the days of the English domination; it had been the abode of the Regent Bedford. From his time it had remained for a hundred years the town residence of the kings of France; but the death of Henry II., slain in its lists by the lance of the same Montgomery who was this day fleeing for his life before Guise, had given his widow a distaste for it. Catherine de Medicis, her sons, and the Court had abandoned it; already its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats played where kings had slept; and in "our palace of the Tournelles" reigned only silence and decay. Unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad, the grim shade of the eleventh Louis sometimes walked in its desolate precincts.
In the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from the rest of Paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken palaces, stood the Arsenal. Destroyed in great part by the explosion of a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of Billy, and its proximity to the Bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of Paris. It was the appanage of the Master of the Ordnance, and within its walls M. de Biron, a Huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm. During the day he had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led them to his gate; and as night fell--on such a carnage as the hapless city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the Armagnacs, one hundred and fifty-four years earlier--the glow of his matches through the dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls, indicated that there was still one place in Paris where the King's will did not run.
In comparison of the disorder which prevailed in the city, a deadly quiet reigned here; a stillness so chill that a timid man must have stood and hesitated to approach. But a stranger who about nightfall rode down the street towards the entrance, a single footman running at his stirrup, only nodded a stern approval of the preparations. As he drew nearer he cast an attentive eye this way and that; nor stayed until a hoarse challenge brought him up when he had come within six horses' lengths of the Arsenal gate. He reined up then, and raising his voice, asked in clear tones for M. de Biron.
"Go," he continued boldly, "tell the Grand Master that one from the King is here, and would speak with him."
"From the King of France?" the officer on the gate asked.
"Surely! Is there more than one King in France?"
A curse and a bitter cry of "King? King Herod!" were followed by a muttered discussion that, in the ears of one of the two who waited in the gloom below, boded little good. The two could descry figures moving to and fro before the faint red light of the smouldering matches; and presently a man on the gate kindled a torch, and held it so as to fling its light downward. The stranger's attendant cowered behind the horse. "Have a care, my lord!" he whispered. "They are aiming at us!"
If so the rider's bold front and unmoved demeanour gave them pause. Presently, "I will send for the Grand Master" the man who had spoken before announced. "In whose name, monsieur?"
"No matter," the stranger answered. "Say, one from the King."
"You are alone?"
"I shall enter alone."
The assurance seemed to be satisfactory, for the man answered "Good!" and after a brief delay a wicket in the gate was opened, the portcullis creaked upward, and a plank was thrust across the ditch. The horseman waited until the preparations were complete; then he slid to the ground, threw his rein to the servant, and boldly walked across. In an instant he left behind him the dark street, the river, and the sounds of outrage, which the night breeze bore from the farther bank, and found himself within the vaulted gateway, in a bright glare of light, the centre of a ring of gleaming eyes and angry faces.
The light blinded him for a few seconds; but the guards, on their side, were in no better case. For the stranger was masked; and in their ignorance who it was looked at them through the slits in the black velvet they stared, disconcerted, and at a loss. There were some there with naked weapons in their hands who would have struck him through had they known who he was; and more who would have stood aside while the deed was done. But the uncertainty--that and the masked man's tone paralysed them. For they reflected that he might be any one. Conde, indeed, stood too small, but Navarre, if he lived, might fill that cloak; or Guise, or Anjou, or the King himself. And while some would not have scrupled to strike the blood royal, more would have been quick to protect and avenge it. And so before the dark uncertainty of the mask, before the riddle of the smiling eyes which glittered through the slits, they stared irresolute; until a hand, the hand of one bolder than his fellows, was raised to pluck away the screen.
The unknown dealt the fellow a buffet with his fist. "Down, rascal!" he said hoarsely. "And you"--to the officer--"show me instantly to M. de Biron!"
But the lieutenant, who stood in fear of his men, looked at him doubtfully. "Nay," he said, "not so fast!" And one of the others, taking the lead, cried, "No! We may have no need of M. de Biron. Your name, monsieur, first."
With a quick movement the stranger gripped the officer's wrist. "Tell your master," he said, "that he who clasped his wrist thus on the night of Pentecost is here, and would speak with him! And say, mark you, that I will come to him, not he to me!"
The sign and the tone imposed upon the boldest. Two-thirds of the watch were Huguenots, who burned to avenge the blood of their fellows; and these, overriding their officer, had agreed to deal with the intruder, if a Papegot, without recourse to the Grand Master, whose moderation they dreaded. A knife-thrust in the ribs, and another body in the ditch--why not, when such things were done outside? But even these doubted now; and M. Peridol, the lieutenant, reading in the eyes of his men the suspicions which he had himself conceived, was only anxious to obey, if they would let him. So gravely was he impressed, indeed, by the bearing of the unknown that he turned when he had withdrawn, and came back to assure himself that the men meditated no harm in his absence; nor until he had exchanged a whisper with one of them would he leave them and go.
While he was gone on his errand the envoy leaned against the wall of the gateway, and, with his chin sunk on his breast and his mind fallen into reverie, seemed unconscious of the dark glances of which he was the target. He remained in this position until the officer came back, followed by a man with a lantern. Their coming roused the unknown, who, invited to follow Peridol, traversed two courts without remark, and in the same silence entered a building in the extreme eastern corner of the enceinte abutting on the ruined Tour de Billy. Here, in an upper floor, the Governor of the Arsenal had established his temporary lodging.
The chamber into which the stranger was introduced betrayed the haste in which it had been prepared for its occupant. Two silver lamps which hung from the beams of the unceiled roof shed light on a medley of arms and inlaid armour, of parchments, books, and steel caskets, which encumbered not the tables only, but the stools and chests that, after the fashion of that day, stood formally along the arras. In the midst of the disorder, on the bare floor, walked the man who, more than any other, had been instrumental in drawing the Huguenots to Paris--and to their doom. It was not wonderful that the events of the day, the surprise and horror still rode his mind; nor that even he who passed for a model of stiffness and reticence betrayed for once the indignation which filled his breast. Until the officer had withdrawn and closed the door he did, indeed, keep silence; standing beside the table and eyeing his visitor with a lofty port and a stern glance. But the moment he was assured that they were alone he spoke.
"Your Highness may unmask now," he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. "Yet were you well advised to take the precaution, since you had hardly come at me in safety without it. Had those who keep the gate seen you, I would not have answered for your Highness's life! The more shame," he continued vehemently, "on the deeds of this day which have compelled the brother of a King of France to hide his face in his own capital and in his own fortress. For I dare to say, Monsieur, what no other will say, now the Admiral is dead. You have brought back the days of the Armagnacs. You have brought bloody days and an evil name on France, and I pray God that you may not pay in your turn what you have exacted. But if you continue to be advised by M. de Guise, this I will say, Monsieur"--and his voice fell low and stern. "Burgundy slew Orleans, indeed; but he came in his turn to the Bridge of Montereau."
"You take me for Monsieur?" the unknown asked. And it was plain that he smiled under his mask.
Biron's face altered. "I take you," he answered sharply, "for him whose sign you sent me."
"The wisest are sometimes astray," the other answered with a low laugh. And he took off his mask.
The Grand Master started back, his eyes sparkling with anger. "M. de Tavannes?" he cried, and for a moment he was silent in sheer astonishment. Then, striking his hand on the table, "What means this trickery!" he asked.
"It is of the simplest," Tavannes answered coolly. "And yet, as you just now said, I had hardly come at you without it. And I had to come at you. No, M. de Biron," he added quickly, as Biron in a rage laid his hand on a bell which stood beside him on the table, "you cannot that way undo what is done."
"I can at least deliver you," the Grand Master answered, in heat, "to those who will deal with you as you have dealt with us and ours."
"It will avail you nothing," Count Hannibal replied soberly. "For see here, Grand Master, I come from the King. If you are at war with him, and hold his fortress in his teeth, I am his ambassador and sacrosanct. If you are at peace with him and hold it at his will, I am his servant, and safe also."
"At peace and safe?" Biron cried, his voice trembling with indignation. "And are those safe or at peace who came here trusting to his word, who lay in his palace and slept in his beds? Where are they, and how have they fared, that you dare appeal to the law of nations, or he to the loyalty of Biron? And for you to beard me, whose brother to-day hounded the dogs of this vile city on the noblest in France, who have leagued yourself with a crew of foreigners to do a deed which will make our country stink in the nostrils of the world when we are dust! You, to come here and talk of peace and safety! M. de Tavannes"--and he struck his hand on the table--"you are a bold man. I know why the King had a will to send you, but I know not why you had the will to come."
"That I will tell you later," Count Hannibal answered coolly. "For the King, first. My message is brief, M. de Biron. Have you a mind to hold the scales in France?"
"Between?" Biron asked contemptuously.
"Between the Lorrainers and the Huguenots."
The Grand Master scowled fiercely. "I have played the go-between once too often," he growled.
"It is no question of going between, it is a question of holding between," Tavannes answered coolly. "It is a question--but, in a word, have you a mind, M. de Biron, to be Governor of Rochelle? The King, having dealt the blow that has been struck to-day, looks to follow up severity, as a wise ruler should, with indulgence. And to quiet the minds of the Rochellois he would set over them a ruler at once acceptable to them--or war must come of it--and faithful to his Majesty. Such a man, M. de Biron, will in such a post be Master of the Kingdom; for he will hold the doors of Janus, and as he bridles his sea-dogs, or unchains them, there will be peace or war in France."
"Is all that from the King's mouth?" Biron asked with sarcasm. But his passion had died down. He was grown thoughtful, suspicious; he eyed the other intently as if he would read his heart.
"The offer is his, and the reflections are mine," Tavannes answered drily. "Let me add one more. The Admiral is dead. The King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde are prisoners. Who is now to balance the Italians and the Guises? The Grand Master--if he be wise and content to give the law to France from the citadel of Rochelle."
Biron stared at the speaker in astonishment at his frankness. "You are a bold man," he cried at last. "But timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," he continued bitterly. "You offer, sir, too much."
"The offer is the King's."
"And the conditions? The price?"
"That you remain quiet, M. de Biron."
"In the Arsenal?"
"In the Arsenal. And do not too openly counteract the King's will. That is all."
The Grand Master looked puzzled. "I will give up no one," he said. "No one! Let that be understood."
"The King requires no one."
A pause. Then, "Does M. de Guise know of the offer?" Biron inquired; and his eye grew bright. He hated the Guises and was hated by them. It was there he was a Huguenot.
"He has gone far to-day," Count Hannibal answered drily. "And if no worse come of it should be content. Madame Catherine knows of it."
The Grand Master was aware that Marshal Tavannes depended on the Queen-mother; and he shrugged his shoulders. "Ay, 'tis like her policy," he muttered. "'Tis like her!" And pointing his guest to a cushioned chest which stood against the wall, he sat down in a chair beside the table and thought awhile, his brow wrinkled, his eyes dreaming. By-and-by he laughed sourly. "You have lighted the fire," he said, "and would fain I put it out."
"We would have you hinder it spreading."
"You have done the deed and are loth to pay the blood-money. That is it, is it?"
"We prefer to pay it to M. de Biron," Count Hannibal answered civilly.
Again the Grand Master was silent awhile. At length he looked up and fixed Tavannes with eyes keen as steel. "What is behind?" he growled. "Say, man, what is it? What is behind?"
"If there be aught behind, I do not know it," Tavannes answered steadfastly.
M. de Biron relaxed the fixity of his gaze. "But you said that you had an object?" he returned.
"I had--in being the bearer of the message."
"What was it?"
"My object? To learn two things."
"The first, if it please you?" The Grand Master's chin stuck out a little, as he spoke.
"Have you in the Arsenal a M. de Tignonville, a gentleman of Poitou?"
"I have not," Biron answered curtly. "The second?"
"Have you here a Huguenot minister?"
"I have not. And if I had I should not give him up," he added firmly.
Tavannes shrugged his shoulders. "I have a use for one," he said carelessly. "But it need not harm him."
"For what, then, do you need him?"
"To marry me."
The other stared. "But you are a Catholic," he said.
"But she is a Huguenot," Tavannes answered.
The Grand Master did not attempt to hide his astonishment. "And she sticks on that?" he exclaimed. "To-day?"
"She sticks on that. To-day."
"To-day? Nom de Dieu! To-day! Well," brushing the matter aside after a pause of bewilderment, "any way, I cannot help her. I have no minister here. If there be aught else I can do for her----"
"Nothing, I thank you," Tavannes answered. "Then it only remains for me to take your answer to the King?" And he rose politely, and taking his mask from the table prepared to assume it.
M. de Biron gazed at him a moment without speaking, as if he pondered on the answer he should give. At length he nodded, and rang the bell which stood beside him.
"The mask!" he muttered in a low voice as footsteps sounded without. And, obedient to the hint, Tavannes disguised himself. A second later the officer who had introduced him opened the door and entered.
"Peridol," M. de Biron said--he had risen to his feet--"I have received a message which needs confirmation; and to obtain this I must leave the Arsenal. I am going to the house--you will remember this--of Marshal Tavannes, who will be responsible for my person; in the meantime this gentleman will remain under strict guard in the south chamber upstairs. You will treat him as a hostage, with all respect, and will allow him to preserve his incognito. But if I do not return by noon to-morrow, you will deliver him to the men below, who will know how to deal with him."
Count Hannibal made no attempt to interrupt him, nor did he betray the discomfiture which he undoubtedly felt. But as the Grand Master paused, "M. de Biron," he said, in a voice harsh and low, "you will answer to me for this!" And his eyes glittered through the slits in the mask.
"Possibly, but not to-day or to-morrow!" Biron replied, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. "Peridol! see the gentleman bestowed as I have ordered, and then return to me. Monsieur," with a bow, half courteous, half ironical, "let me commend to you the advantages of silence and your mask." And he waved his hand in the direction of the door.
A moment Count Hannibal hesitated. He was in the heart of a hostile fortress where the resistance of a single man armed to the teeth must have been futile; and he was unarmed, save for a poniard. Nevertheless, for a moment the impulse to spring on Biron, and with the dagger at his throat to make his life the price of a safe passage, was strong. Then--for with the warp of a harsh and passionate character were interwrought an odd shrewdness and some things little suspected--he resigned himself. Bowing gravely, he turned with dignity, and in silence followed the officer from the room.
Peridol had two men with lanterns in waiting at the door. From one of these the lieutenant took the light, and, with an air at once sullen and deferential, led the way up the stone staircase to the floor over that in which M. de Biron had his lodging. Tavannes followed; the two guards came last, carrying the second lantern. At the head of the staircase, whence a bare passage ran north and south, the procession turned right-handed, and, passing two doors, halted before the third and last, which faced them at the end of the passage. The lieutenant unlocked it with a key which he took from a hook beside the doorpost. Then, holding up his light, he invited his charge to enter.
The room was not small, but it was low in the roof, and prison-like, it had bare walls and smoke-marks on the ceiling. The window, set in a deep recess, the floor of which rose a foot above that of the room, was unglazed; and through the gloomy orifice the night wind blew in, laden even on that August evening with the dank mist of the river flats. A table, two stools, and a truckle bed without straw or covering made up the furniture; but Peridol, after glancing round, ordered one of the men to fetch a truss of straw and the other to bring up a pitcher of wine. While they were gone Tavannes and he stood silently waiting, until, observing that the captive's eyes sought the window, the lieutenant laughed.
"No bars?" he said. "No, monsieur, and no need of them. You will not go by that road, bars or no bars."
"What is below?" Count Hannibal asked carelessly. "The river?"
"Yes, monsieur," with a grin, "but not water. Mud, and six feet of it, soft as Christmas porridge, but not so sweet. I've known two puppies thrown in under this window that did not weigh more than a fat pullet apiece. One was gone before you could count fifty, and the other did not live thrice as long--nor would have lasted that time, but that it fell on the first and clung to it."
Tavannes dismissed the matter with a shrug, and, drawing his cloak about him, set a stool against the wall and sat down. The men who brought in the wine and the bundle of straw were inquisitive, and would have loitered, scanning him stealthily; but Peridol hurried them away. The lieutenant himself stayed only to cast a glance round the room and to mutter that he would return when his lord returned; then, with a "Good night" which said more for his manners than his good will, he followed them out. A moment later the grating of the key in the lock and the sound of the bolts as they sped home told Tavannes that he was a prisoner.
XIV. TOO SHORT A SPOON
Count Hannibal remained seated, his chin sunk on his breast, until his ear assured him that the three men had descended the stairs to the floor below. Then he rose, and, taking the lantern from the table, on which Peridol had placed it, he went softly to the door, which, like the window, stood in a recess--in this case the prolongation of the passage. A brief scrutiny satisfied him that escape that way was impossible, and he turned, after a cursory glance at the floor and ceiling, to the dark, windy aperture which yawned at the end of the apartment. Placing the lantern on the table, and covering it with his cloak, he mounted the window recess, and, stepping to the unguarded edge, looked out.
He knew, rather than saw, that Peridol had told the truth. The smell of the aguish flats which fringed that part of Paris rose strong in his nostrils. He guessed that the sluggish arm of the Seine which divided the Arsenal from the Ile des Louviers crawled below; but the night was dark, and it was impossible to discern land from water. He fancied that he could trace the outline of the island--an uninhabited place, given up to wood piles; but the lights of the college quarter beyond it, which rose feebly twinkling, to the crown of St. Genevieve, confused his sight and rendered the nearer gloom more opaque. From that direction and from the Cite to his right came sounds which told of a city still heaving in its blood-stained sleep, and even in its dreams planning further excesses. Now a distant shot, and now a faint murmur on one of the bridges, or a far-off cry, raucous, sudden, curdled the blood. But even of what was passing under cover of the darkness, he could learn little; and after standing awhile with a hand on either side of the window he found the night air chill. He stepped back, and, descending to the floor, uncovered the lantern and set it on the table. His thoughts travelled back to the preparations he had made the night before with a view to securing Mademoiselle's person, and he considered, with a grim smile, how little he had foreseen that within twenty-four hours he would himself be a prisoner. Presently, finding his mask oppressive, he removed it, and, laying it on the table before him, sat scowling at the light.
Biron had jockeyed him cleverly. Well, the worse for Armand de Gontaut de Biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! But in the meantime? In the meantime his fate was sealed if harm befell Biron. And what the King's real mind in Biron's case was, and what the Queen-Mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far, when they had the Grand Master at their mercy, they would resist the temptation to add him to the victims. If Biron placed himself at once in Marshal Tavannes' hands, all might be well. But if he ventured within the long arm of the Guises, or went directly to the Louvre, the fact that with the Grand Master's fate Count Hannibal's was bound up, would not weigh a straw. In such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the less great the small, without a scruple. And the Guises did not love Count Hannibal; he was not loved by many. Even the strength of his brother the Marshal stood rather in the favour of the King's heir, for whom he had won the battle of Jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the desperate madness of this day had let loose on Paris.
It was not the peril in which he stood, however--though, with the cold clear eye of the man who had often faced peril, he appreciated it to a nicety--that Count Hannibal found least bearable, but his enforced inactivity. He had thought to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm, and out of the danger of others to compact his own success. Instead he lay here, not only powerless to guide his destiny, which hung on the discretion of another, but unable to stretch forth a finger to further his plans.
As he sat looking darkly at the lantern, his mind followed Biron and his riders through the midnight streets: along St. Antoine and La Verrerie, through the gloomy narrows of the Rue la Ferronerie, and so past the house in the Rue St. Honore where Mademoiselle sat awaiting the morrow--sat awaiting Tignonville, the minister, the marriage! Doubtless there were still bands of plunderers roaming to and fro; at the barriers troops of archers stopping the suspected; at the windows pale faces gazing down; at the gates of the Temple, and of the walled enclosures which largely made up the city, strong guards set to prevent invasion. Biron would go with sufficient to secure himself; and unless he encountered with the bodyguard of Guise his passage would quiet the town. But was it so certain that she was safe? He knew his men, and while he had been free he had not hesitated to leave her in their care. But now that he could not go, now that he could not raise a hand to help, the confidence which had not failed him in straits more dangerous grew weak. He pictured the things which might happen, at which, in his normal frame of mind, he would have laughed. Now they troubled him so that he started at a shadow, so that he quailed at a thought. He, who last night, when free to act, had timed his coming and her rescue to a minute! Who had rejoiced in the peril, since with the glamour of such things foolish women were taken! Who had not flinched when the crowd roared most fiercely for her blood!
Why had he suffered himself to be trapped! Why indeed? And thrice in passion he paced the room. Long ago the famous Nostradamus had told him that he would live to be a king, but of the smallest kingdom in the world. "Every man is a king in his coffin," he had answered. "The grave is cold and your kingdom shall be warm," the wizard had rejoined. On which the courtiers had laughed, promising him a Moorish island and a black queen. And he had gibed with the rest, but secretly had taken note of the sovereign counties of France, their rulers and their heirs. Now he held the thought in horror, foreseeing no county, but the cage under the stifling tiles at Loches, in which Cardinal Balue and many another had worn out their hearts.
He came to that thought not by way of his own peril, but of Mademoiselle's; which affected him in so novel a fashion that he wondered at his folly. At last, tired of watching the shadows which the draught set dancing on the wall, he drew his cloak about him and lay down on the straw. He had kept vigil the previous night, and in a few minutes, with a campaigner's ease, he was asleep.
Midnight had struck. About two the light in the lantern burned low in the socket, and with a soft sputtering went out. For an hour after that the room lay still, silent, dark; then slowly the grey dawn, the greyer for the river mist which wrapped the neighbourhood in a clammy shroud, began to creep into the room and discover the vague shapes of things. Again an hour passed, and the sun was rising above Montreuil, and here and there the river began to shimmer through the fog. But in the room it was barely daylight when the sleeper awoke, and sat up, his face expectant. Something had roused him. He listened.
His ear, and the habit of vigilance which a life of danger instils, had not deceived him. There were men moving in the passage; men who shuffled their feet impatiently. Had Biron returned! Or had aught happened to him, and were these men come to avenge him? Count Hannibal rose and stole across the boards to the door, and, setting his ear to it, listened.
He listened while a man might count a hundred and fifty, counting slowly. Then, for the third part of a second, he turned his head, and his eyes travelled the room. He stooped again and listened more closely, scarcely breathing. There were voices as well as feet to be heard now; one voice--he thought it was Peridol's--which held on long, now low, now rising into violence. Others were audible at intervals, but only in a growl or a bitter exclamation, that told of minds made up and hands which would not be restrained. He caught his own name, Tavannes--the mask was useless then! And once a noisy movement which came to nothing, foiled, he fancied, by Peridol.
He knew enough. He rose to his full height, and his eyes seemed a little closer together; an ugly smile curved his lips. His gaze travelled over the objects in the room, the bare stools and table, the lantern, the wine pitcher; beyond these, in a corner, the cloak and straw on the low bed. The light, cold and grey, fell cheerlessly on the dull chamber, and showed it in harmony with the ominous whisper which grew in the gallery; with the stern-faced listener who stood, his one hand on the door. He looked, but he found nothing to his purpose, nothing to serve his end, whatever his end was; and with a quick light step he left the door, mounted the window recess, and, poised on the very edge, looked down.
If he thought to escape that way his hope was desperate. The depth to the water-level was not, he judged, twelve feet. But Peridol had told the truth. Below lay not water, but a smooth surface of viscid slime, here luminous with the florescence of rottenness, there furrowed by a tiny runnel of moisture which sluggishly crept across it to the slow stream beyond. This quicksand, vile and treacherous, lapped the wall below the window, and more than accounted for the absence of bars or fastenings. But, leaning far out, he saw that it ended at the angle of the building, at a point twenty feet or so to the right of his position.
He sprang to the floor again, and listened an instant; then, with guarded movements--for there was fear in the air, fear in the silent room, and at any moment the rush might be made, the door burst in--he set the lantern and wine pitcher on the floor, and took up the table in his arms. He began to carry it to the window, but, halfway thither, his eye told him that it would not pass through the opening, and he set it down again and glided to the bed. Again he was thwarted; the bed was screwed to the floor. Another might have despaired at that, but he rose with no sign of dismay, and listening, always listening, he spread his cloak on the floor, and deftly, with as little noise and rustling as might be, he piled the straw in it, compressed the bundle, and, cutting the bed-cords with his dagger, bound all together with them. In three steps he was in the embrasure of the window, and, even as the men in the passage thrust the lieutenant aside and with a sudden uproar came down to the door, he flung the bundle lightly and carefully to the right--so lightly and carefully, and with so nice and deliberate a calculation, that it seemed odd it fell beyond the reach of an ordinary leap.
An instant and he was on the floor again. The men had to unlock, to draw back the bolts, to draw back the door which opened outwards; their numbers, as well as their savage haste, impeded them. When they burst in at last, with a roar of "To the river! To the river!"--burst in a rush of struggling shoulders and lowered pikes, they found him standing, a solitary figure, on the further side of the table, his arms folded. And the sight of the passive figure for a moment stayed them.
"Say your prayers, child of Satan!" cried the leader, waving his weapon. "We give you one minute!"
"Ay, one minute!" his followers chimed in. "Be ready!"
"You would murder me?" he said with dignity. And when they shouted assent, "Good!" he answered. "It is between you and M. de Biron, whose guest I am. But"--with a glance which passed round the ring of glaring eyes and working features--"I would leave a last word for some one. Is there any one here who values a safe-conduct from the King? 'Tis for two men coming and going for a fortnight." And he held up a slip of paper.
The leader cried "To hell with his safe-conduct! Say your prayers!"
But all were not of his mind; on one or two of the crimson savage faces--the faces, for the most part, of honest men maddened by their wrongs--flashed an avaricious gleam. A safe-conduct? To avenge, to slay, to kill--and to go safe! For some minds such a thing has an invincible fascination. A man thrust himself forward. "Ay, I'll have it!" he cried. "Give it here!"
"It is yours," Count Hannibal answered, "if you will carry ten words to Marshal Tavannes--when I am gone."
The man's neighbour laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. "And Marshal Tavannes will pay you finely," he said.
But Maudron, the man who had offered, shook off the hand. "If I take the message!" he muttered in a grim aside. "Do you think me mad?" And then aloud he cried, "Ay, I'll take your message! Give me the paper."
"You swear you will take it?"
The man had no intention of taking it, but he perjured himself and went forward. The others would have pressed round too, half in envy, half in scorn; but Tavannes by a gesture stayed them. "Gentlemen, I ask a minute only," he said. "A minute for a dying man is not much. Your friends had as much." And the fellows, acknowledging the claim and assured that their victim could not escape, let Maudron go round the table to him.
The man was in haste and ill at ease, conscious of his evil intentions and the fraud he was practising; and at once greedy to have, yet ashamed of the bargain he was making. His attention was divided between the slip of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his comrades; he paid little heed to Count Hannibal, whom he knew to be unarmed. Only when Tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be fain to delay, "Go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is up!"
Tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. Maudron saw a chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have leapt back with it! But quick as he, and quicker, Tavannes too stooped, gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first through the window.
The movement carried Tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. An instant he hung on the verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards.
He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard, and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.
The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. Shout as they might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. They could only look on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from their view, behind the angle of the building.
Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and wall. He struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless Maudron--a tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he turned and painfully climbed the river-bank. The pike-wound in his shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn. Nevertheless, when he had put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the Arsenal he paused, and turned. He saw that the men had run to other windows which looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with triumph.
He shook his fist at them. "Ho, fools!" he cried, "you kill not Tavannes so! Till our next meeting at Montfaucon, fare you well!"
XV. THE BROTHER OF ST. MAGLOIRE
As the exertion of power is for the most part pleasing, so the exercise of that which a woman possesses over a man is especially pleasant. When in addition a risk of no ordinary kind has been run, and the happy issue has been barely expected--above all when the momentary gain seems an augury of final victory--it is impossible that a feeling akin to exultation should not arise in the mind, however black the horizon, and however distant the fair haven.
The situation in which Count Hannibal left Mademoiselle de Vrillac will be remembered. She had prevailed on him; but in return he had bowed her to the earth, partly by subtle threats, and partly by sheer savagery. He had left her weeping, with the words "Madame de Tavannes" ringing doom in her ears, and the dark phantom of his will pointing onward to an inevitable future. Had she abandoned hope, it would have been natural.
But the girl was of a spirit not long nor easily cowed; and Tavannes had not left her half an hour before the reflection, that so far the honours of the day were hers, rose up to console her. In spite of his power and her impotence, she had imposed her will upon his; she had established an influence over him, she had discovered a scruple which stayed him, and a limit beyond which he would not pass. In the result she might escape; for the conditions which he had accepted with an ill grace, might prove beyond his fulfilling. She might escape! True, many in her place would have feared a worse fate and harsher handling. But there lay half the merit of her victory. It had left her not only in a better position, but with a new confidence in her power over her adversary. He would insist on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could look for no indulgence. But if the conditions proved to be beyond his power, she believed that he would spare her: with an ill grace, indeed, with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman's pride might scarcely support. But he would spare her.
And if the worst befell her? She would still have the consolation of knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had ransomed those most dear to her. Owing to the position of her chamber, she saw nothing of the excesses to which Paris gave itself up during the remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the following morning. But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. How could she prove false to them? How doom them to perish, had there been no question of her lover?
Of him she sat thinking by the hour together. She recalled with solemn tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself. She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for himself, and which she quickly forgave him. The revulsion of feeling which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from him, no longer moved her much; while all in his action that might have seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she still clung to him. Clung to him, not so much with the passion of the mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life but sacrifice.
She had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that day, and until late on the following day. Her own servants waited on her, and it was known that below stairs Count Hannibal's riders kept sullen ward behind barred doors and shuttered windows, refusing admission to all who came. Now and again echoes of the riot which filled the streets with bloodshed reached her ears: or word of the more striking occurrences was brought to her by Madame Carlat. And early on this second day, Monday, it was whispered that M. de Tavannes had not returned, and that the men below were growing uneasy.
At last, when the suspense below and above was growing tense, it was broken. Footsteps and voices were heard ascending the stairs, the trampling and hubbub were followed by a heavy knock; perforce the door was opened. While Mademoiselle, who had risen, awaited with a beating heart she knew not what, a cowled father, in the dress of the monks of St. Magloire, stood on the threshold, and, crossing himself, muttered the words of benediction. He entered slowly.
No sight could have been more dreadful to Mademoiselle; for it set at naught the conditions which she had so hardly exacted. What if Count Hannibal were behind, were even now mounting the stairs, prepared to force her to a marriage before this shaveling? Or ready to proceed, if she refused, to the last extremity? Sudden terror taking her by the throat choked her; her colour fled, her hand flew to her breast. Yet, before the door had closed on Bigot, she had recovered herself.
"This intrusion is not by M. de Tavannes' orders!" she cried, stepping forward haughtily. "This person has no business here. How dare you admit him?"
The Norman showed his bearded visage a moment at the door. "My lord's orders," he muttered sullenly. And he closed the door on them.
She had a Huguenot's hatred of a cowl; and, in this crisis, her reasons for fearing it. Her eyes blazed with indignation. "Enough!" she cried, pointing with a gesture of dismissal to the door. "Go back to him who sent you! If he will insult me, let him do it to my face! If he will perjure himself, let him forswear himself in person. Or, if you come on your own account," she continued, flinging prudence to the winds, "as your brethren came to Philippa de Luns, to offer me the choice you offered her, I give you her answer! If I had thought of myself only, I had not lived so long! And rather than bear your presence or hear your arguments----"
She came to a sudden, odd, quavering pause on the word; her lips remained parted, she swayed an instant on her feet. The next moment Madame Carlat, to whom the visitor had turned his shoulder, doubted her eyes, for Mademoiselle was in the monk's arms!
"Clotilde! Clotilde!" he cried, and held her to him.
For the monk was M. de Tignonville! Under the cowl was the lover with whom Mademoiselle's thoughts had been engaged. In this disguise, and armed with Tavannes' note to Madame St. Lo--which the guards below knew for Count Hannibal's hand, though they were unable to decipher the contents--he had found no difficulty in making his way to her.
He had learned before he entered that Tavannes was abroad, and was aware therefore that he ran little risk. His betrothed, on the other hand, who knew nothing of his adventures in the interval, saw in him one who came to her at the greatest risk, across unnumbered perils, through streets swimming with blood. And though she had never embraced him save in the crisis of the massacre, though she had never called him by his Christian name, in the joy of this meeting she abandoned herself to him, she clung to him weeping, she forgot for the time his defection, and thought only of him who had returned to her so gallantly, who brought into the room a breath of Poitou, and the sea, and the old days, and the old life; and at the sight of whom the horrors of the last two days fell from her--for the moment.
And Madame Carlat wept also, and in the room was a sound of weeping. The least moved was, for a certainty, M. de Tignonville himself, who, as we know, had gone through much that day. But even his heart swelled, partly with pride, partly with thankfulness that he had returned to one who loved him so well. Fate had been kinder to him than he deserved; but he need not confess that now. When he had brought off the coup which he had in his mind, he would hasten to forget that he had entertained other ideas.
Mademoiselle had been the first to be carried away; she was also the first to recover herself. "I had forgotten," she cried suddenly. "I had forgotten," and she wrested herself from his embrace with violence, and stood panting, her face white, her eyes affrighted. "I must not! And you--I had forgotten that too! To be here, monsieur, is the worst office you can do me. You must go! Go, monsieur, in mercy I beg of you, while it is possible. Every moment you are here, every moment you spend in this house, I shudder."
"You need not fear for me," he said, in a tone of bravado. He did not understand.
"I fear for myself!" she answered. And then, wringing her hands, divided between her love for him and her fear for herself, "Oh, forgive me!" she said. "You do not know that he has promised to spare me, if he cannot produce you, and--and--a minister! He has granted me that; but I thought when you entered that he had gone back on his word, and sent a priest, and it maddened me! I could not bear to think that I had gained nothing. Now you understand, and you will pardon me, monsieur? If he cannot produce you I am saved. Go then, leave me, I beg, without a moment's delay."
He laughed derisively as he turned back his cowl and squared his shoulders. "All that is over!" he said, "over and done with, sweet! M. de Tavannes is at this moment a prisoner in the Arsenal. On my way hither I fell in with M. de Biron, and he told me. The Grand Master, who would have had me join his company, had been all night at Marshal Tavannes' hotel, where he had been detained longer than he expected. He stood pledged to release Count Hannibal on his return, but at my request he consented to hold him one hour, and to do also a little thing for me."
The glow of hope which had transfigured her face faded slowly. "It will not help," she said, "if he find you here."
"He will not! Nor you!"
"How, monsieur?"
"In a few minutes," he explained--he could not hide his exultation, "a message will come from the Arsenal in the name of Tavannes, bidding the monk he sent to you bring you to him. A spoken message, corroborated by my presence, should suffice: 'Bid the monk who is now with Mademoiselle,' it will run, 'bring her to me at the Arsenal, and let four pikes guard them hither.' When I begged M. de Biron to do this, he laughed. 'I can do better,' he said. 'They shall bring one of Count Hannibal's gloves, which he left on my table. Always supposing my rascals have done him no harm, which God forbid, for I am answerable.'"
Tignonville, delighted with the stratagem which the meeting with Biron had suggested, could see no flaw in it. She could, and though she heard him to the end, no second glow of hope softened the lines of her features. With a gesture full of dignity, which took in not only Madame Carlat and the waiting-woman who stood at the door but the absent servants, "And what of these?" she said. "What of these? You forgot them, monsieur. You do not think, you cannot have thought, that I would abandon them? That I would leave them to such mercy as he, defeated, might extend to them? No, you forgot them."
He did not know what to answer, for the jealous eyes of the frightened waiting-woman, fierce with the fierceness of a hunted animal, were on him. The Carlat and she had heard, could hear. At last, "Better one than none!" he muttered, in a voice so low that if the servants caught his meaning it was but indistinctly. "I have to think of you."
"And I of them," she answered firmly. "Nor is that all. Were they not here, it could not be. My word is passed--though a moment ago, monsieur, in the joy of seeing you I forgot it. And how," she continued, "if I keep not my word, can I expect him to keep his? Or how, if I am ready to break the bond, on this happening which I never expected, can I hold him to conditions which he loves as little--as little as I love him?"
Her voice dropped piteously on the last words; her eyes, craving her lover's pardon, sought his. But rage, not pity or admiration, was the feeling roused in Tignonville's breast. He stood staring at her, struck dumb by folly so immense. At last, "You cannot mean this," he blurted out. "You cannot mean, Mademoiselle, that you intend to stand on that! To keep a promise wrung from you by force, by treachery, in the midst of such horrors as he and his have brought upon us! It is inconceivable!"
She shook her head. "I promised," she said.
"You were forced to it."
"But the promise saved our lives."
"From murderers! From assassins!" he protested.
She shook her head. "I cannot go back," she said firmly; "I cannot."
"Then you are willing to marry him," he cried in ignoble anger. "That is it! Nay, you must wish to marry him! For, as for his conditions, Mademoiselle," the young man continued, with an insulting laugh, "you cannot think seriously of them. He keep conditions and you in his power! He, Count Hannibal! But for the matter of that, and were he in the mind to keep them, what are they? There are plenty of ministers. I left one only this morning. I could lay my hand on one in five minutes. He has only to find one therefore--and to find me!"
"Yes, monsieur," she cried, trembling with wounded pride, "it is for that reason I implore you to go. The sooner you leave me, the sooner you place yourself in a position of security, the happier for me! Every moment that you spend here, you endanger both yourself and me!"
"If you will not be persuaded----"
"I shall not be persuaded," she answered firmly, "and you do but"--alas! her pride began to break down, her voice to quiver, she looked piteously at him--"by staying here make it harder for me to--to----"
"Hush!" cried Madame Carlat, "Hush!" And as they started and turned towards her--she was at the end of the chamber by the door, almost out of earshot--she raised a warning hand. "Listen!" she muttered, "some one has entered the house."
"'Tis my messenger from Biron," Tignonville answered sullenly. And he drew his cowl over his face, and, hiding his hands in his sleeves, moved towards the door. But on the threshold he turned and held out his arms. He could not go thus. "Mademoiselle! Clotilde!" he cried with passion, "for the last time, listen to me, come with me. Be persuaded!"
"Hush!" Madame Carlat interposed again, and turned a scared face on them. "It is no messenger! It is Tavannes himself: I know his voice." And she wrung her hands. "Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, what are we to do?" she continued, panic-stricken. And she looked all ways about the room.
XVI. AT CLOSE QUARTERS
Fear leapt into Mademoiselle's eyes, but she commanded herself. She signed to Madame Carlat to be silent, and they listened, gazing at one another, hoping against hope that the woman was mistaken. A long moment they waited, and some were beginning to breathe again, when the strident tones of Count Hannibal's voice rolled up the staircase, and put an end to doubt. Mademoiselle grasped the table and stood supporting herself by it. "What are we to do?" she muttered. "What are we to do?" and she turned distractedly towards the women. The courage which had supported her in her lover's absence had abandoned her now. "If he finds him here I am lost! I am lost!"
"He will not know me," Tignonville muttered. But he spoke uncertainly; and his gaze, shifting hither and thither, belied the boldness of his words.
Madame Carlat's eyes flew round the room; on her for once the burden seemed to rest. Alas! the room had no second door, and the windows looked on a courtyard guarded by Tavannes' people. And even now Count Hannibal's step rang on the stair! his hand was almost on the latch. The woman wrung her hands; then, a thought striking her, she darted to a corner where Mademoiselle's robes hung on pegs against the wall.
"Here!" she cried, raising them. "Behind these! He may not be seen here! Quick, monsieur, quick! Hide yourself!"
It was a forlorn hope--the suggestion of one who had not thought out the position; and, whatever its promise, Mademoiselle's pride revolted against it.
"No," she cried. "Not there!" while Tignonville, who knew that the step was useless, since Count Hannibal must have learned that a monk had entered, held his ground.
"You could not deny yourself!" he muttered hurriedly.
"And a priest with me?" she answered; and she shook her head.
There was no time for more, and even as Mademoiselle spoke Count Hannibal's knuckles tapped the door. She cast a last look at her lover. He had turned his back on the window; the light no longer fell on his face. It was possible that he might pass unrecognised, if Tavannes' stay was brief; at any rate the risk must be run. In a half-stifled voice she bade her woman, Javette, open the door.
Count Hannibal bowed low as he entered; and he deceived the others. But he did not deceive her. He had not crossed the threshold before she repented that she had not acted on Tignonville's suggestion, and denied herself. For what could escape those hard keen eyes, which swept the room, saw all, and seemed to see nothing--those eyes in which there dwelt even now a glint of cruel humour? He might deceive others, but she who panted within his grasp, as the wild bird palpitates in the hand of the fowler, was not deceived! He saw, he knew! although, as he bowed, and smiling, stood upright, he looked only at her.
"I expected to be with you before this," he said courteously, "but I have been detained. First, Mademoiselle, by some of your friends, who were reluctant to part with me; then by some of your enemies, who, finding me in no handsome case, took me for a Huguenot escaped from the river, and drove me to shifts to get clear of them. However, now I am come, I have news."
"News?" she muttered with dry lips. It could hardly be good news.
"Yes, Mademoiselle, of M. de Tignonville," he answered. "I have little doubt that I shall be able to produce him this evening, and so to satisfy one of your scruples. And as I trust that this good father," he went on, turning to the ecclesiastic, and speaking with the sneer from which he seldom refrained, Catholic as he was, when he mentioned a priest, "has by this time succeeded in removing the other, and persuading you to accept his ministrations----"
"No!" she cried impulsively.
"No?" with a dubious smile, and a glance from one to the other. "Oh, I had hoped better things. But he still may? He still may. I am sure he may. In which case, Mademoiselle, your modesty must pardon me if I plead urgency, and fix the hour after supper this evening for the fulfilment of your promise."
She turned white to the lips. "After supper?" she gasped.
"Yes, Mademoiselle, this evening. Shall I say--at eight o'clock?"
In horror of the thing which menaced her, of the thing from which only two hours separated her, she could find no words but those which she had already used. The worst was upon her; worse than the worst could not befall her. "But he has not persuaded me!" she cried, clenching her hands in passion. "He has not persuaded me!"
"Still he may, Mademoiselle."
"He will not!" she cried wildly. "He will not!"
The room was going round with her. The precipice yawned at her feet; its naked terrors turned her brain. She had been pushed nearer, and nearer, and nearer; struggle as she might she was on the verge. A mist rose before her eyes, and though they thought she listened she understood nothing of what was passing. When she came to herself after the lapse of a minute, Count Hannibal was speaking.
"Permit him another trial," he was saying in a tone of bland irony. "A short time longer, Mademoiselle! One more assault, father! The weapons of the Church could not be better directed or to a more worthy object; and, successful, shall not fail of due recognition and an earthly reward."
And while she listened, half fainting, with a humming in her ears, he was gone. The door closed on him, and the three--Mademoiselle's woman had withdrawn when she opened to him--looked at one another. The girl parted her lips to speak, but she only smiled piteously; and it was M. de Tignonville who broke the silence, in a tone which betrayed rather relief than any other feeling.
"Come, all is not lost yet," he said briskly. "If I can escape from the house----"
"He knows you," she answered.
"What?"
"He knows you," Mademoiselle repeated in a tone almost apathetic. "I read it in his eyes. He knew you at once: and knew, too," she added bitterly, "that he had here under his hand one of the two things he required."
"Then why did he hide his knowledge?" the young man retorted sharply.
"Why?" she answered. "To induce me to waive the other condition in the hope of saving you. Oh!" she continued in a tone of bitter raillery, "he has the cunning of hell, of the priests! You are no match for him, monsieur. Nor I; nor any of us. And"--with a gesture of despair--"he will be my master! He will break me to his will and to his hand! I shall be his! His, body and soul, body and soul!" she continued drearily, as she sank into a chair and, rocking herself to and fro, covered her face. "I shall be his! His till I die!"
The man's eyes burned, and the pulse in his temples beat wildly. "But you shall not," he exclaimed. "I may be no match for him in cunning, you say well. But I can kill him. And I will!" He paced up and down. "I will!"
"You should have done it when he was here," she answered, half in scorn, half in earnest.
"It is not too late," he cried; and then he stopped, silenced by the opening door. It was Javette who entered.
They looked at her, and before she spoke were on their feet. Her face, white and eager, marking something besides fear, announced that she brought news. She closed the door behind her, and in a moment it was told.
"Monsieur can escape, if he is quick," she cried in a low tone; and they saw that she trembled with excitement. "They are at supper. But he must be quick! He must be quick!"
"Is not the door guarded!"
"It is, but----"
"And he knows! Your mistress says that he knows that I am here."
For a moment Javette looked startled. "It is possible," she muttered. "But he has gone out."
Madame Carlat clapped her hands. "I heard the door close," she said, "three minutes ago."
"And if monsieur can reach the room in which he supped last night, the window that was broken is only blocked"--she swallowed once or twice in her excitement--"with something he can move. And then monsieur is in the street, where his cowl will protect him."
"But Count Hannibal's men?" he asked eagerly.
"They are eating in the lodge by the door."
"Ha! And they cannot see the other room from there?"
Javette nodded. Her tale told, she seemed to be unable to add a word. Mademoiselle, who knew her for a craven, wondered that she had found courage either to note what she had or to bring the news. But as Providence had been so good to them as to put it into this woman's head to act as she had, it behoved them to use the opportunity--the last, the very last opportunity they might have.
She turned to Tignonville. "Oh, go!" she cried feverishly. "Go, I beg! Go now, monsieur! The greatest kindness you can do me is to place yourself as quickly as possible beyond his reach." A faint colour, the flush of hope, had returned to her cheeks. Her eyes glittered.
"Right, Mademoiselle!" he cried, obedient for once. "I go! And do you be of good courage." He held her hand an instant, then, moving to the door, he opened it and listened. They all pressed behind him to hear. A murmur of voices, low and distant, mounted the staircase and bore out the girl's tale; apart from this the house was silent. Tignonville cast a last look at Mademoiselle, and, with a gesture of farewell, glided a-tiptoe to the stairs and began to descend, his face hidden in his cowl. They watched him reach the angle of the staircase, they watched him vanish beyond it; and still they listened, looking at one another when a board creaked or the voices below were hushed for a moment.
XVII. THE DUEL
At the foot of the staircase Tignonville paused. The droning Norman voices of the men on guard issued from an open door a few paces before him on the left. He caught a jest, the coarse chuckling laughter which attended it, and the gurgle of applause which followed; and he knew that at any moment one of the men might step out and discover him. Fortunately the door of the room with the shattered window was almost within reach of his hand on the right side of the passage, and he stepped softly to it. He stood an instant hesitating, his hand on the latch; then, alarmed by a movement in the guard-room, as if some were rising, he pushed the door in a panic, slid into the room, and shut the door behind him. He was safe, and he had made no noise; but at the table, at supper, with his back to him and his face to the partly closed window, sat Count Hannibal!
The young man's heart stood still. For a long minute he gazed at the Count's back, spellbound and unable to stir. Then, as Tavannes ate on without looking round, he began to take courage. Possibly he had entered so quietly that he had not been heard, or possibly his entrance was taken for that of a servant. In either case, there was a chance that he might retire after the same fashion; and he had actually raised the latch, and was drawing the door to him with infinite precaution, when Tavannes' voice struck him, as it were, in the face.
"Pray do not admit the draught, M. de Tignonville," he said, without looking round. "In your cowl you do not feel it, but it is otherwise with me."
The unfortunate Tignonville stood transfixed, glaring at the back of the other's head. For an instant he could not find his voice. At last "Curse you!" he hissed in a transport of rage. "Curse you! You did know, then? And she was right."
"If you mean that I expected you, to be sure, monsieur," Count Hannibal answered. "See, your place is laid. You will not feel the air from without there. The very becoming dress which you have adopted secures you from cold. But--do you not find it somewhat oppressive this summer weather?"
"Curse you!" the young man cried, trembling.
Tavannes turned and looked at him with a dark smile. "The curse may fall," he said, "but I fancy it will not be in consequence of your petitions, monsieur. And now, were it not better you played the man?"
"If I were armed," the other cried passionately, "you would not insult me!"
"Sit down, sir, sit down," Count Hannibal answered sternly. "We will talk of that presently. In the meantime I have something to say to you. Will you not eat?"
But Tignonville would not.
"Very well," Count Hannibal answered; and he went on with his supper, "I am indifferent whether you eat or not. It is enough for me that you are one of the two things I lacked an hour ago; and that I have you, M. de Tignonville. And through you I look to obtain the other."
"What other?" Tignonville cried.
"A minister," Tavannes answered, smiling. "A minister. There are not many left in Paris--of your faith. But you met one this morning, I know!"
"I? I met one?"
"Yes, monsieur, you! And can lay your hand on him in five minutes, you know."
M. de Tignonville gasped. His face turned a shade paler. "You have a spy," he cried. "You have a spy upstairs!"
Tavannes raised his cup to his lips, and drank. When he had set it down, "It may be," he said, and he shrugged his shoulders. "I know, it boots not how I know. It is my business to make the most of my knowledge--and of yours!"
M. de Tignonville laughed rudely. "Make the most of your own," he said; "you will have none of mine."
"That remains to be seen," Count Hannibal answered. "Carry your mind back two days, M. de Tignonville. Had I gone to Mademoiselle de Vrillac last Saturday and said to her 'Marry me, or promise to marry me,' what answer would she have given?"
"She would have called you an insolent!" the young man replied hotly. "And I----"
"No matter what you would have done!" Tavannes said. "Suffice it that she would have answered as you suggest. Yet to-day she has given me her promise."
"Yes," the young man retorted, "in circumstances in which no man of honour----"
"Let us say in peculiar circumstances."
"Well?"
"Which still exist! Mark me, M. de Tignonville," Count Hannibal continued, leaning forward and eyeing the young man with meaning, "which still exist! And may have the same effect on another's will as on hers! Listen! Do you hear?" And rising from his seat with a darkening face, he pointed to the partly shuttered window, through which the measured tramp of a body of men came heavily to the ear. "Do you hear, monsieur? Do you understand? As it was yesterday it is to-day! They killed the President La Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase through the streets!"
The younger man had risen also. He stood confronting Tavannes, the cowl fallen back from his face, his eyes dilated. "You think to frighten me!" he cried. "You think that I am craven enough to sacrifice her to save myself. You----"
"You were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this window and waited for death!" Count Hannibal answered brutally. "You flinched then, and may flinch again!"
"Try me!" Tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. "Try me!" And then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, "But you dare not!" he cried. "You dare not!"
"No?"
"No! For if I die you lose her!" Tignonville replied in a voice of triumph. "Ha, ha! I touch you there!" he continued. "You dare not, for my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself! You may threaten, M. de Tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to the window"--and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other's gesture--"but my safety is more to you than to me! And 'twill end there!"
"You believe that?"
"I know it!"
In two strides Count Hannibal was at the window. He seized a great piece of the boarding which closed one half of the opening; he wrenched it away. A flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again to his opponent. "Then if you know it," he cried vehemently, "in God's name act upon it!" And he pointed to the window.
"Act upon it?"
"Ay, act upon it!" Tavannes repeated, with a glance of flame. "The road is open! If you would save your mistress, behold the way! If you would save her from the embrace she abhors, from the eyes under which she trembles, from the hand of a master, there lies the way! And it is not her glove only you will save, but herself, her soul, her body! So," he continued with a certain wildness and in a tone wherein contempt and bitterness were mingled, "to the lions, brave lover! Will you your life for her honour? Will you death that she may live a maid? Will you your head to save her finger? Then, leap down! leap down! The lists are open, the sand is strewed! Out of your own mouth I have it that if you perish she is saved! Then out, monsieur! Cry 'I am a Huguenot!' And God's will be done!"
Tignonville was livid. "Rather, your will!" he panted. "Your will, you devil! Nevertheless----"
"You will go! Ha! ha! You will go!"
For an instant it seemed that he would go. Stung by the challenge, wrought on by the contempt in which Tavannes held him, he shot a look of hate at the tempter; he caught his breath, and laid his hand on the edge of the shuttering as if he would leap out.
But it goes hard with him who has once turned back from the foe. The evening light, glancing cold on the burnished pike-points of a group of archers who stood near, caught his eye and went chill to his heart. Death, not in the arena, not in the sight of shouting thousands, but in this darkening street, with an enemy laughing from the window, death with no revenge to follow, with no certainty that after all she would be safe, such a death could be compassed only by pure love--the love of a child for a parent, of a parent for a child, of a man for the one woman in the world!
He recoiled. "You would not spare her!" he cried, his face damp with sweat--for he knew now that he would not go. "You want to be rid of me! You would fool me, and then----"
"Out of your own mouth you are convict!" Count Hannibal retorted gravely. "It was you who said it! But still I swear it! Shall I swear it to you?"
But Tignonville recoiled another step and was silent.
"No? O preux chevalier, O gallant knight! I knew it! Do you think that I did not know with whom I had to deal?" And Count Hannibal burst into harsh laughter, turning his back on the other, as if he no longer counted. "You will neither die with her nor for her! You were better in her petticoats and she in your breeches! Or no, you are best as you are, good father! Take my advice, M. de Tignonville, have done with arms; and with a string of beads, and soft words, and talk of Holy Mother Church, you will fool the women as surely as the best of them! They are not all like my cousin, a flouting, gibing, jeering woman--you had poor fortune there, I fear?"
"If I had a sword!" Tignonville hissed, his face livid with rage. "You call me coward, because I will not die to please you. But give me a sword, and I will show you if I am a coward!"
Tavannes stood still. "You are there, are you?" he said in an altered tone. "I----"
"Give me a sword," Tignonville repeated, holding out his open trembling hands. "A sword! A sword! 'Tis easy taunting an unarmed man, but----"
"You wish to fight?"
"I ask no more! No more! Give me a sword," he urged, his voice quivering with eagerness. "It is you who are the coward!"
Count Hannibal stared at him. "And what am I to get by fighting you?" he reasoned slowly. "You are in my power. I can do with you as I please. I can call from this window and denounce you, or I can summon my men----"
"Coward! Coward!"
"Ay? Well, I will tell you what I will do," with a subtle smile. "I will give you a sword, M. de Tignonville, and I will meet you foot to foot here, in this room, on a condition."
"What is it? What is it?" the young man cried with incredible eagerness. "Name your condition!"
"That if I get the better of you, you find me a minister."
"I find you a----"
"A minister. Yes, that is it. Or tell me where I can find one."
The young man recoiled. "Never!" he said.
"You know where to find one."
"Never! Never!"
"You can lay your hand on one in five minutes, you know."
"I will not."
"Then I shall not fight you!" Count Hannibal answered coolly; and he turned from him, and back again. "You will pardon me if I say, M. de Tignonville, that you are in as many minds about fighting as about dying! I do not think that you would have made your fortune at Court. Moreover, there is a thing which I fancy you have not considered. If we fight you may kill me, in which case the condition will not help me much. Or I--which is more likely--" he added with a harsh smile, "may kill you, and again I am no better placed."
The young man's, pallid features betrayed the conflict in his breast. To do him justice, his hand itched for the sword-hilt--he was brave enough for that; he hated, and only so could he avenge himself. But the penalty if he had the worse! And yet what of it? He was in hell now, in a hell of humiliation, shame, defeat, tormented by this fiend! 'Twas only to risk a lower hell.
At last, "I will do it!" he cried hoarsely. "Give me a sword and look to yourself."
"You promise?"
"Yes, yes, I promise!"
"Good," Count Hannibal answered suavely; "but we cannot fight so, we must have more light," and striding to the door he opened it, and calling the Norman bade him move the table and bring caudles--a dozen candles; for in the narrow streets the light was waning, and in the half-shuttered room it was growing dusk. Tignonville, listening with a throbbing brain, wondered that the attendant expressed no surprise and said no word--until Tavannes added to his orders one for a pair of swords.
Then, "Monsieur's sword is here," Bigot answered in his half-intelligible patois. "He left it here yester morning."
"You are a good fellow, Bigot," Tavannes answered, with a gaiety and good-humour which astonished Tignonville. "And one of these days you shall marry Suzanne."
The Norman smiled sourly and went in search of the weapon.
"You have a poniard?" Count Hannibal continued in the same tone of unusual good temper, which had already struck Tignonville. "Excellent! Will you strip, then, or--as we are? Very good, monsieur; in the unlikely event of fortune declaring for you, you will be in a better condition to take care of yourself. A man running through the streets in his shirt is exposed to inconveniences!" And he laughed gaily.
While he laughed the other listened; and his rage began to give place to wonder. A man who regarded as a pastime a sword and dagger conflict between four walls, who, having his adversary in his power, was ready to discard the advantage, to descend into the lists, and to risk life for a whim, a fancy--such a man was outside his experience, though in Poitou in those days of war were men reckoned brave. For what, he asked himself as he waited, had Tavannes to gain by fighting? The possession of Mademoiselle? But Mademoiselle, if his passion for her overwhelmed him, was in his power; and if his promise were a barrier--which seemed inconceivable in the light of his reputation--he had only to wait, and to-morrow, or the next day, or the next, a minister would be found, and without risk he could gain that for which he was now risking all.
Tignonville did not know that it was in the other's nature to find pleasure in such utmost ventures. Nevertheless the recklessness to which Tavannes' action bore witness had its effect upon him. By the time the young man's sword arrived something of his passion for the conflict had evaporated; and though the touch of the hilt restored his determination, the locked door, the confined space, and the unaccustomed light went a certain distance towards substituting despair for courage.
The use of the dagger in the duels of that day, however, rendered despair itself formidable. And Tignonville, when he took his place, appeared anything but a mean antagonist. He had removed his robe and cowl, and lithe and active as a cat he stood as it were on springs, throwing his weight now on this foot and now on that, and was continually in motion. The table bearing the candles had been pushed against the window, the boarding of which had been replaced by Bigot before he left the room. Tignonville had this, and consequently the lights, on his dagger hand; and he plumed himself on the advantage, considering his point the more difficult to follow.
Count Hannibal did not seem to notice this, however. "Are you ready?" he asked. And then,
"On guard!" he cried, and he stamped the echo to the word. But, that done, instead of bearing the other down with a headlong rush characteristic of the man--as Tignonville feared--he held off warily, stooping low; and when his slow opening was met by one as cautious, he began to taunt his antagonist.
"Come!" he cried, and feinted half-heartedly. "Come, monsieur, are we going to fight, or play at fighting?"
"Fight yourself, then!" Tignonville answered, his breath quickened by excitement and growing hope. "'Tis not I hold back!" And he lunged, but was put aside.
"Ca! ca!" Tavannes retorted; and he lunged and parried in his turn, but loosely and at a distance. After which the two moved nearer the door, their eyes glittering as they watched one another, their knees bent, the sinews of their backs straining for the leap. Suddenly Tavannes thrust, and leapt away, and as his antagonist thrust in return the Count swept the blade aside with a strong parry, and for a moment seemed to be on the point of falling on Tignonville with the poniard. But Tignonville retired his right foot nimbly, which brought them front to front again. And the younger man laughed.
"Try again, M. le Comte!" he said. And, with the word, he dashed in himself quick as light; for a second the blades ground on one another, the daggers hovered, the two suffused faces glared into one another; then the pair disengaged again. The blood trickled from a scratch on Count Hannibal's neck; half an inch to the right and the point had found his throat. And Tignonville, elated, laughed anew, and swaying from side to side on his hips, watched with growing confidence for a second chance. Lithe as one of the leopards Charles kept at the Louvre, he stooped lower and lower, and more and more with each moment took the attitude of the assailant, watching for an opening; while Count Hannibal, his face dark and his eyes vigilant, stood increasingly on the defence. The light was waning a little, the wicks of the caudles were burning long; but neither noticed it or dared to remove his eyes from the other's. Their laboured breathing found an echo on the farther side of the door, but this again neither observed.
"Well?" Count Hannibal said at last. "Are you coming?"
"When I please," Tignonville answered; and he feinted but drew back. The other did the same, and again they watched one another, their eyes seeming to grow smaller and smaller. Gradually a smile had birth on Tignonville's lips. He thrust! It was parried! He thrust again--parried! Tavannes, grown still more cautious, gave a yard. Tignonville pushed on, but did not allow confidence to master caution. He began, indeed, to taunt his adversary; to flout and jeer him. But it was with a motive.
For suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he repeated the peculiar thrust which had been successful before. This time, however, Tavannes was ready. He put aside the blade with a quick parade, and instead of making a riposte sprang within the other's guard. The two came face to face and breast to shoulder, and struck furiously with their daggers. Count Hannibal was outside his opponent's sword and had the advantage. Tignonville's dagger fell, but glanced off the metalwork of the other's hilt; Tavannes' fell swift and hard between the young man's eyes. The Huguenot flung up his hands and staggered back, falling his length on the floor.
In an instant Count Hannibal was on his breast, and had knocked away his dagger. Then, "You own yourself vanquished?" he cried.
The young man, blinded by the blood which trickled down his face, made a sign with his hands. Count Hannibal rose to his feet again, and stood a moment looking at his foe without speaking. Presently he seemed to be satisfied. He nodded, and going to the table dipped a napkin in water. He brought it, and carefully supporting Tignonville's head, laved his brow. "It is as I thought," he said, when he had stanched the blood. "You are not hurt, man. You are stunned. It is no more than a bruise."
The young man was coming to himself. "But I thought----" he muttered, and broke off to pass his hand over his face. Then he got up slowly, reeling a little, "I thought it was the point," he muttered.
"No, it was the pommel," Tavannes answered drily. "It would not have served me to kill you. I could have done that ten times."
Tignonville groaned, and, sitting down at the table, held the napkin to his aching head. One of the candles had been overturned in the struggle and lay on the floor, flaring in a little pool of grease. Tavannes set his heel upon it; then, striding to the farther end of the room, he picked up Tignonville's dagger and placed it beside his sword on the table. He looked about to see if aught else remained to do, and, finding nothing, he returned to Tignonville's side.
"Now, monsieur," he said in a voice hard and constrained, "I must ask you to perform your part of the bargain."
A groan of anguish broke from the unhappy man. And yet he had set his life on the cast; what more could he have done? "You will not harm him?" he muttered.
"He shall go safe," Count Hannibal replied gravely.
"And----" he fought a moment with his pride, then blurted out the words, "you will not tell her--that it was through me--you found him?"
"I will not," Tavannes answered in the same tone. He stooped and picked up the other's robe and cowl, which had fallen from a chair--so that as he spoke his eyes were averted. "She shall never know through me," he said.
And Tignonville, his face hidden in his hands, told him.