Count Hannibal Part 20

"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 a.s.sured 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed from their view, behind the angle of the building.

Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foresh.o.r.e 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 a.r.s.enal 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!"

CHAPTER 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 over 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 pa.s.s. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sing; 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 pa.s.sion 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. But his betrothed, 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 ma.s.sacre, 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 a.r.s.enal. 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal, 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 G.o.d 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--