“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 haycart, 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!
CHAPTER 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, too, that the haycart was to him only a haycart—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 surprise, 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 farther 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 skyline. 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.
CHAPTER 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 flattered!” 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 haycart 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 galère!
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—”
“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’esté
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 shaveling 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.”
CHAPTER 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 downwards, 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. de 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. de 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, comes 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 grimly. “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 jeopardized 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 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 should 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!”
CHAPTER 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 slaughter-house, 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; anyway 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 weltering 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 façade, 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 homme” 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.
Halfway up the staircase to the great gallery or guard-room 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, Nançay, 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. Nançay?”
“To Chatillon.”
“On pleasant business?”
“Enough that it is on the King’s!” Nançay 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 some one 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 Nançay. 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 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, and with a shaking finger 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 Alençon’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 Maréchale!” 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.