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COUNT HANNIBAL

A ROMANCE OF THE COURT OF FRANCE.

by Stanley J. Weyman.

SORORI SUA CAUSSA CARAE PRO ERGA MATREM AMORE ETIAM CARIORI HOC FRATER.

CHAPTER I. CRIMSON FAVOURS.

M. de Tavannes smiled. Mademoiselle averted her eyes, and shivered; as if the air, even of that close summer night, entering by the door at her elbow, chilled her. And then came a welcome interruption.

"Tavannes!"

"Sire!"

Count Hannibal rose slowly. The King had called, and he had no choice but to obey and go. Yet he hung a last moment over his companion, his hateful breath stirring her hair.

"Our pleasure is cut short too soon, Mademoiselle," he said, in the tone, and with the look, she loathed. "But for a few hours only. We shall meet to-morrow. Or, it may be--earlier."

She did not answer, and "Tavannes!" the King repeated with violence. "Tavannes! Mordieu!" his Majesty continued, looking round furiously. "Will no one fetch him? Sacre nom, am I King, or a dog of a--"

"I come, sire!" the Count cried hastily. For Charles, King of France, Ninth of the name, was none of the most patient; and scarce another in the Court would have ventured to keep him waiting so long. "I come, sire; I come!" Tavannes repeated, as he moved from Mademoiselle's side.

He shouldered his way through the circle of courtiers, who barred the road to the presence, and in part hid her from observation. He pushed past the table at which Charles and the Comte de Rochefoucauld had been playing primero, and at which the latter still sat, trifling idly with the cards. Three more paces, and he reached the King, who stood in the _ruelle_ with Rambouillet and the Italian Marshal. It was the latter who, a moment before, had summoned his Majesty from his game.

Mademoiselle, watching him go, saw so much; so much, and the King's roving eyes and haggard face, and the four figures, posed apart in the fuller light of the upper half of the Chamber. Then the circle of courtiers came together before her, and she sat back on her stool. A fluttering, long-drawn sigh escaped her. Now, if she could slip out and make her escape! Now--she looked round. She was not far from the door; to withdraw seemed easy. But a staring, whispering knot of gentlemen and pages blocked the way; and the girl, ignorant of the etiquette of the Court, and with no more than a week's experience of Paris, had not the courage to rise and pass alone through the group.

She had come to the Louvre this Saturday evening under the wing of Madame d'Yverne, her _fiance's_ cousin. By ill-hap Madame had been summoned to the Princess Dowager's closet, and perforce had left her. Still, Mademoiselle had her betrothed, and in his charge had sat herself down to wait, nothing loth, in the great gallery, where all was bustle and gaiety and entertainment. For this, the seventh day of the fetes, held to celebrate the marriage of the King of Navarre and Charles's sister--a marriage which was to reconcile the two factions of the Huguenots and the Catholics, so long at war--saw the Louvre as gay, as full, and as lively as the first of the fete days had found it; and in the humours of the throng, in the ceaseless passage of masks and maids of honour, guards and bishops, Swiss in the black, white, and green of Anjou, and Huguenot nobles in more sombre habits, the country-bred girl had found recreation and to spare. Until gradually the evening had worn away and she had begun to feel nervous; and M. de Tignonville, her betrothed, placing her in the embrasure of a window, had gone to seek Madame.

She had waited for a time without much misgiving; expecting each moment to see him return. He would be back before she could count a hundred; he would be back before she could number the leagues that separated her from her beloved province, and the home by the Biscay Sea, to which even in that brilliant scene her thoughts turned fondly. But the minutes had passed, and passed, and he had not returned. Worse, in his place Tavannes--not the Marshal, but his brother, Count Hannibal--had found her; he, whose odious court, at once a menace and an insult, had subtly enveloped her for a week past. He had sat down beside her, he had taken possession of her, and, profiting by her inexperience, had played on her fears and smiled at her dislike. Finally, whether she would or no, he had swept her with him into the Chamber. The rest had been an obsession, a nightmare, from which only the King's voice summoning Tavannes to his side had relieved her.

Her aim now was to escape before he returned, and before another, seeing her alone, adopted his _role_ and was rude to her. Already the courtiers about her were beginning to stare, the pages to turn and titter and whisper. Direct her gaze as she might, she met some eye watching her, some couple enjoying her confusion. To make matters worse, she presently discovered that she was the only woman in the Chamber; and she conceived the notion that she had no right to be there at that hour. At the thought her cheeks burned, her eyes dropped; the room seemed to buzz with her name, with gross words and jests, and gibes at her expense.

At last, when the situation had grown nearly unbearable, the group before the door parted, and Tignonville appeared. The girl rose with a cry of relief, and he came to her. The courtiers glanced at the two and smiled.

He did not conceal his astonishment at finding her there. "But, Mademoiselle, how is this?" he asked, in a low voice. He was as conscious of the attention they attracted as she was, and as uncertain on the point of her right to be there. "I left you in the gallery. I came back, missed you, and--"

She stopped him by a gesture. "Not here!" she muttered, with suppressed impatience. "I will tell you outside. Take me--take me out, if you please, Monsieur, at once!"

He was as glad to be gone as she was to go. The group by the doorway parted; she passed through it, he followed. In a moment the two stood in the great gallery, above the Salle des Caryatides. The crowd which had paraded here an hour before was gone, and the vast echoing apartment, used at that date as a guard-room, was well-nigh empty. Only at rare intervals, in the embrasure of a window or the recess of a door, a couple talked softly. At the farther end, near the head of the staircase which led to the hall below, and the courtyard, a group of armed Swiss lounged on guard. Mademoiselle shot a keen glance up and down, then she turned to her lover, her face hot with indignation.

"Why did you leave me?" she asked. "Why did you leave me, if you could not come back at once? Do you understand, sir," she continued, "that it was at your instance I came to Paris, that I came to this Court, and that I look to you for protection?"

"Surely," he said. "And--"

"And do you think Carlat and his wife fit guardians for me? Should I have come or thought of coming to this wedding, but for your promise, and Madame your cousin's? If I had not deemed myself almost your wife," she continued warmly, "and secure of your protection, should I have come within a hundred miles of this dreadful city? To which, had I my will, none of our people should have come."

"Dreadful? Pardieu, not so dreadful," he answered, smiling, and striving to give the dispute a playful turn. "You have seen more in a week than you would have seen at Vrillac in a lifetime, Mademoiselle."

"And I choke!" she retorted; "I choke! Do you not see how they look at us, at us Huguenots, in the street? How they, who live here, point at us and curse us? How the very dogs scent us out and snarl at our heels, and the babes cross themselves when we go by? Can you see the Place des Gastines and not think what stood there? Can you pass the Greve at night and not fill the air above the river with screams and wailings and horrible cries--the cries of our people murdered on that spot?" She paused for breath, recovered herself a little, and in a lower tone, "For me," she said, "I think of Philippa de Luns by day and by night! The eaves are a threat to me; the tiles would fall on us had they their will; the houses nod to--to--"

"To what, Mademoiselle?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders and assuming a tone of cynicism.

"To crush us! Yes, Monsieur, to crush us!"

"And all this because I left you for a moment?"

"For an hour--or well-nigh an hour," she answered more soberly.

"But if I could not help it?"

"You should have thought of that--before you brought me to Paris, Monsieur. In these troublous times."

He coloured warmly. "You are unjust, Mademoiselle," he said. "There are things you forget; in a Court one is not always master of one's self."

"I know it," she answered dryly, thinking of that through which she had gone.

"But you do not know what happened!" he returned with impatience. "You do not understand that I am not to blame. Madame d'Yverne, when I reached the Princess Dowager's closet, had left to go to the Queen of Navarre. I hurried after her, and found a score of gentlemen in the King of Navarre's chamber. They were holding a council, and they begged, nay, they compelled me to remain."

"And it was that which detained you so long?"

"To be sure, Mademoiselle."

"And not--Madame St. Lo?"

M. de Tignonville's face turned scarlet. The thrust in tierce was unexpected. This, then, was the key to Mademoiselle's spirt of temper.

"I do not understand you," he stammered.

"How long were you in the King of Navarre's chamber, and how long with Madame St. Lo?" she asked with fine irony. "Or no, I will not tempt you," she went on quickly, seeing him hesitate. "I heard you talking to Madame St. Lo in the gallery while I sat within. And I know how long you were with her."

"I met Madame as I returned," he stammered, his face still hot, "and I asked her where you were. I did not know, Mademoiselle, that I was not to speak to ladies of my acquaintance."

"I was alone, and I was waiting."

"I could not know that--for certain," he answered, making the best of it. "You were not where I left you. I thought, I confess--that you had gone. That you had gone home."

"With whom? With whom?" she repeated pitilessly. "Was it likely? With whom was I to go? And yet it is true, I might have gone home had I pleased--with M. de Tavannes! Yes," she continued, in a tone of keen reproach, and with the blood mounting to her forehead, "it is to that, Monsieur, you expose me! To be pursued, molested, harassed by a man whose look terrifies me, and whose touch I--I detest! To be addressed wherever I go by a man whose every word proves that he thinks me game for the hunter, and you a thing he may neglect. You are a man and you do not know, you cannot know what I suffer! What I have suffered this week past whenever you have left my side!"

Tignonville looked gloomy. "What has he said to you?" he asked, between his teeth.

"Nothing I can tell you," she answered, with a shudder. "It was he who took me into the Chamber."

"Why did you go?"

"Wait until he bids you do something," she answered. "His manner, his smile, his tone, all frighten me. And to-night, in all these there was a something worse, a hundred times worse than when I saw him last--on Thursday! He seemed to--to gloat on me," the girl stammered, with a flush of shame, "as if I were his! Oh, Monsieur, I wish we had not left our Poitou! Shall we ever see Vrillac again, and the fishers' huts about the port, and the sea beating blue against the long brown causeway?"

He had listened darkly, almost sullenly; but at this, seeing the tears gather in her eyes, he forced a laugh.

"Why, you are as bad as M. de Rosny and the Vidame!" he said. "And they are as full of fears as an egg is of meat! Since the Admiral was wounded by that scoundrel on Friday, they think all Paris is in a league against us."

"And why not?" she asked, her cheek grown pale, her eyes reading his eyes.

"Why not? Why, because it is a monstrous thing even to think of!" Tignonville answered, with the confidence of one who did not use the argument for the first time. "Could they insult the King more deeply than by such a suspicion? A Borgia may kill his guests, but it was never a practice of the Kings of France! Pardieu, I have no patience with them! They may lodge where they please, across the river, or without the walls if they choose, the Rue de l'Arbre Sec is good enough for me, and the King's name sufficient surety!"

"I know you are not apt to be fearful," she answered, smiling; and she looked at him with a woman's pride in her lover. "All the same, you will not desert me again, sir, will you?"

He vowed he would not, kissed her hand, looked into her eyes; then melting to her, stammering, blundering, he named Madame St. Lo. She stopped him.

"There is no need," she said, answering his look with kind eyes, and refusing to hear his protestations. "In a fortnight will you not be my husband? How should I distrust you? It was only that while she talked, I waited--I waited; and--and that Madame St. Lo is Count Hannibal's cousin. For a moment I was mad enough to dream that she held you on purpose. You do not think it was so?"

"She!" he cried sharply; and he winced, as if the thought hurt him. "Absurd! The truth is, Mademoiselle," he continued with a little heat, "you are like so many of our people! You think a Catholic capable of the worst."

"We have long thought so at Vrillac," she answered gravely.

"That's over now, if people would only understand. This wedding has put an end to all that. But I'm harking back," he continued awkwardly; and he stopped. "Instead, let me take you home."

"If you please. Carlat and the servants should be below."

He took her left hand in his right after the wont of the day, and with his other hand touching his sword-hilt, he led her down the staircase, that by a single turn reached the courtyard of the palace. Here a mob of armed servants, of lacqueys, and footboys, some bearing torches, and some carrying their masters' cloaks and _galoshes_, loitered to and fro. Had M. de Tignonville been a little more observant, or a trifle less occupied with his own importance, he might have noted more than one face which looked darkly on him; he might have caught more than one overt sneer at his expense. But in the business of summoning Carlat--Mademoiselle de Vrillac's steward and major-domo--he lost the contemptuous "Christaudins!" that hissed from a footboy's lips, and the "Southern dogs!" that died in the moustachios of a bully in the livery of the King's brother. He was engaged in finding the steward, and in aiding him to cloak his mistress; then with a ruffling air, a new acquirement, which he had picked up since he came to Paris, he made a way for her through the crowd. A moment, and the three, followed by half a dozen armed servants, bearing pikes and torches, detached themselves from the throng, and crossing the courtyard, with its rows of lighted windows, passed out by the gate between the Tennis Courts, and so into the Rue des Fosses de St. Germain.

Before them, against a sky in which the last faint glow of evening still contended with the stars, the spire and pointed arches of the church of St. Germain rose darkly graceful. It was something after nine: the heat of the August day brooded over the crowded city, and dulled the faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. As Mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the Cloister of St. Germain, where only the day before Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort's hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. But he laughed at her.

"It was a private blow," he said, answering her unspoken thought. "It is like enough the Guises sped it. But they know now what is the King's will, and they have taken the hint and withdrawn themselves. It will not happen again, Mademoiselle. For proof, see the guards"--they were passing the end of the Rue Bethizy, in the corner house of which, abutting on the Rue de l'Arbre Sec, Coligny had his lodgings--"whom the King has placed for his security. Fifty pikes under Cosseins."

"Cosseins?" she repeated. "But I thought Cosseins--"

"Was not wont to love us!" Tignonville answered, with a confident chuckle. "He was not. But the dogs lick where the master wills, Mademoiselle. He was not, but he does. This marriage has altered all."

"I hope it may not prove an unlucky one!" she murmured. She felt impelled to say it.

"Not it!" he answered confidently. "Why should it?"

They stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the Rue St. Honore opposite the Croix du Tiroir; which rose shadowy in the middle of the four ways. He hammered on the door.

"But," she said softly, looking in his face, "the change is sudden, is it not? The King was not wont to be so good to us!"

"The King was not King until now," he answered warmly. "That is what I am trying to persuade our people. Believe me, Mademoiselle, you may sleep without fear; and early in the morning I will be with you. Carlat, have a care of your mistress until morning, and let Madame lie in her chamber. She is nervous to-night. There, sweet, until morning! God keep you, and pleasant dreams!"

He uncovered, and bowing over her hand, kissed it; and the door being open he would have turned away. But she lingered as if unwilling to enter.

"There is--do you hear it--a stir in _that_ quarter?" she said, pointing across the Rue St. Honore. "What lies there?"

"Northward? The markets," he answered. "'Tis nothing. They say, you know, that Paris never sleeps. Good night, sweet, and a fair awakening!"

She shivered as she had shivered under Tavannes' eye. And still she lingered, keeping him.

"Are you going to your lodging at once?" she asked--for the sake, it seemed, of saying something.

"I?" he answered a little hurriedly. "No, I was thinking of paying Rochefoucauld the compliment of seeing him home. He has taken a new lodging to be near the Admiral; a horrid bare place in the Rue Bethizy, without furniture, but he would go into it to-day. And he has a sort of claim on my family, you know."

"Yes," she said simply. "Of course. Then I must not detain you. God keep you safe," she continued, with a faint quiver in her tone; and her lip trembled. "Good night, and fair dreams, Monsieur."

He echoed the words gallantly. "Of you, sweet!" he cried; and turning away with a gesture of farewell, he set off on his return.

He walked briskly, nor did he look back, though she stood awhile gazing after him. She was not aware that she gave thought to this; nor that it hurt her. Yet when bolt and bar had shot behind her, and she had mounted the cold, bare staircase of that day--when she had heard the dull echoing footsteps of her attendants as they withdrew to their lairs and sleeping- places, and still more when she had crossed the threshold of her chamber, and signed to Madame Carlat and her woman to listen--it is certain she felt a lack of something.

Perhaps the chill that possessed her came of that lack, which she neither defined nor acknowledged. Or possibly it came of the night air, August though it was; or of sheer nervousness, or of the remembrance of Count Hannibal's smile. Whatever its origin, she took it to bed with her and long after the house slept round her, long after the crowded quarter of the Halles had begun to heave and the Sorbonne to vomit a black-frocked band, long after the tall houses in the gabled streets, from St. Antoine to Montmartre and from St. Denis on the north to St. Jacques on the south, had burst into rows of twinkling lights--nay, long after the Quarter of the Louvre alone remained dark, girdled by this strange midnight brightness--she lay awake. At length she too slept, and dreamed of home and the wide skies of Poitou, and her castle of Vrillac washed day and night by the Biscay tides.

CHAPTER II. HANNIBAL DE SAULX, COMTE DE TAVANNES.

"Tavannes!"

"Sire."

Tavannes, we know, had been slow to obey the summons. Emerging from the crowd, he found that the King, with Retz and Rambouillet, his Marshal des Logis, had retired to the farther end of the Chamber; apparently Charles had forgotten that he had called. His head a little bent--he was tall and had a natural stoop--the King seemed to be listening to a low but continuous murmur of voices which proceeded from the door of his closet. One voice frequently raised was beyond doubt a woman's; a foreign accent, smooth and silky, marked another; a third, that from time to time broke in, wilful and impetuous, was the voice of Monsieur, the King's brother, Catherine de Medicis' favourite son. Tavannes, waiting respectfully two paces behind the King, could catch little that was said; but Charles, something more, it seemed, for on a sudden he laughed, a violent, mirthless laugh. And he clapped Rambouillet on the shoulder.

"There!" he said, with one of his horrible oaths, "'tis settled! 'Tis settled! Go, man, and take your orders! And you, M. de Retz," he continued, in a tone of savage mockery, "go, my lord, and give them!"

"I, sire?" the Italian Marshal answered, in accents of deprecation. There were times when the young King would show his impatience of the Italian ring, the Retzs and Biragues, the Strozzis and Gondys, with whom his mother surrounded him.

"Yes, you!" Charles answered. "You and my lady mother! And in God's name answer for it at the day!" he continued vehemently. "You will have it! You will not let me rest till you have it! Then have it, only see to it, it be done thoroughly! There shall not be one left to cast it in the King's teeth and cry, 'Et tu, Carole!' Swim, swim in blood if you will," he continued, with growing wildness. "Oh, 'twill be a merry night! And it's true so far, you may kill fleas all day, but burn the coat, and there's an end. So burn it, burn it, and--" He broke off with a start as he discovered Tavannes at his elbow. "God's death, man!" he cried roughly, "who sent for you?"

"Your Majesty called me," Tavannes answered; while, partly urged by the King's hand, and partly anxious to escape, the others slipped into the closet and left them together.

"I sent for you? I called your brother, the Marshal!"

"He is within, sire," Tavannes answered, indicating the closet. "A moment ago I heard his voice."

Charles passed his shaking hand across his eyes. "Is he?" he muttered. "So he is! I heard it too. And--and a man cannot be in two places at once!" Then, while his haggard gaze, passing by Tavannes, roved round the Chamber, he laid his hand on Count Hannibal's breast. "They give me no peace, Madame and the Guises," he whispered, his face hectic with excitement. "They will have it. They say that Coligny--they say that he beards me in my own palace. And--and, _mordieu_," with sudden violence, "it's true. It's true enough! It was but to-day he was for making terms with me! With me, the King! Making terms! So it shall be, by God and Devil, it shall! But not six or seven! No, no. All! All! There shall not be one left to say to me, 'You did it!'"

"Softly, sire," Tavannes answered; for Charles had gradually raised his voice. "You will be observed."

For the first time the young King--he was but twenty-two years old, God pity him!--looked at his companion.

"To be sure," he whispered; and his eyes grew cunning. "Besides, and after all, there's another way, if I choose. Oh, I've thought and thought, I'd have you know." And shrugging his shoulders, almost to his ears, he raised and lowered his open hands alternately, while his back hid the movement from the Chamber. "See-saw! See-saw!" he muttered. "And the King between the two, you see. That's Madame's king-craft. She's shown me that a hundred times. But look you, it is as easy to lower the one as the other," with a cunning glance at Tavannes' face, "or to cut off the right as the left. And--and the Admiral's an old man and will pass; and for the matter of that I like to hear him talk. He talks well. While the others, Guise and his kind, are young, and I've thought, oh, yes, I've thought--but there," with a sudden harsh laugh, "my lady mother will have it her own way. And for this time she shall, but, All! All! Even Foucauld, there! Do you mark him. He's sorting the cards. Do you see him--as he will be to-morrow, with the slit in his throat and his teeth showing? Why, God!" his voice rising almost to a scream, "the candles by him are burning blue!" And with a shaking hand, his face convulsed, the young King clutched his companion's arm, and pinched it.

Count Hannibal shrugged his shoulders, but answered nothing.

"D'you think we shall see them afterwards?" Charles resumed, in a sharp, eager whisper. "In our dreams, man? Or when the watchman cries, and we awake, and the monks are singing lauds at St. Germain, and--and the taper is low?"

Tavannes' lip curled. "I don't dream, sire," he answered coldly, "and I seldom wake. For the rest, I fear my enemies neither alive nor dead."

"Don't you? By G-d, I wish I didn't," the young man exclaimed. His brow was wet with sweat. "I wish I didn't. But there, it's settled. They've settled it, and I would it were done! What do you think of--of it, man? What do you think of it, yourself?"

Count Hannibal's face was inscrutable. "I think nothing, sire," he said dryly. "It is for your Majesty and your council to think. It is enough for me that it is the King's will."

"But you'll not flinch?" Charles muttered, with a quick look of suspicion. "But there," with a monstrous oath, "I know you'll not! I believe you'd as soon kill a monk--though, thank God," and he crossed himself devoutly, "there is no question of that--as a man. And sooner than a maiden."

"Much sooner, sire," Tavannes answered grimly. "If you have any orders in the monkish direction--no? Then your Majesty must not talk to me longer. M. de Rochefoucauld is beginning to wonder what is keeping your Majesty from your game. And others are marking you, sire."

"By the Lord!" Charles exclaimed, a ring of wonder mingled with horror in his tone, "if they knew what was in our minds they'd mark us more! Yet, see Nancay there beside the door? He is unmoved. He looks to-day as he looked yesterday. Yet he has charge of the work in the palace--"

For the first time Tavannes allowed a movement of surprise to escape him.

"In the palace?" he muttered. "Is it to be done here, too, sire?"

"Would you let some escape, to return by-and-by and cut our throats?" the King retorted, with a strange spirt of fury; an incapacity to maintain the same attitude of mind for two minutes together was the most fatal weakness of his ill-balanced nature. "No. All! All!" he repeated with vehemence. "Didn't Noah people the earth with eight? But I'll not leave eight! My cousins, for they are blood-royal, shall live if they will recant. And my old nurse, whether or no. And Pare, for no one else understands my complexion. And--"

"And Rochefoucauld, doubtless, sire?"

The King, whose eye had sought his favourite companion, withdrew it. He darted a glance at Tavannes.

"Foucauld? Who said so?" he muttered jealously. "Not I! But we shall see. We shall see! And do you see that you spare no one, M. le Comte, without an order. That is your business."

"I understand, sire," Tavannes answered coolly. And after a moment's silence, seeing that the King had done with him, he bowed low and withdrew; watched by the circle, as all about a King were watched in the days when a King's breath meant life or death, and his smile made the fortunes of men. As he passed Rochefoucauld, the latter looked up and nodded.

"What keeps brother Charles?" he muttered. "He's madder than ever to- night. Is it a masque or a murder he is planning?"

"The vapours," Tavannes answered, with a sneer. "Old tales his old nurse has stuffed him withal. He'll come by-and-by, and 'twill be well if you can divert him."

"I will, if he come," Rochefoucauld answered, shuffling the cards. "If not 'tis Chicot's business, and he should attend to it. I'm tired, and shall to bed."

"He will come," Tavannes answered, and moved, as if to go on. Then he paused for a last word. "He will come," he muttered, stooping and speaking under his breath, his eyes on the other's face. "But play him lightly. He is in an ugly mood. Please him, if you can, and it may serve."

The eyes of the two met an instant, and those of Foucauld--so the King called his Huguenot favourite--betrayed some surprise; for Count Hannibal and he were not intimate. But seeing that the other was in earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. Tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. He was lifting the curtain to go out, when Nancay, the Captain of the Guard, plucked his sleeve.

"What have you been saying to Foucauld, M. de Tavannes?" he muttered.

"I?"

"Yes," with a jealous glance, "you, M. le Comte."

Count Hannibal looked at him with the sudden ferocity that made the man a proverb at Court.

"What I chose, M. le Capitaine des Suisses!" he hissed. And his hand closed like a vice on the other's wrist. "What I chose, look you! And remember, another time, that I am not a Huguenot, and say what I please."

"But there is great need of care," Nancay protested, stammering and flinching. "And--and I have orders, M. le Comte."

"Your orders are not for me," Tavannes answered, releasing his arm with a contemptuous gesture. "And look you, man, do not cross my path to-night. You know our motto? Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes! Be warned by it."

Nancay scowled. "But the priests say, 'If your hand offend you, cut it off!'" he muttered.

Tavannes laughed, a sinister laugh. "If you offend me I'll cut your throat," he said; and with no ceremony he went out, and dropped the curtain behind him.

Nancay looked after him, his face pale with rage. "Curse him!" he whispered, rubbing his wrist. "If he were any one else I would teach him! But he would as soon run you through in the presence as in the Pre aux Clercs! And his brother, the Marshal, has the King's ear! And Madame Catherine's too, which is worse!"

He was still fuming, when an officer in the colours of Monsieur, the King's brother, entered hurriedly, and keeping his hand on the curtain, looked anxiously round the Chamber. As soon as his eye found Nancay, his face cleared.

"Have you the reckoning?" he muttered.

"There are seventeen Huguenots in the palace besides their Highnesses," Nancay replied, in the same cautious tone. "Not counting two or three who are neither the one thing nor the other. In addition, there are the two Montmorencies; but they are to go safe for fear of their brother, who is not in the trap. He is too like his father, the old Bench-burner, to be lightly wronged! And, besides, there is Pare, who is to go to his Majesty's closet as soon as the gates are shut. If the King decides to save any one else, he will send him to his closet. So 'tis all clear and arranged here. If you are forward outside, it will be well! Who deals with the gentleman with the tooth-pick?"

"The Admiral? Monsieur, Guise, and the Grand Prior; Cosseins and Besme have charge. 'Tis to be done first. Then the Provost will raise the town. He will have a body of stout fellows ready at three or four rendezvous, so that the fire may blaze up everywhere at once. Marcel, the ex-provost, has the same commission south of the river. Orders to light the town as for a frolic have been given, and the Halles will be ready."

Nancay nodded, reflected a moment, and then with an involuntary shudder--

"God!" he exclaimed, "it will shake the world!"

"You think so?"

"Ay, will it not!" His next words showed that he bore Tavannes' warning in mind. "For me, my friend, I go in mail to-night," he said. "There will be many a score paid before morning, besides his Majesty's. And many a left-handed blow will be struck in the _melee_!"

The other crossed himself. "Grant none light here!" he said devoutly. And with a last look he nodded and went out.

In the doorway he jostled a person who was in the act of entering. It was M. de Tignonville, who, seeing Nancay at his elbow, saluted him, and stood looking round. The young man's face was flushed, his eyes were bright with unwonted excitement.

"M. de Rochefoucauld?" he asked eagerly. "He has not left yet?"

Nancay caught the thrill in his voice, and marked the young man's flushed face and altered bearing. He noted, too, the crumpled paper he carried half-hidden in his hand; and the Captain's countenance grew dark. He drew a step nearer, and his hand reached softly for his dagger. But his voice, when he spoke, was smooth as the surface of the pleasure-loving Court, smooth as the externals of all things in Paris that summer evening.

"He is here still," he said. "Have you news, M. de Tignonville?"

"News?"

"For M. de Rochefoucauld?"

Tignonville laughed. "No," he said. "I am here to see him to his lodging, that is all. News, Captain? What made you think so?"

"That which you have in your hand," Nancay answered, his fears relieved.

The young man blushed to the roots of his hair. "It is not for him," he said.

"I can see that, Monsieur," Nancay answered politely. "He has his successes, but all the billets-doux do not go one way."

The young man laughed, a conscious, flattered laugh. He was handsome, with such a face as women love, but there was a lack of ease in the way he wore his Court suit. It was a trifle finer, too, than accorded with Huguenot taste; or it looked the finer for the way he wore it, even as Teligny's and Foucauld's velvet capes and stiff brocades lost their richness and became but the adjuncts, fitting and graceful, of the men. Odder still, as Tignonville laughed, half hiding and half revealing the dainty scented paper in his hand, his clothes seemed smarter and he more awkward than usual.

"It is from a lady," he admitted. "But a bit of badinage, I assure you, nothing more!"

"Understood!" M. de Nancay murmured politely. "I congratulate you."

"But--"

"I say I congratulate you!"

"But it is nothing."

"Oh, I understand. And see, the King is about to rise. Go forward, Monsieur," he continued benevolently. "A young man should show himself. Besides, his Majesty likes you well," he added, with a leer. He had an unpleasant sense of humour, had his Majesty's Captain of the Guard; and this evening somewhat more than ordinary on which to exercise it.

Tignonville held too good an opinion of himself to suspect the other of badinage; and thus encouraged, he pushed his way to the front of the circle. During his absence with his betrothed, the crowd in the Chamber had grown thin, the candles had burned an inch shorter in the sconces. But though many who had been there had left, the more select remained, and the King's return to his seat had given the company a fillip. An air of feverish gaiety, common in the unhealthy life of the Court, prevailed. At a table abreast of the King, Montpensier and Marshal Cosse were dicing and disputing, with now a yell of glee, and now an oath, that betrayed which way fortune inclined. At the back of the King's chair, Chicot, his gentleman-jester, hung over Charles's shoulder, now scanning his cards, and now making hideous faces that threw the on-lookers into fits of laughter. Farther up the Chamber, at the end of the alcove, Marshal Tavannes--our Hannibal's brother--occupied a low stool, which was set opposite the open door of the closet. Through this doorway a slender foot, silk-clad, shot now and again into sight; it came, it vanished, it came again, the gallant Marshal striving at each appearance to rob it of its slipper, a dainty jewelled thing of crimson velvet. He failed thrice, a peal of laughter greeting each failure. At the fourth essay, he upset his stool and fell to the floor, but held the slipper. And not the slipper only, but the foot. Amid a flutter of silken skirts and dainty laces--while the hidden beauty shrilly protested--he dragged first the ankle, and then a shapely leg into sight. The circle applauded; the lady, feeling herself still drawn on, screamed loudly and more loudly. All save the King and his opponent turned to look. And then the sport came to a sudden end. A sinewy hand appeared, interposed, released; for an instant the dark, handsome face of Guise looked through the doorway. It was gone as soon as seen; it was there a second only. But more than one recognised it, and wondered. For was not the young Duke in evil odour with the King by reason of the attack on the Admiral? And had he not been chased from Paris only that morning and forbidden to return?

They were still wondering, still gazing, when abruptly--as he did all things--Charles thrust back his chair.

"Foucauld, you owe me ten pieces!" he cried with glee, and he slapped the table. "Pay, my friend; pay!"

"To-morrow, little master; to-morrow!" Rochefoucauld answered in the same tone. And he rose to his feet.

"To-morrow!" Charles repeated. "To-morrow?" And on the word his jaw fell. He looked wildly round. His face was ghastly.

"Well, sire, and why not?" Rochefoucauld answered in astonishment. And in his turn he looked round, wondering; and a chill fell on him. "Why not?" he repeated.

For a moment no one answered him: the silence in the Chamber was intense. Where he looked, wherever he looked, he met solemn, wondering eyes, such eyes as gaze on men in their coffins.

"What has come to you all?" he cried, with an effort. "What is the jest, for faith, sire, I don't see it?"

The King seemed incapable of speech, and it was Chicot who filled the gap.

"It is pretty apparent," he said, with a rude laugh. "The cock will lay and Foucauld will pay--to-morrow!"

The young nobleman's colour rose; between him and the Gascon gentleman was no love lost.

"There are some debts I pay to-day," he cried haughtily. "For the rest, farewell my little master! When one does not understand the jest it is time to be gone."

He was halfway to the door, watched by all, when the King spoke.

"Foucauld!" he cried, in an odd, strangled voice. "Foucauld!" And the Huguenot favourite turned back, wondering. "One minute!" the King continued, in the same forced voice. "Stay till morning--in my closet. It is late now. We'll play away the rest of the night!"

"Your Majesty must excuse me," Rochefoucauld answered frankly. "I am dead asleep."

"You can sleep in the Garde-Robe," the King persisted.

"Thank you for nothing, sire!" was the gay answer. "I know that bed! I shall sleep longer and better in my own."

The King shuddered, but strove to hide the movement under a shrug of his shoulders. He turned away.

"It is God's will!" he muttered. He was white to the lips.

Rochefoucauld did not catch the words. "Good night, sire," he cried. "Farewell, little master." And with a nod here and there, he passed to the door, followed by Mergey and Chamont, two gentlemen of his suite.

Nancay raised the curtain with an obsequious gesture. "Pardon me, M. le Comte," he said, "do you go to his Highness's?"

"For a few minutes, Nancay."

"Permit me to go with you. The guards may be set."

"Do so, my friend," Rochefoucauld answered. "Ah, Tignonville, is it you?"

"I am come to attend you to your lodging," the young man said. And he ranged up beside the other, as, the curtain fallen behind them, they walked along the gallery.

Rochefoucauld stopped and laid his hand on Tignonville's sleeve.

"Thanks, dear lad," he said, "but I am going to the Princess Dowager's. Afterwards to his Highness's. I may be detained an hour or more. You will not like to wait so long."

M. de Tignonville's face fell ludicrously. "Well, no," he said. "I--I don't think I could wait so long--to-night."

"Then come to-morrow night," Rochefoucauld answered, with good nature.

"With pleasure," the other cried heartily, his relief evident. "Certainly. With pleasure." And, nodding good night, they parted.

While Rochefoucauld, with Nancay at his side and his gentlemen attending him, passed along the echoing and now empty gallery, the younger man bounded down the stairs to the great hall of the Caryatides, his face radiant. He for one was not sleepy.

CHAPTER III. THE HOUSE NEXT THE GOLDEN MAID.

We have it on record that before the Comte de la Rochefoucauld left the Louvre that night he received the strongest hints of the peril which threatened him; and at least one written warning was handed to him by a stranger in black, and by him in turn was communicated to the King of Navarre. We are told further that when he took his final leave, about the hour of eleven, he found the courtyard brilliantly lighted, and the three companies of guards--Swiss, Scotch, and French--drawn up in ranked array from the door of the great hall to the gate which opened on the street. But, the chronicler adds, neither this precaution, sinister as it appeared to some of his suite, nor the grave farewell which Rambouillet, from his post at the gate, took of one of his gentlemen, shook that chivalrous soul or sapped its generous confidence.

M. de Tignonville was young and less versed in danger than the Governor of Rochelle; with him, had he seen so much, it might have been different. But he left the Louvre an hour earlier--at a time when the precincts of the palace, gloomy-seeming to us in the light cast by coming events, wore their wonted aspect. His thoughts, moreover, as he crossed the courtyard, were otherwise employed. So much so, indeed, that though he signed to his two servants to follow him, he seemed barely conscious what he was doing; nor did he shake off his reverie until he reached the corner of the Rue Baillet. Here the voices of the Swiss who stood on guard opposite Coligny's lodgings, at the end of the Rue Bethizy, could be plainly heard. They had kindled a fire in an iron basket set in the middle of the road, and knots of them were visible in the distance, moving to and fro about their piled arms.

Tignonville paused before he came within the radius of the firelight, and, turning, bade his servants take their way home. "I shall follow, but I have business first," he added curtly.

The elder of the two demurred. "The streets are not too safe," he said. "In two hours or less, my lord, it will be midnight. And then--"

"Go, booby; do you think I am a child?" his master retorted angrily. "I've my sword and can use it. I shall not be long. And do you hear, men, keep a still tongue, will you?"

The men, country fellows, obeyed reluctantly, and with a full intention of sneaking after him the moment he had turned his back. But he suspected them of this, and stood where he was until they had passed the fire, and could no longer detect his movements. Then he plunged quickly into the Rue Baillet, gained through it the Rue du Roule, and traversing that also, turned to the right into the Rue Ferronerie, the main thoroughfare, east and west, of Paris. Here he halted in front of the long, dark outer wall of the Cemetery of the Innocents, in which, across the tombstones and among the sepulchres of dead Paris, the living Paris of that day, bought and sold, walked, gossiped, and made love.

About him things were to be seen that would have seemed stranger to him had he been less strange to the city. From the quarter of the markets north of him, a quarter which fenced in the cemetery on two sides, the same dull murmur proceeded, which Mademoiselle de Vrillac had remarked an hour earlier. The sky above the cemetery glowed with reflected light, the cause of which was not far to seek, for every window of the tall houses that overlooked it, and the huddle of booths about it, contributed a share of the illumination. At an hour late even for Paris, an hour when honest men should have been sunk in slumber, this strange brilliance did for a moment perplex him; but the past week had been so full of fetes, of masques and frolics, often devised on the moment and dependent on the King's whim, that he set this also down to such a cause, and wondered no more.

The lights in the houses did not serve the purpose he had in his mind, but beside the closed gate of the cemetery, and between two stalls, was a votive lamp burning before an image of the Mother and Child. He crossed to this, and assuring himself by a glance to right and left that he stood in no danger from prowlers, he drew a note from his breast. It had been slipped into his hand in the gallery before he saw Mademoiselle to her lodging; it had been in his possession barely an hour. But brief as its contents were, and easily committed to memory, he had perused it thrice already.

"At the house next the Golden Maid, Rue Cinq Diamants, an hour before midnight, you may find the door open should you desire to talk farther with C. St. L."

As he read it for the fourth time the light of the lamp fell athwart his face; and even as his fine clothes had never seemed to fit him worse than when he faintly denied the imputations of gallantry launched at him by Nancay, so his features had never looked less handsome than they did now. The glow of vanity which warmed his cheek as he read the message, the smile of conceit which wreathed his lips, bespoke a nature not of the most noble; or the lamp did him less than justice. Presently he kissed the note, and hid it. He waited until the clock of St. Jacques struck the hour before midnight; and then moving forward, he turned to the right by way of the narrow neck leading to the Rue Lombard. He walked in the kennel here, his sword in his hand and his eyes looking to right and left; for the place was notorious for robberies. But though he saw more than one figure lurking in a doorway or under the arch that led to a passage, it vanished on his nearer approach. In less than a minute he reached the southern end of the street that bore the odd title of the Five Diamonds.

Situate in the crowded quarter of the butchers, and almost in the shadow of their famous church, this street--which farther north was continued in the Rue Quimcampoix--presented in those days a not uncommon mingling of poverty and wealth. On one side of the street a row of lofty gabled houses, built under Francis the First, sheltered persons of good condition; on the other, divided from these by the width of the road and a reeking kennel, a row of peat-houses, the hovels of cobblers and sausage-makers, leaned against shapeless timber houses which tottered upwards in a medley of sagging roofs and bulging gutters. Tignonville was strange to the place, and nine nights out of ten he would have been at a disadvantage. But, thanks to the tapers that to-night shone in many windows, he made out enough to see that he need search only the one side; and with a beating heart he passed along the row of newer houses, looking eagerly for the sign of the Golden Maid.

He found it at last; and then for a moment he stood puzzled. The note said, next door to the Golden Maid, but it did not say on which side. He scrutinised the nearer house, but he saw nothing to determine him; and he was proceeding to the farther, when he caught sight of two men, who, ambushed behind a horse-block on the opposite side of the roadway, seemed to be watching his movements. Their presence flurried him; but much to his relief his next glance at the houses showed him that the door of the farther one was unlatched. It stood slightly ajar, permitting a beam of light to escape into the street.

He stepped quickly to it--the sooner he was within the house the better--pushed the door open and entered. As soon as he was inside he tried to close the entrance behind him, but he found he could not; the door would not shut. After a brief trial he abandoned the attempt and passed quickly on, through a bare lighted passage which led to the foot of a staircase, equally bare. He stood at this point an instant and listened, in the hope that Madame's maid would come to him. At first he heard nothing save his own breathing; then a gruff voice from above startled him.

"This way, Monsieur," it said. "You are early, but not too soon!"

So Madame trusted her footman! M. de Tignonville shrugged his shoulders; but after all, it was no affair of his, and he went up. Halfway to the top, however, he stood, an oath on his lips. Two men had entered by the open door below--even as he had entered! And as quietly!

The imprudence of it! The imprudence of leaving the door so that it could not be closed! He turned, and descended to meet them, his teeth set, his hand on his sword, one conjecture after another whirling in his brain. Was he beset? Was it a trap? Was it a rival? Was it chance? Two steps he descended; and then the voice he had heard before cried again, but more imperatively--

"No, Monsieur, this way! Did you not hear me? This way, and be quick, if you please. By-and-by there will be a crowd, and then the more we have dealt with the better!"

He knew now that he had made a mistake, that he had entered the wrong house; and naturally his impulse was to continue his descent and secure his retreat. But the pause had brought the two men who had entered face to face with him, and they showed no signs of giving way. On the contrary.

"The room is above, Monsieur," the foremost said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and with a slight salutation. "After you, if you please," and he signed to him to return.

He was a burly man, grim and truculent in appearance, and his follower was like him. Tignonville hesitated, then turned and ascended. But as soon as he had reached the landing where they could pass him, he turned again.

"I have made a mistake, I think," he said. "I have entered the wrong house."

"Are you for the house next the Golden Maid, Monsieur?"

"Yes."

"Rue Cinq Diamants, Quarter of the Boucherie?"

"Yes."

"No mistake, then," the stout man replied firmly. "You are early, that is all. You have arms, I see. Maillard!"--to the person whose voice Tignonville had heard at the head of the stairs--"A white sleeve, and a cross for Monsieur's hat, and his name on the register. Come, make a beginning! Make a beginning, man."

"To be sure, Monsieur. All is ready."

"Then lose no time, I say. Here are others, also early in the good cause. Gentlemen, welcome! Welcome all who are for the true faith! Death to the heretics! 'Kill, and no quarter!' is the word to-night!"

"Death to the heretics!" the last comers cried in chorus. "Kill and no quarter! At what hour, M. le Prevot?"

"At daybreak," the Provost answered importantly. "But have no fear, the tocsin will sound. The King and our good man M. de Guise have all in hand. A white sleeve, a white cross, and a sharp knife shall rid Paris of the vermin! Gentlemen of the quarter, the word of the night is 'Kill, and no quarter! Death to the Huguenots!'"

"Death! Death to the Huguenots! Kill, and no quarter!" A dozen--the room was beginning to fill--waved their weapons and echoed the cry.

Tignonville had been fortunate enough to apprehend the position--and the peril in which he stood--before Maillard advanced to him bearing a white linen sleeve. In the instant of discovery his heart had stood a moment, the blood had left his cheeks; but with some faults, he was no coward, and he managed to hide his emotion. He held out his left arm, and suffered the beadle to pass the sleeve over it and to secure the white linen above the elbow. Then at a gesture he gave up his velvet cap, and saw it decorated with a white cross of the same material.

"Now the register, Monsieur," Maillard continued briskly; and waving him in the direction of a clerk, who sat at the end of the long table, having a book and a ink-horn before him, he turned to the next comer.

Tignonville would fain have avoided the ordeal of the register, but the clerk's eye was on him. He had been fortunate so far, but he knew that the least breath of suspicion would destroy him, and summoning his wits together he gave his name in a steady voice. "Anne Desmartins." It was his mother's maiden name, and the first that came into his mind.

"Of Paris?"

"Recently; by birth, of the Limousin."

"Good, Monsieur," the clerk answered, writing in the name. And he turned to the next. "And you, my friend?"

CHAPTER IV. THE EVE OF THE FEAST.

It was Tignonville's salvation that the men who crowded the long white- walled room, and exchanged vile boasts under the naked flaring lights, were of all classes. There were butchers, natives of the surrounding quarter whom the scent of blood had drawn from their lairs; and there were priests with hatchet faces, who whispered in the butchers' ears. There were gentlemen of the robe, and plain mechanics, rich merchants in their gowns, and bare-armed ragpickers, sleek choristers, and shabby led- captains; but differ as they might in other points, in one thing all were alike. From all, gentle or simple, rose the same cry for blood, the same aspiration to be first equipped for the fray. In one corner a man of rank stood silent and apart, his hand on his sword, the working of his face alone betraying the storm that reigned within. In another, a Norman horse-dealer talked in low whispers with two thieves. In a third, a gold- wire drawer addressed an admiring group from the Sorbonne; and meantime the middle of the floor grew into a seething mass of muttering, scowling men, through whom the last comers, thrust as they might, had much ado to force their way.

And from all under the low ceiling rose a ceaseless hum, though none spoke loud. "Kill! kill! kill!" was the burden; the accompaniment such profanities and blasphemies as had long disgraced the Paris pulpits, and day by day had fanned the bigotry--already at a white heat--of the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered him a whetstone.

"Are you sharp, noble sir?" he asked, with a leer. "Are you sharp? It's surprising how the edge goes on the bone. A cut and thrust? Well, every man to his taste. But give me a broad butcher's knife and I'll ask no help, be it man, woman, or child!"

A bystander, a lean man in rusty black, chuckled as he listened.

"But the woman or the child for choice, eh, Jehan?" he said. And he looked to Tignonville to join in the jest.

"Ay, give me a white throat for choice!" the cripple answered, with horrible zest. "And there'll be delicate necks to prick to-night! Lord, I think I hear them squeal! You don't need it, sir?" he continued, again proffering the whetstone. "No? Then I'll give my blade another whet, in the name of our Lady, the Saints, and good Father Pezelay!"

"Ay, and give me a turn!" the lean man cried, proffering his weapon. "May I die if I do not kill one of the accursed for every finger of my hands!"

"And toe of my feet!" the cripple answered, not to be outdone. "And toe of my feet! A full score!"

"'Tis according to your sins!" the other, who had something of the air of a Churchman, answered. "The more heretics killed, the more sins forgiven. Remember that, brother, and spare not if your soul be burdened! They blaspheme God and call Him paste! In the paste of their own blood," he continued ferociously, "I will knead them and roll them out, saith the good Father Pezelay, my master!"

The cripple crossed himself. "Whom God keep," he said. "He is a good man. But you are looking ill, noble sir?" he continued, peering curiously at the young Huguenot.

"'Tis the heat," Tignonville muttered. "The night is stifling, and the lights make it worse. I will go nearer the door."

He hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room and giving the alarm. But when he had forced his way to the threshold, he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left, the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe, over the shoulders of the crowd.

With that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim before his eyes. The catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium. He strove to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm. But he could not bring his mind to a point. Instead, in lightning flashes he foresaw what must happen: his betrothed in the hands of the murderers; the fair face that had smiled on him frozen with terror; brave men, the fighters of Montauban, the defenders of Angely, strewn dead through the dark lanes of the city. And now a gust of passion, and now a shudder of fear, seized him; and in any other assembly his agitation must have led to detection. But in that room were many twitching faces and trembling hands. Murder, cruel, midnight, and most foul, wrung even from the murderers her toll of horror. While some, to hide the nervousness they felt, babbled of what they would do, others betrayed by the intentness with which they awaited the signal, the dreadful anticipations that possessed their souls.

Before he had formed any plan, a movement took place near the door. The stairs shook beneath the sudden trampling of feet, a voice cried "De par le Roi! De par le Roi!" and the babel of the room died down. The throng swayed and fell back on either hand, and Marshal Tavannes entered, wearing half armour, with a white sash; he was followed by six or eight gentlemen in like guise. Amid cries of "Jarnac! Jarnac!"--for to him the credit of that famous fight, nominally won by the King's brother, was popularly given--he advanced up the room, met the Provost of the merchants, and began to confer with him. Apparently he asked the latter to select some men who could be trusted on a special mission, for the Provost looked round and beckoned to his side one or two of higher rank than the herd, and then one or two of the most truculent aspect.

Tignonville trembled lest he should be singled out. He had hidden himself as well as he could at the rear of the crowd by the door; but his dress, so much above the common, rendered him conspicuous. He fancied that the Provost's eye ranged the crowd for him; and to avoid it and efface himself he moved a pace to his left.

The step was fatal. It saved him from the Provost, but it brought him face to face and eye to eye with Count Hannibal, who stood in the first rank at his brother's elbow. Tavannes stared an instant as if he doubted his eyesight. Then, as doubt gave slow place to certainty, and surprise to amazement, he smiled. And after a moment he looked another way.

Tignonville's heart gave a great bump and seemed to stand still. The lights whirled before his eyes, there was a roaring in his ears. He waited for the word that should denounce him. It did not come. And still it did not come; and Marshal Tavannes was turning. Yes, turning, and going; the Provost, bowing low, was attending him to the door; his suite were opening on either side to let him pass. And Count Hannibal? Count Hannibal was following also, as if nothing had occurred. As if he had seen nothing!

The young man caught his breath. Was it possible that he had imagined the start of recognition, the steady scrutiny, the sinister smile? No; for as Tavannes followed the others, he hung an instant on his heel, their eyes met again, and once more he smiled. In the next breath he was gone through the doorway, his spurs rang on the stairs; and the babel of the crowd, checked by the great man's presence, broke out anew, and louder.

Tignonville shuddered. He was saved as by a miracle; saved, he did not know how. But the respite, though its strangeness diverted his thoughts for a while, brought short relief. The horrors which impended over others surged afresh into his mind, and filled him with a maddening sense of impotence. To be one hour, only one short half-hour without! To run through the sleeping streets, and scream in the dull ears which a King's flatteries had stopped as with wool! To go up and down and shake into life the guests whose royal lodgings daybreak would turn to a shambles reeking with their blood! They slept, the gentle Teligny, the brave Pardaillan, the gallant Rochefoucauld, Piles the hero of St. Jean, while the cruel city stirred rustling about them, and doom crept whispering to the door. They slept, they and a thousand others, gentle and simple, young and old; while the half-mad Valois shifted between two opinions, and the Italian woman, accursed daughter of an accursed race, cried, "Hark!" at her window, and looked eastwards for the dawn.

And the women? The woman he was to marry? And the others? In an access of passion he thrust aside those who stood between, he pushed his way, disregarding complaints, disregarding opposition, to the door. But the pikes lay across it, and he could not utter a syllable to save his life. He would have flung himself on the doorkeepers, for he was losing control of himself; but as he drew back for the spring, a hand clutched his sleeve, and a voice he loathed hummed in his ear.

"No, fair play, noble sir; fair play!" the cripple Jehan muttered, forcibly drawing him aside. "All start together, and it's no man's loss. But if there is any little business," he continued, lowering his tone and peering with a cunning look into the other's face, "of your own, noble sir, or your friends', anything or anybody you want despatched, count on me. It were better, perhaps, you didn't appear in it yourself, and a man you can trust--"

"What do you mean?" the young man cried, recoiling from him.

"No need to look surprised, noble sir," the lean man, who had joined them, answered in a soothing tone. "Who kills to-night does God service, and who serves God much may serve himself a little. 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn,' says good Father Pezelay."

"Hear, hear!" the cripple chimed in eagerly, his impatience such that he danced on his toes. "He preaches as well as the good father his master! So frankly, noble sir, what is it? What is it? A woman grown ugly? A rich man grown old, with perchance a will in his chest? Or a young heir that stands in my lord's way? Whichever it be, or whatever it be, trust me and our friend here, and my butcher's gully shall cut the knot."

Tignonville shook his head.

"But something there is," the lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at Tignonville's clothes. It was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "Have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? If so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and we'll enlist."

"Ay, we know shops on the bridge where you can plunge your arm elbow-deep in gold," the cripple muttered, his eyes sparkling greedily. "There's Baillet's, noble sir! There's a shop for you! And there's the man's shop who works for the King. He's lame like me. And I know the way to all. Oh, it will be a merry night if they ring before the dawn. It must be near daybreak now. And what's that?"

Ay, what was it? A score of voices called for silence; a breathless hush fell on the crowd. A moment the fiercest listened, with parted lips and starting eyes. Then, "It was the bell!" cried one, "let us out!" "It was not!" cried another. "It was a pistol shot!" "Anyhow let us out!" the crowd roared in chorus; "let us out!" And they pressed in a furious mass towards the door, as if they would force it, signal or no signal.

But the pikemen stood fast, and the throng, checked in their first rush, turned on one another, and broke into wrangling and disputing; boasting, and calling Heaven and the saints to witness how thoroughly, how pitilessly, how remorselessly they would purge Paris of this leprosy when the signal did sound. Until again above the babel a man cried "Silence!" and again they listened. And this time, dulled by walls and distance, but unmistakable by the ears of fear or hate, the heavy note of a bell came to them on the hot night air. It was the boom, sullen and menacing, of the death signal.

The doorkeepers lowered their pikes, and with a wild rush, as of wolves swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the narrow passage. "A bas les Huguenots! Mort aux Huguenots!" they shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands, viler faces, they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets of Paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. For as it was here, so it was in a dozen other quarters.

Quickly as they streamed out--and to have issued more quickly would have been impossible--fiercely as they pushed and fought and clove their way, Tignonville was of the foremost. And for a moment, seeing the street clear before him and almost empty, the Huguenot thought that he might do something. He might outstrip the stream of rapine, he might carry the alarm; at worst he might reach his betrothed before harm befell her. But when he had sped fifty yards, his heart sank. True, none passed him; but under the spell of the alarm-bell the stones themselves seemed to turn to men. Houses, courts, alleys, the very churches vomited men. In a twinkling the street was alive with men, roared with them as with a rushing tide, gleamed with their lights and weapons, thundered with the volume of their thousand voices. He was no longer ahead, men were running before him, behind him, on his right hand and on his left. In every side-street, every passage, men were running; and not men only, but women, children, furious creatures without age or sex. And all the time the bell tolled overhead, tolled faster and faster, and louder and louder; and shots and screams, and the clash of arms, and the fall of strong doors began to swell the maelstrom of sound.

He was in the Rue St. Honore now, and speeding westward. But the flood still rose with him, and roared abreast of him. Nay, it outstripped him. When he came, panting, within sight of his goal, and lacked but a hundred paces of it, he found his passage barred by a dense mass of people moving slowly to meet him. In the heart of the press the light of a dozen torches shone on half as many riders mailed and armed; whose eyes, as they moved on, and the furious gleaming eyes of the rabble about them, never left the gabled roofs on their right. On these from time to time a white-clad figure showed itself, and passed from chimney-stack to chimney- stack, or, stooping low, ran along the parapet. Every time that this happened, the men on horseback pointed upwards and the mob foamed with rage.

Tignonville groaned, but he could not help. Unable to go forward, he turned, and with others hurrying, shouting, and brandishing weapons, he pressed into the Rue du Roule, passed through it, and gained the Bethizy. But here, as he might have foreseen, all passage was barred at the Hotel Ponthieu by a horde of savages, who danced and yelled and sang songs round the Admiral's body, which lay in the middle of the way; while to right and left men were bursting into houses and forcing new victims into the street. The worst had happened there, and he turned panting, regained the Rue St. Honore, and, crossing it and turning left-handed, darted through side streets until he came again into the main thoroughfare a little beyond the Croix du Tiroir, that marked the corner of Mademoiselle's house.

Here his last hope left him. The street swarmed with bands of men hurrying to and fro as in a sacked city. The scum of the Halles, the rabble of the quarter poured this way and that, here at random, there swayed and directed by a few knots of men-at-arms, whose corselets reflected the glare of a hundred torches. At one time and within sight, three or four houses were being stormed. On every side rose heart-rending cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of "To the river!" The most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the Seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant Normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles and boat-hooks.

All this Tignonville saw, though his eyes, leaping the turmoil, looked only to the door at which he had left Mademoiselle a few hours earlier. There a crowd of men pressed and struggled; but from the spot where he stood he could see no more. That was enough, however. Rage nerved him, and despair; his world was dying round him. If he could not save her he would avenge her. Recklessly he plunged into the tumult; blade in hand, with vigorous blows he thrust his way through, his white sleeve and the white cross in his hat gaining him passage until he reached the fringe of the band who beset the door. Here his first attempt to pass failed; and he might have remained hampered by the crowd, if a squad of archers had not ridden up. As they spurred to the spot, heedless over whom they rode, he clutched a stirrup, and was borne with them into the heart of the crowd. In a twinkling he stood on the threshold of the house, face to face and foot to foot with Count Hannibal, who stood also on the threshold, but with his back to the door, which, unbarred and unbolted, gaped open behind him.

CHAPTER V. 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 to-night, 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."

"I?"

"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, or 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 broad sweep of the 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!"

CHAPTER 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 went on 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 curse 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.

CHAPTER 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 dryly, "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 muttered, 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 eye 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; 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, Philippa 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.

CHAPTER 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 gunshots; 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 burl 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 haycart, 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 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.