Count Hannibal by Stanley J. Weyman

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"Life or death, Madame," he answered solemnly. "Nay, more; for since
Providence has given me this chance of speaking to you, a thing of which
I despaired, I know that the burden is laid on us, and that it is guilt
or it is innocence, according as we refuse the burden or bear it."

"What is it, then?" she cried impatiently. "What is it?"

"I tried to speak to you this morning."

"Was it you, then, whom Madame St. Lo saw stalking me before dinner?

"It was."

She clasped her hands and heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank God,
Monsieur!" she replied. "You have lifted a weight from me. I fear
nothing in comparison of that. Nothing!"

"Alas!" he answered sombrely, "there is much to fear, for others if not
for ourselves! Do you know what that is which M. de Tavannes bears
always in his belt? What it is he carries with such care? What it was
he handed to you to keep while he bathed to-day?"

"Letters from the King."

"Yes, but the import of those letters?"

"No."

"And yet, should they be written in letters of blood!" the minister
exclaimed, his face kindling. "They should scorch the hands that hold
them and blister the eyes that read them. They are the fire and the
sword! They are the King's order to do at Angers as they have done in
Paris. To slay all of the religion who are found there--and they are
many! To spare none, to have mercy neither on the old man nor the unborn
child! See yonder hawk!" he continued, pointing with a shaking hand to a
falcon which hung light and graceful above the valley, the movement of
its wings invisible. "How it disports itself in the face of the sun! How
easy its way, how smooth its flight! But see, it drops upon its prey in
the rushes beside the brook, and the end of its beauty is slaughter! So
is it with yonder company!" His finger sank until it indicated the
little camp seated toy-like in the green meadow four hundred feet below
them, with every man and horse, and the very camp-kettle, clear-cut and
visible, though diminished by distance to fairy-like proportions. "So it
is with yonder company!" he repeated sternly. "They play and are merry,
and one fishes and another sleeps! But at the end of the journey is
death. Death for their victims, and for them the judgment!"

She stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind
her, and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the
little camp. The sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness
of an August afternoon. But his words went home so truly that the sunlit
landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called
up before the mind.

The Countess turned white and sick. "Are you sure?" she whispered at
last.

"Quite sure."

"Ah, God!" she cried, "are we never to have peace?" And turning from the
valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood. After
a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace.
"What do you want me to do?" she cried, despair in her voice. "What can
I do?"

"Were the letters he bears destroyed--"

"The letters?"

"Yes, were the letters destroyed," La Tribe answered relentlessly, "he
could do nothing! Nothing! Without that authority the magistrates of
Angers would not move. He could do nothing. And men and women and
children--men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for
vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them--will
live! Will live!" he repeated, with a softening eye. And with an all-
embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the
sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round. "Will live!"

She drew a deep breath. "And you have brought me here," she said, "to
ask me to do this?"

"I was sent here to ask you to do this."

"Why me? Why me?" she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him,
her face wan and colourless. "You come to me, a woman! Why to me?"

"You are his wife!"

"And he is my husband!"

"Therefore he trusts you," was the unyielding, the pitiless answer. "You,
and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this."

She gazed at him in astonishment. "And it is you who say that?" she
faltered, after a pause. "You who made us one, who now bid me betray
him, whom I have sworn to love? To ruin him whom I have sworn to
honour?"

"I do!" he answered solemnly. "On my head be the guilt, and on yours the
merit."

"Nay, but--" she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion--"do
you take both guilt and merit! You are a man," she continued, her words
coming quickly in her excitement, "he is but a man! Why do you not call
him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are
but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him? Staking your life
against his, with all those lives for prize? And save them or perish?
Why I, even I, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not
my husband! Surely you, you who are a man, and young--"

"Am no match for him in strength or arms," the minister answered sadly.
"Else would I do it! Else would I stake my life, Heaven knows, as gladly
to save their lives as I sit down to meat! But I should fail, and if I
failed all were lost. Moreover," he continued solemnly, "I am certified
that this task has been set for you. It was not for nothing, Madame, nor
to save one poor household that you were joined to this man; but to
ransom all these lives and this great city. To be the Judith of our
faith, the saviour of Angers, the--"

"Fool! Fool!" she cried. "Will you be silent?" And she stamped the
turf passionately, while her eyes blazed in her white face. "I am no
Judith, and no madwoman as you are fain to make me. Mad?" she continued,
overwhelmed with agitation, "My God, I would I were, and I should be free
from this!" And, turning, she walked a little way from him with the
gesture of one under a crushing burden.

He waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and still she did not
return. At length she came back, her bearing more composed; she looked
at him, and her eyes seized his and seemed as if they would read his
soul.

"Are you sure," she said, "of what you have told me? Will you swear that
the contents of these letters are as you say?"

"As I live," he answered gravely. "As God lives."

"And you know--of no other way, Monsieur? Of no other way?" she repeated
slowly and piteously.

"Of none, Madame, of none, I swear."

She sighed deeply, and stood sunk in thought. Then, "When do we reach
Angers?" she asked heavily.

"The day after to-morrow."

"I have--until the day after to-morrow?"

"Yes. To-night we lie near Vendome."

"And to-morrow night?"

"Near a place called La Fleche. It is possible," he went on with
hesitation--for he did not understand her--"that he may bathe to-morrow,
and may hand the packet to you, as he did to-day when I vainly sought
speech with you. If he does that--"

"Yes?" she said, her eyes on his face.

"The taking will be easy. But when he finds you have it not"--he
faltered anew--"it may go hard with you."

She did not speak.

"And there, I think, I can help you. If you will stray from the party, I
will meet you and destroy the letter. That done--and would God it were
done already--I will take to flight as best I can, and you will raise the
alarm and say that I robbed you of it! And if you tear your dress--"

"No," she said.

He looked a question.

"No!" she repeated in a low voice. "If I betray him I will not lie to
him! And no other shall pay the price! If I ruin him it shall be
between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!"

He shook his head. "I do not know," he murmured, "what he may do to
you!"

"Nor I," she said proudly. "That will be for him."

* * * * *

Curious eyes had watched the two as they climbed the hill. For the path
ran up the slope to the gap which served for gate, much as the path leads
up to the Castle Beautiful in old prints of the Pilgrim's journey, and
Madame St. Lo had marked the first halt and the second, and, noting every
gesture, had lost nothing of the interview save the words. But until the
two, after pausing a moment, passed out of sight she made no sign. Then
she laughed. And as Count Hannibal, at whom the laugh was aimed, did not
heed her, she laughed again. And she hummed the line of Ronsard.

Still he would not be roused, and, piqued, she had recourse to words.

"I wonder what you would do," she said, "if the old lover followed us,
and she went off with him!"

"She would not go," he answered coldly, and without looking up.

"But if he rode off with her?"

"She would come back on her feet!"

Madame St. Lo's prudence was not proof against that. She had the woman's
inclination to hide a woman's secret; and she had not intended, when she
laughed, to do more than play with the formidable man with whom so few
dared to play. Now, stung by his tone and his assurance, she must needs
show him that his trustfulness had no base. And, as so often happens in
the circumstances, she went a little farther than the facts bore her.

"Any way, he has followed us so far!" she cried viciously.

"M. de Tignonville?"

"Yes. I saw him this morning while you were bathing. She left me and
went into the little coppice. He came down the other side of the brook,
stooping and running, and went to join her."

"How did he cross the brook?"

Madame St. Lo blushed. "Old Badelon was there, gathering simples," she
said. "He scared him. And he crawled away."

"Then he did not cross?"

"No. I did not say he did!"

"Nor speak to her?"

"No. But if you think it will pass so next time--you do not know much of
women!"

"Of women generally, not much," he answered, grimly polite. "Of this
woman a great deal!"

"You looked in her big eyes, I suppose!" Madame St. Lo cried with heat.
"And straightway fell down and worshipped her!" She liked rather than
disliked the Countess; but she was of the lightest, and the least
opposition drove her out of her course. "And you think you know her! And
she, if she could save you from death by opening an eye, would go with a
patch on it till her dying day! Take my word for it, Monsieur, between
her and her lover you will come to harm."

Count Hannibal's swarthy face darkened a tone, and his eyes grew a very
little smaller.

"I fancy that he runs the greater risk," he muttered.

"You may deal with him, but, for her--"

"I can deal with her. You deal with some women with a whip--"

"You would whip me, I suppose?"

"Yes," he said quietly. "It would do you good, Madame. And with other
women otherwise. There are women who, if they are well frightened, will
not deceive you. And there are others who will not deceive you though
they are frightened. Madame de Tavannes is of the latter kind."

"Wait! Wait and see!" Madame cried in scorn.

"I am waiting."

"Yes! And whereas if you had come to me I could have told her that about
M. de Tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting
and waiting and waiting until one fine day you'll wake up and find Madame
gone, and--"

"Then I'll take a wife I can whip!" he answered, with a look which
apprised her how far she had carried it. "But it will not be you, sweet
cousin. For I have no whip heavy enough for your case."

CHAPTER XXI. SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT.

We noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a
stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost
to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a
retiring foe. But there are concessions which touch even a good woman's
conscience; and Madame de Tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and
with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy,
shrank appalled before the task which confronted her.

To ignore what La Tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement
on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole
city from massacre--this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish,
that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. But to take the
only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that,
the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not
devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against
punishment. And the Countess was no fanatic. No haze of bigotry
glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than
its own. Even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its
ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay
upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as
he would see her.

True, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might
pass for punishment. But he had saved her life where many had perished;
and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. In
return for which she was to ruin him? It was not hard to imagine what he
would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him.

She pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the weltering sun in
their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the
bracken which fringed the track. Across breezy heaths and over downs,
through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature
fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a
world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world--from
which they came and to which they must return--that she could have wept
in anguish, cursing God for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on
creation. The gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and
swaying stirrups--and singing now a refrain from Ronsard, and now one of
those verses of Marot's psalms which all the world had sung three decades
before--wore their most lamb-like aspect. Behind them Madame St. Lo
chattered to Suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or
planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at
Angers. And the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came
to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. In
time of war death's shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is
out of mind. Of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of
the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of Vendome, three only wore faces
attuned to the cruel August week just ending; three only, like dark beads
strung far apart on a gay nun's rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in
their places. The Countess was one--the others were the two men whose
thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, La Tribe's
with sombre fire in their depths, Count Hannibal's fraught with a gloomy
speculation, which belied his brave words to Madame St. Lo.

He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not
touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her
young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the
darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La
Tribe was single-minded.

This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-
wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the
squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was
hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and
looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which
marked where Vendome stood.

"Another league," Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light
fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'Tis pure and dry
here," he said. "Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water.
I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame?"

"I prefer this," she answered in a low voice.

"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me God's
heaven."

"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her
thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.

He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the
gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but
she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to
give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared
aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor
of Nature's cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining
of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some
clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the
monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took
the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all
in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude
men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew
not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.

The Countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool
gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft
glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and
the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke
indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its
insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.

"Yet, I believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself.
"Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!"

And though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which
her soul shrank! The woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out
against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for
choosing evil, or good, ease for herself or life for others. But the
moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should
be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no
shame and no suffering seemed--for the moment at least--too great a price
to pay for the lives of little children. Love had been taken from her
life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity--that
must go, too!

She felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and
the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night.
But things fell out in a manner she had not pictured. They halted before
noon on the north bank of the Loir, in a level meadow with lines of
poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the
soft shimmer of leaves. Blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky,
flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, Italian
fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair. A road ran across the meadow
to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had
conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself.

Presently Madame St. Lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have
it. The poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a
hermit--in a meadow--was no longer to her taste.

"Let us go on the water!" she cried. "Presently you will go to bathe,
Monsieur, and leave us to grill!"

"Two livres to the man who will fetch the boat!" Count Hannibal cried.

In less than half a minute three men had thrown off their boots, and were
swimming across, amid the laughter and shouts of their fellows. In five
minutes the boat was brought.

It was not large and would hold no more than four. Tavannes' eye fell on
Carlat.

"You understand a boat," he said. "Go with Madame St. Lo. And you, M.
La Tribe."

"But you are coming?" Madame St. Lo cried, turning to the Countess. "Oh,
Madame," with a curtsey, "you are not? You--"

"Yes, I will come," the Countess answered.

"I shall bathe a short distance up the stream," Count Hannibal said. He
took from his belt the packet of letters, and as Carlat held the boat for
Madame St. Lo to enter, he gave it to the Countess, as he had given it to
her yesterday. "Have a care of it, Madame," he said in a low voice, "and
do not let it pass out of your hands. To lose it may be to lose my
head."

The colour ebbed from her cheeks. In spite of herself her shaking hand
put back the packet. "Had you not better then--give it to Bigot?" she
faltered.

"He is bathing."

"Let him bathe afterwards."

"No," he answered almost harshly; he found a species of pleasure in
showing her that, strange as their relations were, he trusted her. "No;
take it, Madame. Only have a care of it."

She took it then, hid it in her dress, and he turned away; and she turned
towards the boat. La Tribe stood beside the stern, holding it for her to
enter, and as her fingers rested an instant on his arm their eyes met.
His were alight, his arm even quivered; and she shuddered.

She avoided looking at him a second time, and this was easy, since he
took his seat in the bows beyond Carlat, who handled the oars. Silently
the boat glided out on the surface of the stream, and floated downwards,
Carlat now and again touching an oar, and Madame St. Lo chattering gaily
in a voice which carried far on the water. Now it was a flowering rush
she must have, now a green bough to shield her face from the sun's
reflection; and now they must lie in some cool, shadowy pool under fern-
clad banks, where the fish rose heavily, and the trickle of a rivulet
fell down over stones.

It was idyllic. But not to the Countess. Her face burned, her temples
throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to
steady her pulses. The packet within her dress scorched her. The great
city and its danger, Tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action,
the irrevocableness of action hurried through her brain. The knowledge
that she must act now--or never--pressed upon her with distracting force.
Her hand felt the packet, and fell again nerveless.

"The sun has caught you, _ma mie_," Madame St. Lo said. "You should ride
in a mask as I do."

"I have not one with me," she muttered, her eyes on the water.

"And I but an old one. But at Angers--"

The Countess heard no more; on that word she caught La Tribe's eye. He
was beckoning to her behind Carlat's back, pointing imperiously to the
water, making signs to her to drop the packet over the side. When she
did not obey--she felt sick and faint--she saw through a mist his brow
grow dark. He menaced her secretly. And still the packet scorched her;
and twice her hand went to it, and dropped again empty.

On a sudden Madame St. Lo cried out. The bank on one side of the stream
was beginning to rise more boldly above the water, and at the head of the
steep thus formed she had espied a late rosebush in bloom; nothing would
now serve but she must land at once and plunder it. The boat was put in
therefore, she jumped ashore, and began to scale the bank.

"Go with Madame!" La Tribe cried, roughly nudging Carlat in the back. "Do
you not see that she cannot climb the bank? Up, man, up!"

The Countess opened her mouth to cry "No!" but the word died half-born on
her lips; and when the steward looked at her, uncertain what she had
said, she nodded.

"Yes, go!" she muttered. She was pale.

"Yes, man, go!" cried the minister, his eyes burning. And he almost
pushed the other out of the boat.

The next second the craft floated from the bank, and began to drift
downwards. La Tribe waited until a tree interposed and hid them from the
two whom they had left; then he leaned forward.

"Now, Madame!" he cried imperiously. "In God's name, now!"

"Oh!" she cried. "Wait! Wait! I want to think."

"To think?"

"He trusted me!" she wailed. "He trusted me! How can I do it?"
Nevertheless, and even while she spoke, she drew forth the packet.

"Heaven has given you the opportunity!"

"If I could have stolen it!" she answered.

"Fool!" he returned, rocking himself to and fro, and fairly beside
himself with impatience. "Why steal it? It is in your hands! You have
it! It is Heaven's own opportunity, it is God's opportunity given to
you!"

For he could not read her mind nor comprehend the scruple which held her
hand. He was single-minded. He had but one aim, one object. He saw the
haggard faces of brave men hopeless; he heard the dying cries of women
and children. Such an opportunity of saving God's elect, of redeeming
the innocent, was in his eyes a gift from Heaven. And having these
thoughts and seeing her hesitate--hesitate when every movement caused him
agony, so imperative was haste, so precious the opportunity--he could
bear the suspense no longer. When she did not answer he stooped forward,
until his knees touched the thwart on which Carlat had sat; then, without
a word, he flung himself forward, and, with one hand far extended,
grasped the packet.

Had he not moved, she would have done his will; almost certainly she
would have done it. But, thus attacked, she resisted instinctively; she
clung to the letters.

"No!" she cried. "No! Let go, Monsieur!" And she tried to drag the
packet from him.

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