Count Hannibal by Stanley J. Weyman

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"Ay, ay!" said Badelon. "And if you fail of your stroke I will not fail
of mine! I shall be there, and I will see to it he goes! I shall be
there!"

"You?"

"Ay, why not?" the old man answered quietly. "I may halt on this leg for
aught I know, and come to starve on crutches like old Claude Boiteux who
was at the taking of Milan and now begs in the passage under the
Chatelet."

"Bah, man, you will get a new lord!"

Badelon nodded. "Ay, a new lord with new ways!" he answered slowly and
thoughtfully. "And I am tired. They are of another sort, lords now,
than they were when I was young. It was a word and a blow then. Now I
am old, with most it is--'Old hog, your distance! You scent my lady!'
Then they rode, and hunted, and tilted year in and year out, and summer
or winter heard the lark sing. Now they are curled, and paint
themselves, and lie in silk and toy with ladies--who shamed to be seen at
Court or board when I was a boy--and love better to hear the mouse squeak
than the lark sing."

"Still, if I give you my gold chain," Count Hannibal answered quietly,
"'twill keep you from that."

"Give it to Bigot," the old man answered. The splint he was fashioning
had fallen on his knees, and his eyes were fixed on the distance of his
youth. "For me, my lord, I am tired, and I go with you. I go with you.
It is a good death to die biting before the strength be quite gone. Have
the dagger too, if you please, and I'll fit it within the splint right
neatly. But I shall be there--"

"And you'll strike home?" Tavannes cried eagerly. He raised himself on
his elbow, a gleam of joy in his gloomy eyes.

"Have no fear, my lord. See, does it tremble?" He held out his hand.
"And when you are sped, I will try the Spanish stroke--upwards with a
turn ere you withdraw, that I learned from Ruiz--on the shaven pate. I
see them about me now!" the old man continued, his face flushing, his
form dilating. "It will be odd if I cannot snatch a sword and hew down
three to go with Tavannes! And Bigot, he will see my lord the Marshal by-
and-by; and as I do to the priest, the Marshal will do to Montsoreau. Ho!
ho! He will teach him the _coup de Jarnac_, never fear!" And the old
man's moustaches curled up ferociously.

Count Hannibal's eyes sparkled with joy. "Old dog!" he cried--and he
held his hand to the veteran, who brushed it reverently with his lips--"we
will go together then! Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes!"

"Touches Tavannes!" Badelon cried, the glow of battle lighting his
bloodshot eyes. He rose to his feet. "Touches Tavannes! You mind at
Jarnac--"

"Ah! At Jarnac!"

"When we charged their horse, was my boot a foot from yours, my lord?"

"Not a foot!"

"And at Dreux," the old man continued with a proud, elated gesture, "when
we rode down the German pikemen--they were grass before us, leaves on the
wind, thistledown--was it not I who covered your bridle hand, and swerved
not in the _melee_?"

"It was! It was!"

"And at St. Quentin, when we fled before the Spaniard--it was his day,
you remember, and cost us dear--"

"Ay, I was young then," Tavannes cried in turn, his eyes glistening. "St.
Quentin! It was the tenth of August. And you were new with me, and
seized my rein--"

"And we rode off together, my lord--of the last, of the last, as God sees
me! And striking as we went, so that they left us for easier game."

"It was so, good sword! I remember it as if it had been yesterday!"

"And at Cerisoles, the Battle of the Plain, in the old Spanish wars, that
was most like a joust of all the pitched fields I ever saw--at Cerisoles,
where I caught your horse? You mind me? It was in the shock when we
broke Guasto's line--"

"At Cerisoles?" Count Hannibal muttered slowly. "Why, man, I--"

"I caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? You remember, my lord? And
at Landriano, where Leyva turned the tables on us again."

Count Hannibal stared. "Landriano?" he muttered bluntly. "'Twas in '29,
forty years ago and more! My father, indeed--"

"And at Rome--at Rome, my lord? _Mon Dieu_! in the old days at Rome!
When the Spanish company scaled the wall--Ruiz was first, I next--was it
not my foot you held? And was it not I who dragged you up, while the
devils of Swiss pressed us hard? Ah, those were days, my lord! I was
young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning--"

"You rave!" Tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. "Rome? You
rave, old man! Why, I was not born in those days. My father even was a
boy! It was in '27 you sacked it--five-and-forty years ago!"

The old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused
suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. The light died out
of his eyes--as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink,
even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down.

"No, I remember," he muttered slowly. "It was Prince Philibert of
Chalons, my lord of Orange."

"Dead these forty years!"

"Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at
his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "And I grow
childish! 'Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but
have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay,
all dead!"

He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile
in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The
day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun
still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to
fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance
as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past
before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in
sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the
sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had
spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman.

She would not now be his. He had played highly, and he would lose
highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of
him highly. Had she begun to think of him at all? In the chamber of the
inn at Angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and
warmth, a shadow of turning to him. It had pleased him to think so, at
any rate. It pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more
confident--that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville's, she
would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in
her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the
man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him.

It pleased him, that. It was almost all that was left to please
him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. But as the day wore on,
and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more
grievous, the frame of his mind altered. A sombre rage was born and grew
in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. To end thus, with
nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! To
die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen,
he who had seen Dreux and Jarnac, had defied the King, and dared to turn
the St. Bartholomew to his ends! To die thus, and leave her to that
puppet! Strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it
taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. Once, indeed, he raised
himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he
seemed about to speak. So that Bigot came hurriedly to him.

"My lord?"

"Water!" he said. "Water, fool!" And, having drunk, he turned his face
to the wall, lest he should name her or ask for her.

For the desire to see her before he died, to look into her eyes, to touch
her hand once, only once, assailed his mind and all but whelmed his will.
She had been with him, he knew it, in the night; she had left him only at
daybreak. But then, in his state of collapse, he had been hardly
conscious of her presence. Now to ask for her or to see her would stamp
him coward, say what he might to her. The proverb, that the King's face
gives grace, applied to her; and an overture on his side could mean but
one thing, that he sought her grace. And that he would not do though the
cold waters of death covered him more and more, and the coming of the
end--in that quiet chamber, while the September sun sank to the appointed
place--awoke wild longings and a wild rebellion in his breast. His
thoughts were very bitter, as he lay, his loneliness of the uttermost. He
turned his face to the wall.

In that posture he slept after a time, watched over by Bigot with looks
of rage and pity. And on the room fell a long silence. The sun had
lacked three hours of setting when he fell asleep. When he re-opened his
eyes, and, after lying for a few minutes between sleep and waking, became
conscious of his position, of the day, of the things which had happened,
and his helplessness--an awakening which wrung from him an involuntary
groan--the light in the room was still strong, and even bright. He
fancied for a moment that he had merely dozed off and awaked again; and
he continued to lie with his face to the wall, courting a return of
slumber.

But sleep did not come, and little by little, as he lay listening and
thinking and growing more restless, he got the fancy that he was alone.
The light fell brightly on the wall to which his face was turned; how
could that be if Bigot's broad shoulders still blocked the loophole?
Presently, to assure himself, he called the man by name.

He got no answer.

"Badelon!" he muttered. "Badelon!"

Had he gone, too, the old and faithful? It seemed so, for again no
answer came.

He had been accustomed all his life to instant service; to see the act
follow the word ere the word ceased to sound. And nothing which had gone
before, nothing which he had suffered since his defeat at Angers, had
brought him to feel his impotence and his position--and that the end of
his power was indeed come--as sharply as this. The blood rushed to his
head; almost the tears to eyes which had not shed them since boyhood, and
would not shed them now, weak as he was! He rose on his elbow and looked
with a full heart; it was as he had fancied. Badelon's stool was empty;
the embrasure--that was empty too. Through its narrow outlet he had a
tiny view of the shore and the low rocky hill, of which the summit shone
warm in the last rays of the setting sun.

The setting sun! Ay, for the lower part of the hill was growing cold;
the shore at its foot was grey. Then he had slept long, and the time was
come. He drew a deep breath and listened. But on all within and without
lay silence, a silence marked, rather than broken, by the dull fall of a
wave on the causeway. The day had been calm, but with the sunset a light
breeze was rising.

He set his teeth hard, and continued to listen. An hour before sunset
was the time they had named for the exchange. What did it mean? In five
minutes the sun would be below the horizon; already the zone of warmth on
the hillside was moving and retreating upwards. And Bigot and old
Badelon? Why had they left him while he slept? An hour before sunset!
Why, the room was growing grey, grey and dark in the corners, and--what
was that?

He started, so violently that he jarred his leg, and the pain wrung a
groan from him. At the foot of the bed, overlooked until then, a woman
lay prone on the floor, her face resting on her outstretched arms. She
lay without motion, her head and her clasped hands towards the loophole,
her thick, clubbed hair hiding her neck. A woman! Count Hannibal
stared, and, fancying he dreamed, closed his eyes, then looked again. It
was no phantasm. It was the Countess; it was his wife!

He drew a deep breath, but he did not speak, though the colour rose
slowly to his cheek. And slowly his eyes devoured her from head to foot,
from the hands lying white in the light below the window to the shod
feet; unchecked he took his fill of that which he had so much desired--the
seeing her! A woman prone, with all of her hidden but her hands: a
hundred acquainted with her would not have known her. But he knew her,
and would have known her from a hundred, nay from a thousand, by her
hands alone.

What was she doing here, and in this guise? He pondered; then he looked
from her for an instant, and saw that while he had gazed at her the sun
had set, the light had passed from the top of the hill; the world without
and the room within were growing cold. Was that the cause she no longer
lay quiet? He saw a shudder run through her, and a second; then it
seemed to him--or was he going mad?--that she moaned, and prayed in half-
heard words, and, wrestling with herself, beat her forehead on her arms,
and then was still again, as still as death. By the time the paroxysm
had passed, the last flush of sunset had faded from the sky, and the
hills were growing dark.

CHAPTER XXXVI. HIS KINGDOM.

Count Hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once.
Warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his
eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. A moment later she
met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. Instead, she stood quiet
and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw
not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second
shook her frame.

At length "It is over!" she whispered. "Patience, Monsieur; have no
fear, I will be brave. But I must give a little to him."

"To him!" Count Hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily, pale.

She smiled with an odd passionateness. "Who was my lover!" she cried,
her voice a-thrill. "Who will ever be my lover, though I have denied
him, though I have left him to die! It was just. He who has so tried me
knows it was just! He whom I have sacrificed--he knows it too, now! But
it is hard to be--just," with a quavering smile. "You who take all may
give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have--patience!"

Count Hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. A
moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. Then he sank
back on the bed.

"Water!" he muttered. "Water!"

She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to
his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so
still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause
he spoke.

"You have done that?" he whispered; "you have done that?"

"Yes," she answered, shuddering. "God forgive me! I have done that! I
had to do that, or--"

"And is it too late--to undo it?"

"It is too late." A sob choked her voice.

Tears--tears incredible, unnatural--welled from under Count Hannibal's
closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of
his beard.

"I would have gone," he muttered. "If you had spoken, I would have
spared you this."

"I know," she answered unsteadily; "the men told me."

"And yet--"

"It was just. And you are my husband," she replied. "More, I am the
captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, I
spared you in your weakness."

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu, Madame!" he cried, "at what a cost!"

And that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her
horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself
into her eyeballs, hung before her. For she knew that it was the cost to
_her_ he was counting. She knew that for himself he had ever held life
cheap, that he could have seen Tignonville suffer without a qualm. And
the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing--even on a
rival's life--because its was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as
few things could have moved her at that moment. She saw it of a piece
with all that had gone before, with all that had passed between them,
since that fatal Sunday in Paris. But she made no sign. More than she
had said she would not say; words of love, even of reconciliation, had no
place on her lips while he whom she had sacrificed awaited his burial.

And meantime the man beside her lay and found it incredible. "It was
just," she had said. And he knew it; Tignonville's folly--that and that
only had led them into the snare and caused his own capture. But what
had justice to do with the things of this world? In his experience, the
strong hand--that was justice, in France; and possession--that was law.
By the strong hand he had taken her, and by the strong hand she might
have freed herself.

And she had not. There was the incredible thing. She had chosen instead
to do justice! It passed belief. Opening his eyes on a silence which
had lasted some minutes, a silence rendered more solemn by the lapping
water without, Tavannes saw her kneeling in the dusk of the chamber, her
head bowed over his couch, her face hidden in her hands. He knew that
she prayed, and feebly he deemed the whole a dream. No scene akin to it
had had place in his life; and, weakened and in pain, he prayed that the
vision might last for ever, that he might never awake.

But by-and-by, wrestling with the dread thought of what she had done, and
the horror which would return upon her by fits and spasms, she flung out
a hand, and it fell on him. He started, and the movement, jarring the
broken limb, wrung from him a cry of pain. She looked up and was going
to speak, when a scuffling of feet under the gateway arch, and a confused
sound of several voices raised at once, arrested the words on her lips.
She rose to her feet and listened. Dimly he could see her face through
the dusk. Her eyes were on the door, and she breathed quickly.

A moment or two passed in this way, and then from the hurly-burly in the
gateway the footsteps of two men--one limped--detached themselves and
came nearer and nearer. They stopped without. A gleam of light shone
under the door, and some one knocked.

She went to the door, and, withdrawing the bar, stepped quickly back to
the bedside, where for an instant the light borne by those who entered
blinded her. Then, above the lanthorn, the faces of La Tribe and Bigot
broke upon her, and their shining eyes told her that they bore good news.
It was well, for the men seemed tongue-tied. The minister's fluency was
gone; he was very pale, and it was Bigot who in the end spoke for both.
He stepped forward, and, kneeling, kissed her cold hand.

"My lady," he said, "you have gained all, and lost nothing. Blessed be
God!"

"Blessed be God!" the minister wept. And from the passage without came
the sound of laughter and weeping and many voices, with a flutter of
lights and flying skirts, and women's feet.

She stared at him wildly, doubtfully, her hand at her throat.

"What?" she said, "he is not dead--M. de Tignonville?"

"No, he is alive," La Tribe answered, "he is alive." And he lifted up
his hands as if he gave thanks.

"Alive?" she cried. "Alive! Oh, Heaven is merciful. You are sure? You
are sure?"

"Sure, Madame, sure. He was not in their hands. He was dismounted in
the first shock, it seems, and, coming to himself after a time, crept
away and reached St. Gilles, and came hither in a boat. But the enemy
learned that he had not entered with us, and of this the priest wove his
snare. Blessed be God, who put it into your heart to escape it!"

The Countess stood motionless, and with closed eyes pressed her hands to
her temples. Once she swayed as if she would fall her length, and Bigot
sprang forward to support and save her. But she opened her eyes at that,
sighed very deeply, and seemed to recover herself.

"You are sure?" she said faintly. "It is no trick?"

"No, Madame, it is no trick," La Tribe answered. "M. de Tignonville is
alive, and here."

"Here!" She started at the word. The colour fluttered in her cheek.
"But the keys," she murmured. And she passed her hand across her brow.
"I thought--that I had them."

"He has not entered," the minister answered, "for that reason. He is
waiting at the postern, where he landed. He came, hoping to be of use to
you."

She paused a moment, and when she spoke again her aspect had undergone a
subtle change. Her head was high, a flush had risen to her cheeks, her
eyes were bright.

"Then," she said, addressing La Tribe, "do you, Monsieur, go to him, and
pray him in my name to retire to St. Gilles, if he can do so without
peril. He has no place here--now; and if he can go safely to his home it
will be well that he do so. Add, if you please, that Madame de Tavannes
thanks him for his offer of aid, but in her husband's house she needs no
other protection."

Bigot's eyes sparkled with joy.

The minister hesitated. "No more, Madame?" he faltered. He was tender-
hearted, and Tignonville was of his people.

"No more," she said gravely, bowing her head. "It is not M. de
Tignonville I have to thank, but Heaven's mercy, that I do not stand here
at this moment unhappy as I entered--a woman accursed, to be pointed at
while I live. And the dead"--she pointed solemnly through the dark
casement to the shore--"the dead lie there."

La Tribe went.

She stood a moment in thought, and then took the keys from the rough
stone window-ledge on which she had laid them when she entered. As the
cold iron touched her fingers she shuddered. The contact awoke again the
horror and misery in which she had groped, a lost thing, when she last
felt that chill.

"Take them," she said; and she gave them to Bigot. "Until my lord can
leave his couch they will remain in your charge, and you will answer for
all to him. Go, now, take the light; and in half an hour send Madame
Carlat to me."

A wave broke heavily on the causeway and ran down seething to the sea;
and another and another, filling the room with rhythmical thunders. But
the voice of the sea was no longer the same in the darkness, where the
Countess knelt in silence beside the bed--knelt, her head bowed on her
clasped hands, as she had knelt before, but with a mind how different,
with what different thoughts! Count Hannibal could see her head but
dimly, for the light shed upwards by the spume of the sea fell only on
the rafters. But he knew she was there, and he would fain, for his heart
was full, have laid his hand on her hair.

And yet he would not. He would not, out of pride. Instead he bit on his
harsh beard, and lay looking upward to the rafters, waiting what would
come. He who had held her at his will now lay at hers, and waited. He
who had spared her life at a price now took his own a gift at her hands,
and bore it.

"_Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes_--"

His mind went back by some chance to those words--the words he had
neither meant nor fulfilled. It passed from them to the marriage and the
blow; to the scene in the meadow beside the river; to the last ride
between La Fleche and Angers--the ride during which he had played with
her fears and hugged himself on the figure he would make on the morrow.
The figure? Alas! of all his plans for dazzling her had come--_this_!
Angers had defeated him, a priest had worsted him. In place of releasing
Tignonville after the fashion of Bayard and the Paladins, and in the
teeth of snarling thousands, he had come near to releasing him after
another fashion and at his own expense. Instead of dazzling her by his
mastery and winning her by his magnanimity, he lay here, owing her his
life, and so weak, so broken, that the tears of childhood welled up in
his eyes.

Out of the darkness a hand, cool and firm, slid into his, clasped it
tightly, drew it to warm lips, carried it to a woman's bosom.

"My lord," she murmured, "I was the captive of your sword, and you spared
me. Him I loved you took and spared him too--not once or twice. Angers,
also, and my people you would have saved for my sake. And you thought I
could do this! Oh! shame, shame!" But her hand held his always.

"You loved him," he muttered.

"Yes, I loved him," she answered slowly and thoughtfully. "I loved him."
And she fell silent a minute. Then, "And I feared you," she added, her
voice low. "Oh, how I feared you--and hated you!"

"And now?"

"I do not fear him," she answered, smiling in the darkness. "Nor hate
him. And for you, my lord, I am your wife and must do your bidding,
whether I will or no. I have no choice."

He was silent.

"Is that not so?" she asked.

He tried weakly to withdraw his hand.

But she clung to it. "I must bear your blows or your kisses. I must be
as you will and do as you will, and go happy or sad, lonely or with you,
as you will! As you will, my lord! For I am your chattel, your
property, your own. Have you not told me so?"

"But your heart," he cried fiercely, "is his! Your heart, which you told
me in the meadow could never be mine!"

"I lied," she murmured, laughing tearfully, and her hands hovered over
him. "It has come back! And it is on my lips."

And she leant over and kissed him. And Count Hannibal knew that he had
entered into his kingdom, the sovereignty of a woman's heart.

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