Count Hannibal by Stanley J. Weyman

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The servant led him to a parlour, a cool shady room on the farther side
of the tiny quadrangle, and, muttering something inaudible, withdrew. A
moment later a frolicsome laugh, and the light flutter of a woman's skirt
as she tripped across the court, brought the blood to his cheeks. He
went a step nearer to the door, and his eyes grew bright.

CHAPTER X. MADAME ST. LO.

So far excitement had supported Tignonville in his escape. It was only
when he knew himself safe, when he heard Madame St. Lo's footstep in the
courtyard and knew that in a moment he would see her, that he knew also
that he was failing for want of food. The room seemed to go round with
him; the window to shift, the light to flicker. And then again, with
equal abruptness, he grew strong and steady and perfectly master of
himself. Nay, never had he felt a confidence in himself so overwhelming
or a capacity so complete. The triumph of that which he had done, the
knowledge that of so many he, almost alone, had escaped, filled his brain
with a delicious and intoxicating vanity. When the door opened, and
Madame St. Lo appeared on the threshold, he advanced holding out his
arms. He expected that she would fall into them.

But Madame only backed and curtseyed, a mischievous light in her eyes.

"A thousand thanks, Monsieur!" she said, "but you are more ready than I!"
And she remained by the door.

"I have come to you through all!" he cried, speaking loudly because of a
humming in his ears. "They are lying in the streets! They are dying,
are dead, are hunted, are pursued, are perishing! But I have come
through all to you!"

She curtseyed anew. "So I see, Monsieur!" she answered. "I am
flattered!" But she did not advance, and gradually, light-headed as he
was, he began to see that she looked at him with an odd closeness. And
he took offence.

"I say, Madame, I have come to you!" he repeated. "And you do not seem
pleased!"

She came forward a step and looked at him still more oddly.

"Oh yes," she said. "I am pleased, M. de Tignonville. It is what I
intended. But tell me how you have fared. You are not hurt?"

"Not a hair!" he cried boastfully. And he told her in a dozen windy
sentences of the adventure of the haycart and his narrow escape. He
wound up with a foolish meaningless laugh.

"Then you have not eaten for thirty-six hours?" she said. And when he
did not answer, "I understand," she continued, nodding and speaking as to
a child. And she rang a silver handbell and gave an order.

She addressed the servant in her usual tone, but to Tignonville's ear her
voice seemed to fall to a whisper. Her figure--she was small and fairy-
like--began to sway before him; and then in a moment, as it seemed to
him, she was gone, and he was seated at a table, his trembling fingers
grasping a cup of wine which the elderly servant who had admitted him was
holding to his lips. On the table before him were a spit of partridges
and a cake of white bread. When he had swallowed a second mouthful of
wine--which cleared his eyes as by magic--the man urged him to eat. And
he fell to with an appetite that grew as he ate.

By-and-by, feeling himself again, he became aware that two of Madame's
women were peering at him through the open doorway. He looked that way
and they fled giggling into the court; but in a moment they were back
again, and the sound of their tittering drew his eyes anew to the door.
It was the custom of the day for ladies of rank to wait on their
favourites at table; and he wondered if Madame were with them, and why
she did not come and serve him herself.

But for a while longer the savour of the roasted game took up the major
part of his thoughts; and when prudence warned him to desist, and he sat
back, satisfied after his long fast, he was in no mood to be critical.
Perhaps--for somewhere in the house he heard a lute--Madame was
entertaining those whom she could not leave? Or deluding some who might
betray him if they discovered him?

From that his mind turned back to the streets and the horrors through
which he had passed; but for a moment and no more. A shudder, an emotion
of prayerful pity, and he recalled his thoughts. In the quiet of the
cool room, looking on the sunny, vine-clad court, with the tinkle of the
lute and the murmurous sound of women's voices in his ears, it was hard
to believe that the things from which he had emerged were real. It was
still more unpleasant, and as futile, to dwell on them. A day of
reckoning would come, and, if La Tribe were right, the cause would rally,
bristling with pikes and snorting with war-horses, and the blood spilled
in this wicked city would cry aloud for vengeance. But the hour was not
yet. He had lost his mistress, and for that atonement must be exacted.
But in the present another mistress awaited him, and as a man could only
die once, and might die at any minute, so he could only live once, and in
the present. Then _vogue la galere_!

As he roused himself from this brief reverie and fell to wondering how
long he was to be left to himself, a rosebud tossed by an unseen hand
struck him on the breast and dropped to his knees. To seize it and kiss
it gallantly, to spring to his feet and look about him were instinctive
movements. But he could see no one; and, in the hope of surprising the
giver, he stole to the window. The sound of the lute and the distant
tinkle of laughter persisted. The court, save for a page, who lay asleep
on a bench in the gallery, was empty. Tignonville scanned the boy
suspiciously; a male disguise was often adopted by the court ladies, and
if Madame would play a prank on him, this was a thing to be reckoned
with. But a boy it seemed to be, and after a while the young man went
back to his seat.

Even as he sat down, a second flower struck him more sharply in the face,
and this time he darted not to the window but to the door. He opened it
quickly and looked out, but again he was too late.

"I shall catch you presently, _ma reine_!" he murmured tenderly, with
intent to be heard. And he closed the door. But, wiser this time, he
waited with his hand on the latch until he heard the rustling of a skirt,
and saw the line of light at the foot of the door darkened by a shadow.
That moment he flung the door wide, and, clasping the wearer of the skirt
in his arms, kissed her lips before she had time to resist.

Then he fell back as if he had been shot! For the wearer of the skirt,
she whom he had kissed, was Madame St. Lo's woman, and behind her stood
Madame herself, laughing, laughing, laughing with all the gay abandonment
of her light little heart.

"Oh, the gallant gentleman!" she cried, and clapped her hands effusively.
"Was ever recovery so rapid? Or triumph so speedy? Suzanne, my child;
you surpass Venus. Your charms conquer before they are seen!"

M. de Tignonville had put poor Suzanne from him as if she burned; and hot
and embarrassed, cursing his haste, he stood looking awkwardly at them.

"Madame," he stammered at last, "you know quite well that--"

"Seeing is believing!"

"That I thought it was you!"

"Oh, what I have lost!" she replied. And she looked archly at Suzanne,
who giggled and tossed her head.

He was growing angry. "But, Madame," he protested, "you know--"

"I know what I know, and I have seen what I have seen!" Madame answered
merrily. And she hummed,

"'Ce fut le plus grand jour d'este
Que m'embrassa la belle Suzanne!'

Oh yes, I know what I know!" she repeated. And she fell again to
laughing immoderately; while the pretty piece of mischief beside her hung
her head, and, putting a finger in her mouth, mocked him with an
affectation of modesty.

The young man glowered at them between rage and embarrassment. This was
not the reception, nor this the hero's return to which he had looked
forward. And a doubt began to take form in his mind. The mistress he
had pictured would not laugh at kisses given to another; nor forget in a
twinkling the straits through which he had come to her, the hell from
which he had plucked himself! Possibly the court ladies held love as
cheap as this, and lovers but as playthings, butts for their wit, and
pegs on which to hang their laughter. But--but he began to doubt, and,
perplexed and irritated, he showed his feelings.

"Madame," he said stiffly, "a jest is an excellent thing. But pardon me
if I say that it is ill played on a fasting man."

Madame desisted from laughter that she might speak. "A fasting man?" she
cried. "And he has eaten two partridges!"

"Fasting from love, Madame."

Madame St. Lo held up her hands. "And it's not two minutes since he took
a kiss!"

He winced, was silent a moment, and then seeing that he got nothing by
the tone he had adopted he cried for quarter.

"A little mercy, Madame, as you are beautiful," he said, wooing her with
his eyes. "Do not plague me beyond what a man can bear. Dismiss, I pray
you, this good creature--whose charms do but set off yours as the star
leads the eye to the moon--and make me the happiest man in the world by
so much of your company as you will vouchsafe to give me."

"That may be but a very little," she answered, letting her eyes fall
coyly, and affecting to handle the tucker of her low ruff. But he saw
that her lip twitched; and he could have sworn that she mocked him to
Suzanne, for the girl giggled.

Still by an effort he controlled his feelings. "Why so cruel?" he
murmured, in a tone meant for her alone, and with a look to match. "You
were not so hard when I spoke with you in the gallery, two evenings ago,
Madame."

"Was I not?" she asked. "Did I look like this? And this?" And,
languishing, she looked at him very sweetly after two fashions.

"Something."

"Oh, then I meant nothing!" she retorted with sudden vivacity. And she
made a face at him, laughing under his nose. "I do that when I mean
nothing, Monsieur! Do you see? But you are Gascon, and given, I fear,
to flatter yourself."

Then he saw clearly that she played with him: and resentment, chagrin,
pique got the better of his courtesy.

"I flatter myself?" he cried, his voice choked with rage. "It may be I
do now, Madame, but did I flatter myself when you wrote me this note?"
And he drew it out and flourished it in her face. "Did I imagine when I
read this? Or is it not in your hand? It is a forgery, perhaps," he
continued bitterly. "Or it means nothing? Nothing, this note bidding me
be at Madame St. Lo's at an hour before midnight--it means nothing? At
an hour before midnight, Madame!"

"On Saturday night? The night before last night?"

"On Saturday night, the night before last night! But Madame knows
nothing of it? Nothing, I suppose?"

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled cheerfully on him. "Oh yes, I
wrote it," she said. "But what of that, M. de Tignonville?"

"What of that?"

"Yes, Monsieur, what of that? Did you think it was written out of love
for you?"

He was staggered for the moment by her coolness. "Out of what, then?" he
cried hoarsely. "Out of what, then, if not out of love?"

"Why, out of pity, my little gentleman!" she answered sharply. "And
trouble thrown away, it seems. Love!" And she laughed so merrily and
spontaneously it cut him to the heart. "No; but you said a dainty thing
or two, and smiled a smile; and like a fool, and like a woman, I was
sorry for the innocent calf that bleated so prettily on its way to the
butcher's! And I would lock you up, and save your life, I thought, until
the blood-letting was over. Now you have it, M. de Tignonville, and I
hope you like it."

Like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish
illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of
ill-fortune? Like it, when the prospect of her charms had bribed him
from the path of fortitude, when for her sake he had been false to his
mistress, to his friends, to his faith, to his cause? Like it, when he
knew as he listened that all was lost, and nothing gained, not even this
poor, unworthy, shameful compensation? Like it? No wonder that words
failed him, and he glared at her in rage, in misery, in shame.

"Oh, if you don't like it," she continued, tossing her head after a
momentary pause, "then you should not have come! It is of no profit to
glower at me, Monsieur. You do not frighten me."

"I would--I would to God I had not come!" he groaned.

"And, I dare say, that you had never seen me--since you cannot win me!"

"That too," he exclaimed.

She was of an extraordinary levity, and at that, after staring at him a
moment, she broke into shrill laughter.

"A little more, and I'll send you to my cousin Hannibal!" she said. "You
do not know how anxious he is to see you. Have you a mind," with a
waggish look, "to play bride's man, M. de Tignonville? Or will you give
away the bride? It is not too late, though soon it will be!"

He winced, and from red grew pale. "What do you mean?" he stammered;
and, averting his eyes in shame, seeing now all the littleness, all the
baseness of his position, "Has he--married her?" he continued.

"Ho, ho!" she cried in triumph. "I've hit you now, have I, Monsieur?
I've hit you!" And mocking him, "Has he--married her?" she lisped. "No;
but he will marry her, have no fear of that! He will marry her. He
waits but to get a priest. Would you like to see what he says?" she
continued, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. "I had a note
from him yesterday. Would you like to see how welcome you'll be at the
wedding?" And she flaunted a piece of paper before his eyes.

"Give it me," he said.

She let him seize it the while she shrugged her shoulders. "It's your
affair, not mine," she said. "See it if you like, and keep it if you
like. Cousin Hannibal wastes few words."

That was true, for the paper contained but a dozen or fifteen words, and
an initial by way of signature.

"I may need your shaveling to-morrow afternoon. Send him, and
Tignonville in safeguard if he come.--H."

"I can guess what use he has for a priest," she said. "It is not to
confess him, I warrant. It's long, I fear, since Hannibal told his
beads."

M. de Tignonville swore. "I would I had the confessing of him!" he said
between his teeth.

She clapped her hands in glee. "Why should you not?" she cried. "Why
should you not? 'Tis time yet, since I am to send to-day and have not
sent. Will you be the shaveling to go confess or marry him?" And she
laughed recklessly. "Will you, M. de Tignonville? The cowl will mask
you as well as another, and pass you through the streets better than a
cut sleeve. He will have both his wishes, lover and clerk in one then.
And it will be pull monk, pull Hannibal with a vengeance."

Tignonville gazed at her, and as he gazed courage and hope awoke in his
eyes. What if, after all, he could undo the past? What if, after all,
he could retrace the false step he had taken, and place himself again
where he had been--by _her_ side?

"If you meant it!" he exclaimed, his breath coming fast. "If you only
meant what you say, Madame."

"If?" she answered, opening her eyes. "And why should I not mean it?"

"Because," he replied slowly, "cowl or no cowl, when I meet your cousin--"

"'Twill go hard with him?" she cried, with a mocking laugh. "And you
think I fear for him. That is it, is it?"

He nodded.

"I fear just _so much_ for him!" she retorted with contempt. "Just so
much!" And coming a step nearer to Tignonville she snapped her small
white fingers under his nose. "Do you see? No, M. de Tignonville," she
continued, "you do not know Count Hannibal if you think that he fears, or
that any fear for him. If you will beard the lion in his den, the risk
will be yours, not his!"

The young man's face glowed. "I take the risk!" he cried. "And I thank
you for the chance; that, Madame, whatever betide. But--"

"But what?" she asked, seeing that he hesitated and that his face fell.

"If he afterwards learn that you have played him a trick," he said, "will
he not punish you?"

"Punish me?"

He nodded.

Madame laughed her high disdain. "You do not yet know Hannibal de
Tavannes," she said. "He does not war with women."

CHAPTER XI. A BARGAIN.

It is the wont of the sex to snatch at an ell where an inch is offered,
and to press an advantage in circumstances in which a man, acknowledging
the claims of generosity, scruples to ask for more. The habit, now
ingrained, may have sprung from long dependence on the male, and is one
which a hundred instances, from the time of Judith downwards, prove to be
at its strongest where the need is greatest.

When Mademoiselle de Vrillac came out of the hour-long swoon into which
her lover's defection had cast her, the expectation of the worst was so
strong upon her that she could not at once credit the respite which
Madame Carlat hastened to announce. She could not believe that she still
lay safe, in her own room above stairs; that she was in the care of her
own servants, and that the chamber held no presence more hateful than
that of the good woman who sat weeping beside her.

As was to be expected, she came to herself sighing and shuddering,
trembling with nervous exhaustion. She looked for _him_, as soon as she
looked for any; and even when she had seen the door locked and double-
locked, she doubted--doubted, and shook and hid herself in the hangings
of the bed. The noise of the riot and rapine which prevailed in the
city, and which reached the ear even in that locked room--and although
the window, of paper, with an upper pane of glass, looked into a
courtyard--was enough to drive the blood from a woman's cheeks. But it
was fear of the house, not of the street, fear from within, not from
without, which impelled the girl into the darkest corner and shook her
wits. She could not believe that even this short respite was hers, until
she had repeatedly heard the fact confirmed at Madame Carlat's mouth.

"You are deceiving me!" she cried more than once. And each time she
started up in fresh terror. "He never said that he would not return
until to-morrow!"

"He did, my lamb, he did!" the old woman answered with tears. "Would I
deceive you?"

"He said he would not return?"

"He said he would not return until to-morrow. You had until to-morrow,
he said."

"And then?"

"He would come and bring the priest with him," Madame Carlat replied
sorrowfully.

"The priest? To-morrow!" Mademoiselle cried. "The priest!" and she
crouched anew with hot eyes behind the hangings of the bed, and,
shivering, hid her face.

But this for a time only. As soon as she had made certain of the
respite, and that she had until the morrow, her courage rose, and with it
the instinct of which mention has been made. Count Hannibal had granted
a respite; short as it was, and no more than the barest humanity
required, to grant one at all was not the act of the mere butcher who
holds the trembling lamb, unresisting, in his hands. It was an act--no
more, again be it said, than humanity required--and yet an act which
bespoke an expectation of some return, of some correlative advantage. It
was not in the part of the mere brigand. Something had been granted.
Something short of the utmost in the captor's power had been exacted. He
had shown that there were things he would not do.

Then might not something more be won from him? A further delay, another
point; something, no matter what, which could be turned to advantage?
With the brigand it is not possible to bargain. But who gives a little
may give more; who gives a day may give a week; who gives a week may give
a month. And a month? Her heart leapt up. A month seemed a lifetime,
an eternity, to her who had but until to-morrow!

Yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less
brave. To obtain aught from Tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to
ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him _before_ that to-morrow
which meant so much to her. It was necessary, in a word, to run some
risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not
hesitate. It might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not
only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of
decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. In that
case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case.

The position of the window, while it increased the women's safety,
debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that
which their ears afforded them. They had no means of judging whether
Tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in
the work of murder. Madame Carlat, indeed, had no desire to know
anything. In that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a
hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had
a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. To her,
therefore, the notion of sending for Tavannes, or communicating with him,
came as a thunderbolt. Was her mistress mad? Did she wish to court her
fate? To reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and
the men-servants were confined above. Those riders were grim, brutal
men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame,
clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of
horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror
tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied
imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris,
fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now
know.

For it was noon--or a little more--of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth,
"a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure
to kill and plunder." From the bridges, and particularly from the stone
bridge of Notre Dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and
Tignonville crouched in his haymow--Huguenots less fortunate were being
cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire
Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own
books. In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor--than
whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered
like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie,
seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being
beaten to death with bludgeons. Nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a
little later, what matters it?--M. de Tignonville's own cousin, Madame
d'Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands
of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in
the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.

Madame Carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. But
Mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded.

"If I am to be Monsieur's wife," she said with quivering nostrils, "shall
I fear his servants?"

And opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called. The
man who answered was a Norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low-
browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the
embodiment of the women's apprehensions. Moreover, his _patois_ of the
cider-land was little better than German to them; their southern, softer
tongue was sheer Italian to him. But he seemed not ill-disposed, or
Mademoiselle's air overawed him; and presently she made him understand,
and with a nod he descended to carry her message.

Then Mademoiselle's heart began to beat; and beat more quickly when she
heard _his_ step--alas! she knew it already, knew it from all others--on
the stairs. The table was set, the card must be played, to win or lose.
It might be that with the low opinion he held of women he would think her
reconciled to her lot; he would think this an overture, a step towards
kinder treatment, one more proof of the inconstancy of the lower and the
weaker sex, made to be men's playthings. And at that thought her eyes
grew hot with rage. But if it were so, she must still put up with it.
She must still put up with it! She had sent for him, and he was
coming--he was at the door!

He entered, and she breathed more freely. For once his face lacked the
sneer, the look of smiling possession, which she had come to know and
hate. It was grave, expectant, even suspicious; still harsh and dark,
akin, as she now observed, to the low-browed, furrowed face of the rider
who had summoned him. But the offensive look was gone, and she could
breathe.

He closed the door behind him, but he did not advance into the room.

"At your pleasure, Mademoiselle?" he said simply. "You sent for me, I
think."

She was on her feet, standing before him with something of the
submissiveness of Roxana before her conqueror.

"I did," she said; and stopped at that, her hand to her side as if she
could not continue. But presently in a low voice, "I have heard," she
went on, "what you said, Monsieur, after I lost consciousness."

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