Count Hannibal: Chapter 15

Chapter 15

THE BROTHER OF ST. MAGLOIRE.

As the exertion of power is for the most part pleasing, so the exercise
of that which a woman possesses over a man is especially pleasant. When
in addition a risk of no ordinary kind has been run, and the happy issue
has been barely expected--above all when the momentary gain seems an
augury of final victory--it is impossible that a feeling akin to
exultation should not arise in the mind, however black the horizon, and
however distant the fair haven.

The situation in which Count Hannibal left Mademoiselle de Vrillac will
be remembered. She had prevailed over him; but in return he had bowed
her to the earth, partly by subtle threats, and partly by sheer savagery.
He had left her weeping, with the words "Madame de Tavannes" ringing doom
in her ears, and the dark phantom of his will pointing onward to an
inevitable future. Had she abandoned hope, it would have been natural.

But the girl was of a spirit not long nor easily cowed; and Tavannes had
not left her half an hour before the reflection, that so far the honours
of the day were hers, rose up to console her. In spite of his power and
her impotence, she had imposed her will upon his; she had established an
influence over him, she had discovered a scruple which stayed him, and a
limit beyond which he would not pass. In the result she might escape;
for the conditions which he had accepted with an ill grace might prove
beyond his fulfilling. She might escape! True, many in her place would
have feared a worse fate and harsher handling. But there lay half the
merit of her victory. It had left her not only in a better position, but
with a new confidence in her power over her adversary. He would insist
on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could
look for no indulgence. But if the conditions proved to be beyond his
power, she believed that he would spare her: with an ill grace, indeed,
with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman's pride might
scarcely support. But he would spare her.

And if the worst befell her? She would still have the consolation of
knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had
ransomed those most dear to her. Owing to the position of her chamber,
she saw nothing of the excesses to which Paris gave itself up during the
remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the
following morning. But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards
below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed
frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. How could she prove
false to them? How doom them to perish, had there been no question of
her lover?

Of him she sat thinking by the hour together. She recalled with solemn
tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which
came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his
subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself.
She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was
her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for
himself, and which she quickly forgave him. The revulsion of feeling
which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from
him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have
seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis
demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she
still clung to him. Clung to him, not so much with the passion of the
mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has
now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life, but
sacrifice.

She had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that
day, and until late on the following day. Her own servants waited on
her, and it was known that below stairs Count Hannibal's riders kept
sullen ward behind barred doors and shuttered windows, refusing admission
to all who came. Now and again echoes of the riot which filled the
streets with bloodshed reached her ears: or word of the more striking
occurrences was brought to her by Madame Carlat. And early on this
second day, Monday, it was whispered that M. de Tavannes had not
returned, and that the men below were growing uneasy.

At last, when the suspense below and above was growing tense, it was
broken. Footsteps and voices were heard ascending the stairs, the
trampling and hubbub were followed by a heavy knock; perforce the door
was opened. While Mademoiselle, who had risen, awaited with a beating
heart she knew not what, a cowled father, in the dress of the monks of
St. Magloire, stood on the threshold, and, crossing himself, muttered the
words of benediction. He entered slowly.

No sight could have been more dreadful to Mademoiselle; for it set at
naught the conditions which she had so hardly exacted. What if Count
Hannibal were behind, were even now mounting the stairs, prepared to
force her to a marriage before this shaveling? Or ready to proceed, if
she refused, to the last extremity? Sudden terror taking her by the
throat choked her; her colour fled, her hand flew to her breast. Yet,
before the door had closed on Bigot, she had recovered herself.

"This intrusion is not by M. de Tavannes' orders!" she cried, stepping
forward haughtily. "This person has no business here. How dare you
admit him?"

The Norman showed his bearded visage a moment at the door.

"My lord's orders," he muttered sullenly. And he closed the door on
them.

She had a Huguenot's hatred of a cowl; and, in this crisis, her reasons
for fearing it. Her eyes blazed with indignation.

"Enough!" she cried, pointing, with a gesture of dismissal, to the door.
"Go back to him who sent you! If he will insult me, let him do it to my
face! If he will perjure himself, let him forswear himself in person.
Or, if you come on your own account," she continued, flinging prudence to
the winds, "as your brethren came to Philippa de Luns, to offer me the
choice you offered her, I give you her answer! If I had thought of
myself only, I had not lived so long! And rather than bear your presence
or hear your arguments--"

She came to a sudden, odd, quavering pause on the word; her lips remained
parted, she swayed an instant on her feet. The next moment Madame
Carlat, to whom the visitor had turned his shoulder, doubted her eyes,
for Mademoiselle was in the monk's arms!

"Clotilde! Clotilde!" he cried, and held her to him.

For the monk was M. de Tignonville! Under the cowl was the lover with
whom Mademoiselle's thoughts had been engaged. In this disguise, and
armed with Tavannes' note to Madame St. Lo--which the guards below knew
for Count Hannibal's hand, though they were unable to decipher the
contents--he had found no difficulty in making his way to her.

He had learned before he entered that Tavannes was abroad, and was aware,
therefore, that he ran little risk. But his betrothed, who knew nothing
of his adventures in the interval, saw in him one who came to her at the
greatest risk, across unnumbered perils, through streets swimming with
blood. And though she had never embraced him save in the crisis of the
massacre, though she had never called him by his Christian name, in the
joy of this meeting she abandoned herself to him, she clung to him
weeping, she forgot for the time his defection, and thought only of him
who had returned to her so gallantly, who brought into the room a breath
of Poitou, and the sea, and the old days, and the old life; and at the
sight of whom the horrors of the last two days fell from her--for the
moment.

And Madame Carlat wept also, and in the room was a sound of weeping. The
least moved was, for a certainty, M. de Tignonville himself, who, as we
know, had gone through much that day. But even his heart swelled, partly
with pride, partly with thankfulness that he had returned to one who
loved him so well. Fate had been kinder to him than he deserved; but he
need not confess that now. When he had brought off the _coup_ which he
had in his mind, he would hasten to forget that he had entertained other
ideas.

Mademoiselle had been the first to be carried away; she was also the
first to recover herself.

"I had forgotten," she cried suddenly, "I had forgotten," and she wrested
herself from his embrace with violence, and stood panting, her face
white, her eyes affrighted. "I must not! And you--I had forgotten that
too! To be here, Monsieur, is the worst office you can do me. You must
go! Go, Monsieur, in mercy I beg of you, while it is possible. Every
moment you are here, every moment you spend in this house, I shudder."

"You need not fear for me," he said, in a tone of bravado. He did not
understand.

"I fear for myself!" she answered. And then, wringing her hands, divided
between her love for him and her fear for herself, "Oh, forgive me!" she
said. "You do not know that he has promised to spare me, if he cannot
produce you, and--and--a minister? He has granted me that; but I thought
when you entered that he had gone back on his word, and sent a priest,
and it maddened me! I could not bear to think that I had gained nothing.
Now you understand, and you will pardon me, Monsieur? If he cannot
produce you I am saved. Go then, leave me, I beg, without a moment's
delay."

He laughed derisively as he turned back his cowl and squared his
shoulders.

"All that is over!" he said, "over and done with, sweet! M. de Tavannes
is at this moment a prisoner in the Arsenal. On my way hither I fell in
with M. de Biron, and he told me. The Grand Master, who would have had
me join his company, had been all night at Marshal Tavannes' hotel, where
he had been detained longer than he expected. He stood pledged to
release Count Hannibal on his return, but at my request he consented to
hold him one hour, and to do also a little thing for me."

The glow of hope which had transfigured her face faded slowly.

"It will not help," she said, "if he find you here."

"He will not! Nor you!"

"How, Monsieur?"

"In a few minutes," he explained--he could not hide his exultation, "a
message will come from the Arsenal in the name of Tavannes, bidding the
monk he sent to you bring you to him. A spoken message, corroborated by
my presence, should suffice: '_Bid the monk who is now with
Mademoiselle_,' it will run, '_bring her to me at the Arsenal, and let
four pikes guard them hither_.' When I begged M. de Biron to do this, he
laughed. 'I can do better,' he said. 'They shall bring one of Count
Hannibal's gloves, which he left on my table. Always supposing my
rascals have done him no harm, which God forbid, for I am answerable.'"

Tignonville, delighted with the stratagem which the meeting with Biron
had suggested, could see no flaw in it. She could, and though she heard
him to the end, no second glow of hope softened the lines of her
features. With a gesture full of dignity, which took in not only Madame
Carlat and the waiting-woman who stood at the door, but the absent
servants--

"And what of these?" she said. "What of these? You forget them,
Monsieur. You do not think, you cannot have thought, that I would
abandon them? That I would leave them to such mercy as he, defeated,
might extend to them? No, you forgot them."

He did not know what to answer, for the jealous eyes of the frightened
waiting-woman, fierce with the fierceness of a hunted animal, were on
him. The Carlat and she had heard, could hear. At last--

"Better one than none!" he muttered, in a voice so low that if the
servants caught his meaning it was but indistinctly. "I have to think of
you."

"And I of them," she answered firmly. "Nor is that all. Were they not
here, it could not be. My word is passed--though a moment ago, Monsieur,
in the joy of seeing you I forgot it. And how," she continued, "if I
keep not my word, can I expect him to keep his? Or how, if I am ready to
break the bond, on this happening which I never expected, can I hold him
to conditions which he loves as little--as little as I love him?"

Her voice dropped piteously on the last words; her eyes, craving her
lover's pardon, sought his. But rage, not pity or admiration, was the
feeling roused in Tignonville's breast. He stood staring at her, struck
dumb by folly so immense. At last--

"You cannot mean this," he blurted out. "You cannot mean, Mademoiselle,
that you intend to stand on that! To keep a promise wrung from you by
force, by treachery, in the midst of such horrors as he and his have
brought upon us! It is inconceivable!"

She shook her head. "I promised," she said.

"You were forced to it."

"But the promise saved our lives."

"From murderers! From assassins!" he protested.

She shook her head. "I cannot go back," she said firmly; "I cannot."

"Then you are willing to marry him," he cried in ignoble anger. "That is
it! Nay, you must wish to marry him! For, as for his conditions,
Mademoiselle," the young man continued, with an insulting laugh, "you
cannot think seriously of them. _He_ keep conditions and you in his
power! He, Count Hannibal! But for the matter of that, and were he in
the mind to keep them, what are they? There are plenty of ministers. I
left one only this morning. I could lay my hand on one in five minutes.
He has only to find one, therefore--and to find me!"

"Yes, Monsieur," she cried, trembling with wounded pride, "it is for that
reason I implore you to go. The sooner you leave me, the sooner you
place yourself in a position of security, the happier for me! Every
moment that you spend here, you endanger both yourself and me!"

"If you will not be persuaded--"

"I shall not be persuaded," she answered firmly, "and you do but"--alas!
her pride began to break down, her voice to quiver, she looked piteously
at him--"by staying here make it harder for me to--to--"

"Hush!" cried Madame Carlat. "Hush!" And as they started and turned
towards her--she was at the end of the chamber by the door, almost out of
earshot--she raised a warning hand. "Listen!" she muttered, "some one
has entered the house."

"'Tis my messenger from Biron," Tignonville answered sullenly. And he
drew his cowl over his face, and, hiding his hands in his sleeves, moved
towards the door. But on the threshold he turned and held out his arms.
He could not go thus. "Mademoiselle! Clotilde!" he cried with passion,
"for the last time, listen to me, come with me. Be persuaded!"

"Hush!" Madame Carlat interposed again, and turned a scared face on them.
"It is no messenger! It is Tavannes himself: I know his voice." And she
wrung her hands. "_Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu_, what are we to do?" she
continued, panic-stricken. And she looked all ways about the room.

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