"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,"