And undismayed by the scowling brows, and the cross ostentatiously lifted to heaven, he gazed after the procession as it moved on under its swaying banner, now one and now another of the acolytes looking back and raising his hands to invoke the bolt of Heaven on the blasphemer. As the _cortege_ passed the huge watering-troughs, and the open gateway of the inn, the knot of persons congregated there fell on their knees. In answer the Churchmen raised their banner higher, and began to sing the _Eripe me, Domine_! and to its strains, now vengeful, now despairing, now rising on a wave of menace, they passed slowly into the distance, slowly towards Angers and the Loire.
Suddenly Madame St. Lo twitched his sleeve. "Enough for me!" she cried passionately. "I go no farther with you!"
"Ah?"
"No farther!" she repeated. She was pale, she shivered. "Many thanks, my cousin, but we part company here. I do not go to Angers. I have seen horrors enough. I will take my people, and go to my aunt by Tours and the east road. For you, I foresee what will happen. You will perish between the hammer and the anvil."
"Ah?"
"You play too fine a game," she continued, her face quivering. "Give over the girl to her lover, and send away her people with her. And wash your hands of her and hers. Or you will see her fall, and fall beside her! Give her to him, I say--give her to him!"
"My wife?"
"Wife?" she echoed, for, fickle, and at all times swept away by the emotions of the moment, she was in earnest now. "Is there a tie," and she pointed after the vanishing procession, "that they cannot unloose? That they will not unloose? Is there a life which escapes if they doom it? Did the Admiral escape? Or Rochefoucauld? Or Madame de Luns in old days? I tell you they go to rouse Angers against you, and I see beforehand what will happen. She will perish, and you with her. Wife? A pretty wife, at whose door you took her lover last night."
"And at your door!" he answered quietly, unmoved by the gibe.
But she did not heed. "I warned you of that!" she cried. "And you would not believe me. I told you he was following. And I warn you of this. You are between the hammer and the anvil, M. le Comte! If Tignonville does not murder you in your bed--"
"I hold him in my power."
"Then Holy Church will fall on you and crush you. For me, I have seen enough and more than enough. I go to Tours by the east road."
He shrugged his shoulders. "As you please," he said.
She flung away in disgust with him. She could not understand a man who played fast and loose at such a time. The game was too fine for her, its danger too apparent, the gain too small. She had, too, a woman's dread of the Church, a woman's belief in the power of the dead hand to punish. And in half an hour her orders were given. In two hours her people were gathered, and she departed by the eastward road, three of Tavannes' riders reinforcing her servants for a part of the way. Count Hannibal stood to watch them start, and noticed Bigot riding by the side of Suzanne's mule. He smiled; and presently, as he turned away, he did a thing rare with him--he laughed outright.
A laugh which reflected a mood rare as itself. Few had seen Count Hannibal's eye sparkle as it sparkled now; few had seen him laugh as he laughed, walking to and fro in the sunshine before the inn. His men watched him, and wondered, and liked it little, for one or two who had overheard his altercation with the Churchmen had reported it, and there was shaking of heads over it. The man who had singed the Pope's beard and chucked cardinals under the chin was growing old, and the most daring of the others had no mind to fight with foes whose weapons were not of this world.
Count Hannibal's gaiety, however, was well grounded, had they known it. He was gay, not because he foresaw peril, and it was his nature to love peril; not--in the main, though a little, perhaps--because he knew that the woman whose heart he desired to win had that night stood between him and death; not, though again a little, perhaps, because she had confirmed his choice by conduct which a small man might have deprecated, but which a great man loved; but chiefly, because the events of the night had placed in his grasp two weapons by the aid of which he looked to recover all the ground he had lost--lost by his impulsive departure from the pall of conduct on which he had started.
Those weapons were Tignonville, taken like a rat in a trap by the rising of the water; and the knowledge that the Countess had stolen the precious packet from his pillow. The knowledge--for he had lain and felt her breath upon his cheek, he had lain and felt her hand beneath his pillow, he had lain while the impulse to fling his arms about her had been almost more than he could tame! He had lain and suffered her to go, to pass out safely as she had passed in. And then he had received his reward in the knowledge that, if she robbed him, she robbed him not for herself; and that where it was a question of his life she did not fear to risk her own.
When he came, indeed, to that point, he trembled. How narrowly had he been saved from misjudging her! Had he not lain and waited, had he not possessed himself in patience, he might have thought her in collusion with the old lover whom he found at her door, and with those who came to slay him. Either he might have perished unwarned; or escaping that danger, he might have detected her with Tignonville and lost for all time the ideal of a noble woman.
He had escaped that peril. More, he had gained the weapons we have indicated; and the sense of power, in regard to her, almost intoxicated him. Surely if he wielded those weapons to the best advantage, if he strained generosity to the uttermost, the citadel of her heart must yield at last!
He had the defect of his courage and his nature, a tendency to do things after a flamboyant fashion. He knew that her act would plunge him in perils which she had not foreseen. If the preachers roused the Papists of Angers, if he arrived to find men's swords whetted for the massacre and the men themselves awaiting the signal, then if he did not give that signal there would be trouble. There would be trouble of the kind in which the soul of Hannibal de Tavannes revelled, trouble about the ancient cathedral and under the black walls of the Angevin castle; trouble amid which the hearts of common men would be as water.
Then, when things seemed at their worst, he would reveal his knowledge. Then, when forgiveness must seem impossible, he would forgive. With the flood of peril which she had unloosed rising round them, he would say, "Go!" to the man who had aimed at his life; he would say to her, "I know, and I forgive!" That, that only, would fitly crown the policy on which he had decided from the first, though he had not hoped to conduct it on lines so splendid as those which now dazzled him.
CHAPTER XXVI. TEMPER.
It was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the Countess. She could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so much hung and of which he had indicated the importance. But if he had missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? Why did he not cry the alarm, search and question and pursue? Why did he not give her that opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her resolution died within her?
Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? Of the snatches of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of astonishment? Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection, made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught it?
Ay, what? Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his melancholy and ride like the youngest? She wondered what the men thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. What were they thinking of it? She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began to grip her heart.
Twenty hours of rest