"There is a thing," he said slowly and with a sort of glare at her, "which, it may be, you have not reckoned. You press me now, and will stand on your terms and your conditions, your _ifs_ and your _unlesses_! You will have the most from me, and the bargain and a little beside the bargain! But I would have you think if you are wise. Bethink you how it will be between us when you are my wife--if you press me so now, Mademoiselle. How will it sweeten things then? How will it soften them? And to what, I pray you, will you trust for fair treatment then, if you will be so against me now?"
She shuddered. "To the mercy of my husband," she said in a low voice. And her chin sank on her breast.
"You will be content to trust to that?" he answered grimly. And his tone and the lifting of his brow promised little clemency. "Bethink you! 'Tis your rights now, and your terms, Mademoiselle! And then it will be only my mercy--Madame."
"I am content," she muttered faintly.
"And the Lord have mercy on my soul, is what you would add," he retorted, "so much trust have you in my mercy! And you are right! You are right, since you have played this trick on me. But as you will. If you will have it so, have it so! You shall stand on your conditions now; you shall have your pennyweight and full advantage, and the rigour of the pact. But afterwards--afterwards, Madame de Tavannes--"
He did not finish his sentence, for at the first word which granted her petition, Mademoiselle had sunk down on the low wooden window-seat beside which she stood, and, cowering into its farthest corner, her face hidden on her arms, had burst into violent weeping. Her hair, hastily knotted up in the hurry of the previous night, hung in a thick plait to the curve of her waist; the nape of her neck showed beside it milk-white. The man stood awhile contemplating her in silence, his gloomy eyes watching the pitiful movement of her shoulders, the convulsive heaving of her figure. But he did not offer to touch her, and at length he turned about. First one and then the other of her women quailed and shrank under his gaze; he seemed about to add something. But he did not speak. The sentence he had left unfinished, the long look he bent on the weeping girl as he turned from her, spoke more eloquently of the future than a score of orations.
"_Afterwards, Madame de Tavannes_!"
CHAPTER XII. IN THE HALL OF THE LOUVRE.
It is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for Mademoiselle which had seized Count Hannibal be deemed unworthy of the higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one.
As Tavannes, after leaving Mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes, beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the Gothic spires of his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder. He saw Paris as a city sacked; a slaughter-house, where for a week a masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments, broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. But he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville; Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office.
Probably it was to this that one man hunted through Paris owed his escape that day. He sprang from a narrow passage full in Tavannes' view, and, hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly--as a hare will run when chased--along the street to meet Count Hannibal's company. The man's face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his breath hissed from him as he ran. His pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by Count Hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead. And dead he would have been within thirty seconds had Tavannes played his part. But his thoughts were elsewhere. Either he took the poor wretch for Tignonville, or for the minister on whom his mind was running; anyway he suffered him to slip under the belly of his horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped the pursuers in their tracks. The quarry slipped into an alley and vanished. The hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed inclined to resent the mistake. But Tavannes smiled; a broader smile lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside.
There are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of others excite pity. Tavannes' lip curled as he rode on through the streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a King twenty-two years old had made of his capital. His lip curled most of all when he came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the Louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication between city and palace cut off. Such a proof of unkingly panic, in a crisis wrought by the King himself, astonished him less a few minutes later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered the courtyard of the fortress.
Within and about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing. The weltering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated and restless movements. To a calm eye they seemed like men acting in a nightmare. Their fitful talk and disjointed gestures, their sweating brows and damp hair, no less than the sullen, brooding silence of one here and there, bespoke the abnormal and the terrible. There were livid faces among them, and twitching cheeks, and some who swallowed much; and some again who bared their crimson arms and bragged insanely of the part they had played. But perhaps the most striking thing was the thirst, the desire, the demand for news, and for fresh excitement. In the space of time it took him to pass through them, Count Hannibal heard a dozen rumours of what was passing in the city; that Montgomery and the gentlemen who had slept beyond the river had escaped on horseback in their shirts; that Guise had been shot in the pursuit; that he had captured the Vidame de Chartres and all the fugitives; that he had never left the city; that he was even then entering by the Porte de Bucy. Again that Biron had surrendered the Arsenal, that he had threatened to fire on the city, that he was dead, that with the Huguenots who had escaped he was marching on the Louvre, that--
And then Tavannes passed out of the blinding sunshine, and out of earshot of their babble, and had plain in his sight across the quadrangle, the new facade, Italian, graceful, of the Renaissance; which rose in smiling contrast with the three dark Gothic sides that now, the central tower removed, frowned unimpeded at one another. But what was this which lay along the foot of the new Italian wall? This, round which some stood, gazing curiously, while others strewed fresh sand about it, or after long downward-looking glanced up to answer the question of a person at a window?
Death; and over death--death in its most cruel aspect--a cloud of buzzing, whirling flies, and the smell, never to be forgotten, of much spilled blood. From a doorway hard by came shrill bursts of hysterical laughter; and with the laughter plumped out, even as Tavannes crossed the court, a young girl, thrust forth it seemed by her fellows, for she turned about and struggled as she came. Once outside she hung back, giggling and protesting, half willing, half unwilling; and meeting Tavannes' eye thrust her way in again with a whirl of her petticoats, and a shriek. But before he had taken four paces she was out again.
He paused to see who she was, and his thoughts involuntarily went back to the woman he had left weeping in the upper room. Then he turned about again and stood to count the dead. He identified Piles, identified Pardaillan, identified Soubise--whose corpse the murderers had robbed of the last rag--and Touchet and St. Galais. He made his reckoning with an unmoved face, and with the same face stopped and stared, and moved from one to another; had he not seen the slaughter about "_le petit homme_" at Jarnac, and the dead of three pitched fields? But when a bystander, smirking obsequiously, passed him a jest on Soubise, and with his finger pointed the jest, he had the same hard unmoved face for the gibe as for the dead. And the jester shrank away, abashed and perplexed by his stare and his reticence.
Halfway