“Being in your full strength,” Count Hannibal murmured cynically.
“Could hold it. We have strength enough for that,” the Norman boasted, though his livid face and his bandages gave the lie to his words. He could not move without pain; and for Badelon, his knee was as big as two with plaisters of his own placing.
Count Hannibal stared at the ceiling. “You could not strike two blows!” he said. “Don’t lie to me! And Badelon cannot walk two yards! Fine fighters!” he continued with bitterness, not all bitter. “Fine bars ‘twixt a man and death! No, it is time to turn the face to the wall. And, since go I must, it shall not be said Count Hannibal dared not go alone! Besides—”
Bigot stopped him with an oath that was in part a cry of pain.
“D — n her!” he exclaimed in fury, “’tis she is that besides! I know it. ’Tis she has been our ruin from the day we saw her first, ay, to this day! ’Tis she has bewitched you until your blood, my lord, has turned to water. Or you would never, to save the hand that betrayed us, never to save a man—”
“Silence!” Count Hannibal cried, in a terrible voice. And rising on his elbow, he poised the dagger as if he would hurl it. “Silence, or I will spit you like the vermin you are! Silence, and listen! And you, old ban-dog, listen too, for I know you obstinate! It is not to save him. It is because I will die as I have lived, fearing nothing and asking nothing! It were easy to bar the door as you would have me, and die in the corner here like a wolf at bay, biting to the last. That were easy, old wolf-hound! Pleasant and good sport!”
“Ay! That were a death!” the veteran cried, his eyes brightening. “So I would fain die!”
“And I!” Count Hannibal returned, showing his teeth in a grim smile. “I too! Yet I will not! I will not! Because so to die were to die unwillingly, and give them triumph. Be dragged to death? No, old dog, if die we must, we will go to death! We will die grandly, highly, as becomes Tavannes! That when we are gone they may say, ‘There died a man!’”
“She may say!” Bigot muttered, scowling.
Count Hannibal heard and glared at him, but presently thought better of it, and after a pause —
“Ay, she too!” he said. “Why not? As we have played the game — for her — so, though we lose, we will play it to the end; nor because we lose throw down the cards! Besides, man, die in the corner, die biting, and he dies too!”
“And why not?” Bigot asked, rising in a fury. “Why not? Whose work is it we lie here, snared by these clowns of fisherfolk? Who led us wrong and betrayed us? He die? Would the devil had taken him a year ago! Would he were within my reach now! I would kill him with my bare fingers! He die? And why not?”
“Why, because, fool, his death would not save me!” Count Hannibal answered coolly. “If it would, he would die! But it will not; and we must even do again as we have done. I have spared him — he’s a white-livered hound! — both once and twice, and we must go to the end with it since no better can be! I have thought it out, and it must be. Only see you, old dog, that I have the dagger hid in the splint where I can reach it. And then, when the exchange has been made, and my lady has her silk glove again — to put in her bosom!” — with a grimace and a sudden reddening of his harsh features— “if master priest come within reach of my arm, I’ll send him before me, where I go.”
“Ay, ay!” said Badelon. “And if you fail of your stroke I will not fail of mine! I shall be there, and I will see to it he goes! I shall be there!”
“You?”
“Ay, why not?” the old man answered quietly. “I may halt on this leg for aught I know, and come to starve on crutches like old Claude Boiteux who was at the taking of Milan and now begs in the passage under the Châtelet.”
“Bah, man, you will get a new lord!”
Badelon nodded. “Ay, a new lord with new ways!” he answered slowly and thoughtfully. “And I am tired. They are of another sort, lords now, than they were when I was young. It was a word and a blow then. Now I am old, with most it is— ‘Old hog, your distance! You scent my lady!’ Then they rode, and hunted, and tilted year in and year out, and summer or winter heard the lark sing. Now they are curled, and paint themselves, and lie in silk and toy with ladies — who shamed to be seen at Court or board when I was a boy — and love better to hear the mouse squeak than the lark sing.”
“Still, if I give you my gold chain,” Count Hannibal answered quietly, “‘twill keep you from that.”
“Give it to Bigot,” the old man answered. The splint he was fashioning had fallen on his knees, and his eyes were fixed on the distance of his youth. “For me, my lord, I am tired, and I go with you. I go with you. It is a good death to die biting before the strength be quite gone. Have the dagger too, if you please, and I’ll fit it within the splint right neatly. But I shall be there—”
“And you’ll strike home?” Tavannes cried eagerly. He raised himself on his elbow, a gleam of joy in his gloomy eyes.
“Have no fear, my lord. See, does it tremble?” He held out his hand. “And when you are sped, I will try the Spanish stroke — upwards with a turn ere you withdraw, that I learned from Ruiz — on the shaven pate. I see them about me now!” the old man continued, his face flushing, his form dilating. “It will be odd if I cannot snatch a sword and hew down three to go with Tavannes! And Bigot, he will see my lord the Marshal by-and-by; and as I do to the priest, the Marshal will do to Montsoreau. Ho! ho! He will teach him the coup de Jarnac, never fear!” And the old man’s moustaches curled up ferociously.
Count Hannibal’s eyes sparkled with joy. “Old dog!” he cried — and he held his hand to the veteran, who brushed it reverently with his lips— “we will go together then! Who touches my brother, touches Tavannes!”
“Touches Tavannes!” Badelon cried, the glow of battle lighting his bloodshot eyes. He rose to his feet. “Touches Tavannes! You mind at Jarnac—”
“Ah! At Jarnac!”
“When we charged their horse, was my boot a foot from yours, my lord?”
“Not a foot!”
“And at Dreux,” the old man continued with a proud, elated gesture, “when we rode down the German pikemen — they were grass before us, leaves on the wind, thistledown — was it not I who covered your bridle hand, and swerved not in the mêlée?”
“It was! It was!”
“And at St. Quentin, when we fled before the Spaniard — it was his day, you remember, and cost us dear—”
“Ay, I was young then,” Tavannes cried in turn, his eyes glistening. “St. Quentin! It was the tenth of August. And you were new with me, and seized my rein—”
“And we rode off together, my lord — of the last, of the last, as God sees me! And striking as we went, so that they left us for easier game.”
“It was so, good sword! I remember it as if it had been yesterday!”
“And at Cerisoles, the Battle of the Plain, in the old Spanish wars, that was most like a joust of all the pitched fields I ever saw — at Cerisoles, where I caught your horse? You mind me? It was in the shock when we broke Guasto’s line—”
“At Cerisoles?” Count Hannibal muttered slowly. “Why, man, I—”
“I caught your horse, and mounted you afresh? You remember, my lord? And at Landriano, where Leyva turned the tables on us again.”
Count Hannibal stared. “Landriano?” he muttered bluntly. “’Twas in ‘29, forty years ago and more! My father, indeed—”
“And at Rome — at Rome, my lord? Mon Dieu! in the old days at Rome! When the Spanish company scaled the wall — Ruiz was first, I next — was it not my foot you held? And was it not I who dragged you up, while the devils of Swiss pressed us hard? Ah, those were days, my lord! I was young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning—”
“You rave!” Tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. “Rome? You rave, old man! Why, I was not born in those days. My father even was a boy! It was in ‘27 you sacked it — five-and-forty years ago!”
The old man passe
d his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. The light died out of his eyes — as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink, even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down.
“No, I remember,” he muttered slowly. “It was Prince Philibert of Chalons, my lord of Orange.”
“Dead these forty years!”
“Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!” the old man whispered, gazing at his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. “And I grow childish! ’Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay, all dead!”
He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had spared and of men he had not spared — and the face of one woman.
She would not now be his. He had played highly, and he would lose highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of him highly. Had she begun to think of him at all? In the chamber of the inn at Angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and warmth, a shadow of turning to him. It had pleased him to think so, at any rate. It pleased him still to imagine — of this he was more confident — that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville’s, she would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him.
It pleased him, that. It was almost all that was left to please him — that, and to die proudly as he had lived. But as the day wore on, and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more grievous, the frame of his mind altered. A sombre rage was born and grew in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. To end thus, with nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! To die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen, he who had seen Dreux and Jarnac, had defied the King, and dared to turn the St. Bartholomew to his ends! To die thus, and leave her to that puppet! Strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. Once, indeed, he raised himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he seemed about to speak. So that Bigot came hurriedly to him.
“My lord?”
“Water!” he said. “Water, fool!” And, having drunk, he turned his face to the wall, lest he should name her or ask for her.
For the desire to see her before he died, to look into her eyes, to touch her hand once, only once, assailed his mind and all but whelmed his will. She had been with him, he knew it, in the night; she had left him only at daybreak. But then, in his state of collapse, he had been hardly conscious of her presence. Now to ask for her or to see her would stamp him coward, say what he might to her. The proverb, that the King’s face gives grace, applied to her; and an overture on his side could mean but one thing, that he sought her grace. And that he would not do though the cold waters of death covered him more and more, and the coming of the end — in that quiet chamber, while the September sun sank to the appointed place — awoke wild longings and a wild rebellion in his breast. His thoughts were very bitter, as he lay, his loneliness of the uttermost. He turned his face to the wall.
In that posture he slept after a time, watched over by Bigot with looks of rage and pity. And on the room fell a long silence. The sun had lacked three hours of setting when he fell asleep. When he re-opened his eyes, and, after lying for a few minutes between sleep and waking, became conscious of his position, of the day, of the things which had happened, and his helplessness — an awakening which wrung from him an involuntary groan — the light in the room was still strong, and even bright. He fancied for a moment that he had merely dozed off and awaked again; and he continued to lie with his face to the wall, courting a return of slumber.
But sleep did not come, and little by little, as he lay listening and thinking and growing more restless, he got the fancy that he was alone. The light fell brightly on the wall to which his face was turned; how could that be if Bigot’s broad shoulders still blocked the loophole? Presently, to assure himself, he called the man by name.
He got no answer.
“Badelon!” he muttered. “Badelon!”
Had he gone, too, the old and faithful? It seemed so, for again no answer came.
He had been accustomed all his life to instant service; to see the act follow the word ere the word ceased to sound. And nothing which had gone before, nothing which he had suffered since his defeat at Angers, had brought him to feel his impotence and his position — and that the end of his power was indeed come — as sharply as this. The blood rushed to his head; almost the tears to eyes which had not shed them since boyhood, and would not shed them now, weak as he was! He rose on his elbow and looked with a full heart; it was as he had fancied. Badelon’s stool was empty; the embrasure — that was empty too. Through its narrow outlet he had a tiny view of the shore and the low rocky hill, of which the summit shone warm in the last rays of the setting sun.
The setting sun! Ay, for the lower part of the hill was growing cold; the shore at its foot was grey. Then he had slept long, and the time was come. He drew a deep breath and listened. But on all within and without lay silence, a silence marked, rather than broken, by the dull fall of a wave on the causeway. The day had been calm, but with the sunset a light breeze was rising.
He set his teeth hard, and continued to listen. An hour before sunset was the time they had named for the exchange. What did it mean? In five minutes the sun would be below the horizon; already the zone of warmth on the hillside was moving and retreating upwards. And Bigot and old Badelon? Why had they left him while he slept? An hour before sunset! Why, the room was growing grey, grey and dark in the corners, and — what was that?
He started, so violently that he jarred his leg, and the pain wrung a groan from him. At the foot of the bed, overlooked until then, a woman lay prone on the floor, her face resting on her outstretched arms. She lay without motion, her head and her clasped hands towards the loophole, her thick, clubbed hair hiding her neck. A woman! Count Hannibal stared, and, fancying he dreamed, closed his eyes, then looked again. It was no phantasm. It was the Countess; it was his wife!
He drew a deep breath, but he did not speak, though the colour rose slowly to his cheek. And slowly his eyes devoured her from head to foot, from the hands lying white in the light below the window to the shod feet; unchecked he took his fill of that which he had so much desired — the seeing her! A woman prone, with all of her hidden but her hands: a hundred acquainted with her would not have known her. But he knew her, and would have known her from a hundred, nay from a thousand, by her hands alone.
What was she doing here, and in this guise? He pondered; then he looked from her for an instant, and saw that while he had gazed at her the sun had set, the light had passed from the top of the hill; the world without and the room within were growing cold. Was that the cause she no longer lay quiet? He saw a shudder run through her, and a second; then it seemed to him — or was he going mad? — that she moaned, and prayed in half-heard words, and, wrestling with herself, beat her forehead on her arms, and then was still again, as still as death. By the time the paroxysm had passed, the last flush of sunset had faded from the sky, and the hills were growing dark.
CHAPTER XXXVI. HIS KINGDOM.
Count Hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once. Warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained
silent, his eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. A moment later she met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. Instead, she stood quiet and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second shook her frame.
At length “It is over!” she whispered. “Patience, Monsieur; have no fear, I will be brave. But I must give a little to him.”
“To him!” Count Hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily, pale.
She smiled with an odd passionateness. “Who was my lover!” she cried, her voice a-thrill. “Who will ever be my lover, though I have denied him, though I have left him to die! It was just. He who has so tried me knows it was just! He whom I have sacrificed — he knows it too, now! But it is hard to be — just,” with a quavering smile. “You who take all may give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have — patience!”
Count Hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. A moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. Then he sank back on the bed.
“Water!” he muttered. “Water!”
She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke.
“You have done that?” he whispered; “you have done that?”
“Yes,” she answered, shuddering. “God forgive me! I have done that! I had to do that, or—”
“And is it too late — to undo it?”
“It is too late.” A sob choked her voice.
Tears — tears incredible, unnatural — welled from under Count Hannibal’s closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of his beard.
“I would have gone,” he muttered. “If you had spoken, I would have spared you this.”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 399