Count Hannibal | Page 5

pikes under Cosseins."
"Cosseins?" she repeated. "But I thought Cosseins--"
"Was not wont to love us!" Tignonville answered, with a confident
chuckle. "He was not. But the dogs lick where the master wills,
Mademoiselle. He was not, but he does. This marriage has altered all."
"I hope it may not prove an unlucky one!" she murmured. She felt
impelled to say it.
"Not it!" he answered confidently. "Why should it?"
They stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the
Rue St. Honore opposite the Croix du Tiroir; which rose shadowy in
the middle of the four ways. He hammered on the door.
"But," she said softly, looking in his face, "the change is sudden, is it

not? The King was not wont to be so good to us!"
"The King was not King until now," he answered warmly. "That is
what I am trying to persuade our people. Believe me, Mademoiselle,
you may sleep without fear; and early in the morning I will be with you.
Carlat, have a care of your mistress until morning, and let Madame lie
in her chamber. She is nervous to-night. There, sweet, until morning!
God keep you, and pleasant dreams!"
He uncovered, and bowing over her hand, kissed it; and the door being
open he would have turned away. But she lingered as if unwilling to
enter.
"There is--do you hear it--a stir in that quarter?" she said, pointing
across the Rue St. Honore. "What lies there?"
"Northward? The markets," he answered. "'Tis nothing. They say, you
know, that Paris never sleeps. Good night, sweet, and a fair
awakening!"
She shivered as she had shivered under Tavannes' eye. And still she
lingered, keeping him.
"Are you going to your lodging at once?" she asked--for the sake, it
seemed, of saying something.
"I?" he answered a little hurriedly. "No, I was thinking of paying
Rochefoucauld the compliment of seeing him home. He has taken a
new lodging to be near the Admiral; a horrid bare place in the Rue
Bethizy, without furniture, but he would go into it to-day. And he has a
sort of claim on my family, you know."
"Yes," she said simply. "Of course. Then I must not detain you. God
keep you safe," she continued, with a faint quiver in her tone; and her
lip trembled. "Good night, and fair dreams, Monsieur."
He echoed the words gallantly. "Of you, sweet!" he cried; and turning
away with a gesture of farewell, he set off on his return.

He walked briskly, nor did he look back, though she stood awhile
gazing after him. She was not aware that she gave thought to this; nor
that it hurt her. Yet when bolt and bar had shot behind her, and she had
mounted the cold, bare staircase of that day--when she had heard the
dull echoing footsteps of her attendants as they withdrew to their lairs
and sleeping- places, and still more when she had crossed the threshold
of her chamber, and signed to Madame Carlat and her woman to
listen--it is certain she felt a lack of something.
Perhaps the chill that possessed her came of that lack, which she neither
defined nor acknowledged. Or possibly it came of the night air, August
though it was; or of sheer nervousness, or of the remembrance of Count
Hannibal's smile. Whatever its origin, she took it to bed with her and
long after the house slept round her, long after the crowded quarter of
the Halles had begun to heave and the Sorbonne to vomit a
black-frocked band, long after the tall houses in the gabled streets, from
St. Antoine to Montmartre and from St. Denis on the north to St.
Jacques on the south, had burst into rows of twinkling lights--nay, long
after the Quarter of the Louvre alone remained dark, girdled by this
strange midnight brightness--she lay awake. At length she too slept,
and dreamed of home and the wide skies of Poitou, and her castle of
Vrillac washed day and night by the Biscay tides.
CHAPTER II.
HANNIBAL DE SAULX, COMTE DE TAVANNES.
"Tavannes!"
"Sire."
Tavannes, we know, had been slow to obey the summons. Emerging
from the crowd, he found that the King, with Retz and Rambouillet, his
Marshal des Logis, had retired to the farther end of the Chamber;
apparently Charles had forgotten that he had called. His head a little
bent--he was tall and had a natural stoop--the King seemed to be
listening to a low but continuous murmur of voices which proceeded
from the door of his closet. One voice frequently raised was beyond

doubt a woman's; a foreign accent, smooth and silky, marked another; a
third, that from time to time broke in, wilful and impetuous, was the
voice of Monsieur, the King's brother, Catherine de