Count Hannibal

He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not

touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her

young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the

darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La

Tribe was single-minded.

This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-

wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the

squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was

hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and

looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which

marked where Vendome stood.

"Another league," Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light

fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'Tis pure and dry

here," he said. "Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water.

I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame?"

"I prefer this," she answered in a low voice.

"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me God's

heaven."

"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her

thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.

He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the

gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but

she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to

give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared

aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor

of Nature's cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining

of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some

clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the

monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took

the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all

in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude

men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew

not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.

The Countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool

gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft

glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and

the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke

indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its

insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.

"Yet, I believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself.

"Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!"