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Count Hannibal

Page 159

"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.

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