Count Hannibal

It was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which

on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the

Countess. She could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so

much hung and of which he had indicated the importance. But if he had

missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? Why did he not cry

the alarm, search and question and pursue? Why did he not give her that

opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her

resolution died within her?

Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? Of the snatches

of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of

astonishment? Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection,

made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught

it?

Ay, what? Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been

robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his

melancholy and ride like the youngest? She wondered what the men

thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him

stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. What were they

thinking of it? She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent

than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began

to grip her heart.

Twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which

the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had

shaken under her. But the cool freshness of the early summer morning,

and the sight of the green landscape and the winding Loir, beside which

their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown

himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting

hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have

faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth.

But his new mood veiled she knew not what. It seemed, if she

comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful

vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. Before it her

heart became as water. Even her colour little by little left her cheeks.

She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it

was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now

guiltily sought and now avoided his. And feeling sure that he did read

it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which

plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her

perplexity.

This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful

thoughts. On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in

steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent. On the other

the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-

deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. Again the

travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through

the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last

year's leaves. And out again and down again they passed, and turning

aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall

of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces

half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through

the glare and heat. Down to the river-level again, where a squalid

anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them,

and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the

hour of Nones.