Count Hannibal

They were fortunate indeed, for a few seconds later they had been too

late. The alarm had preceded them. As they dashed up, a man ran to the

chains of the portcullis and tried to lower it. He failed to do so at

the first touch, and, quailing, fled from Badelon's levelled pistol. A

watchman on one of the bastions of the wall shouted to them to halt or he

would fire: but the riders yelled in derision, and thundering through the

echoing archway, emerged into the open, and saw, extended before them, in

place of the gloomy vistas of the Black Town, the glory of the open

country and the vine-clad hills, and the fields about the Loire yellow

with late harvest.

The women gasped their relief, and one or two who were most out of breath

would have pulled up their horses and let them trot, thinking the danger

at an end. But a curt savage word from the rear set them flying again,

and down and up and on again they galloped, driven forward by the iron

hand which never relaxed its grip of them. Silent and pitiless he

whirled them before him until they were within a mile of the long Ponts

de Ce--a series of bridges rather than one bridge--and the broad shallow

Loire lay plain before them, its sandbanks grilling in the sun, and grey

lines of willows marking its eyots. By this time some of the women,

white with fatigue, could only cling to their saddles with their hands;

while others were red-hot, their hair unrolled, and the perspiration

mingled with the dust on their faces. But he who drove them had no pity

for weakness in an emergency. He looked back and saw, a half-mile behind

them, the glitter of steel following hard on their heels: and "Faster!

faster!" he cried, regardless of their prayers: and he beat the rearmost

of the horses with his scabbard. A waiting-woman shrieked that she

should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, "Fall then, fool!" and the

instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and

toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town

about the bridges, and Badelon raised his hand as a signal that they

might slacken speed.

The bewilderment of the start had been so great that it was then only,

when they found their feet on the first link of the bridge, that two of

the party, the Countess and Tignonville, awoke to the fact that their

faces were set southwards. To cross the Loire in those days meant much

to all: to a Huguenot, very much. It chanced that these two rode on to

the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing--the

remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed

it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and

with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into

the mind of each of them. It deepened the flush which exertion had

brought to the woman's cheek, then left it paler than before. A minute

earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him

accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her

anger died as she looked and she remembered. In the man, shallower of

feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as

he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation.