Count Hannibal

"Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at

his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "And I grow

childish! 'Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but

have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay,

all dead!"

He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile

in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The

day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun

still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to

fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance

as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past

before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in

sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the

sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had

spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman.

She would not now be his. He had played highly, and he would lose

highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of

him highly. Had she begun to think of him at all? In the chamber of the

inn at Angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and

warmth, a shadow of turning to him. It had pleased him to think so, at

any rate. It pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more

confident--that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville's, she

would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in

her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the

man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him.

It pleased him, that. It was almost all that was left to please

him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. But as the day wore on,

and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more

grievous, the frame of his mind altered. A sombre rage was born and grew

in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. To end thus, with

nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! To

die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen,

he who had seen Dreux and Jarnac, had defied the King, and dared to turn

the St. Bartholomew to his ends! To die thus, and leave her to that

puppet! Strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it

taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. Once, indeed, he raised

himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he

seemed about to speak. So that Bigot came hurriedly to him.