Count Hannibal

Tignonville hesitated, but not for long; a burst of voices heralded a new

danger, and he shrank into a doorway. Along one of the lanes a troop of

children, the biggest not twelve years old, came dancing and leaping

round something which they dragged by a string. Now one of the hindmost

would burl it onward with a kick, now another, amid screams of childish

laughter, tripped headlong over the cord; now at the crossways they

stopped to wrangle and question which way they should go, or whose turn

it was to pull and whose to follow. At last they started afresh with a

whoop, the leader singing and all plucking the string to the cadence of

the air. Their plaything leapt and dropped, sprang forward, and lingered

like a thing of life. But it was no thing of life, as Tignonville saw

with a shudder when they passed him. The object of their sport was the

naked body of a child, an infant!

His gorge rose at the sight. Fear such as he had not before experienced

chilled his marrow. This was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong

man quailed; the hate of which Mademoiselle had spoken when she said that

the babes crossed themselves at her passing, and the houses tottered to

fall upon her!

He paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him;

and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed

on him. Instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for

two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and

stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the

back of a house, which looked another way. The outer gates of an arched

doorway were open, and a loaded haycart, touching either side and

brushing the arch above, blocked the passage. His gaze, leaving the

windows, dropped to this--he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he

stiffened. Between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant,

then vanished.

Tignonville stared. At first he thought his eyes had tricked him. Then

the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable

invitation. It is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive

has aught to fear, and Tignonville, after casting a glance down the

lane--which revealed a single man standing with his face the other

way--slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall. He coughed.

A voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the

act, and aided him. In a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed

between the hay and the roof of the arch. Beside him lay a man whose

features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern. But the

man knew him and whispered his name.