"You know me?" Tignonville muttered in astonishment.
"I marked you, M. de Tignonville, at the preaching last Sunday," the
stranger answered placidly.
"You were there?"
"I preached."
"Then you are M. la Tribe!"
"I am," the clergyman answered quietly. "They seized me on my threshold,
but I left my cloak in their hands and fled. One tore my stocking with
his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured.
They hunted me to the end of the next street, but I lived and still live,
and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city."
The sympathy between the Huguenot by faith and the Huguenot by politics
was imperfect. Tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger
generation, was a Huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. He
felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side
to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer.
"I wish I felt as sure!" he muttered bluntly. "You know that all our
people are dead?"
"He can save by few or by many," the preacher answered devoutly. "We are
of the few, blessed be God, and shall see Israel victorious, and our
people as a flock of sheep!"
"I see small chance of it," Tignonville answered contemptuously.
"I know it as certainly as I knew before you came, M. de Tignonville,
that you would come!"
"That I should come?"
"That some one would come," La Tribe answered, correcting himself. "I
knew not who it would be until you appeared and placed yourself in the
doorway over against me, even as Obadiah in the Holy Book passed before
the hiding-place of Elijah."
The two lay on their faces side by side, the rafters of the archway low
on their heads. Tignonville lifted himself a little, and peered anew at
the other. He fancied that La Tribe's mind, shaken by the horrors of the
morning and his narrow escape, had given way.
"You rave, man," he said. "This is no time for visions."
"I said naught of visions," the other answered.
"Then why so sure that we shall escape?"
"I am certified of it," La Tribe replied. "And more than that, I know
that we shall lie here some days. The time has not been revealed to me,
but it will be days and a day. Then we shall leave this place unharmed,
as we entered it, and, whatever betide others, we shall live."
Tignonville shrugged his shoulders. "I tell you, you rave, M. la Tribe,"
he said petulantly. "At any moment we may be discovered. Even now I
hear footsteps."
"They tracked me well-nigh to this place," the minister answered
placidly.