Count Hannibal

Count Hannibal remained seated, his chin sunk on his breast, until his

ear assured him that the three men had descended the stairs to the floor

below. Then he rose, and, taking the lanthorn from the table, on which

Peridol had placed it, he went softly to the door, which, like the

window, stood in a recess--in this case the prolongation of the passage.

A brief scrutiny satisfied him that escape that way was impossible, and

he turned, after a cursory glance at the floor and ceiling, to the dark,

windy aperture which yawned at the end of the apartment. Placing the

lanthorn on the table, and covering it with his cloak, he mounted the

window recess, and, stepping to the unguarded edge, looked out.

He knew, rather than saw, that Peridol had told the truth. The smell of

the aguish flats which fringed that part of Paris rose strong in his

nostrils. He guessed that the sluggish arm of the Seine which divided

the Arsenal from the Ile des Louviers crawled below; but the night was

dark, and it was impossible to discern land from water. He fancied that

he could trace the outline of the island--an uninhabited place, given up

to wood piles; but the lights of the college quarter beyond it, which

rose feebly twinkling to the crown of St. Genevieve, confused his sight

and rendered the nearer gloom more opaque. From that direction and from

the Cite to his right came sounds which told of a city still heaving in

its blood-stained sleep, and even in its dreams planning further

excesses. Now a distant shot, and now a faint murmur on one of the

bridges, or a far-off cry, raucous, sudden, curdled the blood. But even

of what was passing under cover of the darkness, he could learn little;

and after standing awhile with a hand on either side of the window he

found the night air chill. He stepped back, and, descending to the

floor, uncovered the lanthorn and set it on the table. His thoughts

travelled back to the preparations he had made the night before with a

view to securing Mademoiselle's person, and he considered, with a grim

smile, how little he had foreseen that within twenty-four hours he would

himself be a prisoner. Presently, finding his mask oppressive, he

removed it, and, laying it on the table before him, sat scowling at the

light.

Biron had jockeyed him cleverly. Well, the worse for Armand de Gontaut

de Biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! But in the

mean time? In the mean time his fate was sealed if harm befell Biron.

And what the King's real mind in Biron's case was, and what the Queen-

Mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far,

when they had the Grand Master at their mercy, they would resist the

temptation to add him to the victims. If Biron placed himself at once in

Marshal Tavannes' hands, all might be well. But if he ventured within

the long arm of the Guises, or went directly to the Louvre, the fact that

with the Grand Master's fate Count Hannibal's was bound up, would not

weigh a straw. In such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the

less great the small, without a scruple. And the Guises did not love

Count Hannibal; he was not loved by many. Even the strength of his

brother the Marshal stood rather in the favour of the King's heir, for

whom he had won the battle of Jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in

ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the

desperate madness of this day had let loose on Paris.