The leader cried, "To hell with his safe-conduct! Say your prayers!"
But all were not of his mind. On one or two of the savage faces--the
faces, for the most part, of honest men maddened by their wrongs--flashed
an avaricious gleam. A safe-conduct? To avenge, to slay, to kill--and
to go safe! For some minds such a thing has an invincible fascination. A
man thrust himself forward.
"Ay, I'll have it!" he cried. "Give it here!"
"It is yours," Count Hannibal answered, "if you will carry ten words to
Marshal Tavannes--when I am gone."
The man's neighbour laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"And Marshal Tavannes will pay you finely," he said.
But Maudron, the man who had offered, shook off the hand.
"If I take the message!" he muttered in a grim aside. "Do you think me
mad?" And then aloud he cried, "Ay, I'll take your message! Give me the
paper."
"You swear you will take it?"
The man had no intention of taking it, but he perjured himself and went
forward. The others would have pressed round too, half in envy, half in
scorn; but Tavannes by a gesture stayed them.
"Gentlemen, I ask a minute only," he said. "A minute for a dying man is
not much. Your friends had as much."
And the fellows, acknowledging the claim and assured that their victim
could not escape, let Maudron go round the table to him.
The man was in haste and ill at ease, conscious of his evil intentions
and the fraud he was practising; and at once greedy to have, yet ashamed
of the bargain he was making. His attention was divided between the slip
of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his
comrades; he paid little heed to Count Hannibal, whom he knew to be
unarmed. Only when Tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be
fain to delay, "Go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is
up!"
Tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. Maudron saw a
chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought
leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have
leapt back with it! But quick as he, and quicker, Tavannes too stooped,
gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in
which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last
few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first
through the window.
The movement carried Tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream
rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. An instant he hung on the
verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge
their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had
struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards.