Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/22

10 faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. As Mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the Cloister of St. Germain, where only the day before Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort’s hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. But he laughed at her.

“It was a private blow,” he said, answering her unspoken thought. “It is like enough the Guises sped it. But they know now what is the King’s will, and they have taken the hint and withdrawn themselves. It will not happen again, Mademoiselle. For proof, see the guards”—they were passing the end of the Rue Bethizy, in the corner house of which, abutting on the Rue de l’Arbre Sec, Coligny had his lodgings—“whom the King has placed for his security. Fifty pikes under Cosseins.”

“Cosseins?” she repeated. “But I thought Cosseins”

“Was not wont to love us!” Tignonville answered, with a confident chuckle. “He was not. But the dogs lick where the master wills, Mademoiselle. He was not, but he does. This marriage has altered all.”

“I hope it may not prove an unlucky one!” she murmured. She felt impelled to say it.

“Not it!” he answered confidently. “Why should it?”

They stopped, as he spoke, before the last house, at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré opposite the Croix du Tiroir; which rose shadowy in the middle of the four ways. He hammered on the door.

“But,” she said softly, looking in his face, “the change is sudden, is it not? The King was not wont to be so good to us!”

“The King was not King until now,” he answered warmly. “That is what I am trying to persuade our people. Believe me, Mademoiselle, you may sleep without