Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/243

Rh “You have heard,” he said. “Do you blame us?”

“I cannot,” the minister answered, shivering. “I cannot.” He had been for a while beyond the range of these feelings; and in the greenwood, under God’s heaven, with the sunshine about him, they jarred on him. Yet he could not blame men who had suffered as these had suffered; who were maddened, as these were maddened, by the gravest wrongs which it is possible for one man to inflict on another. “I dare not,” he continued sorrowfully. “But in God’s name I offer you a higher and a nobler errand.”

“We need none,” Tignonville muttered impatiently.

“Yet many others need you,” La Tribe answered in a tone of rebuke. “You are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the King for the hands of the magistrates of Angers?”

“Ha! Does he?”

“Bidding them do at Angers as his Majesty has done in Paris?”

The men broke into cries of execration. “But he shall not see Angers!” they swore. “The blood that he has shed shall choke him by the way! And as he would do to others it shall be done to him.”

La Tribe shuddered as he listened, as he looked. Try as he would, the thirst of these men for vengeance appalled him.

“How?” he said. “He has a score and more with him and you are only six.”

“Seven now,” Tignonville answered with a smile.

“True, but”

“And he lies to-night at La Flèche? That is so?”

“It was his intention this morning.”

“At the old King’s Inn at the meeting of the great roads?”

“It was mentioned,” La Tribe admitted, with a reluctance