Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/248

236 revealed not only the broad gleaming stream, between which and a wooded hill their road ran, but the faces of his companions; and these, in their turn, shed a grisly light on the bloody enterprise towards which they were set. Nervous and ill at ease, the minister’s mind dwelt on the stages of that enterprise: the stealthy entrance through the waterway, the ascent through the trap, the surprise, the slaughter in the sleeping-chamber. And either because he had lived for days in the victim’s company, or was swayed by the arguments he had addressed to another, the prospect shook his soul.

In vain he told himself that this was the oppressor; he saw only the man, fresh roused from sleep, with the horror of impending dissolution in his eyes. And when the rider, behind whom he sat, pointed to a faint spark of light, at no great distance before them, and whispered that it was St. Agnes’s Chapel, hard by the inn, he could have cried with the best Catholic of them all, “Inter pontem et fontem, Domine!” Nay, some such words did pass his lips.

For the man before him turned halfway in his saddle. “What?” he asked.

But the Huguenot did not explain.