Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/257

Rh “It is Monsieur I would requite,” Tignonville muttered grimly.

“By using violence to her?” the minister retorted passionately. He and Tuez were still gripping one another. “I tell you, to go on is to risk what we have got! And I for one”

“Am chicken-hearted!” the young man sneered. “Madame” He seemed to choke on the word. “Will you swear that he is not here?”

“I swear that if you do not go I will raise the alarm!” she hissed—all their words were sunk to that stealthy note. “Go! if you have not stayed too long already. Go! Or see!” And she pointed to the trapdoor, from which the face and arms of a sixth man had that moment risen—the face dark with perturbation, so that her woman’s wit told her at once that something was amiss. “See what has come of your delay already!”

“The water is rising,” the man muttered earnestly. “In God’s name come, whether you have done it or not, or we cannot pass out again. It is within a foot of the crown of the culvert now, and it is rising.”

“Curse on the water!” Tuez-les-Moines answered in a frenzied whisper. “And on this Jezebel. Let us kill her and him! What matter afterwards?” And he tried to shake off La Tribe’s grasp.

But the minister held him desperately. “Are you mad? Are you mad?” he answered. “What can we do against thirty? Let us be gone while we can. Let us be gone! Come.”

“Ay, come,” Perrot cried, assenting reluctantly. He had taken no side hitherto. “The luck is against us! ’Tis no use to-night, man!” And he turned with an air of sullen resignation. Letting his legs drop through the trap, he followed the bearer of the tidings out of sight. Another made up his mind to go, and went. Then only