Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/279

Rh and addressing a rogue who, holding his stirrup, was shouting the cry till he was crimson. “Then why not away, and”

“The King! The King’s word and leave!” the man answered.

“Ay, tell us!” shrieked another, looking upward, while he waved his cap; “have we the King’s leave?”

“You’ll bide his leave!” the Norman retorted, indicating the Count with his thumb. “Or ’twill be up with you—on the three-legged horse!”

“But he comes from the King!” the man panted.

“To be sure. To be sure!”

“Then”

“You’ll bide his time! That’s all!” Bigot answered, rather it seemed for his own satisfaction than the other’s enlightenment. “You’ll all bide it, you dogs!” he continued in his beard, as he cast his eye over the weltering crowd. “Ha! so we are here, are we? And not too soon, either.”

He fell silent as they entered an open space, overlooked on one side by the dark façade of the cathedral, on the other three sides by houses more or less illumined. The rabble swept into this open space with them and before them, filled much of it in an instant, and for a while eddied and swirled this way and that, thrust onward by the worshippers who had issued from the church and backwards by those who had been first in the square, and had no mind to be hustled out of hearing. A stranger, confused by the sea of excited faces, and deafened by the clamour of “Vive le Roi!” “Vive Anjou!” mingled with cries against the Huguenots, might have fancied that the whole city was arrayed before him. But he would have been wide of the mark. The scum, indeed—and a dangerous scum—frothed and foamed and spat under Tavannes’ bridle-hand; and here and there among them, but not of them, the dark-