Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/367

Rh devils of Swiss pressed us hard? Ah, those were days, my lord! I was young then, and you, my lord, young too, and handsome as the morning”

“You rave!” Tavannes cried, finding his tongue at last. “Rome? You rave, old man! Why, I was not born in those days. My father even was a boy! It was in ’27 you sacked it—five-and-forty years ago!”

The old man passed his hands over his heated face, and, as a man roused suddenly from sleep looks, he looked round the room. The light died out of his eyes—as a light blown out in a room; his form seemed to shrink, even while the others gazed at him, and he sat down.

“No, I remember,” he muttered slowly. “It was Prince Philibert of Chalons, my lord of Orange.”

“Dead these forty years!”

“Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!” the old man whispered, gazing at his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. “And I grow childish! ’Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay, all dead!”

He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had spared and of men he had not spared—and the face of one woman.

She would not now be his. He had played highly, and