Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/373

Rh “Water!” he muttered. “Water!”

She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke.

“You have done that?” he whispered; “you have done that?”

“Yes,” she answered, shuddering. “God forgive me! I have done that! I had to do that, or”

“And is it too late—to undo it?”

“It is too late.” A sob choked her voice.

Tears—tears incredible, unnatural—welled from under Count Hannibal’s closed eyelids, and rolled sluggishly down his harsh cheek to the edge of his beard.

“I would have gone,” he muttered. “If you had spoken, I would have spared you this.”

“I know,” she answered unsteadily; “the men told me.”

“And yet—”

“It was just. And you are my husband,” she replied. “More, I am the captive of your sword, and as you spared me in your strength, my lord, I spared you in your weakness.”

“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu, Madame!” he cried, “at what a cost!”

And that arrested, that touched her in the depths of her grief and her horror; even while the gibbet on the causeway, which had burned itself into her eyeballs, hung before her. For she knew that it was the cost to her he was counting. She knew that for himself he had ever held life cheap, that he could have seen Tignonville suffer without a qualm. And the thoughtfulness for her, the value he placed on a thing—even on a rival’s life—because its was dear to her, touched her home, moved her as few things could have moved her at that moment. She saw it of a piece with all