Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/79

Rh “Tortured!” he repeated grimly. “You talk of torture while Piles and Pardaillan, Teligny and Rochefoucauld lie dead in the street! While your cause sinks withered in a night, like a gourd! While your servants fall butchered, and France rises round you in a tide of blood! Bah!”—with a gesture of disdain—“you make me also talk, and I have no love for talk, and small time. Mademoiselle, you at least act and do not talk. By your leave I return in an hour, and I bring with me—shall it be my priest, or your minister?”

She looked at him with the face of one who awakes slowly to the full horror, the full dread, of her position. For a moment she did not answer. Then—

“A minister,” she muttered, her voice scarcely audible.

He nodded. “A minister,” he said lightly. “Very well, if I can find one.” And walking to the shattered, gaping casement—through which the cool morning air blew into the room and gently stirred the hair of the unhappy girl—he said some words to the man on guard outside. Then he turned to the door, but on the threshold he paused, looked with a strange expression at the pair, and signed to Carlat and the servants to go out before him.

“Up, and lie close above!” he growled. “Open a window or look out, and you will pay dearly for it! Do you hear? Up! Up! You, too, old crop-ears. What! would you?”—with a sudden glare as Carlat hesitated—“that is better! Mademoiselle, until my return.”

He saw them all out, followed them, and closed the door on the two; who, left together, alone with the gaping window and the disordered feast, maintained a strange silence. The girl, gripping one hand in the other as if to quell her rising horror, sat looking before her, and seemed barely to breathe. The man, leaning against the wall at a little distance, bent his eyes, not on her, but on the floor, his face gloomy and distorted.