Count Hannibal/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
THE DUEL.
At the foot of the staircase Tignonville paused. The droning Norman voices of the men on guard issued from an open door a few paces before him on the left. He caught a jest, the coarse chuckling laughter which attended it, and the gurgle of applause which followed; and he knew that at any moment one of the men might step out and discover him. Fortunately the door of the room with the shattered window was almost within reach of his hand on the right side of the passage, and he stepped softly to it. He stood an instant hesitating, his hand on the latch; then, alarmed by a movement in the guard-room, as if some were rising, he pushed the door in a panic, slid into the room, and shut the door behind him. He was safe, and he had made no noise; but at the table, at supper, with his back to him and his face to the partly closed window, sat Count Hannibal!
The young man’s heart stood still. For a long minute he gazed at the Count’s back, spellbound and unable to stir. Then, as Tavannes ate on without looking round, he began to take courage. Possibly he had entered so quietly that he had not been heard, or possibly his entrance was taken for that of a servant. In either case, there was a chance that he might retire after the same fashion; and he had actually raised the latch, and was drawing the door to him with infinite precaution, when Tavannes’ voice struck him, as it were, in the face.
“Pray do not admit the draught, M. de Tignonville,” he said, without looking round. “In your cowl you do not feel it, but it is otherwise with me.”
The unfortunate Tignonville stood transfixed, glaring at the back of the other’s head. For an instant he could not find his voice. At last—
“Curse you!” he hissed in a transport of rage. “Curse you! You did know, then? And she was right.”
“If you mean that I expected you, to be sure, Monsieur,” Count Hannibal answered. “See, your place is laid. You will not feel the air from without there. The very becoming dress which you have adopted secures you from cold. But—do you not find it somewhat oppressive this summer weather?”
“Curse you!” the young man cried, trembling.
Tavannes turned and looked at him with a dark smile. “The curse may fall,” he said, “but I fancy it will not be in consequence of your petitions, Monsieur. And now, were it not better you played the man?”
“If I were armed,” the other cried passionately, “you would not insult me!”
“Sit down, sir, sit down,” Count Hannibal answered sternly. “We will talk of that presently. In the mean time I have something to say to you. Will you not eat?”
But Tignonville would not.
“Very well,” Count Hannibal answered; and he went on with his supper. “I am indifferent whether you eat or not. It is enough for me that you are one of the two things I lacked an hour ago; and that I have you, M. de Tignonville. And through you I look to obtain the other.”
“What other?” Tignonville cried.
“A minister,” Tavannes answered, smiling. “A minister. There are not many left in Paris—of your faith. But you met one this morning, I know.”
“I? I met one?”
“Yes, Monsieur, you! And can lay your hand on him in five minutes, you know.”
M. de Tignonville gasped. His face turned a shade paler.
“You have a spy,” he cried. “You have a spy upstairs!”
Tavannes raised his cup to his lips, and drank. When he had set it down—
“It may be,” he said, and he shrugged his shoulders. “I know, it boots not how I know. It is my business to make the most of my knowledge—and of yours!”
M. de Tignonville laughed rudely. “Make the most of your own,” he said; “you will have none of mine.”
“That remains to be seen,” Count Hannibal answered. “Carry your mind back two days, M. de Tignonville. Had I gone to Mademoiselle de Vrillac last Saturday and said to her ‘Marry me, or promise to marry me,’ what answer would she have given?”
“She would have called you an insolent!” the young man replied hotly. “And I”
“No matter what you would have done!” Tavannes said. “Suffice it that she would have answered as you suggest. Yet to-day she has given me her promise.”
“Yes,” the young man retorted, “in circumstances in which no man of honour”
“Let us say in peculiar circumstances.”
“Well?”
“Which still exist! Mark me, M. de Tignonville,” Count Hannibal continued, leaning forward and eyeing the young man with meaning, “which still exist! And may have the same effect on another’s will as on hers! Listen! Do you hear?” And rising from his seat with a darkening face, he pointed to the partly shuttered window, through which the measured tramp of a body of men came heavily to the ear. “Do you hear, Monsieur? Do you understand? As it was yesterday it is to-day! They killed the President La Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase through the streets!”
The younger man had risen also. He stood confronting Tavannes, the cowl fallen back from his face, his eyes dilated.
“You think to frighten me!” he cried. “You think that I am craven enough to sacrifice her to save myself. You”
“You were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this window and waited for death!” Count Hannibal answered brutally. “You flinched then, and may flinch again!”
“Try me!” Tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. “Try me!” And then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, “But you dare not!” he cried. “You dare not!”
“No?”
“No! For if I die you lose her!” Tignonville replied in a voice of triumph. “Ha, ha! I touch you there!” he continued. “You dare not, for my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself! You may threaten, M. de Tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to the window”—and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other’s gesture—“but my safety is more to you than to me! And ’twill end there!”
“You believe that?”
“I know it!”
In two strides Count Hannibal was at the window. He seized a great piece of the boarding which closed one-half of the opening; he wrenched it away. A flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again to his opponent.
“Then if you know it,” he cried vehemently, “in God’s name act upon it!” And he pointed to the window.
“Act upon it?”
“Ay, act upon it!” Tavannes repeated, with a glance of flame. “The road is open! If you would save your mistress, behold the way! If you would save her from the embrace she abhors, from the eyes under which she trembles, from the hand of a master, there lies the way! And it is not her glove only you will save, but herself, her soul, her body! So,” he continued, with a certain wildness, and in a tone wherein contempt and bitterness were mingled, “to the lions, brave lover! Will you your life for her honour? Will you death that she may live a maid? Will you your head to save her finger? Then, leap down! leap down! The lists are open, the sand is strewed! Out of your own mouth I have it that if you perish she is saved! Then out, Monsieur! Cry ‘I am a Huguenot!’ And God’s will be done!”
Tignonville was livid. “Rather, your will!” he panted. “Your will, you devil! Nevertheless”
“You will go! Ha! ha! You will go!”
For an instant it seemed that he would go. Stung by the challenge, wrought on by the contempt in which Tavannes held him, he shot a look of hate at the tempter; he caught his breath, and laid his hand on the edge of the shuttering as if he would leap out.
But it goes hard with him who has once turned back from the foe. The evening light, glancing cold on the burnished pike-points of a group of archers who stood near, caught his eye and went chill to his heart. Death, not in the arena, not in the sight of shouting thousands, but in this darkening street, with an enemy laughing from the window, death with no revenge to follow, with no certainty that after all she would be safe, such a death could be compassed only by pure love—the love of a child for a parent, of a parent for a child, of a man for the one woman in the world!
He recoiled. “You would not spare her!” he cried, his face damp with sweat—for he knew now that he would not go. “You want to be rid of me! You would fool me, and then”
“Out of your own mouth you are convict!” Count Hannibal retorted gravely. “It was you who said it! But still I swear it! Shall I swear it to you?”
But Tignonville recoiled another step and was silent.
“No? O preux chevalier, O gallant knight! I knew it! Do you think that I did not know with whom I had to deal?” And Count Hannibal burst into harsh laughter, turning his back on the other, as if he no longer counted. “You will neither die with her nor for her! You were better in her petticoats and she in your breeches! Or no, you are best as you are, good father! Take my advice, M. de Tignonville, have done with arms; and with a string of beads, and soft words, and talk of Holy Mother Church, you will fool the women as surely as the best of them! They are not all like my cousin, a flouting, gibing, jeering woman—you had poor fortune there, I fear?”
“If I had a sword!” Tignonville hissed, his face livid with rage. “You call me coward, because I will not die to please you. But give me a sword, and I will show you if I am a coward!”
Tavannes stood still. “You are there, are you?” he said in an altered tone. “I”
“Give me a sword,” Tignonville repeated, holding out his open trembling hands. “A sword! A sword! ’Tis easy taunting an unarmed man, but”
“You wish to fight?”
“I ask no more! No more! Give me a sword,” he urged, his voice quivering with eagerness. “It is you who are the coward!”
Count Hannibal stared at him. “And what am I to get by fighting you?” he reasoned slowly. “You are in my power. I can do with you as I please. I can call from this window and denounce you, or I can summon my men”
“Coward! Coward!”
“Ay? Well, I will tell you what I will do,” with a subtle smile. “I will give you a sword, M. de Tignonville, and I will meet you foot to foot here, in this room, on a condition.”
“What is it? What is it?” the young man cried with incredible eagerness. “Name your condition!”
“That if I get the better of you, you find me a minister.”
“I find you a”
“A minister. Yes, that is it. Or tell me where I can find one.”
The young man recoiled. “Never!” he said.
“You know where to find one.”
“Never! Never!”
“You can lay your hand on one in five minutes, you know.”
“I will not.”
“Then I shall not fight you!” Count Hannibal answered coolly; and he turned from him, and back again. “You will pardon me if I say, M. de Tignonville, that you are in as many minds about fighting as about dying! I do not think that you would have made your fortune at Court. Moreover, there is a thing which I fancy you have not considered. If we fight you may kill me, in which case the condition will not help me much. Or I—which is more likely—” he added, with a harsh smile, “may kill you, and again I am no better placed.”
The young man’s pallid features betrayed the conflict in his breast. To do him justice, his hand itched for the sword-hilt—he was brave enough for that; he hated, and only so could he avenge himself. But the penalty if he had the worse! And yet what of it? He was in hell now, in a hell of humiliation, shame, defeat, tormented by this fiend! ’Twas only to risk a lower hell.
At last, “I will do it!” he cried hoarsely. “Give me a sword and look to yourself.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, yes, I promise!”
“Good,” Count Hannibal answered suavely, “but we cannot fight so, we must have more light.”
And striding to the door he opened it, and calling the Norman bade him move the table and bring candles—a dozen candles; for in the narrow streets the light was waning, and in the half-shuttered room it was growing dusk. Tignonville, listening with a throbbing brain, wondered that the attendant expressed no surprise and said no word—until Tavannes added to his orders one for a pair of swords.
Then, “Monsieur’s sword is here,” Bigot answered in his half-intelligible patois. “He left it here yester morning.”
“You are a good fellow, Bigot,” Tavannes answered, with a gaiety and good-humour which astonished Tignonville. “And one of these days you shall marry Suzanne.”
The Norman smiled sourly and went in search of the weapon.
“You have a poniard?” Count Hannibal continued in the same tone of unusual good temper, which had already struck Tignonville. “Excellent! Will you strip, then, or—as we are? Very good, Monsieur; in the unlikely event of fortune declaring for you, you will be in a better condition to take care of yourself. A man running through the streets in his shirt is exposed to inconveniences!” And he laughed gaily.
While he laughed the other listened; and his rage began to give place to wonder. A man who regarded as a pastime a sword and dagger conflict between four walls, who, having his adversary in his power, was ready to discard the advantage, to descend into the lists, and to risk life for a whim, a fancy—such a man was outside his experience, though in Poitou in those days of war were men reckoned brave. For what, he asked himself as he waited, had Tavannes to gain by fighting? The possession of Mademoiselle? But Mademoiselle, if his passion for her overwhelmed him, was in his power; and if his promise were a barrier—which seemed inconceivable in the light of his reputation—he had only to wait, and to-morrow, or the next day, or the next, a minister would be found, and without risk he could gain that for which he was now risking all.
Tignonville did not know that it was in the other’s nature to find pleasure in such utmost ventures. Nevertheless the recklessness to which Tavannes’ action bore witness had its effect upon him. By the time the young man’s sword arrived something of his passion for the conflict had evaporated; and though the touch of the hilt restored his determination, the locked door, the confined space, and the unaccustomed light went a certain distance towards substituting despair for courage.
The use of the dagger in the duels of that day, however, rendered despair itself formidable. And Tignonville, when he took his place, appeared anything but a mean antagonist. He had removed his robe and cowl, and lithe and active as a cat he stood as it were on springs, throwing his weight now on this foot and now on that, and was continually in motion. The table bearing the candles had been pushed against the window, the boarding of which had been replaced by Bigot before he left the room. Tignonville had this, and consequently the lights, on his dagger hand; and he plumed himself on the advantage, considering his point the more difficult to follow.
Count Hannibal did not seem to notice this, however. “Are you ready?” he asked. And then—
“On guard!” he cried, and he stamped the echo to the word. But, that done, instead of bearing the other down with a headlong rush characteristic of the man—as Tignonville feared—he held off warily, stooping low; and when his slow opening was met by one as cautious, he began to taunt his antagonist.
“Come!” he cried, and feinted half-heartedly. “Come, Monsieur, are we going to fight, or play at fighting?”
“Fight yourself, then!” Tignonville answered, his breath quickened by excitement and growing hope. “’Tis not I hold back!” And he lunged, but was put aside.
“Ça! ça!” Tavannes retorted; and he lunged and parried in his turn, but loosely and at a distance.
After which the two moved nearer the door, their eyes glittering as they watched one another, their knees bent, the sinews of their backs straining for the leap. Suddenly Tavannes thrust, and leapt away, and as his antagonist thrust in return the Count swept the blade aside with a strong parry, and for a moment seemed to be on the point of falling on Tignonville with the poniard. But Tignonville retired his right foot nimbly, which brought them front to front again. And the younger man laughed.
“Try again, M. le Comte!” he said. And, with the word, he dashed in himself quick as light; for a second the blades ground on one another, the daggers hovered, the two suffused faces glared into one another; then the pair disengaged again.
The blood trickled from a scratch on Count Hannibal’s neck; half an inch to the right and the point had found his throat. And Tignonville, elated, laughed anew, and swaying from side to side on his hips, watched with growing confidence for a second chance. Lithe as one of the leopards Charles kept at the Louvre, he stooped lower and lower, and more and more with each moment took the attitude of the assailant, watching for an opening; while Count Hannibal, his face dark and his eyes vigilant, stood increasingly on the defence. The light was waning a little, the wicks of the candles were burning long; but neither noticed it or dared to remove his eyes from the other’s. Their laboured breathing found an echo on the farther side of the door, but this again neither observed.
“Well?” Count Hannibal said at last. “Are you coming?”
“When I please,” Tignonville answered; and he feinted but drew back.
The other did the same, and again they watched one another, their eyes seeming to grow smaller and smaller. Gradually a smile had birth on Tignonville’s lips. He thrust! It was parried! He thrust again—parried! Tavannes, grown still more cautious, gave a yard. Tignonville pushed on, but did not allow confidence to master caution. He began, indeed, to taunt his adversary; to flout and jeer him. But it was with a motive.
For suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he repeated the peculiar thrust which had been successful before. This time, however, Tavannes was ready. He put aside the blade with a quick parade, and instead of making a riposte sprang within the other’s guard. The two came face to face and breast to shoulder, and struck furiously with their daggers. Count Hannibal was outside his opponent’s sword and had the advantage. Tignonville’s dagger fell, but glanced off the metalwork of the other’s hilt; Tavannes’ fell swift and hard between the young man’s eyes. The Huguenot flung up his hands and staggered back, falling his length on the floor.
In an instant Count Hannibal was on his breast, and had knocked away his dagger. Then—
“You own yourself vanquished?” he cried.
The young man, blinded by the blood which trickled down his face, made a sign with his hands. Count Hannibal rose to his feet again, and stood a moment looking at his foe without speaking. Presently he seemed to be satisfied. He nodded, and going to the table dipped a napkin in water. He brought it, and carefully supporting Tignonville’s head, laved his brow.
“It is as I thought,” he said, when he had stanched the blood. “You are not hurt, man. You are stunned. It is no more than a bruise.”
The young man was coming to himself. “But I thought” he muttered, and broke off to pass his hand over his face. Then he got up slowly, reeling a little, “I thought it was the point,” he muttered.
“No, it was the pommel,” Tavannes answered dryly. “It would not have served me to kill you. I could have done that ten times.”
Tignonville groaned, and, sitting down at the table, held the napkin to his aching head. One of the candles had been overturned in the struggle and lay on the floor, flaring in a little pool of grease. Tavannes set his heel upon it; then, striding to the farther end of the room, he picked up Tignonville’s dagger and placed it beside his sword on the table. He looked about to see if aught else remained to do, and, finding nothing, he returned to Tignonville’s side.
“Now, Monsieur,” he said in a voice hard and constrained, “I must ask you to perform your part of the bargain.”
A groan of anguish broke from the unhappy man. And yet he had set his life on the cast; what more could he have done?
“You will not harm him?” he muttered.
“He shall go safe,” Count Hannibal replied gravely.
“And” he fought a moment with his pride, then blurted out the words, “you will not tell her—that it was through me—you found him?”
“I will not,” Tavannes answered in the same tone. He stooped and picked up the other’s robe and cowl, which had fallen from a chair—so that as he spoke his eyes were averted. “She shall never know through me,” he said.
And Tignonville, his face hidden in his hands, told him.