"I hold him in my power."
"Then Holy Church will fall on you and crush you. For me, I have seen
enough and more than enough. I go to Tours by the east road."
He shrugged his shoulders. "As you please," he said.
She flung away in disgust with him. She could not understand a man who
played fast and loose at such a time. The game was too fine for her, its
danger too apparent, the gain too small. She had, too, a woman's dread
of the Church, a woman's belief in the power of the dead hand to punish.
And in half an hour her orders were given. In two hours her people were
gathered, and she departed by the eastward road, three of Tavannes'
riders reinforcing her servants for a part of the way. Count Hannibal
stood to watch them start, and noticed Bigot riding by the side of
Suzanne's mule. He smiled; and presently, as he turned away, he did a
thing rare with him--he laughed outright.
A laugh which reflected a mood rare as itself. Few had seen Count
Hannibal's eye sparkle as it sparkled now; few had seen him laugh as he
laughed, walking to and fro in the sunshine before the inn. His men
watched him, and wondered, and liked it little, for one or two who had
overheard his altercation with the Churchmen had reported it, and there
was shaking of heads over it. The man who had singed the Pope's beard
and chucked cardinals under the chin was growing old, and the most daring
of the others had no mind to fight with foes whose weapons were not of
this world.
Count Hannibal's gaiety, however, was well grounded, had they known it.
He was gay, not because he foresaw peril, and it was his nature to love
peril; not--in the main, though a little, perhaps--because he knew that
the woman whose heart he desired to win had that night stood between him
and death; not, though again a little, perhaps, because she had confirmed
his choice by conduct which a small man might have deprecated, but which
a great man loved; but chiefly, because the events of the night had
placed in his grasp two weapons by the aid of which he looked to recover
all the ground he had lost--lost by his impulsive departure from the pall
of conduct on which he had started.
Those weapons were Tignonville, taken like a rat in a trap by the rising
of the water; and the knowledge that the Countess had stolen the precious
packet from his pillow. The knowledge--for he had lain and felt her
breath upon his cheek, he had lain and felt her hand beneath his pillow,
he had lain while the impulse to fling his arms about her had been almost
more than he could tame! He had lain and suffered her to go, to pass out
safely as she had passed in. And then he had received his reward in the
knowledge that, if she robbed him, she robbed him not for herself; and
that where it was a question of his life she did not fear to risk her
own.