The minister shook his head. The rider wiped the blood from his eyes,
and turned up his face that he might see the better. But he seemed to be
dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange patois.
She stamped her foot in passion. "More lights!" she cried. "Lights! How
can they find their way? And let six men go down the digue, and meet
them. Will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?"
But Carlat, who had not been able to collect more than a dozen men, shook
his head; and before she could repeat the order, sounds of battle,
shrill, faint, like cries of hungry seagulls, pierced the darkness which
shrouded the farther end of the causeway. The women shrank inward over
the threshold, while Carlat cried to the men at the chains to be ready,
and to some who stood at loopholes above, to blow up their matches and
let fly at his word. And then they all waited, the Countess foremost,
peering eagerly into the growing darkness. They could see nothing.
A distant scuffle, an oath, a cry, silence! The same, a little nearer, a
little louder, followed this time, not by silence, but by the slow tread
of a limping horse. Again a rush of feet, the clash of steel, a scream,
a laugh, all weird and unreal, issuing from the night; then out of the
darkness into the light, stepping slowly with hanging head, moved a
horse, bearing on its back a man--or was it a man?--bending low in the
saddle, his feet swinging loose. For an instant the horse and the man
seemed to be alone, a ghostly pair; then at their heels came into view
two figures, skirmishing this way and that; and now coming nearer, and
now darting back into the gloom. One, a squat figure, stooping low,
wielded a sword with two hands; the other covered him with a half-pike.
And then beyond these--abruptly as it seemed--the night gave up to sight
a swarm of dark figures pressing on them and after them, driving them
before them.
Carlat had an inspiration. "Fire!" he cried; and four arquebuses poured
a score of slugs into the knot of pursuers. A man fell, another shrieked
and stumbled, the rest gave back. Only the horse came on spectrally,
with hanging head and shining eyeballs, until a man ran out and seized
its head, and dragged it, more by his strength than its own, over the
drawbridge. After it Badelon, with a gaping wound in his knee, and
Bigot, bleeding from a dozen hurts, walked over the bridge, and stood on
either side of the saddle, smiling foolishly at the man on the horse.
"Leave me!" he muttered. "Leave me!" He made a feeble movement with his
hand, as if it held a weapon; then his head sank lower. It was Count
Hannibal. His thigh was broken, and there was a lance-head in his arm.
The Countess looked at him, then beyond him, past him into the darkness.