"Ay, dead these forty years! All dead!" the old man whispered, gazing at
his gnarled hand, and opening and shutting it by turns. "And I grow
childish! 'Tis time, high time, I followed them! It trembles now; but
have no fear, my lord, this hand will not tremble then. All dead! Ay,
all dead!"
He sank into a mournful silence; and Tavannes, after gazing at him awhile
in rough pity, fell to his own meditations, which were gloomy enough. The
day was beginning to wane, and with the downward turn, though the sun
still shone brightly through the southern windows, a shadow seemed to
fall across his thoughts. They no longer rioted in a turmoil of defiance
as in the forenoon. In its turn, sober reflection marshalled the past
before his eyes. The hopes of a life, the ambitions of a life, moved in
sombre procession, and things done and things left undone, the
sovereignty which Nostradamus had promised, the faces of men he had
spared and of men he had not spared--and the face of one woman.
She would not now be his. He had played highly, and he would lose
highly, playing the game to the end, that to-morrow she might think of
him highly. Had she begun to think of him at all? In the chamber of the
inn at Angers he had fancied a change in her, an awakening to life and
warmth, a shadow of turning to him. It had pleased him to think so, at
any rate. It pleased him still to imagine--of this he was more
confident--that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville's, she
would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in
her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the
man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him.
It pleased him, that. It was almost all that was left to please
him--that, and to die proudly as he had lived. But as the day wore on,
and the room grew hot and close, and the pain in his thigh became more
grievous, the frame of his mind altered. A sombre rage was born and grew
in him, and a passion fierce and ill-suppressed. To end thus, with
nothing done, nothing accomplished of all his hopes and ambitions! To
die thus, crushed in a corner by a mean priest and a rabble of spearmen,
he who had seen Dreux and Jarnac, had defied the King, and dared to turn
the St. Bartholomew to his ends! To die thus, and leave her to that
puppet! Strong man as he was, of a strength of will surpassed by few, it
taxed him to the utmost to lie and make no sign. Once, indeed, he raised
himself on his elbow with something between an oath and a snarl, and he
seemed about to speak. So that Bigot came hurriedly to him.