Count Hannibal had watched the attack and the check, as a man watches a
play; with smiling interest. In the panic, the torches had been dropped
or extinguished, and now between the house and the sullen crowd which
hung back, yet grew moment by moment more dangerous, the daylight fell
cold on the littered street and the cripple's huddled form prone in the
gutter. A priest raised on the shoulders of the lean man in black began
to harangue the mob, and the dull roar of assent, the brandished arms
which greeted his appeal, had their effect on Tavannes' men. They looked
to the window, and muttered among themselves. It was plain that they had
no stomach for a fight with the Church, and were anxious for the order to
withdraw.
But Count Hannibal gave no order, and, much as his people feared the
cowls, they feared him more. Meanwhile the speaker's eloquence rose
higher; he pointed with frenzied gestures to the house. The mob groaned,
and suddenly a volley of stones fell among the pikemen, whose corselets
rattled under the shower. The priest seized that moment. He sprang to
the ground, and to the front. He caught up his robe and waved his hand,
and the rabble, as if impelled by a single will, rolled forward in a huge
one-fronted thundering wave, before which the two handfuls of
pikemen--afraid to strike, yet afraid to fly--were swept away like straws
upon the tide.
But against the solid walls and oak-barred door of the house the wave
beat, only to fall back again, a broken, seething mass of brandished arms
and ravening faces. One point alone was vulnerable, the window, and
there in the gap stood Tavannes. Quick as thought he fired two pistols
into the crowd; then, while the smoke for a moment hid all, he whistled.
Whether the signal was a summons to his men to fight their way back--as
they were doing to the best of their power--or he had resources still
unseen, was not to be known. For as the smoke began to rise, and while
the rabble before the window, cowed by the fall of two of their number,
were still pushing backward instead of forward, there rose behind them
strange sounds--yells, and the clatter of hoofs, mingled with screams of
alarm. A second, and into the loose skirts of the crowd came charging
helter-skelter, pell-mell, a score of galloping, shrieking, cursing
horsemen, attended by twice as many footmen, who clung to their stirrups
or to the tails of the horses, and yelled and whooped, and struck in
unison with the maddened riders.
"On! on!" the foremost shrieked, rolling in his saddle, and foaming at
the mouth. "Bleed in August, bleed in May! Kill!" And he fired a
pistol among the rabble, who fled every way to escape his rearing,
plunging charger.