Then might not something more be won from him? A further delay, another
point; something, no matter what, which could be turned to advantage?
With the brigand it is not possible to bargain. But who gives a little
may give more; who gives a day may give a week; who gives a week may give
a month. And a month? Her heart leapt up. A month seemed a lifetime,
an eternity, to her who had but until to-morrow!
Yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less
brave. To obtain aught from Tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to
ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him before that to-morrow
which meant so much to her. It was necessary, in a word, to run some
risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not
hesitate. It might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not
only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of
decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. In that
case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case.
The position of the window, while it increased the women's safety,
debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that
which their ears afforded them. They had no means of judging whether
Tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in
the work of murder. Madame Carlat, indeed, had no desire to know
anything. In that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a
hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had
a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. To her,
therefore, the notion of sending for Tavannes, or communicating with him,
came as a thunderbolt. Was her mistress mad? Did she wish to court her
fate? To reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and
the men-servants were confined above. Those riders were grim, brutal
men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame,
clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of
horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror
tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied
imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris,
fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now
know.
For it was noon--or a little more--of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth,
"a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure
to kill and plunder." From the bridges, and particularly from the stone
bridge of Notre Dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and
Tignonville crouched in his haymow--Huguenots less fortunate were being
cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire
Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own
books. In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor--than
whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered
like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie,
seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being
beaten to death with bludgeons. Nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a
little later, what matters it?--M. de Tignonville's own cousin, Madame
d'Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands
of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in
the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.