Count Hannibal: A Romance of the Court of FranceWeyman, Stanley John
General
Count Hannibal: A Romance of the Court of France
Weyman, Stanley John
Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; Huguenots -- Fiction
His gorge rose at the sight. Fear such as he had not before experienced
chilled his marrow. This was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong
man quailed; the hate of which Mademoiselle had spoken when she said that
the babes crossed themselves at her passing, and the houses tottered to
fall upon her!
He paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him;
and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed
on him. Instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for
two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and
stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the
back of a house, which looked another way. The outer gates of an arched
doorway were open, and a loaded haycart, touching either side and
brushing the arch above, blocked the passage. His gaze, leaving the
windows, dropped to this--he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he
stiffened. Between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant,
then vanished.
Tignonville stared. At first he thought his eyes had tricked him. Then
the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable
invitation. It is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive
has aught to fear, and Tignonville, after casting a glance down the
lane--which revealed a single man standing with his face the other
way--slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall. He coughed.
A voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the
act, and aided him. In a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed
between the hay and the roof of the arch. Beside him lay a man whose
features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern. But the
man knew him and whispered his name.
"You know me?" Tignonville muttered in astonishment.
"I marked you, M. de Tignonville, at the preaching last Sunday," the
stranger answered placidly.
"You were there?"
"I preached."
"Then you are M. la Tribe!"
"I am," the clergyman answered quietly. "They seized me on my threshold,
but I left my cloak in their hands and fled. One tore my stocking with
his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured.
They hunted me to the end of the next street, but I lived and still live,
and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city."
The sympathy between the Huguenot by faith and the Huguenot by politics
was imperfect. Tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger
generation, was a Huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. He
felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side
to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer.
"I wish I felt as sure!" he muttered bluntly. "You know that all our
people are dead?"
"He can save by few or by many," the preacher answered devoutly. "We are
of the few, blessed be God, and shall see Israel victorious, and our
people as a flock of sheep!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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