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Updated: June 19, 2025
It was known as the House of the Wolf, and was a grim stone building surrounding a courtyard. Rows of wolves' heads carved in stone flanked the windows, whence their bare fangs grinned day and night at the church porch opposite. The noise drew our eyes in this direction; and there lolling in a window over the door, looking out on the street with a laughing eye, was Bezers himself.
Indeed?" The words, and the cold, cynical voice, were not those of Mirepoix; they came from behind. The priest wheeled round, as if he had been stabbed in the back. I clutched Croisette, and arrested the cramped limb I was moving under cover of the noise. The speaker was Bezers! He stood in the open door-way, his great form filling it from post to post, the old gibing smile on his face.
On finding herself alone she gazed a short time in alarmed silence at the door, and then ran to the window and peered out, still trembling, terrified, silent. So she remained a while. She had not noticed that Bezers on going out had omitted to lock the door behind him. I had. But I was unwilling to move hastily. Some one might return to see to it before the Vidame left the house.
That Mademoiselle de Caylus had been his sport and plaything. And that we in trying to be beforehand with Bezers had been striving to save a scoundrel from his due. It meant all that, as soon as we grasped it in the least. "Madame," said Croisette gravely, after a pause so prolonged that her smile faded pitifully from her face, scared by our strange looks.
It had been the first thought of all of us, to take such men as we could get together and fall upon Bezers wherever we found him, making it our simple object to kill him. But the lackeys M. le Vicomte had left with us, the times being peaceful and the neighbours friendly, were poor-spirited fellows. Bezers' handful, on the contrary, were reckless Swiss riders like master, like men.
"Do you mean," I cried, "that Bezers has drawn his men forward on purpose?" "Precisely;" was Louis's answer. "That is the fact. Nothing would please him better than to take my honour first, and my life afterwards. But, thank God, only the one is in his power." And when I came to look at the horsemen, immediately before us, they confirmed Louis's view.
M. de Pavannes' the other M. de Pavannes' suspicions had been well founded. Worse than Bezers was she? Ay! worse a hundred times. As much worse as treachery ever is than violence; as the pitiless fraud of the serpent is baser than the rage of the wolf.
There the rougher elements were collected, and there I more than once saw Bezers' troopers in conflict with the mob. In that quarter too a savage chant was presently struck up, the whole gathering joining in and yelling with an indescribably appalling effect: "Hau! Hau! Huguenots! Faites place aux Papegots!" in derision of the old song said to be popular amongst the Protestants.
Behind a frank brutality Bezers unless his reputation belied him concealed an Italian intellect. Under a cynical recklessness he veiled a rare cunning and a constant suspicion; enjoying in that respect a combination of apparently opposite qualities, which I have known no other man to possess in an equal degree, unless it might be his late majesty, Henry the Great.
Through the window came unmistakeable sounds of voices. "They have discovered our flight," I said, my heart sinking. Luckily we had had the forethought to draw the curtain across the casement. Bezers' people could therefore, from their window, see no more than ours, dimly lighted and indistinct. Yet they would no doubt guess the way we had escaped, and hasten to cut off our retreat below.
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