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And Tignonville, his face hidden in his hands, told him. Little by little while they fought below the gloom had thickened, and night had fallen in the room above. But Mademoiselle would not have candles brought.
The man turned then; and for a moment the two stared at one another between the pricked ears of the horse. At last "M. de Tignonville!" the minister ejaculated. "La Tribe!" "It is truly you?" "Well I think so," the young man answered. The minister lifted up his eyes and seemed to call the trees and the clouds and the birds to witness. "Now," he cried, "I know that I am chosen!
Tignonville rejoined with a passion of which the other's manner seemed an inadequate cause. "What will you! What is it?" "I would take your place," La Tribe answered quietly. "My place?" "Yes." "What, are we too many?" "We are enough without you, M. Tignonville," the minister answered. "These men, who have wrongs to avenge, God will justify them." Tignonville's eyes sparkled with anger.
Between the suddenness of the alarm, the uproar without, and the panic within, none but a man whose people served him at a nod and dreaded his very gesture could have got his party mounted in time. Javette would fain have swooned, but she dared not. Tignonville would fain have questioned, but he shrank from the venture.
"You were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this window and waited for death!" Count Hannibal answered brutally. "You flinched then, and may flinch again!" "Try me!" Tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. "Try me!" And then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, "But you dare not!" he cried. "You dare not!" "No?" "No! For if I die you lose her!"
But he saw all with eyes which in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville; Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in him to do his office. Probably it was to this that one man hunted through Paris owed his escape that day.
Tignonville slid behind one of these, found that it masked the mouth of an alley, and, heedless whither the passage led, ran hurriedly along it.
And I would lock you up, and save your life, I thought, until the blood-letting was over. Now you have it, M. de Tignonville, and I hope you like it." Like it, when every word she uttered stripped him of the selfish illusions in which he had wrapped himself against the blasts of ill-fortune?
Low down in the corner where the roof descended, a small door, square, and not more than two feet high, disclosed itself. The two crept to it on hands and knees and listened. "It will lead to the leads, I doubt?" La Tribe whispered. They dared not raise their voices. "As well that way as another!" Tignonville answered recklessly.
Tignonville cried; and leaping, with flaming eyes, on the bed, he fell to hacking and jabbing and tearing at the laths amid a rain of dust and rubbish.
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