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Updated: June 3, 2025
The Countess covered her face and wept. It was in the grey dawning of the next day, at the hour before the sun rose, that word of M. de Tignonville's fate came to them in the castle.
It saved him from the Provost, but it brought him face to face and eye to eye with Count Hannibal, who stood in the first rank at his brother's elbow. Tavannes stared an instant as if he doubted his eyesight. Then, as doubt gave slow place to certainty, and surprise to amazement, he smiled. And after a moment he looked another way. Tignonville's heart gave a great bump and seemed to stand still.
The hen which had made its nest at Tignonville's feet, disturbed by the movement or by the newcomer's hand, flew out with a rush and flutter as of a great firework.
Was it wonderful, when they had suffered so much on that northern bank? When their experience during the month had been comparable only with the direst nightmare? Yet one among them, after the first impulse of relief and satisfaction, felt differently. Tignonville's gorge rose against the sense of compulsion, of inferiority.
"But something there is," the lean man persisted obstinately; and he cast a suspicious glance at Tignonville's clothes. It was evident that the two had discussed him, and the motives of his presence there. "Have the dice proved fickle, my lord, and are you for the jewellers' shops on the bridge to fill your purse again? If so, take my word, it were better to go three than one, and we'll enlist."
It pleased him still to imagine of this he was more confident that in the time to come, when she was Tignonville's, she would think of him secretly and kindly. She would remember him, and in her thoughts and in her memory he would grow to the heroic, even as the man she had chosen would shrink as she learned to know him. It pleased him, that.
Carlat threw himself before his mistress, the Countess in her turn sheltered a young girl, who stood beside her and from whose face the last trace of colour had fled. Madame Carlat and a waiting-woman ran shrieking to the window; another instant and the alarm would have gone abroad. Tignonville's voice stopped it. "Don't you know me?" he cried, "Madame! you at least! Carlat! Are you all mad?"
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.
The grapes hung nearly ripe, and amid their clusters and the green lattice of their foliage Tignonville's gaze sought eagerly but in vain the laughing eyes and piquant face of his new mistress.
He had not crossed the threshold before she repented that she had not acted on Tignonville's suggestion, and denied herself. For what could escape those hard keen eyes, which swept the room, saw all, and seemed to see nothing those eyes in which there dwelt even now a glint of cruel humour?
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