“I know who that is,” he said, “he visited my master down at Taverney. It is Baron Balsamo. Oh, I care not if I die provided she lives. This man has the power to save her.”
In perfect self-sacrifice, he raised the girl up in both hands and shouted:
“Baron Balsamo, save Andrea de Taverney!”
Balsamo heard this voice from the depths; he saw the white figure lifted above the matted beings; he used the phalanx he had collected to cover his charge to the spot. Seizing the girl, still sustained by Gilbert though his arms were weakening, he snatched her away, and let the crowd carry them both afar.
He had not time to turn his head.
Gilbert had not the breath to utter a word. Perhaps, after having Andrea aided, he would have supplicated assistance for himself; but all he could do was clutch with a hand which tore a scrap of the dress of the girl. After this grasp, a last farewell, the young man tried no longer to struggle, as though he were willing to die. He closed his eyes and fell on a heap of the dead.
CHAPTER II.
THE FIELD OF THE DEAD.
TO great tempests succeeds calm, dreadful but reparative.
At two o’clock in the morning a wan moon was playing through the swift-driving white clouds upon the fatal scene where the merry-makers had trampled and buried one another in the ditches.
The corpses stuck out arms lifted in prayers and legs broken and entangled, while the clothes were ripped and the faces livid.