“Ay, go!” La Tribe added more quietly.
The man turned away with a shrug of the shoulders, and moved off a dozen paces, watched by all on the gate with the same fixed attention. But presently he paused; he returned.
“Very well,” he said, looking up with an ill grace. “I will do my office here, if I cannot come to her. But I hold also a letter from M. de Tignonville, and that I can deliver to no other hands than hers!” He held it up as he spoke, a thin scrap of greyish paper, the fly-leaf of a missal perhaps. “See!” he continued, “and take notice! If she does not get this, and learns when it is too late that it was offered—”
“The terms,” Carlat growled impatiently. “The terms! Come to them!”
“You will have them?” the man answered, nervously passing his tongue over his lips. “You will not let me see her, or speak to her privately?”
“No.”
“Then hear them. His Excellency is informed that one Hannibal de Tavannes, guilty of the detestable crime of sacrilege and of other gross crimes, has taken refuge here. He requires that the said Hannibal de Tavannes be handed to him for punishment, and, this being done before sunset this evening, he will yield to you free and uninjured the said M. de Tignonville, and will retire from the lands of Vrillac. But if you refuse”—the man passed his eye along the line of attentive faces which fringed the battlement—“he will at sunset hang the said Tignonville on the gallows raised for Tavannes, and will harry the demesne of Vrillac to its farthest border!”
There was a long silence on the gate. Some, their gaze still fixed on him, moved their lips as if they chewed. Others looked aside, met their fellows’ eyes in a pregnant glance, and slowly returned to him. But no one spoke. At his back the flush of dawn was flooding the east, and spreading and waxing brighter. The air was growing warm; the shore below, from grey, was turning green.
In a minute or two the sun, whose glowing marge already peeped above the low hills of France, would top the horizon.
The man, getting no answer, shifted his feet uneasily. “Well,” he cried, “what answer am I to take?”