It had
no significance for me that the past day was the 23rd of August,
or that the morrow was St. Bartholomew's feast!
No. Yet mingled with the jubilation which the possibility of
triumph over our enemy raised in my breast, there was certainly a
foreboding. The Vidame's hints, no less than his open boasts,
had pointed to something to happen before morning--something
wider than the mere murder of a single man. The warning also
which the Baron de Rosny had given us at the inn occurred to me
with new meaning. And I could not shake the feeling off. I
fancied, as I sat in the darkness astride of my beam, that I
could see, closing the narrow vista of the street, the heavy mass
of the Louvre; and that the murmur of voices and the tramp of men
assembling came from its courts, with now and again the stealthy
challenge of a sentry, the restrained voice of an officer.
Scarcely a wayfarer passed beneath me: so few, indeed, that I
had no fear of being detected from below. And yet unless I was
mistaken, a furtive step, a subdued whisper were borne to me on
every breeze, from every quarter.
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