But what was this which lay
along the foot of the new Italian wall? This, round which some stood,
gazing curiously, while others strewed fresh sand about it, or after long
downward-looking glanced up to answer the question of a person at a
window?
Death; and over death--death in its most cruel aspect--a cloud of
buzzing, whirling flies, and the smell, never to be forgotten, of much
spilled blood. From a doorway hard by came shrill bursts of hysterical
laughter; and with the laughter plumped out, even as Tavannes crossed the
court, a young girl, thrust forth it seemed by her fellows, for she
turned about and struggled as she came. Once outside she hung back,
giggling and protesting, half willing, half unwilling; and meeting
Tavannes' eye thrust her way in again with a whirl of her petticoats, and
a shriek. But before he had taken four paces she was out again.
He paused to see who she was, and his thoughts involuntarily went back to
the woman he had left weeping in the upper room. Then he turned about
again and stood to count the dead. He identified Piles, identified
Pardaillan, identified Soubise--whose corpse the murderers had robbed of
the last rag--and Touchet and St. Galais. He made his reckoning with an
unmoved face, and with the same face stopped and stared, and moved from
one to another; had he not seen the slaughter about "_le petit homme_" at
Jarnac, and the dead of three pitched fields? But when a bystander,
smirking obsequiously, passed him a jest on Soubise, and with his finger
pointed the jest, he had the same hard unmoved face for the gibe as for
the dead.
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