"Give it here!"
"It is yours," Count Hannibal answered, "if you will carry ten words to
Marshal Tavannes--when I am gone."
The man's neighbour laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"And Marshal Tavannes will pay you finely," he said.
But Maudron, the man who had offered, shook off the hand.
"If I take the message!" he muttered in a grim aside. "Do you think me
mad?" And then aloud he cried, "Ay, I'll take your message! Give me the
paper."
"You swear you will take it?"
The man had no intention of taking it, but he perjured himself and went
forward. The others would have pressed round too, half in envy, half in
scorn; but Tavannes by a gesture stayed them.
"Gentlemen, I ask a minute only," he said. "A minute for a dying man is
not much. Your friends had as much."
And the fellows, acknowledging the claim and assured that their victim
could not escape, let Maudron go round the table to him.
The man was in haste and ill at ease, conscious of his evil intentions
and the fraud he was practising; and at once greedy to have, yet ashamed
of the bargain he was making. His attention was divided between the slip
of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his
comrades; he paid little heed to Count Hannibal, whom he knew to be
unarmed.
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