The movement carried Tavannes himself—­even while his victim’s scream rang through the chamber—­into the embrasure.  An instant he hung on the verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards.

He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he himself bounded off right-handed.  The peril was appalling, the possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have taken.  But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing.  He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it.  But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough—­but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature.  They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength—­he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face was submerged—­he reached out another yard, and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.

The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud.  Shout as they might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes.  They could only look on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from their view, behind the angle of the building.

Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and wall.  He struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless Maudron—­a tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold—­he turned and painfully climbed the river-bank.  The pike-wound in his shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn.  Nevertheless, when he had put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the Arsenal he paused, and turned.  He saw that the men had run to other windows which looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with triumph.

He shook his fist at them.  “Ho, fools!” he cried, “you kill not Tavannes so!  Till our next meeting at Montfaucon, fare you well!”

CHAPTER XV.  THE BROTHER OF ST. MAGLOIRE.

As the exertion of power is for the most part pleasing, so the exercise of that which a woman possesses over a man is especially pleasant.  When in addition a risk of no ordinary kind has been run, and the happy issue has been barely expected—­above all when the momentary gain seems an augury of final victory—­it is impossible that a feeling akin to exultation should not arise in the mind, however black the horizon, and however distant the fair haven.