“By using violence to her?” the minister retorted passionately.  He and Tuez were still gripping one another.  “I tell you, to go on is to risk what we have got!  And I for one—­”

“Am chicken-hearted!” the young man sneered.  “Madame—­” He seemed to choke on the word.  “Will you swear that he is not here?”

“I swear that if you do not go I will raise the alarm!” she hissed—­all their words were sunk to that stealthy note.  “Go! if you have not stayed too long already.  Go!  Or see!” And she pointed to the trapdoor, from which the face and arms of a sixth man had that moment risen—­the face dark with perturbation, so that her woman’s wit told her at once that something was amiss.  “See what has come of your delay already!”

“The water is rising,” the man muttered earnestly.  “In God’s name come, whether you have done it or not, or we cannot pass out again.  It is within a foot of the crown of the culvert now, and it is rising.”

“Curse on the water!” Tuez-les-Moines answered in a frenzied whisper.  “And on this Jezebel.  Let us kill her and him!  What matter afterwards?” And he tried to shake off La Tribe’s grasp.

But the minister held him desperately.  “Are you mad?  Are you mad?” he answered.  “What can we do against thirty?  Let us be gone while we can.  Let us be gone!  Come.”

“Ay, come,” Perrot cried, assenting reluctantly.  He had taken no side hitherto.  “The luck is against us!  ’Tis no use to-night, man!” And he turned with an air of sullen resignation.  Letting his legs drop through the trap, he followed the bearer of the tidings out of sight.  Another made up his mind to go, and went.  Then only Tignonville, holding the lanthorn, and La Tribe, who feared to release Tuez-les-Moines, remained with the fanatic.

The Countess’s eyes met her old lover’s, and whether old memories overcame her, or, now that the danger was nearly past, she began to give way, she swayed a little on her feet.  But he did not notice it.  He was sunk in black rage—­rage against her, rage against himself.

“Take the light,” she muttered unsteadily.  “And—­and he must follow!”

“And you?”

But she could bear it no longer.  “Oh, go,” she wailed.  “Go!  Will you never go?  If you love me, if you ever loved me, I implore you to go.”

He had betrayed little of a lover’s feeling.  But he could not resist that appeal, and he turned silently.  Seizing Tuez-les-Moines by the other arm, he drew him by force to the trap.

“Quiet, fool,” he muttered savagely when the man would have resisted, “and go down!  If we stay to kill him, we shall have no way of escape, and his life will be dearly bought.  Down, man, down!” And between them, in a struggling silence, with now and then an audible rap, or a ring of metal, the two forced the desperado to descend.