They were fortunate indeed, for a few seconds later they had been too
late. The alarm had preceded them. As they dashed up, a man ran to the
chains of the portcullis and tried to lower it. He failed to do so at
the first touch, and, quailing, fled from Badelon's levelled pistol. A
watchman on one of the bastions of the wall shouted to them to halt or he
would fire: but the riders yelled in derision, and thundering through the
echoing archway, emerged into the open, and saw, extended before them, in
place of the gloomy vistas of the Black Town, the glory of the open
country and the vine-clad hills, and the fields about the Loire yellow
with late harvest.
The women gasped their relief, and one or two who were most out of breath
would have pulled up their horses and let them trot, thinking the danger
at an end. But a curt savage word from the rear set them flying again,
and down and up and on again they galloped, driven forward by the iron
hand which never relaxed its grip of them. Silent and pitiless he
whirled them before him until they were within a mile of the long Ponts
de Ce--a series of bridges rather than one bridge--and the broad shallow
Loire lay plain before them, its sandbanks grilling in the sun, and grey
lines of willows marking its eyots. By this time some of the women,
white with fatigue, could only cling to their saddles with their hands;
while others were red-hot, their hair unrolled, and the perspiration
mingled with the dust on their faces. But he who drove them had no pity
for weakness in an emergency. He looked back and saw, a half-mile behind
them, the glitter of steel following hard on their heels: and "Faster!
faster!" he cried, regardless of their prayers: and he beat the rearmost
of the horses with his scabbard. A waiting-woman shrieked that she
should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, "Fall then, fool!" and the
instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and
toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town
about the bridges, and Badelon raised his hand as a signal that they
might slacken speed.
The bewilderment of the start had been so great that it was then only,
when they found their feet on the first link of the bridge, that two of
the party, the Countess and Tignonville, awoke to the fact that their
faces were set southwards. To cross the Loire in those days meant much
to all: to a Huguenot, very much. It chanced that these two rode on to
the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing--the
remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed
it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and
with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into
the mind of each of them. It deepened the flush which exertion had
brought to the woman's cheek, then left it paler than before. A minute
earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him
accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her
anger died as she looked and she remembered. In the man, shallower of
feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as
he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation.