Historical Romances: Under the Red Robe, Count Hannibal, A Gentleman of France

Madame St. Lo drew in her breath. As if he had heard the sound-which was impossible-the man dropped down where he stood, crawled a yard or two on his face, and disappeared.

Madame stared a moment, expecting to see him or hear him. Then, as nothing happened, she screamed. She was a woman of quick impulses, essentially feminine; and she screamed three or four times, standing where she was, her eyes on the edge of the wood. "If that does not bring her out, nothing will!" she thought.

It brought her. An instant, and the Countess appeared, and hurried in dismay to her side. "What is it?" the younger woman asked, glancing over her shoulder; for all the valley, all the hills were peaceful, and behind Madame St. Lo-but the lady had not discovered it-the servants who had returned were laying the meal. "What is it?" she repeated anxiously.

"Who was it?" Madame St. Lo asked curtly. She was quite calm now.

"Who was-who?"

"The man in the wood?"

The Countess stared a moment, then laughed. "Only the old soldier they call Badelon, gathering simples. Did you think that he would harm me?"

"It was not old Badelon whom I saw!" Madame St. Lo retorted. "It was a younger man, who crept along the other side of the brook, keeping under cover. When I first saw him he was there," she continued, pointing to the place. "And he crept on and on until he came opposite to you. Then he waved his hand."

"To me!"

Madame nodded.

"But if you saw him, who was he?" the Countess asked.

"I did not see his face," Madame St. Lo answered. "But he waved to you. That I saw."

The Countess had a thought which slowly flooded her face with crimson. Madame St. Lo saw the change, saw the tender light which on a sudden softened the other's eyes; and the same thought occurred to her. And having a mind to punish her companion for her reticence-for she did not doubt that the girl knew more than she acknowledged-she proposed that they should return and find Badelon, and learn if he had seen the man.

"Why?" Madame Tavannes asked. And she stood stubbornly, her head high. "Why should we?"

"To clear it up," the elder woman answered mischievously. "But perhaps, it were better to tell your husband and let his men search the coppice."

The colour left the Countess's face as quickly as it had come. For a moment she was tongue-tied. Then, "Have we not had enough of seeking and being sought?" she cried; more bitterly than befitted the occasion. "Why should we hunt him? I am not timid, and he did me no harm. I beg, Madame, that you will do me the favour of being silent on the matter."

"Oh, if you insist? But what a pother-"

"I did not see him, and he did not see me," Madame de Tavannes answered vehemently. "I fail, therefore, to understand why we should harass him, whoever he be. Besides, M. de Tavannes is waiting for us."

"And M. de Tignonville-is following us!" Madame St. Lo muttered-under her breath. And she made a face at the other's back.

She was silent, however; they returned to the others; and nothing of import, it would seem, had happened. The soft summer air played on the meal laid under the willows as it had played on the meal of yesterday laid under the chestnut-trees. The horses grazed within sight, moving now and again, with a jingle of trappings or a jealous neigh; the women's chatter vied with the unceasing sound of the mill-stream. After dinner, Madame St. Lo touched the lute, and Badelon-Badelon who had seen the sack of the Colonna's Palace, and been served by cardinals on the knee-fed a water-rat, which had its home in one of the willow-stumps, with carrot-parings. One by one the men laid themselves to sleep with their faces on their arms; and to the eyes all was as all had been yesterday in this camp of armed men living peacefully.

But not to the Countess! She had accepted her life, she had resigned herself, she had marvelled that it was no worse. After the horrors of Paris the calm of the last two days had fallen on her as balm on a wound. Worn out in body and mind, she had rested, and only rested; without thought, almost without emotion, save for the feeling, half fear, half curiosity, which stirred her in regard to the strange man, her husband. Who on his side left her alone.

But the last hour had wrought a change. Her eyes were grown restless, her colour came and went. The past stirred in its shallow-ah, so shallow-grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might, thrust out hands to plague and torment her. If the man who sought to speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the skirts of her party, were Tignonville-her lover, who at his own request had been escorted to the Arsenal before their departure from Paris-then her plight was a sorry one. For what woman, wedded as she had been wedded, could think otherwise than indulgently of his persistence? And yet, lover and husband! What peril, what shame the words had often spelled! At the thought only she trembled and her colour ebbed. She saw, as one who stands on the brink of a precipice, the depth which yawned before her. She asked herself, shivering, if she would ever sink to that.

All the loyalty of a strong nature, all the virtue of a good woman revolted against the thought. True, her husband-husband she must call him-had not deserved her love; but his bizarre magnanimity, the gloomy, disdainful kindness with which he had crowned possession, even the unity of their interests, which he had impressed upon her in so strange a fashion, claimed a return in honour.

To be paid-how? how? That was the crux which perplexed, which frightened, which harassed her. For, if she told her suspicions, she exposed her lover to capture by one who had no longer a reason to be merciful. And if she sought occasion to see Tignonville and so to dissuade him, she did it at deadly risk to herself. Yet what other course lay open to her if she would not stand by? If she would not play the traitor? If she-

"Madame," – it was her husband, and he spoke to her suddenly, – "are you not well?" And, looking up guiltily, she found his eyes fixed curiously on hers.

Her face turned red and white and red again, and she faltered something and looked from him, but only to meet Madame St. Lo's eyes. My lady laughed softly in sheer mischief.

"What is it?" Count Hannibal asked sharply.

But Madame St. Lo's answer was a line of Ronsard.

CHAPTER XX
ON THE CASTLE HILL

Thrice she hummed it, bland and smiling. Then from the neighbouring group came an interruption. The wine he had drunk had put it into Bigot's head to snatch a kiss from Suzanne; and Suzanne's modesty, which was very nice in company, obliged her to squeal. The uproar which ensued, the men backing the man and the women the woman, brought Tavannes to his feet. He did not speak, but a glance from his eyes was enough. There was not one who failed to see that something was amiss with him, and a sudden silence fell on the party.

He turned to the Countess. "You wished to see the castle?" he said. "You had better go now, but not alone." He cast his eyes over the company, and summoned La Tribe, who was seated with the Carlats. "Go with Madame," he said curtly. "She has a mind to climb the hill. Bear in mind, we start at three, and do not venture out of hearing."

"I understand, M. le Comte," the minister answered. He spoke quietly, but there was a strange light in his face as he turned to go with her.

None the less he was silent until Madame's lagging feet-for all her interest in the expedition was gone-had borne her a hundred paces from the company. Then, "Who knoweth our thoughts and forerunneth all our desires," he murmured. And when she turned to him, astonished, "Madame," he continued, "I have prayed, ah, how I have prayed, for this opportunity of speaking to you! And it has come. I would it had come this morning, but it has come. Do not start or look round; many eyes are on us, and alas! I have that to say to you which it will move you to hear, and that to ask of you which it must task your courage to perform."

She began to tremble, and stood, looking up the green slope to the broken grey wall which crowned its summit. "What is it?" she whispered, commanding herself with an effort. "What is it? If it have aught to do with M. Tignonville-"

"It has not!"

In her surprise-for although she had put the question she had felt no doubt of the answer-she started and turned to him. "It has not?" she exclaimed almost incredulously.

"No."

"Then what is it, monsieur?" she replied, a little haughtily. "What can there be that should move me so?"

"Life or death, Madame," he answered solemnly. "Nay, more; for since Providence has given me this chance of speaking to you, a thing of which, I despaired, I know that the burden is laid on us, and that it is guilt or it is innocence, according as we refuse the burden or bear it."

"What is it then?" she cried impatiently. "What is it?"

"I tried to speak to you this morning."

"Was it you then, whom Madame St. Lo saw stalking me before dinner?"

"It was."

She clasped her hands and heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank God, monsieur!" she replied. "You have lifted a weight from me. I fear nothing in comparison of that. Nothing!"

"Alas," he answered sombrely, "there is much to fear, for others if not for ourselves! Do you know what that is which M. de Tavannes bears always in his belt? What it is he carries with such care? What it was he handed to you to keep while he bathed to-day?"

"Letters from the King."

"Yes, but the import of those letters?"

"No."

"And yet should they be written in letters of blood!" the minister exclaimed, his face kindling. "They should scorch the hands that hold them and blister the eyes that read them. They are the fire and the sword! They are the King's order to do at Angers as they have done in Paris. To slay all of the religion who are found there-and they are many! To spare none, to have mercy neither on the old man nor the unborn child! See yonder hawk!" he continued, pointing with a shaking hand to a falcon which hung light and graceful above the valley, the movement of its wings invisible. "How it disports itself in the face of the sun! How easy its way, how smooth its flight! But see, it drops upon its prey in the rushes beside the brook, and the end of its beauty is slaughter! So is it with yonder company!" His finger sank until it indicated the little camp seated toy-like in the green meadow four hundred feet below them, with every man and horse, and the very camp-kettle, clear-cut and visible, though diminished by distance to fairy-like proportions. "So it is with yonder company!" he repeated sternly. "They play and are merry, and one fishes and another sleeps! But at the end of the journey is death. Death for their victims, and for them the judgment!"

She stood, as he spoke, in the ruined gateway, a walled grass-plot behind her and at her feet the stream, the smiling valley, the alders, and the little camp. The sky was cloudless, the scene drowsy with the stillness of an August afternoon. But his words went home so truly that the sunlit landscape before the eyes added one more horror to the picture he called up before the mind.

The Countess turned white and sick. "Are you sure?" she whispered at last.

"Quite sure."

"Ah, God!" she cried, "are we never to have peace?" And turning from the valley, she walked some distance into the grass court, and stood. After a time, she turned to him; he had followed her doggedly, pace for pace. "What do you want me to do?" she cried, despair in her voice. "What can I do?"

"Were the letters he bears destroyed-"

"The letters?"

"Yes, were the letters destroyed," La Tribe answered relentlessly, "he could do nothing! Nothing! Without that authority the magistrates of Angers would not move. He could do nothing. And men and women and children-men and women and children whose blood will otherwise cry for vengeance, perhaps for vengeance on us who might have saved them-will live! Will live!" he repeated with a softening eye. And with an all-embracing gesture he seemed to call to witness the open heavens, the sunshine and the summer breeze which wrapped them round. "Will live!"

She drew a deep breath. "And you have brought me here," she said, "to ask me to do this?"

"I was sent here to ask you to do this."

"Why me? Why me!" she wailed, and she held out her open hands to him, her face wan and colourless. "You come to me, a woman! Why to me?"

"You are his wife!"

"And he is my husband!"

"Therefore he trusts you," was the unyielding, the pitiless answer. "You, and you alone, have the opportunity of doing this."

She gazed at him in astonishment. "And it is you who say that?" she faltered, after a pause. "You who made us one, who now bid me betray him, whom I have sworn to love? To ruin him whom I have sworn to honour?"

"I do!" he answered solemnly. "On my head be the guilt, and on yours the merit."

"Nay, but-" she cried quickly, and her eyes glittered with passion-"do you take both guilt and merit! You are a man," she continued, her words coming quickly in her excitement, "he is but a man! Why do you not call him aside, trick him apart on some pretence or other, and when there are but you two, man to man, wrench the warrant from him? Staking your life against his, with all those lives for prize? And save them or perish? Why I, even I, a woman, could find it in my heart to do that, were he not my husband! Surely you, you who are a man, and young-"

"Am no match for him in strength or arms," the minister answered sadly. "Else would I do it."

"Else would I stake my life, Heaven knows, as gladly to save their lives as I sit down to meat! But I should fail, and if I failed all were lost. Moreover," he continued solemnly, "I am certified that this task has been set for you. It was not for nothing, Madame, nor to save one poor household that you were joined to this man; but to ransom all these lives and this great city. To be the Judith of our faith, the saviour of Angers, the-"

"Fool! Fool!" she cried. "Will you be silent?" And she stamped the turf passionately, while her eyes blazed in her white face. "I am no Judith, and no madwoman as you are fain to make me. Mad?" she continued, overwhelmed with agitation. "My God, I would I were, and I should be free from this!" And, turning, she walked a little way from him with the gesture of one under a crushing burden.

He waited a minute, two minutes, three minutes, and still she did not return. At length she came back, her bearing more composed; she looked at him and her eyes seized his and seemed as if they would read his soul. "Are you sure," she said, "of what you have told me? Will you swear that the contents of these letters are as you say?"

"As I live," he answered gravely. "As God lives."

"And you know-of no other way, monsieur? Of no other way?" she repeated slowly and piteously.

"Of none, Madame, of none, I swear."

She sighed deeply, and stood sunk in thought. Then, "When do we reach Angers?" she asked heavily.

"The day after to-morrow."

"I have-until the day after to-morrow?"

"Yes. To-night we lie near Vendôme."

"And to-morrow night?"

"Near a place called La Flèche. It is possible," he went on with hesitation-for he did not understand her-"that he may bathe to-morrow, and may hand the packet to you, as he did to-day when I vainly sought speech with you. If he does that-"

"Yes?" she said, her eyes on his face.

"The taking will be easy. But when he finds you have it not-" he faltered anew-"it may go hard with you."

She did not speak.

"And there, I think, I can help you. If you will stray from the party, I will meet you and destroy the letter. That done-and would God it were done already-I will take to flight as best I can, and you will raise the alarm and say that I robbed you of it! And if you tear your dress-"

"No," she said.

He looked a question.

"No!" she repeated in a low voice. "If I betray him I will not lie to him! And no other shall pay the price! If I ruin him it shall be between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!"

He shook his head. "I do not know," he murmured, "what he may do to you!"

"Nor I," she said proudly. "That will be for him."

* * * * *

Curious eyes had watched the two as they climbed the hill. For the path ran up the slope to the gap which served for gate, much as the path leads up to the Castle Beautiful in old prints of the Pilgrim's journey; and Madame St. Lo had marked the first halt and the second, and, noting every gesture, had lost nothing of the interview save the words. But until the two, after pausing a moment, passed out of sight she made no sign. Then she laughed. And as Count Hannibal, at whom the laugh was aimed, did not heed her, she laughed again. And she hummed the line of Ronsard.

Still he would not be roused, and, piqued, she had recourse to words. "I wonder what you would do," she said, "if the old lover followed us, and she went off with him!"

"She would not go," he answered coldly, and without looking up.

"But if he rode off with her?"

"She would come back on her feet!"

Madame St. Lo's prudence was not proof against that. She had the woman's inclination to hide a woman's secret; and she had not intended, when she laughed, to do more than play with the formidable man with whom so few dared to play. Now, stung by his tone and his assurance, she must needs show him that his trustfulness had no base. And, as so often happens in the circumstances, she went a little farther than the facts bore her. "Any way, he has followed us so far!" she cried viciously.

"M. de Tignonville?"

"Yes. I saw him this morning while you were bathing. She left me and went into the little coppice. He came down the other side of the brook, stooping and running, and went to join her."

"How did he cross the brook?"

Madame St. Lo blushed. "Old Badelon was there, gathering simples," she said. "He scared him. And he crawled away."

"Then he did not cross?"

"No. I did not say he did!"

"Nor speak to her?"

"No. But if you think it will pass so next time-you do not know much of women!"

"Of women generally, not much," he answered, grimly polite. "Of this woman a great deal!"

"You looked in her big eyes, I suppose!" Madame St. Lo cried with heat. "And straightway fell down and worshipped her!" She liked rather than disliked the Countess; but she was of the lightest, and the least opposition drove her out of her course. "And you think you know her! And she, if she could save you from death by opening an eye, would go with a patch on it till her dying day! Take my word for it, monsieur, between her and her lover you will come to harm."

Count Hannibal's swarthy face darkened a tone, and his eyes grew a very little smaller. "I fancy that he runs the greater risk," he muttered.

"You may deal with him, but, for her-"

"I can deal with her. You deal with some women with a whip"

"You would whip me, I suppose?"

"Yes," he said quietly. "It would do you good, Madame. And with other women otherwise. There are women who, if they are well frightened, will not deceive you. And there are others who will not deceive you though they are frightened. Madame de Tavannes is of the latter kind."

"Wait! Wait and see!" Madame cried in scorn.

"I am waiting."

"Yes! And whereas if you had come to me I could have told her that about M. Tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting and waiting and waiting until one fine day you'll wake up and find Madame gone, and-"

"Then I'll take a wife I can whip!" he answered, with a look which apprised her how far she had carried it. "But it will not be you, sweet cousin. For I have no whip heavy enough for your case."

CHAPTER XXI
SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT

We noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe. But there are concessions which touch even a good woman's conscience; and Madame de Tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her.

To ignore what La Tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from massacre-this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. But to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment. And the Countess was no fanatic. No haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own. Even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her.

True, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pass for punishment. But he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. In return for which she was to ruin him! It was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him.

She pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the westering sun in their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the bracken which fringed the track. Across breezy heaths and over downs, through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world-from which they came and to which they must return-that she could have wept in anguish, cursing God for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on creation. The gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and swaying stirrups-and singing now a refrain from Ronsard, and now one of those verses of Marot's psalms which all the world had sung three decades before-wore their most lamblike aspect. Behind them Madame St. Lo chattered to Suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at Angers. And the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. In time of war death's shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is out of mind. Of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of Vendôme, three only wore faces attuned to the cruel August week just ending; three only, like dark beads strung far apart on a gay nun's rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in their places. The Countess was one; the others were the two men whose thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, La Tribe's with sombre fire in their depths, Count Hannibal's fraught with a gloomy speculation, which belied his brave words to Madame St. Lo.

He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La Tribe was single-minded.

This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which marked where Vendôme stood. "Another league," Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'Tis pure and dry here," he said. "Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water. I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame!"

"I prefer this," she answered in a low voice.

"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me God's heaven."

"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.

He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which, they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of Nature's cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.

The Countess long remembered that vigil-for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions. "Yet, I believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself. "Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!"

And though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which her soul shrank! The woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for choosing evil or good, ease for herself or life for others. But the moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no shame and no suffering seemed-for the moment at least-too great a price to pay for the lives of little children. Love had been taken from her life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity-that must go, too!

She felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night. But things fell out in a manner she had not pictured. They halted before noon on the north bank of the Loir, in a level meadow with lines of poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the soft shimmer of leaves. Blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky, flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, Italian fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair. A road ran across the meadow to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself.

Presently Madame St. Lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have it. The poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a hermit-in a meadow-was no longer to her taste. "Let us go on the water!" she cried. "Presently you will go to bathe, monsieur, and leave us to grill!"

"Two livres to the man who will fetch the boat!" Count Hannibal cried. In less than half a minute three men had thrown off their boots, and were swimming across, amid the laughter and shouts of their fellows. In five minutes the boat was brought.

It was not large and would hold no more than four. Tavannes' eye fell on Carlat. "You understand a boat," he said. "Go with Madame St. Lo. And you, M. La Tribe."

"But you are coming?" Madame St. Lo cried, turning to the Countess. "Oh, Madame," with a curtsey, "you are not? You-"

"Yes, I will come," the Countess answered.

"I shall bathe a short distance up the stream," Count Hannibal said. He took from his belt the packet of letters, and as Carlat held the boat for Madame St. Lo to enter, he gave it to the Countess, as he had given it to her yesterday. "Have a care of it, Madame," he said in a low voice, "and do not let it pass out of your hands. To lose it may be to lose my head."

The colour ebbed from her cheeks. In spite of herself her shaking hand put back the packet. "Had you not better then-give it to Bigot?" she faltered.

"He is bathing."

"Let him bathe afterwards."

"No," he answered almost harshly; he found a species of pleasure in showing her that, strange as their relations were, he trusted her. "No; take it, Madame. Only have a care of it."

She took it then, hid it in her dress, and he turned away; and she turned towards the boat. La Tribe stood beside the stern, holding it for her to enter, and as her fingers rested an instant on his arm their eyes met. His were alight, his arm even quivered; and she shuddered.

She avoided looking at him a second time, and this was easy, since he took his seat in the bows beyond Carlat, who handled the oars. Silently the boat glided out on the surface of the stream, and floated downwards, Carlat now and again touching an oar, and Madame St. Lo chattering gaily in a voice which carried far on the water. Now it was a flowering rush she must have, now a green bough to shield her face from the sun's reflection; and now they must lie in some cool, shadowy pool under fern-clad banks, where the fish rose heavily, and the trickle of a rivulet fell down over stones.

It was idyllic. But not to the Countess. Her face burned, her temples throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to steady her pulses. The packet within her dress scorched her. The great city and its danger, Tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action, the irrevocableness of action hurried through her brain. The knowledge that she must act now-or never-pressed upon her with distracting force. Her hand felt the packet, and fell again nerveless.