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Title: Historical vignettes, 1st series

Author: Bernard Capes

Release date: April 24, 2023 [eBook #70642]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: T. FISHER UNWIN, 1910

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL VIGNETTES, 1ST SERIES ***





 HISTORICAL
 VIGNETTES,
 _1st Series_


 BY
 BERNARD CAPES
 AUTHOR OF “A JAY OF ITALY” ETC.




 LONDON
 T. FISHER UNWIN
 ADELPHI TERRACE
 1910
 (_All rights reserved._)




 CONTENTS

 GEORGE I.
 FOUQUIER-TINVILLE
 THE QUEEN’S NURSE
 LOUIS XIV.
 NAPOLEON
 LEONORA OF TOLEDO
 CHARLES IX.
 THE KING’S CHAMPION
 QUEEN ELIZABETH
 JANE SHORE
 THE CHAPLAIN OF THE TOWER
 LADY GODIVA
 THE HERO OF WATERLOO
 MAID MARIAN
 THOMAS PAINE
 FAIR ROSAMOND
 THE GALILEAN
 THE BORGIA DEATH
 “DEAD MAN’S PLACK”
 THE EXECUTIONER OF NANTES
 THE LORD TREASURER
 MARGARET OF ANJOU
 “KING COLLEY”
 THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE
 THE PRIOR OF ST. COME
 CAPTAIN MACARTNEY
 THE DUC DE GUISE




 HISTORICAL VIGNETTES

 GEORGE I

“Halt!” The voice of an officer rang out in the heavy twilight, and
with a sudden scream of brakes and jangle of harness the cavalcade
came to a stand.

“Tell the Herr von Gastein his Majesty desires to speak with him.” The
name ran up the long line, quick and sharp, like a rattle of musketry,
and passed out of hearing of him who had uttered it. “Tell the Herr
Captain to come at once.”

The Herr Captain was already, on the word, spurring back from the head
of the cortège, which was of royal extent. It stood upon a flat road
in a flat country, covering more ground than and including almost as
many human souls as a modern mail-train. There was the King’s coach
for principal item--a veritable little room slung on straps and drawn
by eight horses; and there were carriages--seven or eight, and each
holding as many people--for his retinue, and baggage-wagons, and a
troop of fifty sabres to escort the whole. It took so much, or more,
to carry this little corpulent apoplectic on his annual visit to
Herrenhausen, whither he had already travelled to within a league or
so of Osnabrück and a much-needed night’s rest.

The Captain von Gastein, having dismounted and thrown his reins to a
groom, stood at stiff attention by the coach door. He was a patient,
somewhat exhausted-looking man of fifty, spare-bodied, and with
stone-blue eyes which rather matched the dusty Hanoverian blue of his
uniform. His expression at the moment was one of a quiet fatality, as
if the summons had not been altogether unforeseen by him.

A preternatural silence seemed to have succeeded the tumult of hoofs
and wheels. There was a soundless blink of lightning in the sky, and a
windmill on the flat roadside blackened and paled alternately in its
flicker, as if it palpitated. It was late June, and the air seemed to
have come out of a limekiln. The dust rolled up into it began to
settle down sluggishly.

The door of the great travelling-coach opened, and a little bewigged
gentleman, who had been peering from behind the glass, descended. His
manner was dry, self-important, professional; he was the King’s
English physician.

“His Majesty, my dear Captain,” he whispered, “is in a strange mood.
You are commanded to ascend and converse with him--you may guess why.
The affair of last year--you understand? Old associations are
re-awakened, old injuries re-exposed--you were intimately acquainted
with their subject. Bear in mind that this sad event has interposed
itself between his last departure from and his present revisit to his
paternal dominions, and venture upon nothing in the nature of a
reminder. If you find him fanciful, excited----”

A querulous voice, breaking from the interior of the carriage,
interrupted him:

“Der Herr Jesus! What is all this chatter? Tell the man to enter.”

The physician, placing a warning finger on his lips, skipped to one of
the supplementary coaches; the Captain von Gastein climbed into the
royal vehicle. A postillion put up the steps; the door was closed, the
word given, and the cavalcade lurched on. “Sit,” motioned the King;
and the Herr Captain, with what steadiness he could command, settled
himself on the edge of the broad seat backing upon the horses, and
awaited, rigid and upright.

He was quite alone with his Majesty, and there was plenty of room for
them both. The interior of the coach was like a cabinet, and
luxuriously upholstered. There were accommodations for writing,
card-playing, shaving, coffee-making, and other conveniences. The pace
was leisurely, the motion restful; the great wheels turned outside the
windows with little apparent sound. The King of England lay in his
padded corner opposite, a very weary, moodish little old man. His
cheeks bagged, his eyes goggled, strained, and anxious; the silk
travelling-cloak in which he was wrapped only partly concealed his
immense corpulence, and his thick legs and stumpy feet dangled short
of the floor. His head was unwigged, and enveloped in a close cap with
a fur border which came down over his eyes.

The officer, observant of everything, for all the respectful rigidity
of his vision, could not but be conscious of a certain feeling of
repulsion in this his first close contact with the prince to whose
unwelcome service, in one most tragic direction, he had devoted the
best twenty-five years of his life. Twenty-five years it was since he
had been ordered, a young impecunious captain, to the lonely castle of
Ahlden on the Aller, where lived, already seven years incarcerated,
the beautiful young wife of the then electoral Prince George--Sophia
Dorothea, accused, rightly or wrongly, of misconduct with a Swedish
adventurer. She was fair; unhappy; her husband had not loved her; the
cold cruelty of his temperament had been confessed in this his
consignment of her to a living grave. Had she not lain in his arms,
borne him children? Gastein had needed no more to inflame his
chivalry. Thenceforth he had given himself to the service of this
lady, to ameliorate, to the best of his power, her bitter fate. His
partiality, his sympathy, being, no doubt, reported, had kept him poor
and unpromoted. For a quarter of a century he had shared his
princess’s exile, and had only returned to the world when death had
ended that, less than a twelvemonth ago. After thirty-two years! And
this was the unlovely Rhadamanthus who had condemned her, this little
wheezy, potbellied old frog of a man, who had become Elector of
Hanover and King of England in the interval! The Captain had been
educated to the right divine succession; but something monstrous in
the picture struck him. His convictions and his emotions hurt one
another in their efforts at a reconciliation. It was somehow not right
that tragic beauty should lie at the mercy of this commonplace. He sat
as stiff as a ramrod.

It is one of the most grotesque privileges of royalty to command
silence. No one must address it unless addressed. Then, at its word,
its gesture, the empty brass pot ceases to tinkle or the golden vessel
overflows. This seems an unnatural impost, like taxing a man’s
daylight or his drinking-water. It gives an uncanny self-possession to
the mortal who levies it. The little swollen tub of a creature,
glowering in his corner, mutely discussed the figure opposite for as
long as it pleased him, with no more concern, probably less, than he
would have shown in regarding a black-beetle; and when he spoke at
last it was even with some grudging in his cold, guttural voice.

“You are of the escort, then, mein Herr?”

The Captain, stiffening yet a trifle, saluted. “As your Majesty
commanded,” he said.

The other shrugged fretfully.

“I am glad,” he said, “to find something surviving to your sense of
duty.”

Von Gastein made no answer. He ought not; he could not, indeed. That
sense of warring emotions hurt him like a violent indigestion.

The King, for some minutes, condescended to speak no more, but sat
looking out of the window upon the darkening flats and the white
ribbon of the road reeling under him. What was in his mind? He had
always declared, for some reason, that he would not long survive his
wife; and she had died six months ago. Had he somehow cheated Fate--or
might he have cheated it had he remained in England? This was his
first visit to his patrimony since her death. Her death, her released
spirit--turn the coach!

No, his beloved Herrenhausen! The stout little Guelph was no coward
for all his love of life and good-living. A murrain on this old wives’
trash of spectres and premonitions! He glanced at the figure
opposite--it sat up rigid and grey like a signpost--and, with a scowl,
looked out of the window again.

Thirty-two years--a woman of sixty, and she had been a fresh, blooming
young wife of twenty-eight when he had consigned her to her living
death! Much water, as they said in England, had flowed under London
Bridge during that interval--the highways of life had been paved and
repaved. Thirty-two years! The Schloss was a dead, dreary place,
situated in a dead, dreary country--a mere lonely manor-house in the
wilds, good enough for a month’s stay; but--thirty-two years! Gott in
Himmel! And she had been vivacious, worldly, sparkling with the glory
of being and doing when he had last seen her!

A vision of the castle, as he had known it once or twice in the old,
far-off days, rose before him. He saw again the leagues of flat
marshland which surrounded it, the reedy river crawling by its walls,
the grey alders shivering in the wind, and the wheeling of lonely
plovers. He saw the sad towers, the cold, undecorated rooms, the
windows looking out upon the lifeless waste of road. The road! the
livid unfruitful highway, upon which, for hours at a time, it had been
said, dry burning eyes had been set, despairing for the mercy, the
deliverance, which never came! For thirty-two years! God in heaven!
while the frost of age slowly settled on the beautiful eyes, the deep
black hair, the breaking heart! With a writhe, as of physical
suffering, the old man turned from his window.

“The life was dull at Schloss Ahlden?” he said.

“Dull, sire.”

The correct, impassive attitude of the Captain maddened while it half
cowed him. For a minute he held his breath--only to release it in a
sudden question, unexpected, astounding:

“In your eyes, soldier, _she_ was innocent?”

Von Gastein started under the shock--and recovered himself.

“During the twenty-five years, sire, I had the privilege of attending
on her the Princess of Ahlden did not fail weekly to take the
Sacrament, and on each occasion to avow her innocence before the
altar.”

The King stared, then mumbled from loud to low.

“They will avow it,” he began, and broke off quickly. Some words
reported to him, as having been uttered by her to one seeking to bring
about a reconciliation before his enthronement, recurred to his mind:
“If I am guilty, I am not worthy to be your Queen; if I am innocent,
your King is not worthy to be my husband.”

A casuistry, feminine, non-committing--hedging, in the true sporting
sense. He hardened. This fate had not after all seemed so merciless to
one so guilty.

“She had liberty,” he said, as if appealing to his own conscience.

The Captain made a frigid reverence, acquiescing in the enormous lie.

“I say, she had liberty,” repeated the King--“permission to drive
abroad.”

“For six miles, sire, back and forth,” answered the soldier, as if he
accounted himself addressed: “for six miles west, to the old stone
bridge on the Hayden road. So much and no more. At the bridge the
escort turned her. On fine days she would drive herself--fast and
faster, till the stones spun from the wheels. She would seem to madden
for freedom, to outstrip her misery. Many times she would traverse the
distance, the lady-in-waiting sitting, the troop spurring at her side;
and at the stone bridge it would be always the same. ‘No further?’ ‘No
further, madam.’ ‘Ah! but death will release me!’”

He stopped, conscious of his own emotion. He had served the lovely
sorrow so long, that its tragedy had become part of himself.

“I crave your Majesty’s forgiveness,” he muttered in a broken voice.

The King spoke up harshly:

“She was limited to that road by necessity.”

“During life, sire.”

The response came swift and involuntary. The soldier gasped, having
made it.

“You will stop the coach, and return to your duty,” said the King,
blue in the face.

The former commotion was repeated; the physician returned to his
patient; the cavalcade rolled on. His Majesty spoke not a single word
further, but sat staring from the window. It was deep dusk now
without, and the lightning flickered with a ghastlier brilliancy. But
still the King would give no order to have the lamps lighted. Instead,
he lay with his livid face and protruding eyes addressed to the
heavens, and the horror of a thought incessant in his mind. _The road
was open to her at last, and she was driving to cut him off from
Osnabrück, the city in which he had been born._ She knew that a man
could not die in the room where he was born; and she was coming to
forestall him with the dread summons to appear before his Maker, and
answer for the thing he had done.

 * * * * *

Much agitated, von Gastein remounted his horse, and spurred on to his
place in the front. He did more; he drove ahead of all, and took the
lead on the solitary road making for Osnabrück. The lights of the
city were already faintly starring the distance, when a sound coming
from in front startled and then thrilled him. Swift wheels, and the
hoofs of a tearing horse! There was nothing uncommon in that; and yet
his heart went cold to hear it. “God have mercy on me!” he muttered:
“I am a fool!”

Nearer and nearer came the sound--it was close--it was upon him--and
there rushed past the shadow of a cabriolet, with a wild woman on the
seat flogging a wild black horse. The night of her hair streamed
behind like a thin cloud dusted with diamonds, and there was a frenzy
of triumph in her eyes, and on her lips a smile. And so she passed and
was gone.

The Captain turned his horse’s head, and drove back upon the van.

“Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too
late!”

They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented.

“What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this
way.”

And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third
time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind,
and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little
cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step
by the open door.

“His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a
stroke, and is dead!”




 FOUQUIER-TINVILLE

“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice, bear, for
your consolation, its memory to the scaffold.”

With a stiff smile on his lips, and those words of the President of
the reconstituted Court in his ears, Antoine Quentin Fouquier de
Tinville, late Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turned
to follow his guard.

This was at seven o’clock of a May evening, and twelve or fourteen
hours remained to him in which to collect his thoughts and settle his
affairs. At ten on the following morning the tumbrils would arrive at
the archway to the Cour du Mai, and he and his fifteen condemned
jurymen would start on their long road of agony to the Place de la
Révolution, whither, or elsewhere, on a like errand, he himself had
already despatched so many thousands.

Those words of the President somehow haunted him.

So many thousands--dismissed to their deaths, without remorse or pity,
from that same _salle de la liberté_ in which he had just stood his
own trial! How familiar it had all seemed, how matter-of-course, how
inevitable!--the relentless hands of the clock, creeping on to the
premeditated doom-stroke; the hungry, bestial faces lolling at the
barriers; the voices of the street entering by the open windows, and
seeming to comment derisively on the drawling evidence, selected to
convict. He had known the procedure so well, had been so instrumental
in creating it, that any defence had well seemed a mockery of the
methods of the Palais de Justice.

“I have been a busy man,” he had said. “I forget things. Are we to be
held accountable for every parasite we destroy in crushing out the
life of a monster?”

That had appeared a reasonable plea. What did not seem reasonable was
the base sums he had personally amassed out of the destruction of the
parasites, the bribes he had accepted, his subornation of witnesses,
his deafness to the just pleas of unprofitable virtue, his neglect of
the principles of brotherhood. He had held one of the first offices of
the fraternal State, and had made of it a wholly self-seeking vehicle.
He had seen his _chance_ in the mad battle of a people for liberty,
and had used it to rob the dead. There was, in truth, no more
despicable joint in that “tail of Robespierre” which Sanson was busily
engaged just now in docking than this same Antoine Quentin. And yet he
believed himself aggrieved.

That night he wrote to his second wife, from his cell in the
Conciergerie, to which he had been returned, the following words:

“I shall die, heart and hands pure, for having served my country with
too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed to the wishes of
the Government.”

It bettered Wolsey’s cry in the singleness of its reproach.

The problem of all villainy is that it regards itself with an
obliquity of vision for which it seems hard to hold it accountable.
Given a lack of the moral sense, and how is a man to make an honest
living? Tinville--or de Tinville, mark you--became an attorney because
he was poor, and then a rascal because he was an attorney. There are
always many thousands living in an odour of respectability whom
fortune alone saves from a like revelation of themselves. But that is
not to say that, in the general purification of society, the lethal
chamber is not the best answer to the problem.

This man was by nature a callous, coarse-grained ruffian,
constitutionally insensible to the pleas of humanity, and with the
self-protective instinct prominently developed in him as in brutes.
You could not regard his sallow, grim-jawed face-structure, his
staring, over-bushed black eyes, his thin-lipped mouth, perpetually
mobile in sneers and spitting scorns and cynicisms, and affect to read
in them any under-suggestion of charity or benevolence. Numbers, poor
obsequious wretches, had essayed the monstrous pretence, and had
pitiably retracted their heresy under the axe. He was forty-seven
years of age; he had lived every day of his later manhood in secret
scorn and abuse of the principles he had hired himself to advocate;
and only where his personal interests were not affected had it ever
been possible to credit him with a deed of grace, or, at the best, of
passive indifference.

“_If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice!_”

He had done kind things in his time, two or three; but had they ever
included “one act of self-sacrifice”? Had he not conceded them,
rather, for the very contrary reason? He tried to think it out. The
question worried him oddly and persistently; it seemed to have
absorbed every other; he groped perpetually for an answer to it
through the whirling chaos of his mind. There had been the wife and
daughters of the Marquis de Miranion, whom he had shielded in their
peril because once, when he had been a young man contemplating Orders,
they had shown him kindness. He suddenly remembered the case, and
remembered too that his condescension had occurred at a time when the
despotic nature of his office had held him virtually immune from
criticism or misrepresentation. Again, there had been the young
virgins of Verdun, condemned and executed for offering sweetmeats to
the King of Prussia. He had pitied them; but pity was inexpensive,
and, at the moment, not unpopular. There had been--what else had there
been? He flogged his brains for a third instance, and, not being
successful, had to fall back upon the minor amenities. Little
convivial generosities (for he had been a _camarade_, a
_joyeux-vivant_, in his rough way), little family indulgences, and
sensual concessions--he had these to set against the habitual inhuman
greed which had made him the most squalid, soulless Harpagon of his
tribe. Insolent to weakness, truckling to power, his interest in the
awful part he had played had never risen above self-interest. The very
list of the great names he had extinguished represented nothing to his
ignoble mind but so many opportunities seized by him to acquire
personal gain or personal safety. Vergniaud the ineffable, Corday the
magnificent, Lavoisier the gentle, Hébert the dastard, Danton the
tremendous--these, to take but a handful, he had despatched to their
graves with a like indifference to the principles which had brought
them subject to his chastisement. There were no principles in his
creed but self-gain and self-preservation. From the poor Austrian
“plucked hen” at one limit of the tale to Robespierre at the other, he
had been always as ready to cut short a saint as a rogue in the
vindication of that creed. He simply could not understand any other;
and yet the words of the President were worrying him horribly.

He had answered them, at the time, after his nature--that is to say,
with servility while a thread of hope remained, and afterwards with
loud scorn and venomous defiance. Brazen by constitution, he was not
to reveal himself soft metal at the last. Trapped and at bay, he
snarled like a tiger, confessing his yellow fangs at their longest.
Hope might exist for other men; but he knew too well it was ended. He
himself had stabbed it to death with a thousand wounds.

And yet he was racked with a sense of grievance.

And yet those words of the President tormented him.

He spoke, and wrote, and raged--throughout the brief interval of life
which remained to him he was seldom still. But always the one sentence
floated in letters of dim fire in the background of his mind. He had a
mad feeling that if only once he could recall the necessary instance,
he would be equipped with the means to defy his enemies--to defy
heaven and hell and earth. That was a strange obsession for a sceptic
and atheist, but it clung to him. The words, and the rebuke that they
implied, were for ever in his brain, crossing its dark wastes like a
shaft of light peopled with tiny travelling motes, which bore some
relation, only in an insignificant form, to the tremendous business of
the day, and yet seemed to have survived that business as its only
realities. Thus through the texture of the ray came and went little
absurd memories of a cut that juryman Vilate, a fellow-prisoner, had
made upon his chin in shaving, of an early queen-wasp that had come
and droned about the presidential desk during the droning indictment,
of the face of an old shrewd, wintry hag which had peered out, white
and momentary, from among the crowd of spectators, and had been as
swiftly absorbed back into it.

The face! His wandering mind brought up on the recollection of it with
an instant shock. The hate, the tumult, all other foam-white faces of
the court, seemed in one moment to drop and seethe away from it like a
spent wave, and to leave it flung up alone, stark, motionless,
astounding.

 * * * * *

At ten came the tumbrils, together with the prescriptive guard of
sixty gendarmes to escort them to the scaffold. The ex-Public
Prosecutor mounted to his place, dogged, baleful, heroic, according to
his lights. He could not help bullying even his fellow-sufferers; but
from the outset there was a strange, searching gleam in his eyes,
which never left them until they were closed for ever.

From the Quai de l’Horloge came the first roar of the mob, as rabid to
flesh its teeth in the accuser as it had ever been in the accused.
Already, as the Pont Neuf was reached, a running, howling _valetaille_
of blackguards and prostitutes was travelling with the procession.
Lumbering onwards, between ranks of many-windowed houses alive with
screaming faces and waving hands, the carts traversed the rues la
Monoie and du Roule, and turned into the long stretch of the rue St.
Honoré, which ended only at the bend into the great square of the
guillotine.

They cursed him all the way; he cursed them back. The habit of his
lips spat venom, while his brain ignored and his vision overlooked
them.

“Where are thy batches now, Antoine?” they screamed.

“Ravening curs!” he thundered; “is thy bread cheaper lacking them?”

All the time his eyes were going with the running crowd, searching it,
beating it like covert, hunting for something on which they hungered
to fasten. And suddenly they found it--_the figure of a little
withered old woman, bearing a gross green umbrella in her hand_.

She was there in a moment, moving in pace with the carts, a dead twig
borne on the living stream, now afloat, now under, but always
reappearing--bobbing out grotesque and vital, and dancing on her way.
She was of the poorest class, bent, lean, tattered, and her face was
quite hidden behind the wings of a frowsy cap. No one seemed to
observe her; only the eyes of the condemned gloated on her movements,
followed them, watched her every step with an intense greed that never
wavered. For she it was who stood to him, at last, for that single act
of self-sacrifice with the instance of which he was to refute his
slanderers and defy the grave.

It had come upon him, all at once, with the memory of that face,
projected, livid and instant, from the mist of faces that had walled
him in. He had recalled how, on a certain wet and dismal evening
months ago, he had been crossing the Pont St. Michel on his way home
after an exhausting day, when the gleam of a gold coin lying in the
kennel had arrested his attention. Avaricious in the most peddling
sense, he had been stooping eagerly to grasp his find, when the
interposition of a second body had halted him unexpectedly on his way.

“Bon Dieu, little citizen, let the old rag-sorter be happy for once!”

He had heard the febrile plea; had checked himself and had looked. It
was an old, old woman, grotesque, battered, drenched with rain. In her
trembling claw, nevertheless, she had borne a shapeless green
umbrella, an article sufficiently preposterous in that context of
poverty and sans-culottism. No doubt the dislocation of the times
accounted for her possession of it. It had burst open as she grabbed
at the coin, and out had rolled a sodden red cabbage, fished from some
mixen. It had borne an uncanny resemblance to a severed head, and had
made him start for the moment.

“Let the old rag-sorter be happy for once.”

And, with a laugh, he had let her clutch the gold, restore the cabbage
to its receptacle, and hobble off breathing benedictions on his head.
God knew why he had let her--God would know. And yet God was a cipher
in the scheme of things. Only, from the moment when the President had
uttered those words, he had been looking--he knew it now--for the old
rag-sorter to refute them. She could testify, if she would, that his
life had not been entirely devoid of disinterested self-sacrifice. He
had once, for another’s sake, refused a ten-franc piece.

How had she risen, and whence followed? There had been something
unearthly in the apparition; there was something unearthly in his
present possession by it. Yet, from the moment of his mental
identification of the face, he had expected to renew the vision of it,
to take it up somewhere between the prison and the scaffold, and he
would have been perplexed only to find his expectation at fault. His
witnesses were not wont to fail him, and this, the most personal of
any, he could not afford to spare. He dwelt upon the flitting figure
with a passion of interest which blinded him to the crowd, deafened
him to its maledictions. Automatically he roared back blasphemy for
hate; subliminally he was alone in Paris with his old rag-sorter.

He could never see her face; yet he knew it was she as surely as he
knew himself. She went on and on, keeping pace with the cart,
threading the throng, and always, it seemed, unobserved by it.

And then, all in a moment, the guillotine--and he was going up the
steps to it!

He turned as he reached the platform. For an instant, tumult and a
sense of mad disaster hemmed him in. There was a foam of upturned
faces, vaster than anything he had yet realised; there was the tall,
lean yoke, with its wedge of dripping steel swung up between; there
was the lunette, the little window, and the corners, just visible, of
the deep basket beyond into which he was to vomit his life. They were
hauling away the trunk of the last victim, a ludicrous, flabby welter,
into the red cart adjacent. What a way to treat a man--soulless,
obscene! For one instant a deadly sickness overpowered him; he turned
his head away--and saw her panting up the steps, confessed, but yet
unnoticed, a jocund leer on her withered old face.

Then suddenly something happened. The thundering voice of the crowd
rose to an exultant pitch; there was a crash, a numbing jerk--and he
was erect again, amazed and flung at liberty.

But even in that supreme moment his vision sought out his old
rag-sorter, and was for her alone. She was down on her knees, eager
and mumbling, stuffing something into her green umbrella. What was
it--a red cabbage--a head? He caught a glimpse of it as it went
in--and it was his own head--the head of Antoine Quentin Fouquier de
Tinville, ex-Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal.




 THE QUEEN’S NURSE

Frivolous she may have been, shallow and light-hearted as a brook,
but not heartless. Her nurse--she who, in modern parlance, had “taken
her from the month” and had fed and bred her in the house of her
father, Sir John Seymour, of Wiltshire, knight--would always defend
her tooth and nail from that charge. And when at last, having followed
her nursling’s dancing career through the Courts of the old gloomy
Louvre and the more splendid Whitehall, she came to see her supplant
in the royal caprice the unhappy Queen whose maid-of-honour she had
been, she would allow in her presence no breath of detraction to slur
the good fame of her darling, but would constantly aver that she had
fought against the inevitable with all the desperation of which her
buoyant nature was capable. Jane could never say nay to the least
plausible beggar in the world, she would declare; and what was her
chance when that suppliant was King Harry himself? She loved life, to
be sure, the sweet butterfly--who would not with such a disposition?
And when the alternative was to be broken on a wheel! How many, though
deeper ones, would have chosen that in her place, she would like to
know? And here was she about to justify her monarch’s choice by
presenting him with a male heir--the heir for whom he had been
growling and raging these twenty years past. She had no doubt it would
be a male, since her bird always gave every one what he asked. And she
had come to nurse her nursling through her first troublous days in
this the new great palace of Hampton that the red Cardinal had built.

So she believed up to the last, and at that last the King, the least
plausible beggar, sat all alone one wild October evening in the great
oriel window of the great hall at the Court. It blew and rained
boisterously without, and the wet, red leaves were dashed against the
glass, where they ran down like gouts of blood. Their hue was
reflected in the royal eyes, which stared out upon the desolate
prospect between wrath and anxiety. Henry’s conscience was gnawing at
his heart, in truth, and despot-like he resented the pain.

The tapers burned under that vaulted gloom like glow-worms in a dark
avenue; the residue of a discarded feast lay tumbled about the tables.
Apart from the golden dishes, the piles of fruit, the crusted goblets
and great flagons of wine, he sat in his tremendous isolation, and
fought the fight between desire and humanity. It was never, alas! but
a brief struggle with him. He rose in a moment, a heavy, butcher-like
figure of a man, a huge common hulk made formidable by padded doublet
and “blistered” sleeves all roped and starred with gems, and, his lips
puffing, the scant ginger hair bristling on his swollen neck and
jowls, thundered an order into space. Instant to it an obsequious page
leaped into the Presence.

“Sir Anthony Denny--summon him.”

The page vanished; the King strode up and down. At the fourth turn he
paused to see a figure bow before him. This figure, for contrast, was
robed all in black, with a tight coif on its head, and, hanging from
its shoulders, a long, sleeveless gown edged with brown fur. It was
the figure, livid and drawn-faced, of the chief barber-surgeon
attending on her Majesty the Queen’s confinement.

“Sir Anthony,” said the King, “make note of our decision. Meseemeth in
this realm of ours that wives be plenty, but heirs most sorely lack.
Poor Jane must suffer for the succession. If one must perish----” He
paused.

“It is even so, your Majesty,” murmured the physician.

The King stamped his foot, and turned away.

“I must have my heir,” he said. “God’s blood, I must and will!”

But that night, as he was crossing a corridor to his cabinet, an old
woman broke upon him with tears and lamentations.

“They are killing my bird!”

“Peace, fool!” said the King, harsh and lowering. “I must have mine
heir, though all birds fell dumb from this moment.”

She clung to him, but he shook her off roughly, and went on his way.
She followed, importunate and beyond fear.

“Spare my nursling! She is one and only; thou canst not renew her; but
many shall be her gifts of love to thee.”

He turned like a goaded bull, and the woman was dragged away.

That night the little Prince was born; and thereafter the wreck from
which he had been delivered settled down, and on the twelfth day it
sank into the fathomless deeps.

The King was sorry for a while; but he had his heir to reward him for
the sacrifice he had made. Mary Tudor, a girl of twenty, and already
as sour as crabs, was the little dead queen’s chief mourner. The
trumpets brayed her obsequies, the laureate sang them in execrable
verse, the baby--a pinched atom--screamed them. Only the old nurse sat
dumb and dry-eyed, taking no notice of anything.

She would have nothing to do with the Prince, craved or claimed no
part in his rearing. But presently she took her spinning-wheel to the
little dark room by the chapel which had been allotted her; and there
she would sit all day drawing flax from the distaff.

One noon, the door being open, the King in passing saw her thus
occupied, and went in. She neither moved nor acknowledged his
presence, but went on with her spinning. His eyes began to redden in
the way all knew.

“What spinnest thou?” he demanded.

“Flax,” she answered, grim and quiet, without stopping in her work.

“For what?” he roared.

“Thy shroud,” she said, “and that of all thy house.”

Those with him thought the roof would have fallen. He raised his own
blazing eyes to it, as if in momentary doubt of his omnipotence. But
when he spoke at last it was noted with amazement that his words were
temperate.

“That shall we see, old dotard,” he said. “Dispart her wheel and her.”

She stood up, with a smile on her thin lips, as they snatched her
wheel away.

“Dispose them,” said the King, “where neither may avail the other.
And, for her, take her incontinent in her sorcery, and put her where
she may weave a shroud of darkness for evermore.”

He spoke, and passed out; and, as he had ordered, so was it done. The
spinning-wheel was cast into a cupboard under the great staircase, and
the nurse disappeared from human ken. Nothing more was heard of her
for ten long years.

At the end of that time the King’s majesty lay ill. His huge bombard
of a body was swollen with gout and dropsy; a mere rust of hair
remained to his gross head; his hearing was capricious, and his eyes
rheumy with half-blindness. He had grown slovenly in his dress; his
every breath bullied the sweet air for ease and comfort; and, to cap
all, his temper had grown with his deformities till hardly a man durst
meet his eye.

Lying at Whitehall, he had a dream one night which troubled him. He
sent for Sir Anthony Denny, always now in close attendance, and,
heaving himself on his elbow, glared at the physician through a mist
of anguish.

“Give me,” he said, “to mend this whirring in my brain.”

Sir Anthony, quaking in his list slippers, prescribed and administered
a febrifuge. It availed little. Day and night the buzzing noise went
on until it grew to madness. One morning the King groaned in torture:
“It droneth, droneth for ever like a wheel!” and of a sudden sat up as
if stricken.

“The old beldame’s!” he whispered. “What of it?”

It was some time before the alarmed leech could gather the import of
his question, and then he hurried to have inquiries made. A special
courier was despatched boot and spur to Hampton Court. But in these
full years the very memory of the incident had vanished, and none knew
where the wheel had been deposited. Only it seemed that others there
had been haunted of late by a mysterious sound, so that none dared
venture by the great staircase whence it appeared to proceed. And that
was the message returned, in fear and trembling, to the tyrant.

He raged: “I will have no mysteries in my house. Pluck the stairway
down.”

A despot’s will is law. In preparing to obey it the masons came upon
the wheel. The King, being informed of the discovery, roared like a
wounded tiger.

“Burn the thing to ashes!” he thundered, and, on the very word, turned
white and mumbled. “Nay,” he said, in a fallen voice, “put it where
the arts of Satan may not prevail with it; hide it away in my royal
chapel, and the fiend shall be baffled. And look you that none comes
near me in the night again to choke me in my shroud.”

His mind was impaired; it was evident that he was approaching his end;
yet through all his desperation and mental anguish the inflexible
will, which had surmounted all other wills of half the world, remained
true, as history knows, to its dogged traditions. Almost his last
breath was given to confirm the death sentence passed on a great
subject. If one bitterer pang than another rent his released spirit,
it must have been that which showed him his final vengeance
unaccomplished.

And, in the meanwhile, none dared approach him with the truth of his
nearing dissolution. He had killed men in the past for prophesying his
mortality. He had held death so cheaply, had carried it so lightly in
the hollow of his hand, that he could not believe it capable of
striking at his omnipotence.

But there came a time when the truth could be no longer withheld from
him, and Sir Anthony Denny was the one deputed to break it. He
approached his task with a very natural apprehension, the more so as
his Majesty had that morning shown some increased signs of confidence
in his own recovery. He greeted the physician’s return with a
distorted smile.

“I shall live to plague mine enemies yet,” he said, “so I can pluck
this cursed hornet from my brain. Look you, man, I see a cause. It is
my mind accusing me of an over-harshness in the past. Poor Jane her
nurse, that old demented fool! Well, she loved her; the debt is paid;
let her go free, I say.”

The physician stood aghast. He had been half expecting this
thunderbolt ever since the King’s sick fancy had raised the dust of a
long-forgotten sentence.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered, “your Majesty! The beldame died in
prison this very day se’nnight.”

“This day!” The King struggled into a sitting posture. His face was
like nothing human. “This day se’nnight!” He battled for breath. “It
was when the sound began. God’s mercy! the wheel!”

“Alas, your Majesty!” half whimpered the leech; “there be those who
say they cannot hear themselves pray for its whirring. The chapel is
deserted.”

The King fell back, and raised his hands feebly, as if drawing
something over his face. For an instant it appeared to the agitated
physician as if a shroud of white had actually hidden it; but, on
nearer approach, he saw that it was the frost of death that had
fallen.

Long years after, a tradition which had for ages associated a muffled,
incomprehensible droning with the occurrence of any death in the
palace received, “in the white winter of its age,” a curious
justification. Some workmen, in breaking through a wall of the old
chapel, came upon an ancient spinning-wheel hidden away behind the
panelling.




 LOUIS XIV

Looking over the inner Cour de Marbre at Versailles Palace were two
little rooms, in the main pile of the building, which constituted the
very core of privacy in the Petits Appartements du Roi. One was his
Majesty’s “den,” the other his wig-room, and both were elegantly
simple, almost severe, in their appointments. In the Galerie des
Glaces adjoining, marble, paint, crystal, and silver, in lavish
profusion, represented to the public eye the habitual equipage of a
Grand Monarch; these more restful surroundings represented to the
monarch himself his secret possession of some emotions felt in common
with the vulgar herd, to wit, the joys of a retreat where he could do
just as he liked, without the necessity of posing to himself or
others. A few chairs, a table, a secrétaire--all profusely painted
and be-ormolued, it was true, but for the simple reason that beauty
unadorned was unprocurable in the Paris of the period--sober hangings,
a quiet picture or so--such was the furniture of the little apartment
appropriated by Louis XIV. to his inmost meditations.

We find him in this distinguished snuggery on a certain afternoon of
the year 1704--the twenty-first of August, to be exact. It is within
three days of St. Bartholomew, a feast which his Most Catholic Majesty
makes a particular point of solemnising. He is, in fact, pondering a
minor detail of its observances at this very moment.

As he sits, his eyes fixed on nothingness in crinkled abstraction, we
will seize the fearful opportunity to scrutinise him. He is sixty-six
years of age, and in suggestion, we think, more like a queen-dowager
than a monarch. His minute stature, his old-matronly face, worldly,
shrewd, not unkindly; his immense falling wig, resembling a cap with
hanging wattles; his feminine particularities and prejudices, all
combine to convey that false impression of his sex. He has a woman’s
tastes for dainty clothes and china and gossip; I am convinced that,
were it possible to conceive him stooping to the condescension, he
would play the part of Madame more realistically than the Chevalier
d’Eon himself came to play it.

He is attired (for monarchs do not dress) in a full-skirted coat of
apricot velvet, with silver frogs. The coat is left unbuttoned from
neck to waist, revealing an ample breast of cambric and a rich lace
cravat. His white silk stockings are rolled back over their garters,
which are fastened above the knee, and embrace breeches of the same
velvet material; and stiff diamond-buckled shoes, with square toes,
long tongues, and very high silver heels, complete the exquisite
picture.

So he poses, and posed, as punctilious in his homage to himself as any
courtier. If he did not appear, in bulk, a star of the first
magnitude, he was as brilliant a centre as his own dazzled system need
desire.

An odd train of thought was in Louis’s mind as he sat thus gazing into
vacancy. The nearness of the Feast of St. Bartholomew was its central
subject, since it entailed the repetition of a custom long practised
by him to significant effect. Or had there been any connection between
the custom and the effect? That was just the question in his mind. He
was inclining, for some extraordinary reason, to doubt for the first
time their relationship. It had come upon him all in an instant at
what, adopting the fashion, we must call a psychologic moment in his
career.

He was not, according to some people, a really wise man; but there was
no denying that he was a supremely self-sufficient. It had never
occurred to him, in all his life, that his judgment could possibly be
surpassed by another. That was the queer thing. He had tacitly, almost
unconsciously, it seemed, permitted, in one curious instance, his
mental supremacy to subordinate itself to a superstition. He appeared
to recognise the fact all at once, and with an amazement that was like
one of those sudden developments of reason which a child will exhibit
between a single night’s sleeping and waking. Something had happened
to him, and he saw himself in a moment--not a fool; that were
impossible--but, in a certain solitary direction, a dupe to his own
modesty. Quality, kingship, all his greatness as it stood, he had let
be accounted, by default, less to the essence of divinity in himself
than to a paltry charm, in the accidental possession of which any
quacksalver might boast himself omniscient. He felt strangely small
all of a sudden.

Presently he stirred, and threw out his chest. Small! He, Louis? Had
he not made France what she was? Had he not in the blood of two great
wars, prolonged, triumphant, deadly, cemented the fabric of state of
which he stood, golden, sacrosanct, the supreme expression? Was he not
at this date the most powerful monarch, the most glorious, the most
dreaded that a dazzled world had ever worshipped? And since some there
remained who questioned his preeminence, were not his armies at this
moment opening a third victorious campaign in order to re-convince the
recalcitrants? And to what was all this success to be attributed--to
his own mastering genius, inspired, stupendous, or to his possession
of a trumpery talisman, whose favour, even, was conditional?

He drew in his breath, with a slight hissing sound, as if he had been
stung. Superstition? an aberration, to which the mightiest were
subject. He thanked his majestic stars only that the knowledge of it
was private to himself.

He half rose, and sank into his chair again, with a frown. It was his
custom, he told himself haughtily, to command Destiny, not truckle to
it. How had he come to concede even this single exception to his
custom? There was a blind spot, it was said, in every eye; perhaps
there was some like defect in every kingly constitution. The heel of
Achilles! Or, maybe--what else?

Age!

The word seemed to smite him out of the depths. He almost jumped where
he sat. This business, so childish in its credulity! Merciful Heaven!
was it possible he could be verging on his _second_ childhood--he,
Louis, who had almost come to convince himself that he was destined to
the fiery chariot? Of late the sun discs, the emblems of the _Roi
soleil_, had increased in number on his walls and ceilings. Perhaps
they, too, were a sign of his dotage.

He hesitated no longer, but, rising hastily, sought the secrétaire
against the wall, and, feeling in a very remote and secret little
recess of it, brought out a tiny packet, somewhat like a Hebrew
phylactery in suggestion. It was no more than a couple of inches or so
square, of vellum, flattish in form, and closely sealed with an odd,
incomprehensible device. A number of pin-pricks perforated it.

As he stood, holding the thing in his hand, the time and occasion on
which he had consented to its acceptance rose vividly before him. It
had been a black night in a certain October long past, when a dark
Italian monk, a famed astrologer, had waited on him by appointment in
his Sêvres villa. He recalled how, consequent on his casting of the
royal horoscope, this sardonic Genethliac had offered him (for a
weighty consideration), as a defence against certain threatened
complications in his royal ecliptic, the very talisman he now
regarded, and which, saddled with a condition, was to procure him
consistent happiness and prosperity throughout his reign. And he
recalled how he had accepted the terms, covenanting, on pain of
disaster, to preserve the charm intact, and, moreover, to plunge, on
the occasion of every notable Church festival, a pin through its
sides.

A naïve undertaking, perhaps, yet seeming justified in its results.
Half credulous, half contemptuous, and entirely good-humoured, he had
been faithful to the conditions, and had certainly prospered. The
thing had become a habit with him, and his conscience had never felt a
scruple in its performance. Why should it? Was not the bestower of the
gift a consecrated priest? He could find a hundred reasons for
tolerating his superstition, and not one for condemning it. Probably,
if the truth were known, the packet contained what might be called a
black, or contrary relic--a lock of Judas’s hair, a shaving of
Ananias’s toe-nail, a scale of Saladin’s liver, or one shed by the
devil himself when he struggled in St. Dunstan’s tongs. Or more likely
it contained nothing at all, and had served for a mere trick to extort
money.

He held it out at arm’s length, with a smile on his face. The
absurdity of his compliance had struck him all at once acutely. That
his destiny, through all these long years, could have hung at the
mercy of so ridiculous a trifle! He was great because he was great, a
conqueror by force of inherent genius. Away for once and for ever with
the imposture!

One moment he held the packet up to the light, and saw a hundred tiny
stars shine through the punctures he had made in it on successive
feasts; the next he broke the seals, unfolded the vellum, stared,
dropped the whole on the floor, and staggered back as if stricken to
the heart.

There, at his feet, it lay revealed before him--the thing that he had
done; and he knew that he, the most Christian King, he who had revoked
the Edict of Nantes, he who had rooted up the tares and made all
France one crop of catholicity, he who stood for Heaven’s vicegerent,
its high priest, its super-pope, had been for years stabbing the
Blessed Host, the consecrated wafer!

As he thus dwelt, motionless, aghast, a knock came at his door. He
collected himself by a wrenching effort, and bade the intruder into
his presence.

It was a courier from the Maréchal de Villeroy, introduced by a
favoured courtier. Both men were agitated and death-pale. They came to
inform his Majesty that his entire army, under Marshal Tallard, had
been destroyed, or had capitulated to the Duke of Marlborough at
Blenheim, in Bavaria.

The King at first answered nothing; but his eyes were observed to
wander towards a scrap of vellum, apparently insignificant, which lay
upon the floor. And then he recovered himself, with a courageous
smile.

“But that is very bad news, my friend,” he said.




 NAPOLEON

It was the fourth of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In
Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the
imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and
insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s
milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic
response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The
occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor,
himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the
Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat
upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment
his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first
time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its _amour-propre_ and its
hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the
scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to
Strasburg.

That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the
nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was
concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery
of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his
tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind
cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding
distractions--one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals,
the forges, the rope walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens
and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats
themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which
bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their
loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents,
the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there
were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man
of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites
picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this
same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those
wounded at Aspern--limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter
among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood;
thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters
which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and
its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared
down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible
annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had
all that hideous picture a place in the background of the master-mind,
or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as
sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost
out of all the multitudes--the figure of his old comrade Marshal
Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and
muskets on the fatal day--one shattered horror more to feed the
carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying
man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a
melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that
he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees
through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has
raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield
but as a map, so clear to his mind, that, as the opposing troops
manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way
to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,”
and as such superhuman--or superdiabolic.

As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an
immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was
extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the
boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles,
soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling
through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the
universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under
these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and
were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the
shores.

In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the
neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent--it might have been a trodden
bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte
Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he,
vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval
by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian
preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a
clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his
feet.

“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”

The man saluted.

“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry--thus; and I saw him
fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier
saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the
closeness, the thunder----”

The officer interrupted him:

“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”

The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix
bent over the fallen man.

“How is it, Lebrun?”

The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest
lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged,
toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his
god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the
coming end. He struggled to speak.

“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”

De Sainte Croix took the livid head on his knee. The posture somewhat
eased the fighting heart.

“Courage, comrade! This fit will pass with the oppression. Why, I
myself feel it--I. When the storm breaks----”

The blue lips caught at the word.

“When the storm breaks! What will he have answered?”

“He? Who?” said the young officer.

The dying corporal, twisting in his arms, made an awful gesture
towards the Emperor’s tent.

“As always,” said de Sainte Croix, “with the cry to victory.”

The other clutched his hand with a grip like madness.

“I believe it, monsieur. He will have renewed the compact.”

“What compact, my poor friend?”

“With the red man.”

De Sainte Croix could hardly catch the answer.

He laughed--men must laugh, though they died for it--and spoke a
soothing word. He believed the poor fellow delirious.

“I have laughed too, I have scorned, I have feigned to disbelieve,”
said Lebrun, thickly and passionately. “I laugh no longer. Marengo,
Hohenlinden, Jena, Austerlitz--what mortal brain unassisted could have
so added victory to victory, could so, and for so long a time, have
held the world’s destinies in the hollow of one hand? I am a soldier,
monsieur, a simple, uneducated man, and yet I know things and I have
seen things that would make the wise falter in their wisdom.”

“This red man, amongst others,” said the young officer conciliatingly.

A quiver of lightning at the moment glazed the dying face. Great drops
stood on it; the fallen cheeks were filling with shadow; the eyeballs
shone like porcelain. In spite of himself, a shiver ran down de Sainte
Croix’s spine. There was certainly something uncanny in the night,
even to war-toughened nerves. Lebrun’s voice had sunk to a whisper as
he answered:

“Didst thou never hear of the General’s proclamation in Egypt to the
Ulemas and Shereefs? He stood then on shifting sand--the English
sea-captain had just beaten us. A false step, and he were engulfed for
ever. And, to gain the people, he told them that their God had sent
him to destroy the enemies of Islam and to trample on the cross.”

“Policy, Lebrun,” said de Sainte Croix, lifting his hand to wipe his
own wet forehead. “He never meant it.”

“Then why, monsieur, did this blasphemy follow immediately on the
visit of the red man? There had been no hint of it before--and
afterwards he swore to them that their false bible was the true word.”

De Sainte Croix snapped somewhat fretfully:

“This red man? Who the devil is he?”

A shudder quite convulsed the corporal.

“Thou hast spoken it, monsieur.”

“A figment of your excited fancy, soldier.”

“With these eyes I saw him, monsieur. It was ten years ago. I was on
guard in a corridor of the palace at Cairo, _and there came out of the
General’s cabinet one who had never gone in_. Little he was, like a
child of a hundred years, and he had on a blood-red bernous, and his
face was black as a Nubian’s. Only at the lips it pulsed with fire,
and fire, dim and wavering, travelled under his cheeks. One moment
thus he stood--I could have touched him--and, behold! he was a little
draped black figure of bronze that stood on a pedestal by a red
curtain. It had always been there--I rubbed my eyes----”

“Voilà la chose!”

“Monsieur, I dared. I listened at the General’s door, and I heard him
laugh softly to himself--he who never laughs--and he said: ‘Greet
thee, Zamiel! Ten years I have given thee to make me a god, or our
compact is ended!’ Monsieur, the ten years are passed, and to-night he
stands again, as he stood then, at the parting of the ways.”

A flash, more brilliant than any that had yet shown, weltered and was
gone. The dying soldier lifted his head quickly, with a fearful cry:

“Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer! I saw him again--but now, before I
fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!”

The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the
island.

“Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!”

The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the
soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash.

And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of
it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent
movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French
upon the opposite shore--and victory.

A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy
flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it
was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As
he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and
melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the
thunder’s.

It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was
aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have
been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely
alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost
to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice
speaking close by:

“I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to
renew my compact with Destiny.”

He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor
himself.

“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.

“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.




 LEONORA OF TOLEDO

“For the fruit of the blood belongs to those who bring the price of
love.”

So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy
virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess
Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of
Florence.

The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept,
burning to pay it--indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told
herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what
was her desire? Only for mercy--only for life, shameful and abandoned
if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most
despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray
by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would
confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the
knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of
her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had
borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the
father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed
would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!

And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a
tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the
extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her
crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had
insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of
ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth
were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of
compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in
all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no
hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in
this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril.
The Duke himself----

She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it
recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing
its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful
for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling
to eternal forgetfulness!

Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands,
and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.

 * * * * *

Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had
come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora
(daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died
twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of
whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the
Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo,
niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the
Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison
being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet
it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest
odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions
and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her
husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual
_cavaliere-servente_--in this case one Alessandro Gagi--more, it would
seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation
having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected
to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora
had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more
daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young
Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and
this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed
headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the
worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to
herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence.
The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was
not asleep because his eyes were shut.

The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage
vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was
ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was
a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young
nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the
procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of
written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not
long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting
it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison
of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his
death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by
Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she
wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in
that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her
illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the
envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her
husband.

This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as
faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a
word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out
of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff
like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk
hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard--all had
been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He
had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had
come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:

“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into
which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his
Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter
air will restore to you your health.”

And she had looked at him, with a sudden catch at her heart, though
the flame of defiance in her still flickered.

“I thank you, Messer. For when is my doom pronounced?”

Whereat the envoy had raised one white hand ineffably.

“Alas, Madonna! Is our dear prince’s tender consideration so hurtful?
Even now he waits to welcome you.”

Then she had put out entreating arms to him.

“Messer--a little time to prepare--to say goodbye. I have a son,
Messer, a very little child. Look, this is the Vecchio, is it not--the
Duke’s palace? I am quite alone in my corner of it, caged, shunned
like a leper, yet my every exit from it is guarded. Give me this night
in which to part seemingly with all I have left to love on earth.”

His laugh had sounded like the tinkle of ice on glass.

“Love? You wilfully postpone it, madam. Yet will I venture to enlarge
upon my credentials to the extent your Grace demands. To-morrow----”

“I will deliver myself without fail to the sacrifice, Messer.”

And, with a patient, deprecating shrug, in which shoulders, eyebrows,
and lips were all included, he had made his profound obeisance, and
left her. And then!

It came upon her like a stroke, electric, instant, agonising out of
numbness. She did not want to die; she had only been tricking herself
in the trappings of tragedy; like the spoiled beauty she was, she had
believed herself irresistible though playing with devils; and each
day’s grace had but confirmed her in her wilful self-delusion. And now
at last she was awake and mad with fear--confessed now to herself for
the unheroic creature of selfishness and vanity which her deeds had
already proclaimed her to the world.

Passion, indeed, often speaks big until it finds itself trapped. Its
artificial heat is very susceptible to chills. Then, in proportion as
it has burned furious, is the abjectness of its relapse. I speak of it
as an emotion apart from love. This poor Leonora, in her craven
frenzy, condoned in her mind the offences of the monster in whose
relentless grasp she now felt herself writhing. Her leaning towards
him, her desire to propitiate, was like a lust. She would swear
herself his creature, his sympathiser, his fellow-passionist, if only
he would accept and spare her as such. Do not blame her over-harshly.
The spirit crazed with fear of darkness has no volition but towards
the light. Moreover, the catalogue of the deadly sins was much
confused in her time, and some crimes which in our day would be held
unpardonable were avowed pleasantries. The butterfly bred to carrion
is not easily weaned to honey--our own fair Purple-Emperor is an
example--and grapes fattened on bullocks’ blood wither deprived of it.
What wonder that this poor lovely creature, bred on corruption,
confessed her tastes vitiated? It was life she wanted, and, at the
last, even with Pietro da Medici for her boon-fellow. The woman was
debased; yet the mother remained. It had been already dusk when the
envoy withdrew. Now, with streaming eyes and labouring bosom, she
hurried to spend her last night on earth by the cradle of her little
Cosimo.

 * * * * *

With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the
familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that
tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s
spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had
the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly
to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment,
she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes,
lovely submission and lovely solicitation--so she acted the part of a
prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.

In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and
escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical,
she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt
over his face as she kissed him.

“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”

It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her,
and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been
ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were
under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness,
rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some
distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess
employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must
make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She
was never denied; she was humoured--and watched--in everything. A
subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was
evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion;
but these common minds had not the _savoir faire_ to throw off the
weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they
left the city behind, and came into the open country--an abandonment
which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as
possible.

And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers--for the month
was July--and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful
than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and
melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no
thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest
of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the
carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the
attendants came round to the door to help her alight.

She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and
shrank back.

“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.

“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.

Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the
steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a
fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned.
The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road
they had come. She tried to call to them--her dry throat would not
articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again.
They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite
alone and unprotected in that deserted place.

There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which
giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose
above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky
minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and
flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow,
palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them,
watching for her descent--eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she
turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule,
melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came
from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and
deserted.

Hush! a whisper--a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below.
Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great
hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a
mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow
from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs
of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of
blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully
potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as
her only resource. There was a room above--a room she knew and had
slept in--and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight,
she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of
terror!

She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the
wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation,
made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven
picture--Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner
holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand
seemed empty--the head had run to a point--in a sudden sick
fascination she peered forward to examine it.

God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a
dagger!

And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she
saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.

Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning,
soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate
body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried
to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.

“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and
babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were
suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.

He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on
his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands,
besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks,
Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to
marry again.

With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his
remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown
desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the
coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the
living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.

That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in
the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser
seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer
remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had
ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited
with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.




 CHARLES IX

“Scatter _them, scatter them ere the Death cometh! They are like
black crows seeking carrion, and where they watch some soul is doomed
to hell. From afar they spy their prey, and on the roof they gather,
waiting till it fall._”

These words of a fanatic priest, denouncing the Huguenots, were for
ever in his brain from the moment of the rising of the dark bird. They
had rung in its haunted corridors before, had he known it; but it was
the rising of the bird which had doomed it to their eternal
possession. It had happened in this way:

With the first weak breaking of dawn, three pallid, guilty figures
came stealing into a little chamber of the Louvre which overlooked the
_basse-cour_ notched into that angle of the palace which faced towards
St. Germain l’Auxerrois. They were the King, his mother, and his
brother the Duc D’Anjou. An unnatural quiet brooded over the city. It
suggested the paralysed horror of a sleeper awakened to sudden
consciousness of some ghastly presence in his room. They stood, in a
little quaking group, peering from the window upon the courtyard and
the quay of the Louvre, both in seeming dark and empty, and in seeming
uncannily close beneath. What if some tigerish bound were to clear
that interval, and they, the gloating Cæsars of the arena, be made
the sport of their own blood-lust? The King’s hand twitched on the
musquetoon he carried.

The river, a livid tongue, lapped up the blackness; the wind fell all
in a moment, like a shot bird, and rustling its wings a little on the
pavement, died and gave place to silence utter and profound. Suddenly
in the distance a pistol rattled out.

It was followed by the bells. At first it was only the tocsin of St.
Germain l’Auxerrois, the shattering boom of the great bronze dome
shouting death from its tower. But soon other bells took up the tale,
the signal leaping on from height to height, as warning beacons are
fired, and in the same breath the streets were full of armed men. They
seemed to spring from the ground, like the dragon men of Thebes, and
to fall as instantly to slaughter and destruction. Every second they
gathered, and roaring and sweeping on, crashed in the last defences of
sleep and woke the city to pandemonium. And then came the King’s
madness.

He had fought against it to the end. Even in the little ghostly
chamber his soul had risen, in a final revolt of sanity, against the
merciless policy which had set itself deliberately to undermine his
reason. But he had not the strength to escape. His hand, with the
dagger in it, had been held from first to last by his mother
Catherine, as mothers of a human mould direct the little stumbling
hands of their children in forming letters with a pen; and not to him
was due the significance of the characters which that bloody stylus
had written upon the wall. His old nurse, indeed, whom next to Marie
Touchet and her child he most dearly loved, was a staunch Huguenot.
And he kept the wit to save her; but he could not save the good
Admiral Coligny whom he honoured. His mother had her way with him at
last, and was herself panic-struck by the fury of the blaze she had
fuelled.

Having once tasted blood, he cried for it, for more and more until the
gutters choked; insulted the fallen who appealed to him for mercy;
decoyed the partisans of Condé and Navarre into his toils with
cunning messages, and chuckled to see them butchered in the Court
below. The roar, the rushing tumult of the quays, the yells of the
pursuers, the screams of agony of the smitten, the bells and the guns,
all danced in his mad veins and wrought him to frenzy. He outscreamed
the victims; he fired at the corpses floating in the river; he laughed
and stared alternately. Once, early in the business, a boatful of
Huguenots, coming across the water from the opposite faubourg, was
emptied out in a twinkling, and its human load dragged for slaughter
across the stones. They had believed it all an affair of the Guisea,
and had come to beg protection of the King. The King! what shadow of
justification was theirs? A King of shreds and patches! He cursed
their monstrous credulity; he pointed his piece and fired straight
into the breast of the tallest fool of them all, who had fallen on his
back on the stones immediately below. With the sound of his shot a
great black bird rose straight from out the dead man, and flapping
upwards with solemn wings, disappeared over the roof of the Louvre.
The King threw down his musquetoon, and stood staring.

They said that it was a raven, its master’s constant companion, his
pet, his mascot, which he seldom let from his bosom when he went
abroad. The King did not contradict them; the mortal distress in him
found even some solace in the fable. But in his deep heart he knew
that the apparition had been none other than the black soul of the
Huguenot, and that it had flown to settle on the roof, to watch for
the passing of another soul, his own, already doomed by it to hell.
“_Ere the death cometh!_” From that moment, as he believed, he was
marked down; and the thought of how he might elude the bird on the
roof never left him. If he could only circumvent it, he might yet be
saved.

He was sitting with his suite, days after the massacre, in a chamber
of the palace, when a sudden uproar overhead startled them all. It was
evening, but the tapers were not yet lit. The sound was hideous--a
sound as of a multitude of lost spirits screaming and blaspheming in
the upper air. It was the eve of St. Bartholomew all over again, the
pent-up terrors of it broken loose and re-enacted, Even in their
graves, it seemed, the ghosts could not be held down, but had burst
their bloody cerements and risen in an uncontrollable agony of memory.
Where would it end? Where could it? There was no mowing down spirits
by sword and fire; they had the upper hand now, and the minds and
reasons of the living were their ghastly prey. Rising, as they looked
at one another with grey faces, the group one and all sought the open
air.

What was it? A black cloud of crows, no more; a flock in constant
motion, circling, settling and resettling--calling for a second glut
of victims. They had learned to imitate the voices of the massacre,
screeching, sobbing, praying--a horrible thing. They were the souls of
the murdered, ministers of hell, come to await their turn on the roof.
The King said no word, but that same night, after he had slept a
little from exhaustion, he rose suddenly in a horror too great for
speech, and sat staring and listening. His good old nurse hurried to
him; he whispered to her, Did she not hear it? Those haunted chambers
of his brain were full of wild trampings, and execrations, and the
hubbub of a mad conflict. He declared there was a riot in the town,
that he would have his guard dispatched to end it, that he wanted no
more murder. They returned in a little to say that the whole city
slept peaceful in the moonlight, though it was true that the air was
curiously agitated, as by the hot vapour above an oven. He dismissed
them, and dropped his weary head upon his nurse’s bosom. He was her
child again, her nursling, her little frightened dreamer waking in the
dark.

“They shall not touch thee, Charlot,” she whispered. “Thou didst not
mean it, thou.”

For seven nights was this repeated, the noises, the horror, the
collapse; and then the crows departed. Like a black cloud they
gathered in a moment, and drifted away northwards to wait for the
coming of the Armada.

“Are they all gone?” asked the pallid King. He would trust to nobody
but his nurse. She went out, and looked along the ridge of the roof,
and returned.

“All but one,” she said; “and he is hurt belike, and will not last out
the night.”

“That is the one,” he answered, “and he will last out the night of my
life. O, nurse! he waiteth for my soul, and, so he marketh its passage
hence, he will seize it, and I am damned for ever.”

“That then shall he never do, Charlot,” she exclaimed; “for I will
have him shot here and now.”

The King shook his head; and, indeed, he expressed what he knew. The
crow was never shot; the bird seemed to bear a charmed life; but all
of a sudden one day it was gone.

To say that he breathed again would imply but a qualified respite,
inasmuch as his every breath was a pain to him. Through all that
autumn and through all the ensuing year he was a dying man, and in the
May that followed he lay down on his bed for the last time. At the end
he spoke little but with the shapes that haunted him. He lay on his
couch, wrapped in a robe that, for all its lightness, it hurt his
chest to lift. He suffered intolerably, both mentally and physically.
His faithful little wife, whose love he had neglected, came and sat by
his side, silent, with large haunted eyes, and prayed for him, and
wept secretly, and blew her little red nose softly to explain her need
for a handkerchief. And Marie Touchet came with their child, and
wondered how, at the last, the wreck of sweet royalty differed so
little from all other human wrecks. He made his peace with these, but
he could not with himself. The vision of the crow was eternally in his
mind; his atom of trust in the strong faith of his nurse was his
solitary grain of comfort in a world of terrors. He floated in crimson
streams, and rose choking from them, foul and horrible. “Ah, nurse,”
he sighed perpetually, “what blood and what murders!”

She was always ready with the faith, with the triumphant word that
touched like a healing judgment.

“Let them that called the feast answer for the reckoning.”

And so the hours crept on to the end.

One day, as she watched alone beside him, he fell asleep. He had made
his testament that morning, had committed the sore destinies of his
kingdom to his mother and his brother of Navarre, and, exhausted with
the effort, had fallen back on his pillow, breathing out the last
words he was ever to utter on earth:

“I thank my God that I leave no male child behind me to wear my
crown!”

It was as still as death. The sunshine came through the open window,
and threw a patch of light on the floor. As the tired nurse sat
watching this, half hypnotised by the glow, of a sudden she saw it
blotted by a soft shadow. She raised her eyes quickly, and there on
the windowsill, black and motionless, was perched a great crow.

She did not even start; but she turned her head and looked at the
King’s face. The sign of the awful change was overspreading it; the
nostrils pulsed; the fingers below picked feebly at the silken robe.
In a few moments, she saw, he would be gone. She rose quickly, and
moved across to the window. The dark bird never stirred. There seemed
a deep, unearthly movement in the sleek gloom of its eyes, and that
was all. It was absorbed in watching, but not her. She flung out her
hands, and caught it in a grip of iron.

“Charlot!” she cried, “my babe! Die while I hold him!”

There was a rustle behind her, a sudden cry, a drumming as of feet
running, speeding from the earth and life; and then all fell silent.
But not the bird. He leaped and battled in her hands. His beak was an
inky dagger, his talons rakes of steel. His screams seared her
heart--they seemed uttered in it; his pinions beat on her brain. But
she held on, driving in her nails, her teeth set and her resolution.
She felt the blood pouring down her wrists, and she cared no whit, so
long as she could keep the horror from pursuing her nursling. And
presently the struggles slackened, and she felt the bird die in her
hands.

Holding it thus away from her, she went to the window and flung it
forth. It dropped without sound, like a shadow that had suddenly been
blown from her brain. She looked at her hands--they were unhurt; at
the King--he lay with a smile on his dead lips.




 THE KING’S CHAMPION

“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the
goronation?”

It was his Majesty King William III. who spoke, crumpled back into his
big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from the nest of an
enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive frame, and legs
like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might have thought, to
carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He appeared, indeed, to be
always lost in it, and as if just on the point of finding his way out.
Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would hardly have sufficed for his
spirit.

The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his
stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this
his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord
Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch
mynheers--D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been
appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the
Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject,
long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.

It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its
context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous
ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by
the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor,
offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should
challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as
sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in
his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had
followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens,
and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied
_commode_ of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the
spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the
Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away,
melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before any
one could think of interposing.

The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly
subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion,
had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and
re-deliver his cartel.

But it had not passed unobserved by the King himself or by those
around him. Extinguished as he had appeared to be in his panoply of
purple and ermine and embroidered scarlet, looking, as he had risen at
the great table to drink his Champion’s health, for all the world like
a little over-swaddled Greek Icon elevated against a background of
glittering stained glass, his diminutive Majesty had had an ear and an
eye for everything within the longest range of either. His birdlike
optics, bright as twin buttons sunk amid that pomp of raiment, had
been fully cognisant of the little episode, and had watched the
after-approach of his Champion with an unwinking interest, which had
seemed to concentrate itself to such a challenging focus on the
flushed face of the knight as he came near, that that doughty Paladin
had fallen into confusion and had something botched the business of
the toast that followed. However, he had managed, though crestfallen,
to retire presently with sufficient aplomb and his perquisite of a
golden beaker; and there for the moment the matter had ended.

“Sir Charles Dymoke,” began Lord Halifax----

“Who is dat man?” interrupted the King. “Vat is his title to the
bost?”

“It is claimed by him, sire,” answered the peer, “in his right of the
Manor of Scrivelsby. The office was originally deputed, I understand,
to Sir Richard de Marmyon by the Conqueror, and hath descended by
virtue of that tenure to this day. Sir Charles is its legitimate
representative.”

“Well,” said the King, “broduce him before us.”

“Why,” said the Marquis feebly, “that is the odd thing. Sir Charles is
nowhere to be found.”

The three Dutch mynheers uttered guttural sounds in their throats, and
looked at one another and at the King significantly.

His Majesty’s brows knotted.

“Dat is very vonny,” he said. “Not to be vound, mein vrent?”

“It has been ascertained, your Majesty,” said Lord Denby wearily--he
was a picked white bone of a man, with no stomach and yet a perpetual
stomach-ache, which naturally aggrieved him--“that Sir Charles rode,
immediately after the ceremony, to the ‘Cock’ hostelry in Tothill
Street, whence, having disencumbered himself of his panoply, he
continued his way to the riding-school of one Dobney, near Islington,
where he delivered up his horse and disappeared. Since when he has
neither returned to his inn nor vouchsafed the least token of his
existence.”

The King considered the matter very glumpily within himself. It
appeared a trifle; yet trifles might easily be under-estimated in the
existing state of things. The incident was something or nothing--a
mere meaningless frolic, or a challenge to his title bearing a certain
significance. The land swarmed with Jacobites of more or less power
and prominence. What if one of them were to meet and defeat his
Champion? How, in that event, would his claim stand? What was the
procedure? It was an odd contingency, and he put it rather acridly to
my Lord Privy Seal.

“He drow de gage; anodder agcept it; dey vight; my man vall. Vat is to
vollow?” he demanded.

“Ja! Dat is vat strike idself into me bom-bom,” said Schomberg the
warrior.

Lord Halifax smiled rather sheepishly. He was a large, tolerant soul
of sixty, repudiating all sentiment and subject to much. He had been
called the “Trimmer”; but, then, no man of humour can ever be a man of
convictions. Kind, witty, and cynical, he was yet so fond of Reason
that he could make a fool of himself with her. He was even worked upon
to do so in the present case.

“There is positively no precedent, sire,” he said. “To my certain
knowledge the thing has never happened before.”

“Bot zhould it jost zo happen?” insisted his master.

“Ach!” said D’Auverquerque penetratingly.

“With deference, sire,” said his lordship, “is it not something
premature to assume any hostile intent in the matter? The good
lady----”

“Posh!” put in the King irritably. “Neither goot nor lady.”

“Zo it strike itself into mein head bom-bom,” said Schomberg.

“Dat dress vas a masgerade,” said William--“a vact, we zhould haf
gonsidered, blain to the stupidest indelligence.”

“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Lord Halifax nervously.

“Vell, sir--vat den?”

“Ach! vat den?” demanded D’Auverquerque cunningly.

“I vill dell your lordship,” said Schomberg. “Dere was a vine
swordsman gonzealed under dose bettigoats.”

The Lord Privy Seal, considering the subject, woke to a certain
trepidation.

“It is impossible,” he admitted, “to avoid attaching a measure of
importance to the affair, or to gauge its consequences should it be
carried through. Surely Sir Charles could not be so foolish as to risk
a serious encounter? But he must be found and warned at all costs.”

His mood communicated itself to the others. The matter began to assume
with them all an increasingly sinister aspect. Majesty was not yet so
safe on its throne that omens could be disregarded. The King, prompt
and tireless, for all his sickly constitution, in business--the little
man who was to regain for England her reputation for workaday
sanity--had yet, at this beginning, a vast estate to recover from
chaos, and his path was beset with perils. The country was still in
two minds, and each distracted; a trifle might upset the balance.
Deliberating in this sort, a species of hysteria communicated itself
after a time from one to another of the little Council, until it
definitely came to perceive in the episode a daring ruse for bringing
about a reaction in popular sentiment. What if the meeting were
actually to occur, and the Champion to be overthrown? It was not to be
doubted that the event would have been provided for, and those engaged
in bringing it about forearmed. Defeat might result in riot, and riot
in revolution. Arrived at that pitch of the debate, the six gentlemen,
including his Majesty, were all speaking together in considerable
agitation.

It was the personality of the mysterious Mohock, once convicted of
masculinity, which most exercised their minds. He was certainly an
individual of importance, as so momentous a mission would hardly have
been entrusted to a nonentity. But who? A dozen names suggested
themselves. Berwick, Tyrconnel, Lord Henry Fitzjames, the ex-monarch’s
natural son, Marlborough himself, and others. It was Zuylestein,
speaking for the first and last time, who finally put the spark to all
this accumulating tow. “Vat,” he said, “if it is James himselv,
zegretly gom over from St. Germains and resolved upon venturing dis
bigduresque abbeal to de poblic?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg.

He rose, Halifax rose, they all rose, and faced the King.

“Ik dank U, mijnheer,” said his Majesty; “it is a very blausible
suggestion.”

The words were equivalent to a bid to action. The Council broke up
hurriedly, and within an hour the Dutch troops had been beaten to
arms, the militia called out, the magistrates warned, and the whole
city placed under a surveillance of the most searching description. It
was at this momentous pass, when panic was in the air, that Sir
Charles Dymoke walked unconcerned into the “Cock” tavern, in Tothill
Street, and was immediately arrested by the guard set to watch that
hostelry, and conveyed in a state of complete stupefaction to
Whitehall. He was taken at once before the King sitting in Council.

“Vere haf you been?” demanded William sternly.

“Your Majesty!” gasped the Champion, a sturdy gallant of middle age.

“Answer, sir,” said the monarch--“and vidout eguivocation.”

“I have been with a friend,” stammered Sir Charles, all amazement.

“Ach!” exclaimed his Majesty sarcastically. “The vrow, vas it, vat
returnt you your gage in the Hall yesterday?”

“Certainly not, sire,” said the Champion, the flush of outrage on his
cheek.

“Not?” said the King. “Who vas she, den, dat voman?”

“The wife of Dobney, the horse-tamer, sire.”

“The vife--vat! Vat had she said to you?”

“She said, your Majesty, ‘Didn’t I warn you not to throw it down in
front of her nose, unless you want her to kneel and pick it up?’”

“She? Who?”

“The mare, sire. She performs at Islington.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Lord Privy Seal very softly, “shall we thank
Sir Charles and proceed to the order of the day?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg under his breath.




 QUEEN ELIZABETH

“What was that?”

“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”

“Methought it was a footstep.”

“No, madam.”

“There, heard you it not--the sound of some one running?”

“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”

“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”

“Your Highness is overwrought.”

“Will some one speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones
ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”

The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped
lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her
young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.

“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”

The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring
from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet
of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end
like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees
and over the palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed
no sign of life anywhere.

Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed
the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the
figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of
the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood.
The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with
the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As
to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this
gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.

Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by
the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the
child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the
moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her
own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an
officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human
neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn
soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her.
She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if
they were no more than inarticulate animals--wistful dumb affections
on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their
unconscious understanding.

Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awe-struck a
moment, then bent and whispered to her mother: “O, madam, the Tower
gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”

The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with
a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her
mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions,
self-communings.

“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their
relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the
mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh--he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind
blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no
courtier--the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”

The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging
to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed
her.

“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.

“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too
honest--the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”

“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day
of February.”

She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the
horror of this coming day had brooded--this ghastly morning when on
Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex--he was but thirty-four--was to pay
the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one
tranced.

“Never flattered,” she repeated--“a bad policy where a woman reigns.
The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or
writes.”

“Yes, madam--O, yes, indeed!”

The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.

“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”

“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”

“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the
axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead--no longer dub my
mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with
the years, striving to slough its vesture, like a snake. A fool, that
cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how
Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper.
Shall I not be Dian still to him?”

She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge--an
old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white
face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and
pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened
teeth--little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories.
Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her
poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven
dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.

“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His
eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown.
When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless
woman--barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It
turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly
alone--no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois
wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince
and curst to flattery?”

She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.

“Truth!” she cried--“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned
and struck it down.”

“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.

“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the
speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think
you?”

“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare,
that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds
the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn
the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy
with him because he saw your Highness so distorted--not to extenuate
the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon
me, madam!”

The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was
evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears
regarded the import of her speech.

“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean
I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the
well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who
could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on
his forehead, child?”

“O, madam! Your Grace!”

“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash
and headstrong fool! To think to overbear us!--teach our displeasure
a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain
of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp,
and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or
thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord--his
lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy--a man of men, brave, honest,
generous, and a fool.”

“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”

“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love
that made him but to ruin?”

“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”

“What for?”

“The ruin followed on the treachery.”

“Was he a traitor?”

“O, Madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot
and league to win him the succession?”

“Yes, he’s a traitor.”

“Your Grace forgive me.”

“And I’m a woman.”

“Madam!”

“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much
of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”

“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, Madam.”

“I swear I heard him.”

“No, Madam.”

“Pride! Will he not meet us so far--but to crave our clemency? He
knows the way, and, not taking it, must die. What o’clock is it? O,
God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready.
Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”

She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek;
she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two
terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw
her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition
beyond their ken:

“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to
come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to
us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you
not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long?
A viper in our bosom--O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can
we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So
pale?--the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I
would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you
not send it--prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O,
I have waited, dear my love--have waited dying for this token.
Speak--utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel
so and bow thy comely head----”

A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a
shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her
hands before her eyes:

“O, God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”

Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that
instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of
the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.

“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.

“Your Majesty!”

“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is
he?”

“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”

The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.




 JANE SHORE

It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from
time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones
about St. Paul’s Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would
come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare
footsteps that were to follow.

It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to
totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church
itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag,
soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its
midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass,
wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement,
waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm
about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north
side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul’s,
surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy,
or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window
in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a
lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a
triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps
to it.

Whether from the weather, or the day, or the occasion, the crowd was a
curiously quiet one. The weight of the new King’s authority, no doubt,
rested upon it heavily. A general air of numbness and stupefaction
appeared to prevail. Events of late had come, matured, and yielded to
others so rapidly. Edward’s death in April; the disappearance of the
young princes, his sons, in June; the new coronation in July;
Buckingham’s short abortive conspiracy and execution in October;
finally, in this very first month of the new year, the passing of the
_Titulus Regius_, or Act which bastardised the late King’s issue and
confirmed the crown to his usurper--such was the astonishing tale.
Nothing was evident for the moment but that this crooked fellow could
see clearly and strike quickly; that he was bold, unscrupulous, and
strong. He was not unpopular for that, or for certain manly attributes
which the crowd admire. The difficulty was, as in all sudden _coups
d’état_, to adapt oneself politicly to the fresh conditions, while
awaiting security from retaliation by the old. The twisted King was
not so firm in his seat as a Pope of Rome. There was a certain risk in
subscribing even to his pleasantries, among which the present show
might be counted.

No one had properly believed in the worser guilt of poor Mistress
Shore, the late Prince’s naughty, good-hearted mistress. The
indictment which charged her with complicity in the asserted attempt
of Lord Hastings, her second protector, to destroy the present King’s
life by witchcraft, had succeeded in proving nothing but her lovable
qualities of mind and heart; whereby the Court was obliged to fall
back upon her frailty, which was notorious and undeniable. It made no
point, indeed, of the real tragedy of her sinning, which lay in her
desertion of a young husband--a good, honest, uncorrupt fellow, a
prosperous goldsmith of Lombard Street--whose happiness she had done
her best to wreck, and whose name she had not had the grace to
exchange for another. It was really only concerned, at bottom, with
proving what an obnoxious libertine had been the fourth Edward, and
how sweetly the crooked one shone by contrast. And so, to make all
this clear, it washed, Pilate-like, its hands of the beautiful
frailty, and handed her over to the Churchmen for chastisement. They
were prompt to deliver it, and not altogether inhumanly. The concubine
was sentenced to make public confession of her fault, in the
prescriptive deshabille of sheet and candle, and thereafter depart in
peace and mend her ways. The penalty, in fact, was in process at the
moment.

There was not much gossip. The crowd, penned within the multitude of
low buildings which surrounded the old Cathedral, showed more
curiosity, even sympathy, than hostility towards the delinquent. Its
constituents were much the same as when it had listened six months
before to Dr. Shaw’s famous sermon at the Cross, and that truckling
divine had first broached the question of the last two Edwards’
illegitimacy. It had acquiesced then, in the insensibility following
exhaustion; it had not yet recovered from that condition. This present
matter, or the sin which had procured it, was not of a nature wont to
excite much comment or reproof; but the undoubted popularity of the
usurper was confusing all issues. It supposed he had a reason for
humiliating pretty Mrs. Shore, who had been as notable for her
kindness as her beauty; and so it accepted his ruling as part of the
perplexity of things, which some day must be going to lighten.

She came out in a minute, a half-dozen of acolytes preceding, a group
of priests following her. As she appeared on the steps, a waft of wind
took the hem of the white sheet, which was her sole drapery, and blew
it aside from her knees. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed
to an instant pink, which never thereafter deserted it. She clapped
down her hand in a haste which extinguished the taper she held;
whereat a cold voice halted the procession, and she must stand in her
shame while the light was being rekindled. And as they came on again
she hung her head and her lip trembled.

“Her stature,” says an eye-witness, “was meane [signifying short]; her
haire of a dark yellow; her face round and full; her eye grey,
delicate harmony between each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s
colour; her body white and smooth ... she went in countenance and pase
demure, so womanlie, that albeit she were out of all araie save her
kirtle onlie, yet went she so faire and lovelie, namelie, while the
woondering of the people cast a comelier rud in her cheeks (of which
she before had most misse), that hir great shame was hir much praise
among those that were more amorous of hir bodie than curious of hir
soule. And manie good folks that hated hir living (and glad were to
see sin corrected), yet pitied they more hir penance than rejoised
therein, when they considered that the King procured it more of a
corrupt intent, than anie virtuous affection.”

“Proper she was and fair; nothing in her body that you would have
changed, but if you would, have wished her somewhat higher”--no
romancer can better that description, and so it shall stand.

She came down the steps so shamed that she seemed insensible to the
weather. It was snowing again, and the flakes kissed her pink feet as
if in pity, and kissed her neck, and cried into her cold bosom. She
tried to shake her long, loose hair before her face.

Round by the north side they turned; and so to the pulpit, where she
knelt; and all the way the people were silent. And the Bishop mounted
into the tribune, and, sheltered in his snuggery, delivered a long
harangue on the iniquity of loose living. And at the end he demanded
of her if she confessed and repented; whereat she answered, in a voice
all little and shrunken: “I do own my fault, and ask pardon for it.”
At which he raised his tone and bade her depart where she would, and
mend her ways and live cleanly; only first he pronounced the King’s
mandate, that no man should relieve or succour her on pain of death,
which set many marvelling over the reason which could deliver with one
hand and deprive with the other.

Now, Jane Shore rose like one dazed, and the lighted taper fell from
her hand, and she looked hither and thither, as if seeking where she
could escape in her misery and confusion. And all of a sudden the cold
seemed to smite her, and she gathered the sheet about her tender limbs
and gave a single cry like a lamb. And in its very utterance she had a
desperate inspiration, which was to follow a tall man who all this
time had stood close by among the crowd. Something--the shadow of a
gesture, the look in his eyes, close under which his hand had gathered
his cloak--had seemed to invite her, and when he moved, without
appearing to pursue him she followed--on the road to clean living. But
was she the first or the only woman helplessly abandoned to the
paradoxes of life?

The crowd made way for her, and no man durst follow. Soon she was upon
the outskirts of the throng, soon quit of it altogether. Some
whispered ribaldries, some rude touches she had to endure, and that
was all. She believed that the lure would not have let her lose sight
of him; and sure enough there he was going on in front, a noble by
token of his jewelled bonnet, with the long pendant gathered from it
about his neck, and the rich scarlet hose which showed under his
cloak. She thought well, desperate as she was, not to compromise him,
and she followed at a distance. He went round by the deserted east end
of the church, through the place that was called Old Change, and so,
turning sharp down towards the river, made a sudden twist among the
confusion of buildings there, and wheeled into a narrow way known as
Sermon Lane, where he loitered just sufficiently to enable her to see
him disappear into a certain house. Clutching her sheet about her, and
watchful of suspicious eyes, she stole on, hesitated a moment, and
hurried in his footsteps. She may have been observed or not; in any
case she was a contagion whom all avoided. The door closed behind her
as she entered and sank against the wall.

“Rise, madam,” he whispered. He was close beside her. His voice was
quick and strange.

She burst into tears at once, passionate, heart-rending, exhausting.
He let her weep herself out, while she crouched against the wall.
Presently, the storm subsiding, she looked half up.

“Will you not give me your cloak?” she said. “I am cold.”

“For no other reason?” he asked.

She slunk down again.

“No,” she said. “That were a poor pretence, and meet for your mockery.
I must barter a private place with you against raiment. Even a whore
must go covered.”

He stooped and took her, unresisting, in his arms, though she held her
face averted. He carried her impassive up the stairs of that dark,
unknown house, and all the way there was passion in his hold and grief
in his labouring sighs. She knew that they had entered a warm room,
that he had shut the door, had placed her gently on a couch by the
fire.

“Jane!” he said.

She uttered a quick, wild cry, and started erect, so that the sheet
fell from her shoulders.

“Cover them, in mercy to me,” he said.

She stared at him a moment, then went into a sudden hysteric laugh. It
stabbed him to the heart to hear her, for her voice had ever been
merry and sweet.

“O!” she cried, “that a woman should be so used by her own husband!”

“Nay,” said he--“but that I might know you still not dead to shame.”

The ripple of her laugh stopped as it had begun.

“Why are you so richly dight, Harry?” she said.

“A lure,” he answered, “to lead thee hither. Who would win a King’s
mistress must borrow peacock’s plumes.”

She shivered a little, looking down, then whispered hoarse:

“Well, I am well answered. Yet you look like a noble. O, Harry, speak
like one!”

“God forbid it, Jane! I will speak like Harry Shore.”

“He loved me once.”

“Aye; he is risking death to prove it.”

She looked up quickly; but before she could speak the door opened, and
a little boy peeped into the room. He was caught away in a moment by
an unseen hand, and the door closed; but in that instant the woman had
snatched her drapery about her nakedness, shamed as she had never been
yet.

“A wretch!” she said, her face on fire.

“Saw’st thou his blue eyes and pretty curls?” said the goldsmith. “He
is son to my master-setter, whose house this is. I had dreamed once of
such a babe, mine own and thine.”

She rose and crept to him, looking in his face. It was a bronzed and
honest one, though drawn with pain.

“Harry,” she whispered, “find me clothes and bid me begone--in memory
of our once kisses, Harry.”

“They are here,” he said. “Everything is prepared for thee--the means
to lead a blameless life henceforth. Summon the woman when I’m gone. I
would not have them say I left my wife to starve.”

He put out his arms, passion in his eyes, but withdrew them
resolutely.

“Nay,” he said; “in heaven--not yet.”

He fell back a little, and cried out suddenly:

“Your foot, Jane! Poor foot; it bleeds!”

He motioned her to the couch, knelt, lifted the wounded limb, and with
his napkin staunched the trickling blood. He held it to his breast,
and at last, with a long, yearning sigh, put his lips to it.

“This hath atoned,” he said--“so far I shame myself,” and he rose.
“Little sinful wife,” he whispered, “he loved thee once; he loves thee
ever; else could he leave thee thus? Now, let me never hear thy name
again--for love’s sake do I ask it.”

She had buried her face in the cushions. And there she lay, long after
he had gone, weeping out her soul.




 THE CHAPLAIN OF THE TOWER

“My son!”

The kneeling figure started slightly, hearing the whisper in its ear,
and half turned its face.

“_Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Ricardum_, my son.”

The Benedictine had stolen list-footed from among the shadows of the
great pillars, and stood, a blacker shadow, bending over the solitary
worshipper in the darkening chapel of St. John. It was a breathless
August evening of the year 1483, and not a sound penetrated to this
remote fastness of the Keep.

“God save the King, Father!” answered the suppliant. It was
Brackenbury himself, Lieutenant of the Tower, and a sore matter of
conscience had brought him to this place. He rose instantly to his
feet.

“I say it with all my heart,” quoth he. “God save the King--from
numbering himself among his worst enemies.”

“Sh--sh!” whispered the chaplain. “Sh--sh! good Sir John.” He put a
finger to his lips, and, motioning the other forth, held him on the
outer threshold.

“To ensure the pure succession,” he said low. “This bastard boy, Sir
John--a canker that would eat into the State. No safety but in his
excision.”

“For the second time,” replied the knight sternly, “take my answer.
Question, if you will, the blood that courses in his veins; question
not mine. That stoops to no midnight butchery.”

He waved his hand, as if in appeal or protest, towards the chapel, and
turned to go. But the priest detained him.

“A moment, good Sir John. The King wills it.”

“He must find a baser instrument.”

“Well so,” said the Benedictine, “well so, good Sir John. Only keep
your back to us, saving your honour, and see nothing for a little
space.”

The Lieutenant, without another word, strode away, his harness
clanging in the vaults.

The covert priest stood listening, a smile, small and hungry, on his
lips. He hungered, indeed, had always hungered, for many
things--preferment, power, the good immoral gifts of life and
indulgences other than Papal. And suddenly, amazingly, it appeared,
they were all come within his grasp. He had only to persuade this
master of his to a certain deed, by absolving him for it before
committed, and a mitre awaited him. It had been whispered in his ear,
as he had whispered in Sir John’s. The abbot of his own Order at
Westminster was deeply involved with the Queen-Dowager, to whom he had
given sanctuary. The crooked King disliked people who sheltered his
enemies. A motion of his hand and the chaplain was in the abbot’s
place. The seat awaited him--it was stupendous, actual--and, while
reaching for it, to be baulked by a scruple of conscience not his own!
The thing was intolerable.

Abbot of St. Peter’s! His lips watered, thinking of it; his eyelids
blinked and reddened. He was a lean, famished-looking body, with
sharp-set features, and a smile perpetually on his mouth between
propitiatory and craving. One might have counted his ribs, and never
guessed at the dreams of surfeit that wantoned under them. He turned
and crept away.

That night a messenger rode from the Tower, following in the wake of
the royal progress northwards. He found the King where he lay at
Warwick Castle, and, entering to him at midnight, whispered of Sir
John’s obstinate density and of the chaplain’s better understanding. A
few minutes later Sir James Tyrrell, Master of the King’s Horse,
started on his way back to London. He took with him a brace of
confidants, fat trusty fellows, whose names should be pilloried
throughout the ages. They were John Dighton and Miles Forrest, sinewy
miscreants, as callous to suffering as Smithfield butchers. He took
also a royal warrant, entrusting to him, for one night only, the
custody of the fortress, its keys and passwords; and finally he took,
for his personal comfort in the business, a sure conviction of his own
damnation. Reaching the Tower, he displayed his commission, locked
away all troublesome witnesses, emptied the outer ward, to which the
public had access, of its loiterers, and had the place to himself.
Having done which, he hastened with his two ruffians to the gate-house
where the princes lay.

It was a close, windless night, with thunder brooding over the river.
Every stone that slipped under the assassin’s feet jarred his nerves
intolerably. He muttered to himself as he walked, wringing his wet
forehead. The shadow of a figure that rose upon him from the shadowy
porch brought an oath from his lips.

“Who’s that? Answer, and be damned!”

“Hist, good Sir James!” whispered the crawling priest. “Curse not
thine own absolver.”

“A blasphemy,” answered Tyrrell; “or God Himself is a villain. Come,”
he said intolerantly: “show us the way to hell.”

The Benedictine crossed himself.

“_Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordium tuam_,” he murmured. “Direct
our stumbling feet who seek the light by dubious ways. Give me the
key, soldier. It were well that I ascended first to report if the
children sleep. The better for them, the better for us.”

Bending under a low doorway in the wall of the passage, he
disappeared. Tyrrell let out a quaking groan.

“Trip his heels, trip his heels, O, devil my master!” he sighed
between his teeth.

The shadow went up the stairs, paused at a certain door, fitted a key
into its lock with stealthy caution, listened, and glided into the
room beyond. It was small, and fast locked in stone ten feet in
thickness. There were windows front and back. Through the former a
cresset burning on St. Thomas’s Tower across the ward cast a red
flicker upon a couple of pallets standing near side by side against
the wall. A sound of unconscious breathing came from these. The evil
shadow crept on and stooped.

Blood on the young white face! Fool! it was the painting of the
cresset. This deed might seem a pitiful thing were it not for the
hunger that seemed a pitifuller. To be abbot--to be bishop--to be
cardinal even! Who knew? He glanced down. His own inky cassock was
smeared with the scarlet fire. To wade through blood to the Sacred
College! Why not? The end expiated all means thereto. There were a
score of precedents to justify him. The Abbacy once gained, his power
for good would be multiplied a hundredfold. He raised his eyes. The
red glare seemed to fill them from within. Something in his
interposing shadow appeared to make the younger child behind him
uneasy. He stirred and moaned in his sleep. Presently he murmured,
with a whimper:

“Take it away, mother!”

He was always her Saxon darling, with the head of gold. She used to
call his eyes like cockles in the corn. The shadow stole apart, and,
with a sigh, he breathed warm again.

To be abbot! What surer justification of his right than to dispatch
these innocent souls to God? They would thank him in the end for much
peril spared them. He hesitated no longer, but, leaving the door ajar,
descended as he had come.

The human dogs below were straining in their leashes. At a sign
Tyrrell motioned them to their work. The two stole up, while their
master remained to hold the door. And then came the awful interval.

The blood on the white face! The priest blinked at the cresset flaming
high across the yard. Surely it burned with a lurider glow? It was the
wind fanning it. Wind? there was no breath of wind in all the dead
night. What, then, if not the pipe of wind in passage or keyhole, was
that sudden whine which rose upon the silence? With the sweat breaking
out on his forehead, he seized a mattock, one of several which had
been laid ready, and began frenziedly striking at the ground under the
wall. Tyrrell, with a gasping oath, came hurrying to join him.

They dug like madmen, against their own terror and the vision to come.
And when at last it announced itself with heave, and shuffle, and the
grunting of brute lungs, they would not pause for a moment, but,
reinforced, wrought and wrought until the grave was made, and closed
in, and their sin covered. And then Tyrrell, summoning his vile
grooms, delivered up his trust and rode away for York, with his soul
rattling like a dried kernel within him.

The chaplain thought of a prayer for the dead, and bending, with an
abject face, to kneel by the grave, saw dark stains on his sandalled
feet. He glanced at the burning cresset, stooped and, touching them,
looked at his fingers. To wade through blood! With a shudder he thrust
his hands out of sight into the wide sleeves of his cassock, and went
hurriedly away, drifting across the open ward like the black shadow of
a cloud.

But the morning found him restored and unrepentant.

Abbot of St. Peter’s! Day by day, while that preferment was delayed,
the hunger ravened in him and the conscience hardened, until his
crime, going unrewarded, filled him with an insane and rageful joy.
But one evening there came a secret message to him that the King,
superstitious after the fashion of the sceptical and world-serving,
had taken exception to the place of burial, and desired that the dead
should be privately exhumed and reinterred in a place less
unconsecrate. Flushed with renewed hope, then, he hugged his
confidence, and went with burning eyes about his task.

God knows how he managed to perform it, and alone, and without
exciting suspicion. He was lord of his own sacred domain. But, working
with demoniac energy, he got out the spoiled young bodies, and
conveyed them one by one to the new grave he had himself opened for
them under the chapel stairs. There they might repose within sound of
the Mass, at peace and at rest for evermore. His imagination, as with
monomaniacs, could flow only in one direction. Each day he trod upon
the stones that hid his secret, and never faltered or feared. And each
day he waited, hungering, for his summons to Westminster.

It came at last--the prize for which he had wrought, and suffered, and
bartered his priestly soul. He was in the chapel at the time, and he
heard the voice of the Lieutenant calling to him. He hurried out, and
saw Sir John standing, citation in hand, at the foot of the stairs.

“Hail, Father Abbot!” quoth the knight, in that derisory tone he had
ever assumed towards him since their last interview.

The chaplain, his thin lips chewing out a smile, lingered on the top
of the flight. And then, all in a moment, his eyes were seen to fix
themselves in a stare of horror, as if some terrific vision opposed
them.

“What’s this?” he whispered. “Who put it here?”

The other answered, startled: “I see naught.”

“Ah-ha!”

He threw up his hands with a screech and fell headlong. His neck, as
he pitched, doubled under him with a crack, and the body, bowling
down, was flung at Sir John’s feet. There, with its head fallen back
upon the very stone which locked away its secret, it relaxed and
settled.

_He had received the wages and paid the price of blood in one and the
same instant._

So died that chaplain of the Tower who alone, out of all the kingdom,
could have solved the mystery of the tragic dead. When, on the
accession of Henry, it became necessary, for reasons of high policy,
to disinter the bodies, the grave under the wall was found to have
been violated--only rumour could whisper by whom. One of the actual
murderers was dead; the other, together with the late Master of the
Horse, being seized and questioned, could throw no light upon the
matter. Not until two hundred years had passed was the secret to be
unearthed by some masons engaged in repairing the chapel stairs.

And the priest? There was a legend once current of an odd little
detail connected with his end. And that was that the body, when picked
up, exhibited no marks of injury about the head and neck, only the
feet were bloody. It might well have been, seeing whereon they had
trodden those many days past.




 LADY GODIVA

“Will you not, Leofric?”

“Hence! You weary me.”

“Dear lord?”

“Dear lady. So you plead like a child, the gold circlet in thy hair,
the gold hem at thy robe, the gold garters about thy knees. Remission
of these dues, quotha! Are gems got with forbearance? Go to! you talk.
Wouldst sacrifice one garnet in thy brooch to ease these churls of
mine?”

“O, yes! and more.”

“More, more! What more? The garnets of thy lips, perchance, thine
eyes’ amethysts, the whole treasury of thy love?”

“Nay, for that is my dear lord’s.”

“What so? You are considerate.”

“Leofric, they come crying at my stirrup: ‘While you lie soft, O lady,
we cannot sleep for cold; while you toy with profusion, our children
moan for bread. We toil to keep, not pay, a tithe of what we earn. We
may not eat the swine we rear, the eels we net. The taxes crush us;
pray you our good lord to lift the heavy burden. Our lives are his.’”

“Do they say so? They shall answer for it for thus importuning you.”

“God forbid! Leofric, hear me! For the love of God, Leofric.”

“Away!”

“Of the sweet Virgin----”

“Will you tempt me too much!”

“For thy love of poor Godiva.”

The Earl turned with a roar.

“_My_ love! What of thine, so to scheme to rob me?”

“O, not rob, but give. I would have them love thee as I love.”

“By robbing me. That is a one-sided compact. I see naught but my own
loss in it.”

“Alas! I would give my all.”

“A vain boast. What is thine to give?”

She sighed.

“_My_ love, perhaps?” he said, mocking.

She shook her head.

“What is thy dearest possession?” he asked, still bantering. “Most
women count their modesty. Wouldst thou give that?”

She said, weeping, “I would trust in Mary.”

He stamped down his foot.

“Trust, then! Strip off thy robe, ride naked through the town--so then
I will believe thee.”

She looked up at him amazed. The colour flushed and waned in her round
cheek, leaving it a lily white.

“_But will you give me leave to do so?_” she whispered.

“Aye,” he said, breathing scorn.

“And, being done, remit the tolls and set thy people free?”

“On my knightly oath,” he swore, and, in a sudden tickle of humour,
chucked her soft chin, and went off between anger and hard laughter.

She was of the stock of Thorold, this young wife, sheriffs of
Lincolnshire and a devout and noble family. It had been like
garlanding of a bull with flowers, this wedding of her sweet
gentleness with the stormy Saxon earl. Yet from the first she had had
influence with him. He bore her humorously, one moment reverencing
her, the next loving to bring the shameful scarlet to her cheek, and
then to crush her about with his arms in mighty protection and
ownership. She had a soft white beauty like a rose, and it was good
thus to hold her full fragrance against his breast.

Now, trembling a little and her eyes cast down, she sought Father
Thomas, the chaplain of the house, and told him all. Was she justified
in the venture? she asked him, her voice scarcely audible.

The man was young and erotic, under his habit a sickly craver of
emotions. He would often in his inmost soul gloat upon a dream, a
thought--wild and scarce conceivable; yet the authority of his cloth
was potent. It was a swooning experience to him to be near her day by
day, to feel the leaning of her soul towards his, to handle the soft
places of her conscience. Accepting what was regard for his office as
regard for the priest, he would whisper to himself: “Even greater
miracles have come to pass.” Wherefore now, moistening his dry lips
and thinking of her loveliness, he answered her with the Greek
proverb: “A little evil is a great good. You are justified, my
daughter.”

She turned and fled from him with a strangled cry. Perhaps she had
hoped against hope to find her venture banned by Mother Church;
perhaps, unrecognised by herself, the pure spirit in her had recoiled
from contact with a thing unclean. Yet he was God’s servant, and he
had spoken.

For days after, awaiting the ordeal, she walked as in a nightmare, a
rose of fever in her cheek. She named the hour of her trial, and sent
her herald forth to cry it, and to pray all human creatures of their
love to spare her shame, since she was consecrating her womanhood to
their salvation, and offering herself for their sakes to be exposed on
this pillory. And a sound like a wind went throughout the town, and
each soul there, from thrall to freedman, kindled like dull fire blown
upon, and dropped upon his knees to call the bitter curse of Heaven on
him that should prove a traitor to such trust. And Godiva heard and
sighed; yet she could not escape that sense of soilure in her, since
to a spotless soul it is defilement enough to be outraged in a
dreamer’s thought. “O, Mother Mary, ward and hide me!” she prayed
perpetually.

Her lord learned the truth amazed. She was resolved, then, after all?
She would take him at his word to browbeat and defy him? Yet he would
not interfere, nor move one step to control her. But ever in his
frowning eyes was a shadow like death, and on his lips a muttered
curse: “Will she do it? Will she do it? A wanton--no wife of mine.”
And, thinking so, he let her have her way, even to the brief command
of all his house and borough.

Now, on that day of sacrifice, by noon all Coventry was like a city of
the dead. The last step had echoed from its streets; the voice of lean
barter was hushed; behind veiled windows a thousand ears were strained
in thrill and ecstasy to hear the tinkle of a palfry’s feet upon the
stones without. Only one sacrilegious hound, doomed to eternal infamy,
could be found to slur the honest record--a small, livid-faced man,
slinking like a fearful thief, his cowl pulled over his eyes, up the
steps of the Byward tower by the castle gate. Father Thomas it was,
who had left Godiva in the chapel prostrate before the figure of the
Virgin, praying for strength to do her part. It was only right, he
told himself, licking his pale lips, that the Church should sanction
this live-offering by its presence.

The Castle had fallen as silent as the town. Its inmates whispered
apart, or wept if they were women. Its great gate was flung open, its
battlements were deserted, its windows stopped and eyeless; only in
the courtyard a single creamy jennet, fastened to a pillar, champed
and fretted for her rider.

The frowning Leofric, his ear bent to a curtain close at hand,
fingered his sword-hilt as he waited listening. His fair Saxon face,
clean-shaved but for the corn-coloured beard which forked from its
chin like a swallow’s tail, was flushed a deep red; the muscles of his
bare arms and thighs, white against his purple gold-hemmed tunic,
twitched spasmodically; the leggings of twisted gold upon his calves
seemed to undulate like snake-skin.

“She shall die first!” he kept muttering to himself. “She shall die
first!”

A soft step whispered on the stones; he heard the mare whinny, her
trappings clinked. “Now!” he muttered, and, drawing his blade, parted
the curtain noiselessly and looked forth. In the very act he staggered
and flung his hand across his face.

His wife--no question of it! But so etherealised, so remote from his
carnal conception of her, that his soul shrank abashed before the
spirit his ruthless challenge had evoked. Her hair was down, veiling
her from crown to pearly thigh. A nimbus, painted by the sunlight in
its gossamer, seemed to hang about her head. Through golden mist
budded a rose of lips, a thought of blue eyes flowered, like little
eyes of heaven seen through a haze of dawn. So glorified in her
sacrifice, seen, but unseeing, she went by him and disappeared, silent
as a figure in a glass. He stood like one turned suddenly to stone.

Full ten minutes must have passed before, coming again to
consciousness, as it were, he bethought himself that she would be
returning in a little, her task accomplished.

“_Introibo ad altare Mariæ!_” he sighed, amazed. “I will pray my
love’s forgiveness. I am not worthy to kiss her little latchet.”

He clanked his sword into its scabbard, and, going like a blind man,
sought the chapel. The lamp before the altar shone like a star; all
the dusk air seemed thick with scent of roses; and before the shrine
of the Virgin lay his wife prostrate on the stones.

He stood a moment as if death-smitten; the blood about his heart
seemed to stagnate and leave him grey as ashes. Then fury was born in
him, and flamed to fire.

“A trick!” he stormed within. “She hath bribed another to take her
place.”

He strode roughly forward, bent, and seized the body to his arms. She
never moved or spoke. Looking in her face, he saw its eyes closed, its
cheek stone-white. No breath came from the parted lips.

“Dead!” he whispered. “My God! have I killed her?”

Raising his eyes in anguish, he saw the shrine empty. The painted
figure of the Virgin proper to it was gone. At that moment a sound of
horse’s hoofs striking upon the stones outside came to his ear. She
was returning! She--who? An awe as of immortality smote into his
veins. The body in his arms stirred, and a deep sigh issued from its
lips.

“Mother so dear, Mother without stain, protect and cover me thy child
with the mantle of thy chastity. I am ready, Mother.”

Her fingers trembled to her belt. Leofric, with a gasp of emotion,
caught and held them. “Mother?” he choked, and, looking up, saw the
figure in its place once more.

 * * * * *

There was a distant cry of jubilance, swelling to a roar, and then
near at hand another, on a new and startled note. Something had
befallen in the castle--something as unexpected as it was very fearful
in its revelation. In a chamber of the Byward tower they had come upon
the body of the priest. There was an augur in its crooked clutch, and
in the boarded shutter of the window a hole to correspond. The body
lay decently, and undefiled of blood, but where the eyes should have
been were two burnt and blackened sockets.

A judgment, said the people; but only Leofric and Godiva ever knew of
what tremendous import. Divine is beauty, and those who would view it
unveiled must risk Actæon’s fate.




 THE HERO OF WATERLOO

Colonel Manton put up his rod and demanded to be set ashore. It had
been his first experience of coarse fishing on the river, and it had
not proved to his taste. It was not that the perch had been distant or
the chub unapproachable. On the contrary, the place having been
ground-baited overnight, the sport had been excellent. It was the
worms and one other thing which decided him. He had been present at
Talavera, at Ciudad Rodrigo, at Badajos, at Vittoria, at Quatre Bras,
at Waterloo; he had seen as much carnage as most men, but this
bloodless impaling of lob-worms on hooks, and then casting them, so
transfixed, to lie writhing on the river bottom for an indefinite
period at the end of a ledger-line, offended his sense of fitness. It
was not, it seemed to him, playing the game. The worms had no chance,
and they could not bite back. He hated to sit there and think of what
was going on under the quiet water, and the reflection gained nothing
in relish from the fact that, by refusing to soil his own hands with
the viscous contortions of the creatures, he must appear, in
delegating that operation to the boatman, to torture by deputy, like
the most cowardly of Eastern despots. And so when, as presently
happened, this same stolid deputy, in “disgorging” an obstinate hook
from a barbel’s throat tore away---- But it is enough to say that the
Colonel put down his rod and demanded there and then to be set ashore.

There was no gainsaying him, of course. It was sufficient that he was
the guest of a distinguished General living at Datchet; but in
addition to this the Colonel’s personal actions invited no criticism.
He fished--as he walked, as he rode, as he appeared on all secular
occasions--in a dark blue wasp-waisted frock-coat with frogs, in tight
nankeen trousers strapped under neat insteps, in a stiff collar and
full black stock, in a tall hat with a brim so crescented that its
front peak looked like the “nasal” of a Norman helmet. And for the
rest he carried himself and his white moustache with the conscious
authority of a cock of a hundred fights.

The boatman put him ashore on the river-bank some half-mile below
Datchet, towards which village he immediately addressed his steps. The
path was lonely and unfrequented, and it gave the Colonel some
surprise to observe, as he turned a clump of bushes, a fashionable old
beau toddling along it in front of him. In a few moments the latter
paused, nonplussed, at a stile, and the Colonel came up with him.

The pedestrian was a man of uncouth bulk but distinguished mien. He
wore a black frock-coat of a somewhat military cut, with a rich fur
collar. Curly auburn locks, obviously artificial, showed beneath the
brim of his glossy hat, and accented somewhat ghastfully the puffy
pallor of a face whose texture betrayed its age. His eyes had a
glutinous, half-blind appearance; his loose lower lip perpetually
trembled. He peered at the newcomer, panting a good deal, as if the
sudden apparition had shaken his nerves.

“If I may venture, sir,” said Colonel Manton, and proffered his arm.
The other accepted it to mount the stile. It was an ungraceful
business, and, once over, he stood, with his hands to his sides,
vibrating heavily, like a worn-out engine, to his own respirations.
Presently he was sufficiently recovered to speak.

“A damned obstruction--a damned obstruction! Cannot I leave my
carriage a moment to walk round by the water but this annoyance must
appear in my path!”

“A villainous stile,” said the Colonel. “We will indict it for a
trespass.”

He was a reasonable man, and he felt the absurdity of the complaint.
But, to his surprise, his sarcasm missed fire.

“Do so, do so,” said the old gentleman, and took his arm again, as it
might have been his own walking-stick. They went on together, and in a
little the stranger had opened a conversation with all the effrontery
in the world.

“My boy, what’s your rank?” said he. “I perceive you are a soldier.”

The officer stared, and drew himself up.

“Colonel Manton, sir, at your service,” he answered distantly.

He was surprised; but the man was old, near seventy by his appearance,
and very possibly from his cut a retired veteran like himself.
Familiarity from a general, say, would be pardonable, and even kindly.
Besides, he did not dislike the implied suggestion of juniority.

“Hey!” said the stranger--“retired?”

“Yes, sir, retired.”

“Brevet rank?”

“Brevet be damned!” said Colonel Manton hotly. “I owe my promotion,
sir, if you wish to know, to Waterloo.”

The stranger glanced at him with a curiously sly look, and pinched the
arm on which his own fingers rested.

“What!” he said, “were you there?”

“I had the honour, sir,” said the Colonel grandiloquently, “of playing
my little part in that Homeric contest.”

“Whose division, hey?”

“Picton’s--Pack’s brigade. You are a little--you will excuse my saying
it--particular.”

“Certainly I will, my boy. Wounded--hey?”

A distinct flush suffused the Colonel’s cheek.

“Wounded--yes,” he replied shortly.

The old fellow nudged him confidentially.

“Tell me,” he said--“how?”

“Look here--you must forgive me, you know,” exploded the Colonel; “but
I must point out that we are strangers. Still--as a
fellow-campaigner--if that is the case--may I ask, sir, if _you_ were
at Waterloo?”

The other laughed enjoyingly.

“_Was_ I?” he said. “To be sure I was. You had all good reason for
knowing it.”

Colonel Manton’s eyes opened. Here was a momentous implication.
Evidently he had to do with some great general of division, though the
boast sounded a little extravagant and unmilitary. He ran over in his
mind a dozen possible names, but without success. And then the thought
occurred to him: “Good reason for knowing it? What the devil! Is it
possible he was on the other side?”

The idea seemed too preposterous for belief; the stranger was so
obviously British. Who, in wonder’s name, could he be, then? Hill,
Macdonnell, Saltoun, Uxbridge, Vandeleur, Somersett, Hackett--all
divisional or brigadier-generals? He could not identify him, of his
knowledge, with any one of these. The Iron Duke himself? He had never
been brought into very close personal contact with the great man, but
naturally he was familiar with his features. Could it be possible that
time had so fused and blunted those that their characteristic contour
had degenerated into this scarce distinguishable pulp? Prosperity, he
knew, could play strange tricks with countenances, yet a _volte-face_
so revolutionary seemed incredible. And yet who else but the Duke had
been on that day as indispensable as implied? But it was conceivable
that some might have so regarded themselves--that certain heads might
have been turned by their share in the success of so stupendous a
victory.

Colonel Manton had been living abroad on his half-pay for some years,
and, until the occasion of this visit during the summer of 1830, had
dwelt for long a stranger to his native land. He could but suppose
that he had in a measure lost the clue, through subsequent
developments, to old events. It remained clear only that he was in the
presence of one who had, or believed himself to have, contributed
signally to the success of the epoch-making battle. And that must be
enough for him. He spoke thenceforth as a subordinate to his
commanding officer.

“I beg your indulgence, sir,” he said. “I have been absent from my
country for a considerable time, and features once familiar elude me.
You asked about my wound. It is a ridiculous matter, and I recall it
without enthusiasm. The fact is that, when d’Erlon’s guns were
pounding us before the advance, a ball smashed the head of a sergeant
standing near me, and one of the fellow’s cursed double-teeth was
driven into my neck. It was not enough to cripple my fighting-power,
but I would have given a dozen of my own to boast a more honourable
scar.”

The stranger chuckled.

“Scars are not the only guarantee of valour,” he said.

The Colonel ventured: “You brought away some of your own, sir?”

“No,” said the old fellow. “No; Wellington and I got off scot-free.”

The Colonel dared again: “Were you, may I ask, on his personal staff?”

“Well, yes,” said the stranger, chuckling still more, “I suppose you
might call it that.”

Suppose? Colonel Manton gaped. It was positively a matter of history
that not one of that staff had escaped death or mutilation. The other
may have noticed his perplexity, for he turned on him with an air of
sudden annoyance.

“You haven’t the assurance to question my word, I hope, sir?” he
demanded.

“Certainly not,” answered the Colonel.

“I could give you convincing proof,” said the stranger. “Did the
Commander-in-Chief--now did he or did he not--visit General Blücher
at Wavre the night before the battle to make sure of his
co-operation?”

“It is a disputed point, sir,” said the Colonel. “I believe that even
his Grace has been known to contradict himself in the matter, saying
at one time that he would never have fought without Blücher’s
explicit promise to back him up, at another flatly contradicting the
report that he saw the Prussian general on the night before the
battle.”

“And he did not, my boy,” sniggered the old fellow triumphantly, “for
his interview with him was after midnight, and therefore on the day
_of_ the battle. I ought to know, _for I sent him off there myself_.”

He cackled into such a spasm of laughter that the convulsion caught
his wind.

“O, my chest!” he wheezed and gasped, “my miserable chest! I’m the
most wretched creature on earth. But it’s nothing, nothing--the
youngest fellows are subject to it.” He coughed and wiped his eyes
with a heavily-scented handkerchief. “Yes,” he said presently, “yes,
Wellington was a sound workaday general, a fine soldier, an inspired
commissary, but, of genius--h’m! We need only suggest, Manty my boy,
that he was well advised. The man at his elbow, hey? You need not
mention it, you know, but the real hero of Waterloo--hey, d’ye see?
Keep it to yourself; there were reasons against its being
divulged--you understand? What, my boy!”

The Colonel stared before him as if hypnotised; he stumbled in his
walk. Was it possible to mistake the implication--that the laurels
ought by rights to have adorned the brow of this stranger beside him?
He felt like one whose faith had suddenly exploded of its own
intensity, leaving his breast a blackened shell. Could there actually
have been another, of whom he had never heard, at the Duke’s right
hand on that tremendous day, the presiding but unconfessed genius of
it? He had heard speak of the Corsican’s little red familiar. Was his
great rival, were possibly all commanding intellects, so
supernaturally provided?

He was really a simple man, with a mind ruled to certain prescriptive
lines of conduct. He glanced askance at his companion, who was smiling
and murmuring to himself. Who in Heaven’s name could he be, and why
had he selected _him_ for his astounding confidences? For all his own
fearless rectitude, an uncanny feeling began to possess him. He was
glad, in turning a corner, to see the end of the path, and the head of
a waiting coachman showing above the hedge. And the next moment they
had emerged on to the village green.

A barouche stood there, with a bareheaded gentleman standing at its
door. The liveries of the servants were scarlet, and a mounted man in
a scarlet embroidered coat waited a little apart. The gentleman came
forward.

“Will your Majesty be pleased to ascend?” he asked.

The King dropped the Colonel’s arm, and appeared on the instant to
forget all about him.

“Yes, Watty; yes, certainly, my boy,” he said. “Is that the fiery
chariot?”




 MAID MARIAN

“Master Kay, are you my friend?”

“Hear me vow it, madam.”

“Alas! what vow?”

“That I am your friend.”

“Can you so perjure yourself? Are you not the King’s friend?”

“O, yes, indeed!”

“How can you be his friend and mine?”

“Why, as the bee’s the flower’s friend. I carry messages of love.”

“Does he ask mine of me?”

“Just that, madam--only your love, no more.”

“No more? You say well. Why, truly my love were a little thing to be
valued at no more than a man’s base desire.”

“The man is the King, madam. His desire is great like himself.”

“The King is the man, sir, and the man is hateful to me. Will you tell
him so, and be indeed my friend?”

“It would serve you ill, madam.”

“Will he force me? Alack! I will kill myself.”

“Nay, that you shall not, save you hold your breath and die of your
own sweetness like a rose. No other way, be assured. He will wear you
in his bosom first.”

“God! Dear Master Kay, good Master Kay, sweet, gentle friend, let me
kill myself!”

“I must not.”

“But to leap from the wall! It is a little way--but a step, and to
save me hell? You would not have me burn for ever?”

“I would have you reasonable, madam.”

She had fallen on her knees to him, this Maud Fitzwalter, fair
daughter of Robert the Baron, who was to come to head the revolt
against the infamous King. Her long white fingers plucked at his
sleeves; her eyes sought his eyes imploringly. He drank of them,
lusting in their passionate appeal. She was called Madelon la Belle,
and to see her was to think of spring, with its crab-blossoms against
a blue sky, its glow and youth and waywardness. There is a lack of the
sense of symmetry in Love that makes his sweetest faces out of
drawing; and yet one never doubts but that they are Love’s faces, as
endearing as they are faulty, and for their very faultiness most
lovable. His drawing, I say, may be defective, but he knows the trick
of lip and eyelash to a curve and how to snare men’s hearts thereby.
And so, while we criticise his work, saying that this or that line
goes astray, we would not have it turned by a hair’s breadth nearer
the truth, lest we should miss love in aiming at perfection.

Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that,
parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they
almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple
tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled
gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or
Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of
her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian,
given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had
followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire
moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her
loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for
wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her
father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come,
shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and
had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower
on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she
would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little
more as her obduracy held him aloof.

This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or
threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better
than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in
the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his
figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair,
rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom,
was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A
curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his
shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part
of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s
head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a
mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.

“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.

She rose and stood away from him.

“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.

“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the
thief come in well-armed and strong of body? It were reason better to
yield it with a good grace.”

She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O, hence, thou beast!” And so
she lay writhing--“Only to die--and they will not let me die!”

She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost,
lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so
favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her
hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers
to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a
weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself
down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was
excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover
himself.

On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable.
There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And
it was late spring without--she could see it through her window across
the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its
sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart
came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad
song that she and her Robin had often sung together:

 “Summer is a comin’ in,
  Loud sing cuckoo.
 Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
 And springeth the wood now.
  Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.”

“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O, Robin, my Robin!” She
would never see him again--could never wish to. In a few hours,
perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death,
found too late, could cleanse.

In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim
jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a
bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and
flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen
torches he brought.

“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”

Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.

“Plunge thy knife into my breast, Sir King,” she said, “and with my
last sigh I will praise thee.”

“What!” he snarled--“so much in love with Death? We’ll see to it thy
desire’s whetted in his fondling. He shall prick thee here and there
before ye close. Away with her to the Watch Tower!”

It was at least a respite, and she had dreaded the instant worst. This
Watch, or Round Turret, rose from the north-east angle of the great
Keep. He had her there at his mercy. Her cries might rise to heaven,
but could not penetrate the dense fabric below. In this chill, high
dungeon they imprisoned the girl. Its cold, its dreadful loneliness,
scant food, and the silent guard should break her spirit, the wretch
thought. He would taste her submission to the dregs, then fling her to
his lackeys to teach her what it meant to flout her King. She answered
by starving herself; on which came Kay, the silky-tongued, and warned
her smoothly that such contumacy could only invite its swift reprisal.
She would not be permitted so to slip through her royal lover’s hands.
Whereat she ate all that they would give her, and despaired the more.

There was no escape, none. Locked in as she was, she knew that her
every movement was canvassed by hidden eyes, her every sigh recorded.
And Robin made no sign.

One day it moved her to hear unwonted sounds rising from the outer
ward below, into which the public were admitted on occasion of State
festivities, executions, and so forth. The multitudinous jollity of
voices, soaring above the whine of bugle and tap of drum, proclaimed
it a May-day revel, when the whole place was delivered over to sport
and merriment.

She could not see from her high, narrow window, sunk deep in the wall;
but the babble flowing in on a shaft of sunlight made her heart warm
as it had never felt for days. Some spirit of release seemed to ride
in on the happy music, some emotion that made her bosom heave and her
eyes fill thick with tears.

She was standing, drinking in the merry noise, when her lids blinked
involuntarily, and, with a swish and smack on the ceiling of her cell,
something alighted at her feet. She fancied on the instant that a bird
had flown in and struck against the stone; but, looking down quickly,
she saw that it was a broken arrow--one of a dear, familiar pattern.
With a gasp she stooped, snatched at it, and stood listening. There
was no sign of any one having observed. With swift trembling fingers
she detached a strand of green worsted which was knotted about the
shaft under the quill, and found beneath a folded scrap of parchment,
which, on being opened, revealed a glutinous smear of brown substance,
and just these four woeful words written above:

“_Poor Robin’s Pledge. Farewell._”

It was her death-warrant.

So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she
read it. She knew at once what it was--a mortal Arab poison, given
long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King.
It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the
gift--to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her,
proposing, half-playfully, that they should pledge one another in its
Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.

And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could
not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them,
the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He
had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take
advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had
realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a
bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover,
between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.

She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his
dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the
green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of
interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name
on them.

That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his
mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a
flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.

But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the
refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.

And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him
came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of
Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.




 THOMAS PAINE

“Ah, monsieur!” said the tall, nervous prisoner with the ravaged
face, “the rights of one man are very well the wrongs of another--that
is a new discovery; but you did not make it. Even God--who,
nevertheless, does not exist just at present--could not invent a gale
that would favour all ships; and yet you have thought yourself
cleverer than God.”

“I do not know you,” interrupted his hearer and fellow-captive
peevishly. “Why do you presume to address yourself to me?”

“Why?” The other lifted a little broken plaque or medallion which hung
by a spoiled tricolour ribbon from his neck. “Do you observe this, M.
Paine? I am one Garat, ex-President of the Sectional Committee of the
Bonnet-Rouge, and this is my badge of office--or what remains of it.
It represented the table of the law, _en précis_, as revealed to Mr.
Paine on Sinai. Wearing it, I symbolised the Rights of Man. Well, what
I say is, ‘Damn the Rights of Man!’”

“O! certainly, if you wish,” responded Mr. Paine coolly.

“They are fragile, are they not?” said the ex-President, with feverish
derision; “they are apt to be broken in any scuffle. And where is
there not a scuffle where opinions differ--which they always do? The
_Rights_ of Man have not, I perceive, altered the _nature_ of man,
which is to have his way wherever he can get it. Observe: I desired to
do justice according to this tablet, but the mob would not permit me.
Instead they haled away their suspect, unheard; and I, because I would
not commit him unheard, was pronounced a traitor to the principles I
represented and was despatched to this Luxembourg, where, to my
profound amazement, I find incarcerated before me the lawgiver
himself! Now I think I begin to understand everything. Your Rights of
Man could not even save yourself. What the devil did you want
redeeming others with them? For me, I would welcome all my ancient
wrongs to find myself once more a prosperous barber in the Marche
Neuf.”

 * * * * *

In Paris on the 28th July, 1794, at six o’clock in the evening, ended
at a stroke the Terror, lopped off by the head. It had been virile and
active up to that last moment, prepared with its daily _fournée_, all
chosen and set out for the baking; only in the result the order had
been somewhat changed. Messieurs the Triumvirs and their following had
been called upon to take the place of their destined victims--that was
the difference.

But the evening before the death-carts had jolted as usual on their
monotonous way to the Place du Trône; and therein surely the
insensate tragedy of the guillotine had found its crowning expression.
For at that time the dissolution of the Terror had actually begun, and
the smallest gift of fortune or of foresight might have saved the
lives of a half-hundred innocents. There is no sorrier fate than to
perish in the lash of a just expiring monster’s tail.

There was one man appointed to figure in those tragic last tumbrils
who had the best reason in the world for considering himself a spoilt
child of Fortune. This was Mr. Deputy Thomas Paine, some time fallen
from his popular estate, and since January imprisoned in the
Luxembourg. We see him, as he stands in the courtyard of the old
palace nominally taking exercise, an aloof, self-complacent little man
of fifty-seven, dressed in plain brown, and wearing his own brown
hair, which nature has curled. His eyes are large, dreamy, and bagged
underneath; his drooping nose has a suggestion of red in its fall; he
has a moist, temulent mouth, rather weighed down at the corners by
pursey cheeks.

It is evening of the 26th July, and the prisoners, their brief liberty
ended, are filing back to their cells. There is an unwonted excitement
abroad. Some rumour of it has penetrated the walls, and fluttered the
breasts of the poor caged birds within. A change is imminent; they
know not what; but scarce any could be for the worse. Meanwhile,
nevertheless, Fouquier’s emissary is up above, condemned list in hand,
waiting to prick off the names for the morrow’s batch. The procedure
is quite simple; it consists in a chalk-mark made on the door of each
victim’s cell, whence on the following morning its inmate will pass to
the Conciergerie, to the Revolutionary Tribunal, back to the
Conciergerie, and thence the same evening to the scaffold. That is a
predestined course, which much treading has made monotonous and much
philosophy smoothed. It is possible even to walk it with a gay
fatalism--under prescriptive circumstances. Supposing, however, that
there _be_ truth in the reports; that the Triumvirs are threatened and
the Terror itself doomed? What tragedy on tragedy, then, to drown in
the turn of the tide! The prisoners, yesterday resigned, to-day are
pacing their cells like wild beasts. Yet nothing will avail them. The
last tumbrils must have their load.

Paine was sensible of their misery; he believed in the imminence of a
political _volte-face_, and he pitied them. For himself he had not,
nor ever had had, the least apprehension. As he lingered in
abstraction, the last to withdraw, his own security, his own
importance, were the first of convictions in his mind. As a moderate,
he was unacceptable to the extremists--it amounted to no more than
that. He had been put out of the way because he was in the way. But
they would never dare more than to coerce into silence so notable an
apostle of liberty. He reviewed, with some smug satisfaction, the
processes of his own career. By origin a Norfolk staymaker, by chance
an exciseman, by nature a demagogue, his inherent force of character
had lifted him to a position which suffered at the moment only a
temporary eclipse. Was it to be believed that he who had forcibly
contributed to the Declaration of American Independence, who had been
honoured and rewarded by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, who had
earned Franklin’s friendship and Burke’s hostility, who had been
elected by the Department of Calais to sit in the French Convention,
and whose bold assertion of the Rights of Man had been accepted for
the very ritual of the Revolution, would be let to be snuffed out by
the dirty fingers of a murdering attorney? Fouquier dare not do it;
Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, the all-powerful Triumvirate, were not
assured enough for such a venture. Besides, they represented, in an
age of reason, the crowning expression of reason--that government by
minority which had always been a pet theory of his.

He frowned, then lifted his eyebrows with a smile. Something in the
connection, a memory of his own once discomfiture on a certain
occasion, had recurred to him. It had happened in London, in a Fleet
Street tavern, two or three years before. How remote it all seemed!
Dr. Wolcot--he who called himself Peter Pindar--had been there--a
huge, overbearing old voluptuary, with flashing eyes, and a flashing
wit, and a scurrilous tongue. Paine had been discoursing to an
admiring audience on the reasonableness of deciding questions in
Parliament by minorities instead of majorities, “since,” said he, “the
proportion of men of sense to ignoramuses is but as one to ten.
Wherefore the wisest portion of mankind are always in the minority in
debate”--a statement which the Doctor disputed. “Still,” said the
latter, “I will assert nothing for myself, but leave the question to
the company.”

Now, at that, Paine, confident of his surroundings, had risen, and put
the question to the vote, those who agreed with him to hold up their
hands. Whereupon every hand had gone up, and the Doctor had arisen,
with a bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I thank you for this decision in my
favour. The wise minority, as represented in my person, carries the
vote. I pronounce Mr. Paine wrong.” And he had swallowed his glassful
and lumbered out.

Somehow the prisoner remembered that occasion with pleasure. It
suggested a form of liberty much more in accord with his real nature
than a world of abstract utilitarianisms. The wine in the Luxembourg
was thin; indulgences were few; they often dined off stale sprats. The
end of his own nose, touched by a ray of the slanting sun, caught his
eye as with the glint of a ruby. He pished under his breath.

“Bah!” he muttered. “He was a domineering beast; but I wish I were
with him now at Dick’s in Fleet Street.”

He sighed and stirred; and it was at that moment that the stranger of
the broken plaque had approached and accosted him. He was a newcomer,
and unknown to the ex-Deputy.

“To the devil with your Rights of Man!” ended the tall prisoner. He
caught at Paine, who had turned an angry shoulder to him and was
going. “Is it not so?” he demanded. “They are just one’s right, it
appears, to run with the crowd the crowd’s way. If one takes the
_Liberty_ to pause a moment for reflection, one is trampled underfoot
by _Fraternity_ and packed off to discuss _Equality_ with the other
heads in the basket.”

“I would have you observe,” said Paine frigidly, “that the turnkey is
summoning us to return to our cells.”

He moved away, but the other followed close beside him, agitated and
voluble.

“Cells!” he cried--“cells! But is not that a fine comment on your
propaganda? I interpret your Rights according to the tables, and you
send me to the guillotine for it.”

“_I?_” said Paine. He stopped in desperation.

“Is not your emissary up there now,” cried Garat, “marking off the
doomed?”

“_My_ emissary?” said Paine.

“You are as responsible as any for him,” said the ex-President,
kneading his damp palms together. “If you _would_ try to blow east and
west at once, meddling with unknown forces. You should have
remembered, monsieur, that the first right of man is to existence.
There would have been a fine air of originality about that precept. It
has always been the easiest thing in the world to solve human problems
by killing.”

The demagogue took refuge behind derision.

“I perceive you are simply a coward,” he said.

“Yes,” cried Garat, his lips trembling. “I am simply that. What can
you expect, who have decreed us annihilation for our despair? Our
ancient wrongs conceded us a heaven after all; your modern rights have
taken it away. It is all very well for you, safeguarded by your
position, to pretend to despise death; it would be another matter, I
expect, if you feared, like me, to find the chalk-mark on your door.”

“Rest assured,” said Paine contemptuously. “If you have sought to
serve Justice, Justice will not destroy her own.”

“But there are accidents.”

“I answer for her, I say,” insisted the demagogue, with an air of
pompous finality. “You may, trust to my own share, citizen--grossly as
you libel it--in her modern scheme, which provides against such
possibilities. No trick of Fortune is permitted nowadays to spare the
guilty or condemn the innocent.”

“But are you sure, monsieur? Monsieur, in God’s name!”

Paine waved the creature aside with a peremptory gesture, and
continued his way across the yard. They were the last to enter the
prison, and they mounted the naked stairs almost together. In the same
corridor above were their cells situated, and Torné, the surly
gaoler, was already holding half-closed the door of Garat’s, which
came first. It was bare of the fatal sign, and Garat ran into his fold
with a bleat like a comforted sheep.

Mr. Thomas Paine, with a shrug and sneer, tripped on his way to his
own cell. Reaching it, he raised his eyes, staggered slightly, and
gave a single gasp. Its door was flung back against the outer wall,
_and the mark was on it_.

_Inside!_ He had but to close it upon himself, and the mark would
vanish. Fouquier’s hurrying emissary, not being of the wise minority,
had overlooked that contingency.

Torné, having locked in Garat, was coming down the corridor.
Screening the sign with his arm, the ex-Deputy swung round the door
and shut himself in.

He died a dozen deaths before he heard the key turn in the lock
outside--a hundred before the news of next day’s _coup d’état_ came
to restore life to ten thousand withering hopes.

But the tumbrils went on the morrow, and for the last time, all the
same--only he was not a passenger by them. It was just his luck that
Fortune was offered such a characteristic way of retaliating upon him
for his boasted command of her.




 FAIR ROSAMOND

A lady, accompanied by a small armed retinue, rode out of a forest
glade near Woodstock, and, pausing beside the waters of the Glyme,
which here came tumbling in a little weir, smooth as a barrel of
glass, over an artificial dam, reined in her steed, and sat gazing, in
the full glow of noon, upon the scene before her.

It was a scene of perfect pastoral quiet--woodland and meadow as far
as the eye could reach, broken by green hillocks and dominated by a
solitary keep of stone set on a leafy height in the foreground. To the
right a film of floating vapour showed where a hidden hamlet smoked.
There was no other token of human life or habitation anywhere.

The lady, halting a little in advance of her party, made a preoccupied
motion with her hand, whereupon there pushed forward to her a certain
horseman, who dragged with him a churl roped to his saddle-bow. The
knight was in bascinet and chain-mail like the others, but his shield
and _pavon_ were emblazoned with arms betokening his higher rank.

“Messer de Polwarth,” said the lady, “is not this in sooth Love’s
paradise?”

“Certes, madam,” he answered grimly; “it is the King’s Manor of
Woodstock.”

She laughed; then, stiffening suddenly in her saddle, pointed upwards.

“Look!” she said.

A poising kite, as she spoke, had dropped to the wood-edge, and thence
rose swiftly with a dove beating in its talons.

“Behold a fruitful omen,” she cried, and turned on the hind: “Dog!
where lies the garden?”

De Polwarth struck the fellow a steely blow across the scruff.

“Answer, beast!”

The man, a sullen, unkempt savage, pointed with an arm like a snag.

“Down yon, a bowshot from the lodge. Boun by the waterside.”

The lady nodded, her eyes fixed in a sort of smiling trance. She was
Eleanor of Aquitaine, no less, the divorced wife of France, the
neglected and embittered Queen of England, and she was at this moment
on the verge of flight to those rebellious sons of hers who conspired
in Guienne against their father.

But, before she fled, she had just one deed of savage vengeance to
perpetrate, and of that she would not be baulked, though to accomplish
it she must ride across half England. Somewhere, she knew, in this
place was situated that “house of wonderful working--wrought like unto
a knot in a garden,” where lived her hated child-rival, that beautiful
frail rose of the Cliffords who had borne the King a son. So much the
worse for her--so much the worse.

The Queen descended to earth, spiritually and literally. She was
dressed like a queen in a belted blue robe latticed with gold, and a
long purple cloak over. A jewelled coronet embraced her headcloth and
the headcloth her face. The rim of hair that showed under was still,
for all her fifty odd years, crow black. Her colour was high, her
frame masculine; the prominence of her lower lip gave her a cruel
expression, and without belying her.

“Nay, de Polwarth,” she said, as the knight made a movement to
dismount. “No hand in this but mine.”

He retorted gruffly: “The place is reputed impenetrable.”

She smiled. “Hate will find out a way. Rest you here till I return.”

Never to be gainsaid, she went off alone by the streamside, and soon
disappeared among the trees beyond.

Her way took her under the slope of the hill which ran up to the
King’s Manor. At first, looking through the branches, she could catch
glimpses of the strong, irregular pile, butting like a mountain crag
from the forehead of the green height; but, in a little, the density
of the trees increasing, the house was hidden from her view, and she
had only the thick, towering woods and the little stream for company.

On and on she went, resolute to her purpose, thrilled with some
presentiment of its near accomplishment--and suddenly a white rabbit
ran out from the green almost under her feet.

She stopped dead on the instant, and, as she stood motionless, the
thicket parted near the bole of a great beech-tree hard by, and a
little boy slipped out into the open. He was pink-cheeked,
Saxon-haired and eyed--a shapely manikin of five or so. Intent on
recapturing his pet, he did not at first notice the stranger; but when
he turned, with the bunny hugged in his arms, he stood rosily
transfixed. In a swift stride or two the Queen was upon him, cutting
off his retreat.

She stooped, with a little exultant laugh.

“What is thy name, sweet imp?” she said.

He pouted, half-frightened, but still essaying the man, rubbing one
foot against the opposite calf.

“Willie Clifford, madam,” he said, wondering for a moment at her
crown; but then panic overtook him.

“Nay, Willie,” said the Queen, holding him with a hand that belied its
own softness; “I like thy tunic of white lawn and thy pretty shoon so
latched with gold. Hast a fond mother, Willie--whose name I will guess
of thee for Rosamond? And for thy father, Willie--do you see him
often?”

“He hath a crown like thine, but finer,” said the child; “and when he
comes he puts it on my head.” Something in the staring face above him
awoke his sudden fear. He began to struggle.

“Let me go!” he cried--“I want to go back to my minny.”

“Thy minny?” said the Queen. “One moment, child. Is that thy secret
way behind the tree there?”

“I will not tell thee,” cried the boy. “I want my minny! Let me go!”

With one swift movement she tore the rabbit from his arms, and holding
it aloft with her left hand, with her right whipped a jewelled bodkin
from its sheath at her waist, and stabbed the little white body,
stabbed it, stabbed it. Then she flung the convulsed encrimsoned thing
to the ground, and, resheathing the weapon, held the child with a
stare of fury.

The swiftness, the savagery, the dreadful novelty of the act had had
their purposed effect on him. His eyes widened, his throat swelled;
but the scream to which he was on the instant impelled never came. His
little soul was paralysed; he was utter slave to horror. If she had
told him at that moment to lie down and go to sleep, he would have
tried to obey her will, though the unuttered sobs were half-bursting
his bosom.

“Now,” she said, “now!” panting a little. “Seest, thou harlot’s whelp?
Cross me again, and so shalt thou be served. Wait here--move one step
hence an thou darest--until I come again.”

She cast one final look of menace at him, then, stepping to the
beech-tree, parted the green and disappeared.

It was a cunning blind, as she had expected. The great trunk was so
packed amongst the thickets of the hillside that none would have
guessed its concealment of a scarce-discernible track which threaded
the matted growths above and behind it. Mounting by this, the malign
creature came suddenly upon a broken opening in the rock, so mossy and
so choked with foliage that its presence would have been quite
unsuspected from the glade below. She stopped; she uttered a little
gloating exclamation; for there, looped over a projection of the
stone, was the end of a strong green thread hanging out of the
darkness. The clue, of which she had heard whisper with but small
faith, was actually in her hand. Providence had doomed the foolish
mother to permit her child to sport with the very means designed
against her own destruction.

The cavity led into a ramification of passages, roughly trenched and
hewn out of the calcareous slate of the hill. Occasionally roofed,
mostly open, always tangled in foliage, and so cunningly devised to
mislead that it had been near humanly impossible to resolve its
intricacies without such guide to follow, the labyrinth led the Queen
by a complicated course to a sense of approaching light and release.
And then all in a moment the thread had come to an end against a stake
to which it was fastened; and there was a pleasant garden sunk in a
hollow of the hill, and a fair young woman, with an awaiting, somewhat
troubled expression on her face, standing hard by. She had evidently
spun the clue, and returned the first by it from the glade, to make
sport for her little man.

The intruder took all in at a glance--the expectant figure, the quiet,
inaccessible pleasaunce, the roof of a gilt pavilion rising, a long
stone’s-throw away, above the branches of a flowering orchard;
dominating all, and hiding this lovely secret in its lap, the wooded
hill crowned by its protecting keep.

The young woman, with one startled glance, turned to fly; but in the
very act, staggered by a recollection, turned, and came towards the
Queen, a hand pressed to her bosom. She was a frail thing, in the
ethereal as well as the worldly sense--fragile, it seemed, as china,
and as delicately tinted. All pink and cream, with pale golden hair,
her darker eyebrows were the only definite note of colour in a thin
face. Even her long robe of pale green suggested the anæmia of
tulip-leaves forced into premature growth.

“A weak craft to have borne so huge a sin,” said Eleanor, as the girl
approached. She eyed her with malignant scorn, her under lip
projecting. “So, wanton,” she said, “dost know the wife thou hast
wronged?”

The other gave a little mortal start and cry: “The Queen!” and could
utter no more.

A small, hateful laugh answered her.

“The wife, fool! the she-wolf against whom you thought to guard your
fold with straws. Why, look at you--I could peel you in my hands--a
bloodless stalk, without heat or beauty!”

“Spare me!”

“Aye, as the wolf spares the lamb, the hawk the wren. Let me look on
you. So this is a King’s fancy. I could have wrought him better from a
kitchen-scrub. Quick! I am in; I have no time to lose, and thine has
come. Poison or steel--make thy choice.”

“O, madam, in pity! My heart--I have been weak and ill--I shall not
vex thee long!”

“God’s blood! And baulk my vengeance? Come--poison----”

“O! What poison?”

“Why, that thou art betrayed--supplanted. Another leman lies in thy
bed--wife to one Blewit, a willing cuckold. Drink it, thy desertion,
to the dregs.”

“Sin must not beshrew sin. It is bitter to the death; but I drink it.”

“O, thou toad! Thou wilt not die, for all thy stricken heart? Will
this kill thee then?”

She whipped out the red stiletto. Rosamond uttered a faint shriek.

“Blood!”

The Queen brandished it before her eyes.

“I met thy whelp in the glade. It was he who betrayed the way to me.”

The girl gasped and tottered forward.

“I let him to his death. Monster, thou hast killed my Willie--my boy,
my one darling!”

She made an effort to leap forward--swayed--and fell her full length
upon the grass.

The Queen, softly replacing her blade, stood staring down. No sound or
movement followed on the fall. Stooping, she gazed long and silently
into the thin face, then, without a word, turned and retreated as she
had come.

The boy was standing, white and tearless, by his dead rabbit as she
parted the leaves and slunk forth.

“Go to thy mother, child,” she whispered, hoarse and small. “She is
ill.”




 THE GALILEAN

A solitary goatherd sat crouched on a slope above the Sea of
Galilee. It was approaching morning, and he had lit a little fire on
the rocks in order to roast his breakfast of fish. It was still dark,
though the embroidered velvet canopy overhead was beginning to reveal
a grape-like bloom along its eastern verge. Seven miles across, on the
opposite shore, the lamps of Tiberias, minute and liquid, dripped
threads of gold into the motionless lake; to the north the snows of
Mount Hermon lay like a pillow to the quiet hills; everywhere was the
swoon and stillness which characterise that last deep hour of slumber
when sleep itself sleeps.

The smoke of the goatherd’s fire rose in a thin, unbroken shaft; the
hiss and explosion of its thorns were uttered in a subdued voice; he
himself sat like a figure carved in old ivory. His arms and legs were
bare; his only garment was a tunic of brown sackcloth; he was the
gauntest man of his race in all Galilee. He suggested some grotesque
vulturine fledgling rather than a human being, in his leathery skin,
denuded scalp, prominent eyes, and great horny beak of a nose.
Whatever juice there was in him must have been as brown and acrid as a
walnut’s.

He had laid his sticks upon a little ledge or plateau where the green
of the banks, rising some fifty feet or so from the margin of the
lake, first strayed to lose itself among the waste and tumble of the
sandstone heights above. Scattered among the bents and yellow boulders
from which he had descended lay his silent flock. He was the only soul
awake, it seemed, in all that heaped-up solitude.

Suddenly he raised his head. The sound of a footstep, distant at
first, but regularly approaching, penetrated to his ears. It fell low
and loud, unmistakably human, until it resolved itself into the tramp
of a worried man coming over the hills from the south. The goatherd
was not interested or concerned. He sat apathetic, even when the
traveller, appearing round a bend of the rocks, walked grunting into
the firelight and revealed himself a Roman soldier.

The newcomer had a heavy, colourless face with thick black eyebrows.
The close chin-piece of his small cap-like helmet gave his lower jaw
a bulldog look. His body to the hips was cased in a laminated cuirass
of brass, epaulets of which covered his shoulders, and his short tunic
was garnished with hanging straps of leather plated with strips of the
same metal. Skin-tight drawers descended to the middle of his calves,
and were succeeded by puttees of pliant felt, which ended in military
caligæ with spiked soles. A short, double-edged sword hung in a
sheath at his right side, and in his hand he carried a javelin of
about his own height, the shaft of which had served him for a staff.
Weary and benighted as he appeared to be, his speech and bearing
expressed the arrogance of the dominant race.

“Ho!” he said, “ho!” and stretched himself relieved. “Food and fire,
and a respite at least from his cursed chase. What lights are yon
across the lake, goatherd?”

“Tiberias.”

It might have been an automaton speaking. The soldier swore by all his
gods.

“Eighty miles from Jerusalem--a land of rogues and fools! Now directed
this way, now that, mountains where I was told valleys, and torrents
for fords, and to find at last that I have taken the wrong bank!
Harkee, thou wooden Satyrus: my horse fell foundered among the hills,
and I saw thy fire and made for it on foot. Well, I carry despatches
for thy Tetrach, and thou tellest me that is Tiberias yonder. Should
I not do well to beat thee for it?”

The large eyes of the goatherd conned the speaker immovably.

“Tiberias,” he repeated. And then he added: “With dawn will come the
fishermen.”

The soldier cursed: “What, calf!” and checked himself. “Thou meanest,”
he said, “a boat to carry me across?” He heaved out a sigh. “Well,
goatherd, so be it; and while I wait I starve. Dost thou not hunger
too?”

“Aye,” said the goatherd, “always and for ever.”

The fish were spluttering on the embers. The soldier speared one with
his javelin, and, blowing on it, began to eat unceremoniously.

“I would not concede so much to _my_ Fates,” he said. “I would rob
sooner. Besides, here is proof plenty that you lie, old goatherd.”

The goatherd bent forward, and prodded the speaker once with a finger
like a crooked stick.

“How old wouldst call me?” he said.

“A hundred.”

“I am seven and twenty, Roman.”

The soldier laughed and stared.

“Bearest thy years ill. Since when beganst to age?”

“Since I began to starve.”

“And when was that?”

“When one said to me: ‘Feed on the illusions of the flesh until I come
again.’”

“One--one? What one?”

“A strange white man. They called him Jesus of Nazareth about here.”

The soldier, his cheek bulged with fish, stopped masticating a moment
to stare, then burst into a hoarse laugh.

“Ho ho! my friend! Art in a sorry case indeed! Thou shalt starve and
starve, by Cæsar. Tell me the story, goatherd.”

The gaunt creature mused a little.

“Why, there is none, Roman, but just this. I had heard of him and
scoffed--I, a practical man--and one day (it was many seasons back) he
came across the water to these hills, and a great multitude followed
and gathered to him from all sides. And they brought with them a
number that were maimed and sick, and the man touched them and they
appeared healed, rising and blessing his name, so that I, though
counting it an illusion of the spirit, could not but marvel in his
magic and the people’s blindness. Now the crowd abode here into the
third day, and they felt neither thirst nor hunger; but I, that durst
not leave my flock, waiting for them to go, was like a ravenous wolf.
And on the third day this Jesus called for food to give to his
followers, and some that were his went down to the boat, and I with
them. And, lo! there were but a few loaves and fishes--nothing at all
for such a multitude. But I helped to carry these up, and on the way
the largest fish of all I hid beneath my tunic, for I thought: ‘Great
he may be, but nothing is lost that I take precautions against his
failure to assuage my hunger.’ Then did he bid us all to sit upon the
ground, and he blessed and brake the fish and bread; and so it
happened--account it to what you will--for every soul there was a meal
and to spare. But when it came to my turn he would give me none; only,
gazing on me, he bade me, since faith I had not, to feed on the
illusions of the flesh until he came again. And I laughed to myself,
thinking of the fish; but, Roman, that fish when I came to devour it
was like a shadow in the water, having form but no substance, and so
it is with all food to me since. Though I behold it, handle it, I put
a shadow to my lips. Yet every day do I prepare my meal, hoping the
curse removed, and knowing always it shall not be until he come
again.”

The soldier broke into a roar of laughter.

“Until he come again!” he cried, “until he come again! O, a jockeyed
Jew, a poor deluded Jew!”

He was so gloriously tickled that he had to gasp and choke himself
into sobriety.

“Harkee, goatherd,” he said presently; “there was a day, not long
past, in Jerusalem--a lamentable day for thee. It thundered--gods, how
it thundered, rattling the Place of Skulls! I ought to remember,
seeing I was on duty there. Nazareth was it, now? Why, to be sure--I
know my letters, and it was writ plain enough and high enough. Jesus
of Nazareth, who saved others, but could not save himself--that was
it--one of three rogues condemned. Well, he laid an embargo on thee,
did he? You see this spear----”

He paused, in the very act of lifting his javelin, and sat staring
stupidly at it. Its point was tipped with crimson.

“The rising sun!” muttered the goatherd, and, getting suddenly to his
feet, stood gazing seawards. The soldier came and stood beside him.

The whole wide valley, while they spoke, had opened to the morning
like a rose, the clustered hills its petals, its calyx the deep lake,
the lights upon it dewdrops shining at its heart. And there upon the
dim waters, swinging close inshore, was a fisherman’s boat, its crew
gathering in an empty net.

Now the two on the hill stood too remote to distinguish sounds or
faces, while the conformation of the rocks hid the shore from their
view. But of a sudden, as they looked, the forms in the boat started
erect, and, all standing in a huddled group, appeared to gaze
landwards. And instantly, as if they had received therefrom some
direction, they seized and cast their net the other side of the boat
and drew on it, and the watchers saw by their straining muscles that
the net was full. Perceiving which, one of the fishermen, a burly
fellow, quitted his hold of the cords, and, leaping into the water,
floundered for the shore and disappeared.

“What now?” said the soldier. “Do they spy and seek us?” He muttered
vacantly, and glanced again at his spear-head, and shook the haft
impatiently. But the sunrise would not be detached from it.

Now the goatherd ran to a cleft which commanded the shore below, and,
glaring a moment, returned swiftly, his face alight.

“Rabboni,” he said excitedly, “it is the man of Nazareth himself come
back, and he ascendeth the hill towards us, and the spell will be
removed from me so that I shall taste fish once more.”

But the words were hardly out of his mouth when the soldier seized his
arm, and, dragging him to the shelter of a great boulder at a
distance, forced him to crouch with him behind it, so that they might
see without being seen. And so hidden, they were aware of a shape that
came into the firelight, and it was white like a spirit of the hills
and waters, and it stretched its hands above the embers, so that they
leaped again.

And the goatherd heard the soldier mutter in his ear:

“A practical man--you say you are a practical man! Now, who is it?”

“Jesus of Nazareth,” he answered.

But the soldier looked at his javelin and it ran with sunrise.

“That cannot be,” he said, “for seven days ago I opened his side with
this spear as he hung upon the cross, and there is the blood to
testify to it.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the goatherd; “my palate is
sufficient evidence for me. Look where they come and lay their fish
upon my embers. The very savour of their cooking tells me I can taste
again. It is Jesus, sure enough!”




 THE BORGIA DEATH

“This is the house, father,” muttered the Benedictine.

His companion, like himself, wore the black habit of the Order, and
his cowl so shrouded his face that little of that was visible but a
short white beard fringing a mouth and jaw of singular grimness.

The two stood before the door of a common dwelling situated in a block
of buildings near the Ponte Sisto, and almost under the shadow of the
Castle of the Capoferri. It was a June evening of the year 1504, and
already the seven hills of Rome were like seven burning kilns. The
heat radiated from them, even at midnight, would have sufficed a
reasonable land for its summer.

The door was opened to the low knock of the friar by a scared-looking
young girl. She wore a simple dress of green frieze, the bodice of
which, unlaced to the heat, had slipped about her shoulders. The light
of the lamp she carried rounded upon her full lower lip, and gave a
dusky mystery to her wide animal eyes. The older man, regarding the
child a moment, raised his hand and fondled her chin and neck,
deliberately, and like a privileged connoisseur.

“Balatrone’s daughter?” he asked.

The girl answered “Yes” with a motion of her lips. Taking him for the
prior of some great community, she never even thought of resenting his
caress.

“It may count to thy father for a score of indulgences,” said the
monk. “We shall see. Now take us to him.”

She went before, and they followed her into a little stifling chamber
looking on a small courtyard where a scrap of fountain tinkled. Tiny
as its voice was, it conveyed a thought of refreshment to the sick man
who lay on a couch against the wall beside.

The face of this man already bore the shadow of coming dissolution. He
had been fat once, and so recently that his skin had had no time to
adapt itself to the waste within, but hung in folds like wrinkled
tripe. His eyes had a haunted, pathetic look in them, for he had lived
his later time with a damning secret for company, and he dreaded
unspeakably the mortal moment which should find him still unrelieved
of its burden. Wherefore he had provisionally, and with a reservation
in favour of his own possible recovery, confided to his confessor
enough of the business to awaken that cleric’s lively interest, and to
send him off in search of one more fitted, by virtue of his canonical
rank and authority, to accept contrition and deliver judgment on a
momentous matter. The two lost no time in preliminaries.

“This is one, Balatrone,” said the friar, “endowed with the highest
gift for absolution. I am about to make known to him the substance of
the report you have committed to me.”

“_Bene, bene_,” said the sick man, nodding exhaustedly. “I ask the
good father to purge my soul.”

The “good father” mentioned had seated himself in an obscure corner,
his face bowed and concealed by his hood. The other monk took a
parchment from his bosom, and referred to it.

“These are the depositions,” he said softly, “of one Andrea Sfondrati,
late page to his Holiness Alexander VI. The man died recently under
suspicion of poison, and the document came into the hands of Balatrone
here.”

“I stole it from his chamber,” declared the patient, in a tremulous
but resolved voice, “after I had poisoned him. None but I and he knew
of its existence. It is all true. No alternative was left me.”

“Continue,” said the seated monk passionlessly. “Continue, brother. So
far this implies nothing beyond your province.”

The Benedictine, unperturbed, unfolded the parchment.

“The statement, Father,” he said, “covers the night of his late
Holiness’s mortal sickness, which in a few hours left the throne of
St. Peter vacant.” He glanced significantly towards the other, who
silently motioned him to proceed. “There were present with his
Holiness on that occasion,” he went on, “his son the Don Cesare Borgia
and his Eminence the Cardinal Adriano of Corneto. The narrator takes
up the tale at the moment when a certain dish was placed before his
Eminence during the feast served privately in his honour.”

He shifted, so as to get the light upon the document, and began to
read in a clear, low voice:

“‘We all knew well enough,’ says Sfondrati, ‘what was going to happen.
When I took the dish from Torelli at the door, I thought to myself,
“Here ensues a vacancy in the Sacred College.” There had been so much
purring and fondling, such solicitude about the Cardinal’s health,
such brotherly frankness, such plans for the morrow. That was the
Borgia way, the one they always followed by choice. Though they might
cut throats under provocation, to take a man by the hand, to praise
and flatter and applaud him, to caress his prosperous fatness, as it
were, while studying in his face the working of the poison they had
already insinuated into his belly--that was the sport of sports to
them. And this Cardinal had loggias and vineyards and much oil and
corn. He was a wealthy prince, a succulent mouthful, and it was his
turn to be swallowed. “How,” I thought, “can any one, not a credulous
ass, be brought to commit himself to these gloved tigers? Has not
Corneto heard, like the rest of us, of the Orsini, of Vitellozzo, of
Oliverotto, of brother Gandia and brother-in-law Biseglia, of Peroto,
the Holy Father’s little favourite, whose wisand was split by Cesare
as he clung screaming to the arms of his old patron? Has he not heard
of these and a hundred others; of the mysterious illnesses, of the
stabs in the dark, of the bodies tipped into the Tiber, of that
charcoal-burner, witness to Gandia’s murder, who excused himself for
not having reported the matter to the Governor on the ground that such
affairs had grown too common o’ nights to excite interest? Has he not
heard, in short, of these Spaniards their little ways, that he can
thus voluntarily venture himself within reach of their covetous grip?
Or does he throw up the game in despair, and yield his money-bags
incontinent to the Vatican exchequer?”

“‘I judged his Eminence wrongly, as the sequel will show; but the
belief was in me at the moment, and pretty contemptuously, that the
man was a fool.

“‘Well, I took the dish, I say, from Torelli, and Nicandro took it
from me. We were supping in the garden-house, in Apollo’s bower, for
the month was August; and Nicandro was our Ganymede and little Lisetta
our Hebe. They made a pretty couple, and may have shared something
less than a shirt between them. Nicandro placed the dish before his
Eminence. It was confetti of creamed fruit, and a perfume like
ambrosia rose from it. I had never seen the handsome, devilish face of
Don Cesare look more gentle and ingratiatory than it did at that
moment. Its expression put to rebuke the Holy Father’s, which was as
sick and flabby as a skinned calf’s. The old devil had not the nerve
of his whelp--that is the truth. The dish was placed before his
Eminence, I say, and its fellow before each of the other two.’”

“He was the very maestro of confetti, that cook,” broke out the sick
man feebly from his couch. “His designs in gilt and coloured sugar
were sheer masterpieces!”

The monk glanced dumbly at him a moment, then continued his reading:

“‘Lisette hung over the Cardinal, with the flagon of wine in her hand.
Her bosom pressed his neck; she laid her cheek upon his bald head,
and, so standing, filled his glass. But Corneto put neither his hand
to the dish nor his lips to the beaker. Instead he rose, and so
suddenly, that he bruised the child’s lips.

“‘“Blood!” said Cæsar softly, and with a smile. “That is a harsh
retort on love, Prince.”

“‘Then, in one instant, I recognised that I had misjudged his
Eminence, that he knew or guessed, and that a crisis was upon us. His
eyes were like black glass in stone; he looked into the black, excited
eyes of his host. The two white, black-eyed faces, the one awful, the
other wet and piteous, opposed each other.

“‘“Is it your will, Borgia, that I eat of this dish?” he said.

“‘The Pope strove to reply, and no word could he articulate. But his
son answered for him: “What distemper is this, Corneto? Come, rally
thee, man, nor leave the feast uncrowned. One effort more; see, we
will give thee the lead!”

“‘He ate himself, and made his father eat. When the two were finished,
the Cardinal addressed the Pope. “God forgive thee, Borgia,” he said,
“and prosper thy design for all its worth.” And he, in his turn, ate
of his sweet, and flung the dish from him. “_Consummatum est_,” he
said. “I have my peace to make with Heaven. I crave your Holiness’s
permission to withdraw.”

“‘Now Don Cesare rose laughing, and rallying their guest for his weak
stomach, saw him for a distance through the gardens and then himself
returned. And there were we, the frightened witnesses, whispering half
tearful now the thing was done, yet dreading that he should see and
resent our tremors.

“‘But the Pope sat staring with a ghastly face; and Don Cesare sat
down beside him, and the two fell murmuring together. And suddenly, in
one moment, his Holiness uttered a mortal cry: “Corneto, I am
poisoned! He hath retorted on us with our own!”

“‘It was true. The Cardinal, well foreseeing his fate, had prevailed,
by bribes and prayers and promises, over the conscience of his
Holiness’s cook, and had induced the man to serve to his masters the
poison intended for himself. The Borgia took the Borgia’s own
prescription, and died that night in torture. Cæsar hung between hell
and earth awhile, and presently escaped. This is all true as I record
it.’”

The monk ceased reading, and looked towards the couch. For a little no
sound broke the stillness but the faint gasping of the patient and the
noisome droning of a fly about the room.

“Balatrone?” whispered the Benedictine.

“I was that cook!” cried the dying man in a fearful voice. “Sfondrati
read my secret, and recorded it, and bled me with it till he ruined
me. I had to poison him to still his tongue and secure the record.”

The seated monk arose, and came with a fierce stride to the bed.

“Thou hast killed a Pope,” he said. “Yield up the secret of that
poison--the Borgia death.”

“Absolve me first.”

“None but a Pope can do that.”

“Then I must take it with me to the grave.”

“Hark ye, fellow--I am Julius; I am the Pope.”

“It is his Holiness indeed, Balatrone,” cried the friar.

The man screamed and writhed.

“It is the foam of swine, poisoned with arsenic and then whipped to
frenzy. Absolve me, Holy Father, absolve me!”

“Ha!” exclaimed the Pontiff, in the voice of a long-covetous man
satisfied.

He heard a choke behind him, and turned to find the girl close by. His
face softened. “What, little Hebe,” he said. “Wouldst like to come and
serve the wine to Papa Julius? But, wait.”

He turned, with hand uplifted, to give the blessing; but Balatrone was
dead.




 “DEAD MAN’S PLACK”

Elfrida, wife of Athelwold, the King’s favourite, and daughter and
heiress to Olgar Earl of Devonshire, was a beauty of the true Helena
complexion. To see her, for most men, was to covet; to possess her,
for the one, was to wear a crown of exquisite thorns. The orchard
needs most watching when the fruit is ripe, and Elfrida hung at
perpetual ripeness, maddening to parched lips without. The keeper of
this garden of sweet things might hardly enjoy it for his fear of
robbers. And the worst of it was that, to maintain so ravishing a
possession in its perfection, no warning as to its own irresistible
witchery must be so much as hinted to it, lest the blue innocence of
two of the most lovely wondering eyes in the world should be impaired
thereby, and self-consciousness usurp in them the place of
_naïveté_. Gazing into those artless depths, if one had the
privilege, one presently recognised in their little floating motes and
shadows the souls of the many who had drowned themselves therein. Was
Elfrida conscious of the tragic secrets hidden away under those azure
waters? Her husband at least thought her the most loving, the most
unsophisticated, the most trustworthy of wives; and if the wish was
very particularly the father to the thought, the thought was none the
less for that sincere.

One noon the young wife sat, yawning and a little _ennuyé_, in her
bower of the Thanage house by Harewood Forest in Hampshire. Athelwold
was with the Court at Winchester, and time hung heavy on her hands.
She leaned back in her seat, listlessly conning the crumpled figure of
Daukin, the Earl’s clerk or bookesman, as he squatted on his stool
monotonously mouthing the Canons of Eusebius from an illuminated
manuscript--the light literature of England when Dunstan was Primate.
Like many ethereal women, Elfrida found a fascination in the deformed
and grotesque. She petted little harsh Daukin; and he, while he took
his full sardonic change of the licence allowed him, for ever in
spirit kissed the beautiful feet that trampled on his soul. So, he
thought, must feel the writhing, adoring, hopeless serpent under
Mary’s feet in the chapel.

She broke in upon his reading, suddenly and irrelevantly.

“Will our lord return this night, think you, Master Bookesman?”

The dwarf, closing the manuscript, accepted grimly the moral of his
own eloquence.

“Will a star shoot out of the east?” he said. “I’ll tell thee when the
night hath come and gone.”

“Nay, say that you think he will--say it, say it!”

“The King loves the Earl, lady, and thou desirest him. Which passion
shall pull the stronger?”

“Do not _I_ love him, thou toad?”

“Well, then, pull, and in double harness; so, belike, the King, that
holds to him, shall be drawn too.”

“I do not desire the King.”

“God give him strength to bear it!”

She laughed musically: “Insolent!” and so fell into thought.

“Thou knowest, Daukin,” she said presently, “I have never been to
Court--nor desired it indeed. Of what complexion is the King?”

“Hot.”

“Is he not very young?”

“He hath learned to lisp and help himself to what he wants. The young
husbands in his suite observe discretion.”

“Poor husbands! O, Daukin, O, waly me, how the day loiters! If my love
could draw so strong, I’d e’en take the worser for the better’s sake.”

“Which first?”

“Peace, fool!”

“Well, the comfort is the King’s heard of thee, and heard enough to
satisfy him, it seems. He’ll not trouble thee with a visit.”

“He has not heard.”

“What! Did he not use his influence with the Earl thy father to
promote this match?”

“Aye, on grounds of policy and fortune. Thank Heaven I am not
beautiful!”

“It listens and will record.”

She sighed: “Alack, a doleful day! O, I wish my lord would come!”

A bugle sounding without answered on her word. There was a thud of
racing hoofs, a sudden turmoil in the court, a mingling of many
voices, servile or peremptory. Elfrida rose ecstatic, clasping her
hands.

“’Tis he himself!” she cried, and advancing, as the curtain parted,
almost ran into the arms of her husband Athelwold.

He was tall, sinewy, pale-haired and lashed. His tunic of fine
cramasie was torn, his gold garters trailed; he looked like a man in
the last extreme of haste and agitation. He took the wondering beauty
in his arms, and gazed into her face, searchingly, passionately.

“Wife,” he said, “I have something of wild urgency for thy ear. I must
speak it ere my blood cools. Tell me that thy heart is mine?”

“Athelwold! What questions!”

“Tell it, tell it!”

“Am I not thy wife?”

“Priests’ business. I speak of love.”

“Why, did I not swear to love thee?”

“Elfrida, thy love’s my heaven; without it--hell. Hear my confession.
There’s no moment to lose.”

“Thou strange husband!”

“When I first saw thee in thy father’s house I saw my destiny. Such
immortal beauty, child--God, I was just man! Forgive the mad cunning
jealousy that would deceive thee even in thyself. ‘I must possess,’ I
thought, ‘this immortal thing or die.’ I bid for thy rank, thy
fortune, in pretence, the King upholding my suit. His interest turned
the scale, and we were wed. Elfrida, wife, dear love--I wronged the
King in all; I was no more at first than his deputy for thy hand.”

A little spot of white had come to her cheek; but she smiled on him,
not stirring.

“How, Athelwold?”

“I must confess it,” he said. “Edgar had heard speak of this lovely
Devon rose; and, toying, only half-inclined, with a thought of
matrimony, sent me, on some feigned mission, to discover if the lady’s
beauty really matched her nobility--in which case----”

“Yes, Athelwold?”

He held her convulsively. “O, forgive me, Elfrida, that I made thee
Queen of love, not England! Thy wealth, thy name, I told him, were the
charms that gilded servile eyes--enough, perhaps, for such as I, but
for him, lacking the first and best of recommendations. And he
believed me, and yielded thee to me. And now, and now”--he held her
from him, his chest heaving, his voice breaking--“my sin hath found me
out--some one hath betrayed me--and he is coming in person to put my
report to the proof. Feigning to prepare for his visit, I fled but in
time to forestall him by a few hours. Ah, love! all is lost unless
thou lovest me.”

She answered quite softly: “What am I to do, Athelwold?”

“Do, be, anything but Elfrida. Dress slovenly, speak rudely, soil and
discredit thine own perfection.”

“Substitute another for thy lady.”

They both started, and fell apart. The dwarf, forgotten by the one,
unnoticed by the other, had risen from his stool. The Thane’s hand
whipped furiously to his sword-hilt.

“Nay,” said the girl, interposing--“Daukin is my dog; Daukin loves me;
Daukin shall speak.”

“Let the Thane,” said the dwarf, cool and caustic, “seek his couch on
pretence of fever, and let Alse, the cookmaid, receive the King. We be
all devoted servants of our house. A little persuasion, a little
guile, and the thing is carried.”

“I will go instruct the wench,” said Elfrida hurriedly.

She seemed charmed with the idea. She drove her lord to his hiding,
with a peremptory laughing injunction that he was not to issue
therefrom until summoned by herself; she refused to linger a moment by
his side in her excitement. Her eyes had never looked so
heavenly-bright and blue.

At eve came the King, with a little brilliant retinue.

But Alse did not receive him. Instead there advanced and knelt at his
feet one of the most radiant young beauties his eyes had ever
encountered. The violet Saxon hood fell back from her face as she
raised it, revealing a sun of little curls bound by a golden fillet.
The slender lifted hands, the bright parted lips, most of all the
eyes, blue as lazulite and wide with innocence, seemed all as if posed
for a picture of Love’s ecstasy. The King, young, and lustful, and
handsome, with his strong, clean-cut face, stood the speechless one.

“Welcome, lord King,” she said in a half-articulate voice, like a
child murmuring a lesson.

He raised and kissed her. “Welcome, wife of Athelwold!” he said, and
let out a sigh like a man restored from drowning.

But apart stood the dwarf, amazed and sorrowful.

“She hath deceived us,” he thought. “What is to be the end?”

That night was spent in feasting; and in the morning came Elfrida to
her husband’s couch. Worn with fatigue and anxiety--since she had
given orders that none was to approach him--he had fallen asleep at
last.

“Up, up, my Thane!” she cried. “The King is bent on hunting, and
awaits thee in the court. Say nothing. All goes well.”

She would not linger, lest, as she whispered, she should risk
discovery; but, running from him, sought her bower. There listening, a
hand upon her bosom, she heard the chase ride forth; and presently the
dwarf stole in to her.

“Thou hast done it,” he said. “The King will kill him.”

She began: “Dog! Thou darest----” but, checking herself, put her hands
a moment to her face, then went up and down, up and down, like one
distracted.

“Well, he wronged the King,” said Daukin.

She stopped before him, and his soul struggled against the fascination
of the blue waters.

“What was that to his wrong of me?” she said passionately; and, as he
gazed, he saw the waters brim. “O, Daukin!” she wept; “cannot _you_
understand me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And love me still?”

“I can love the truth,” he said, with a heart-broken sigh. “I have
found it at last in the depths I have studied so long.”

When the King returned, the sternness of his white face belied his
uttered commiseration. The Thane, he told his lady, had stumbled on
his own boar-spear, and met with a mortal hurt.

“Long live the Queen!” said Daukin.

Edgar started, and his hand went to his dagger. Elfrida stumbled
forward.

“No,” she said, in a weak voice, “it is my dog, lord King. I will not
have him killed because he barks.”




 THE EXECUTIONER OF NANTES

When Carrier, commissioned by Heraut Seychelles, acting on behalf of
the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, to _purge_ Nantes, arrived in
that town, he found all ready to his hand a Revolutionary Committee
such as his heart, or whatever deformity represented that organ, could
most desire. There were Goullin, Grandmaison, Chaux, Jolly,
Perrochaux, and a score others, all “intrepid” Mountain men, and all
scoundrels of the most atrocious antecedents. His task was
consequently a simple one. He had merely to produce his credentials
and authorise his instruments, and the depopulating process started,
as it were, automatically. One need not recapitulate, for the
thousandth time, a selection from the infernal wickednesses
perpetrated by these fiends. Such were being enacted, in more or less
degree, in a hundred other districts of the tortured land, and these
were noteworthy in nothing but their multitude. What _was_ noteworthy,
however, was the fact that Nantes produced the solitary instance--so
far as one may gather throughout the entire Revolution--of a
butchering devil succumbing to a sense of his own enormities. But,
even so, there was to be observed a particular judgment in the case.

Carrier’s theories of political economy were simplicity itself. The
population of France, he declared, was out of all proportion with the
amount of food the land could produce; wherefore he proposed, for his
individual part, to pare down the population until it corresponded
with the yield. But this decimating process was fatiguing, and called
for some compensation. It was only decent that the killers should be
allowed to extract what profit and enjoyment they could from their
task. And, in fact, they enjoyed a glut, which was the reason why a
good many personable women, not of the first order of attractiveness,
were allowed to escape--to the scaffold, or to the drownings.

Amongst these came one day to the Place du Buffay, where the
guillotine was erected, a mother and her five daughters and their
little maid, all, according to a chronicler, _jeunes et belles,
condamnées sans jugement_. There was a good batch that noon, and the
seven were kept waiting for a long half-hour at the foot of the
scaffold before their turn came. The populace was not yet so hardened
but that it could witness this tragedy with emotion. “Ah, the poor
infants! But what is their crime?” “Hush! they were taken with arms in
their hands!” “My God! but it is outrageous! Are knitting-needles
arms?” “I know not, I. It is Carrier who decides.”

The six encouraged one another amidst tears and embraces. Most of all
they sought to fortify the little _bonne_, who, a mere large-eyed
child, stood quite stunned with the turn affairs had taken. When at
length the period came to their agony, they mounted the steps in
succession, faltering to one another sweet hymns of consolation, their
voices fading away one by one like the lights in Tenebrae. The
spectators were dissolved in tears; in the midst of a weeping silence
the rush and thud of the axe was the only sound audible. Stolidly,
monotonously, Jules Garreau, the executioner, a powerful,
black-bearded man, sliced off the heads as they came through the
“little window.” He might have been cutting chaff for any concern he
showed.

The little maid came last. She understood things least of all at that
moment, and only cried like a child when the assistants jerked her
roughly down on the board and slid her under the yoke. And then, in
the very instant that Garreau mechanically touched off the knife, the
man was seen to stagger and fall back, his hands flung to his face.

He died the next day in a raving delirium. “It is no wonder,”
whispered the less inhumane of those who had witnessed the execution.
“The pity of it would have killed a wolf’s heart.”

That was the truth, but not the whole of the truth. The full
explanation was not given until years afterwards, when the story was
communicated to a priest to whom one of Garreau’s assistants came to
unburden himself. He knew all about the man and the reason for his
death. It had been actually due, he declared, to an instantaneous
realisation of the terrific part he was playing, and of the mortal
hazards he had invited in lending himself to it. In that moment he had
known his soul as surely lost as if he had heard God’s voice in his
ear, and the shock had killed him. But it will be well to give the
story in the narrator’s own words:

“I had known this Garreau since we were young men together. We were in
the same office, a wine merchant’s, in the Isle Feydeau. Garreau was a
very handsome fellow, but as headstrong as the devil. He had a great
tenacity of purpose, and when once he had set his heart on a thing, he
would pursue it, as a weasel follows a rabbit, until he could set his
teeth in its neck. We had no quarrel with the existing order, and our
lives were, for our position, prosperous and content. For my part, I
was always a slave to the stronger will of my comrade.

“We were at that time good children of the Church, which was indeed
our misfortune, for the change in us dated from the moment of
Garreau’s return from a week’s retreat in the monastery of St. Pierre
de la Roche. He had acquired therein something other than the
religious serenity he had gone to seek, had meditated a passion remote
from that of the Testament. It happened in this way.

“Attached to the monastery was the Convent of the Bon Secours, whose
sisters washed the linen of the ghostly fathers. To one of these
sisters, a beautiful neophyte, Jules found himself instantly
attracted. His interest ripened into desire, and his desire into a
devouring passion. From that moment all was decided. He never rested
until he had secured its object to himself.

“He would have married the lovely apostate, but the Church refused to
sanction their union. It was that refusal which first inspired his
recusancy, and in consequence mine. I admired and looked up to him in
all things. A child, a girl, was born to the thus ostracised pair, and
it was remarked that a little torn heart, emblematic of her birthright
of sin, was printed on the innocent’s neck under her hair. It was the
rending of the Sacred Heart which she was thus made to symbolise in
her birth.

“But Garreau loved her, and far more than her mother did. If he had
been great, aristocratic, he would have experienced no difficulty in
sheltering his mistress from slander and persecution; but he was
neither, and he could give her little of the protection that she
craved. So in the end she sought and found it in the arms of the Comte
de Chasles, son of a marquis, who carried her off to Paris. It was
then that Jules and I attached ourselves to the party of the advanced
thinkers.

“He followed the seducer, and for years I lost sight of him. In the
meanwhile all that I knew of his affairs was that the infant had been
claimed as their perquisite by the sisters of the Bon Secours, and
that they were training her, ignorant of her parentage, to service.
Then, in a clap, came the Revolution.

“All society was disintegrated in that shock. Institutions ceased to
exist and order resolved itself into chaos. The religious houses were
the first to suffer. The hour of the great retribution had struck, and
I sided with the extremists. And presently arrived Carrier.

“I was out of employment, as who was not? The beneficent Republic
provided idleness for us all; but, alas! idleness begot no bread. At
this juncture the Revolutionary Tribunal called for candidates for the
post of executioner. It was their purpose to strip the office of
prejudice, and exalt it to a State dignity. This headsman was to be
entitled for the future the People’s Avenger.

“There were many applicants, and among them came one whom I had
difficulty in recognising at first for my old friend and leader Jules
Garreau. It was thirteen years since we had met. Most of that time he
had spent in the prison of la Force in Paris, whither he had been
conveyed on a process for debt ingeniously devised against him by the
Comte de Chasles. When released at length by the Revolution, he went,
like that weasel before-mentioned, straight for the neck of his enemy.
It was at the Abbaye that he found him, and he took what revenge he
could for that long term of suffering out of the September massacres.
Afterwards he drank blood awhile in Paris, and then came on to his
native town to surfeit his hatred on the social order which had been
responsible for his ruin. He was by then rabid among the rabid. His
deadly sense of wrong had killed whatever spirit of humanity had once
existed within him. His only desire was to kill, and kill, and yet
kill. This post offered him such an opportunity for the satisfaction
of his lust as could be found nowhere else, and he applied for it. He
was elected unanimously and with enthusiasm by the National
Representatives. All lesser candidates, among whom I figured, waived
their claims in view of his, which were irresistible. But he made me
his assistant, and I resumed my natural position of subordinate to
him.

“Jules lacked from that moment no food to satiate his vengeance; and
yet it hungered perpetually. He was a dark, powerful man, wholly
inexorable, yet in seeming more stern than wrathful. He appeared the
Avatar of sans-culottism, a soulless, sightless idol, to whom human
flesh had to be sacrificed. Of his child, the pledge of that lost
passion, he never seemed to think. Indeed, in the utter annihilation
of the religious houses which had occurred it would have been
impossible to discover whether she lived or were dead. And perhaps
even, one might assume, he did not care. His soul was by now delivered
completely over to the one lust of destruction.

“On the day of the execution of the Marcé family we wrought
consciously in an unsympathetic atmosphere. It is so sometimes on that
platform of the guillotine, as on the stage, when the actor is aware,
he does not know why, of an antagonistic presence in the house. One
plays then with caution and deprecation, fearing to give offence. I
was very sensitive to a throbbing in the popular pulse; but, as for
Jules, he showed no more sign of feeling than was his wont. Indeed, I
observed even an increased callousness in the way in which, noting
that the heads were seven, he ticked off each one as it fell with a
day from the little nursery proverb uttered _sub voce_, as thus:

“‘Monday, fair of face; Tuesday, full of grace; Wednesday, full of
woe; Thursday, far to go; Friday, loving and giving; Saturday, work
for a living; Sunday----’

“With the word on his lips, and his hand in the very act of touching
off the bolt, he suddenly paled and staggered. I ran to catch him,
_and looked straight into the face of one that was damned_.

“It was the last head, and we conveyed Garreau to his lodging. He was
by then in a raving fever, from which he never recovered. But in one
of the few lucid intervals that came to him he recognised me, and,
catching at my hand, whispered in a voice, whose exquisite horror I
shall never forget, the secret of his awakening.

“In the very moment that his fingers released the knife, he had caught
sight of a little torn heart printed on the neck beneath him.”




 THE LORD TREASURER

“Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer--“my breeches!”

The attendant, stooping to the august legs, reverentially relieved
them of their small-clothes, and his lordship stood up in his shirt
with his back to the fire. Even so denuded, he could never have
conceived himself as anything less than a hero to his valet--no, not
when, with a comfortable rearward shrug of his shoulders, he lifted
the veil of his unspeakableness to the gratifying warmth.

“Let me see, Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer. “To-morrow is
Wednesday--the black velvet with the plain falling band, is it not?
Very well. Empty that pocket of its papers, Phineas.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Sir Richard Weston, Baron of Exchequer and Lord High Treasurer to his
Majesty King Charles I., was disrobing for the night in his official
residence off Chancellor’s or Chancery Lane. He was a man of
inflexible routine, who changed his raiment, parcelled out his duties,
and pigeon-holed his correspondence with an unswerving regularity from
which nothing could ever make him deviate but a bribe. He had a suit
of clothes for Monday, a suit for Wednesday, another for Friday, and
so on--a change on every third day; and in the doublet of each suit
was a little pocket below the waist, into which it was his custom to
slip all memoranda of affairs requiring his early attention. This
pocket it was the valet’s duty to explore upon every occasion of
exchange into fresh habiliments.

Now, _system_ has this drawback, that it entices those who practise it
into a confidence in their inability to err, which is in itself an
error. Pigeon-holes are useful things, if one is convinced that every
article in them is docketed under its obvious letter. But, alas! in
actual fact the short cut too often proves itself the longest way
round, and the pigeon has an amazing way of hiding in the unexpected
compartment. He may fail to answer to his own name or his firm’s, and
leave one in the last resort only his subject or his business by which
to trace him--if, indeed, one can identify either under a capital
letter. We have known an orderly man to tear the heart out of a nest
of pigeon-holes from “B” to “Z,” only at length to find what he sought
under “Anonymous.” Yet he remained no less convinced than the
Treasurer that he had eliminated confusion from his category of
affairs. System, in short, may provide against everything but the bad
memory which most trusts to it.

Sir Richard, pleasantly conscious of his calves and upwards, reared
himself on his toes and yawned and sank down again.

“Is aught there, varlet?” he demanded. “Bring me whatsoever it
containeth.”

The man laid down the discarded doublet.

“Naught, my lord,” he said, “but a single scrap of paper.”

“Give it me.”

The servant crossed the room, and presented the memorandum with an
obeisance. The master accepted it, glanced down, and stood suddenly
rigid.

“_Remember Cæsar!_”

That was all--just those two words, written bold in ink in an unknown
hand. “Remember Cæsar!”

Sir Richard was holding the paper in his right hand; dropping the
veil, he brought his left to the front and stood staring in a sort of
stupor. A consciousness as of chill, as of a sense of warmth and
security suddenly and shockingly withdrawn, tingled through his veins.
It was succeeded by a faint thrill of grievance or self-pity. He had
been so exceedingly comfortable and happy a moment ago.

“Remember Cæsar!”--just those two words, no more, but how voluminous
in terrific import! “Remember Cæsar!” Remember the retribution that
always waited on “vaulting ambition.” A vision of a vast Senate-Hall,
of a throng of passionate figures holding aloft blood-stained daggers,
of a silent, prostrate form in their midst, rose before him. “Remember
Cæsar!” Remember Cæsar’s fate: remember what came to befall the
greatest soldier, statesman, jurist of his time--possibly of all time.

A certain flattery in the analogy for an instant restored the colour
to Sir Richard’s cheek. Perhaps the comparison was not so extravagant
a one after all. The position of Lord Treasurer was so exalted, that,
looking down from it, all lesser offices and all lesser men appeared
dwarfed. It needed surely a stupendous intellect to preserve its
equilibrium at that altitude. And yet, such the height, such the fall.
The Treasurer’s momentary heroics came down with an anticipatory
thwack which left him gasping.

If he could only avoid Cæsar’s fate while admitting the soft analogy!
The illustrious Imperator had also, if he remembered rightly, received
_his_ warning, and had ignored it. To ape the foolhardinesses of the
great was surely not to justify one’s relation to them in the best
sense.

A shrill wind blew upon the casement. Its voice had but now awakened a
snug response in the Treasurer’s breast. All in a moment it spoke to
him of the near approach of the Ides of March, and he shivered and
dropped the paper to the floor.

“Phineas,” he said in an agitated voice, “Phineas! How came that into
my pocket?”

The valet, busy about his affairs, approached deferentially but
curiously, and, at a sign from his master, lifted and examined the
billet, and shook his head.

“You don’t know?”

“No, indeed, my lord.”

“How do you read it, man? How do you read it?”

Phineas scratched his poll, and grinned and was silent.

“You are just an intolerable ass,” cried his master. He danced in his
excitement. His dignity was all gone; he was simply a man in a shirt.
“Fetch master secretary!” he cried. “Fetch master comptroller! Rouse
the household, and warn the porter at the gate! Send every one in to
me, here and at once.”

The valet hesitated.

“Do you hear?” shouted Sir Richard. “Why do you wait?”

“It doesn’t come down to your knees, my lord,” said Phineas.

The Treasurer leaped to a press and tore out a robe. “Go!” he screamed
over his shoulder.

In a minute they all came hurrying in--comptroller, secretary, clerks,
grooms, and underlings--in dress or in undress, a motley crew, as the
occasion had found them.

“What is it, my lord?” asked the first, in an astonished voice. He was
a tall, pallid man, so inured to method and routine that a rat behind
the wainscot was enough to throw him into a flutter.

“Master Hugh,” cried the Treasurer--“Master Hugh! I found that in my
pocket when I came to strip--a thing that I had never put there, or
put unconsciously. What do you make of it, my friend? What does it
import?”

They all gathered round the comptroller to read the billet, and,
having examined it, fell apart with grave, inquiring faces.

The comptroller looked up, his lips trembling.

“My lord,” he said, “it can signify but one thing.”

“My assassination?”

“Without doubt, my lord.”

The Treasurer turned pale to the bare dome of his head. He had to the
last hoped to have his worst apprehensions refuted; but it was plain
that only one construction could be put upon the missive.

“How did it reach me?” he said dismally. “How did it get there?”

“Probably, my lord,” ventured the secretary, a sleek, apologetic man,
“it was slipped into your lordship’s hand by one whom your lordship
mistook for a chance importunate suitor, and your lordship accepted
and pouched and forgot it.”

“It may have represented a threat or a friendly warning,” said the
comptroller.

“Your lordship hath many and mighty enemies,” said the secretary, “as
who hath not among the great and influential?”

“Your power, your imperious will, your favour in high places, my
lord,” said the comptroller--“these be all incitements to the envious
and unscrupulous. Without question there is some conspiracy formed
against your life.”

“I could almost suspect you all of collusion in it,” cried the
Treasurer bitterly, “for the relish with which you dispose of me.”

The comptroller murmured distressfully, “O, my lord, my lord!”

Sir Richard broke out, moved beyond endurance:

“What the devil do you all, moaning and croaking? I am not food yet
for your commiseration. The plot may be already forward while you
babble. Look under the bed, Phineas.”

The valet dived, rose, scoured the room, examined into every possible
lurking-place.

“Shall I set a guard, my lord?” inquired the comptroller.

The Treasurer exploded:

“Set a guard when the thief is in! A household of braying jackasses!
Go, dolt, and remedy your oversight. Shut the gates and warn the
porter; beat up every hole and corner first. See that not a soul is
allowed entrance on any pretext whatever. And, hark ye, Master Hugh,
no eye to-night shall be shut on penalty of my high displeasure. An
unwinking vigil, an unwinking vigil, Master Hugh, on the part of all.
See to it. And if any one asks an audience, save of the first
consequence and character, I am indisposed, Master Hugh--I am
indisposed, do you hear?”

He was so, in very truth, as he drove them all out, and locked the
door upon himself, and sank into a seat before the fire. A sickness of
apprehension stirred in his bile and made his face like yellow wax.
This business had given him such a shock as he had never before
experienced. What did it mean--what could it mean? No doubt the
secretary’s theory was the right one: he was incessantly being
importuned by petitioners, and often, to get rid of them, he would
accept their memorials, and pocket and forget all about them. So must
it have been with this paper, thrust into his hand amidst a crowd. It
was merciful chance alone that had restored it to his notice before
too late. But, accepting all that, _why_ was his life threatened? His
heart was full of an emotional complaint and protest against destiny.
He was not an unjust man as things went--certainly not so signally as
to merit this fatal distinction.

He passed a terrible night, shrinking from every shadow, starting at
every sound. Morning when it came only added to his sick perplexity.
What course was he to pursue, fearful of the lurking terror, to
preserve his dignity and his life at once? He dressed in a sort of
mental palsy, crept breakfastless to his library, and sent for the
comptroller’s report. So far, it appeared, the night had passed
without event. No doubt the deed was destined for the open air.

As he stood, trying to deliberate his policy, a visitor, the Earl of
Tullibardine, was announced as craving an audience. His lordship was a
personal friend of his, and beyond suspicion. Reluctantly Sir Richard
gave the order for his admittance.

The nobleman came in breezily, and with much concern expressed over
the report of the Treasurer’s indisposition. “Which,” said he, “maketh
me loth to trouble your lordship on a personal matter, which, saving
the pressure of the occasion, I would forbear. But the business calls
for dispatch, and your lordship had promised me an answer.”

Sir Richard put a hand to his forehead.

“Not well,” he murmured, “and overtaxed. You must pardon me, my lord.
What business?”

“Why,” cried the Earl, “have you forgot how you promised me three days
ago to speak to the King about appointing my kinsman, Robert Cæsar,
to a vacant clerkship of the Rolls, and how, asking me for a
memorandum of the matter, I writ ‘_Remember Cæsar_’ on a slip of
paper and gave it you?”

Sir Richard stood staring a moment, then burst into an uproarious
laugh.




 MARGARET OF ANJOU

The sun was setting over Hexham in Northumberland as the last
remnants of the Lancastrian force broke and scattered before the
explosive charges of the Yorkists under Montacute, Warden of the East
Marches. Thenceforth all was mad flight and frenzied pursuit. No
quarter was given or expected. The hurtling fragments of the rout flew
in a thousand directions, to be pursued and overtaken and stamped to
extinction where they fell. Steel and flesh and harness, swept into
mangled heaps, dotted acres of the country, like manure laid ready for
its potent dressing. Hardly a cry or a movement issued from these
fermenting masses. Montacute had ordered his work thoroughly, and the
chase as it swept on and away had seen to it that the fallen should
yield no hangman’s perquisites. Only a spark struck out from steel
here and there witnessed to the sharp eviction of a soul betrayed
through its agony.

The young May moon stole up and out, and, in sickness at the sight,
drew a passing cloud across her face. The horse that, miles away,
carried a frantic woman and her child, stumbled in the shadow, and,
half recovering itself, and again sinking, pitched its riders upon the
turf.

They rose immediately, to find themselves upon the fringe of a dense
wood, remote, unknown, but a haven of desperate refuge in their
plight.

“Art thou hurt, child?” whispered the breathless woman.

“No, mother.”

“Come, then. No other choice is ours but death and outrage. We must
take shelter where we can.”

She seized his hand--he was a pretty, delicate boy of eleven--and
together they entered among the trees. All was strange and voiceless
there, yet the leaves were not so full-grown but that the moonlight
penetrating might help them a little on their way. It sparkled softly
on the woman’s girdle, and on her little turbaned cap, and on the
jewels, which she had not thought in her haste to remove or hide,
clasped about her white neck; it peopled the glades with moving
phantoms, mystic and watchful. She felt the little hand in hers clutch
and quiver, and squeezed it, drearily responsive.

“Better,” she said, “these thousand spectres than a single sword of
the usurper.”

She was only thirty-four, and of those years she had spent five in the
Tower. Yet, born as she was a child of sorrow, always the sport of
faction, her baby rattle the roll of drums, her games real warriors
and real warfare, her indomitable spirit, wasting itself for ever in
fruitless struggles and on timorous souls, refused still to
acknowledge its own eclipse. She had fought, had she known it, her
weak husband’s cause to within sight of the end, but the fire in her
heart, though in the full front of this disaster, was not yet wholly
extinguished. Only a tragic woe lined her beautiful face, and she
clung half hysterically to this one shadow out of all her dreams which
remained to her.

She had been a child herself when her gentle boy was born. They were
even now more like brother and mothering sister than son and parent.
What hope remained to her was centred entirely in him and his
passionate preservation. She carried him into the woods, as a
frightened woodcock bears its fledgling, with one only instinct--to
put as far and as obscure an interval as possible between their
enemies and themselves.

Yet, in the end, worn with grief and terror and the actual fatigues of
that bloody day, they faltered and sunk down exhausted at the lip of
a little clearing situated but a few hundred yards within the
forest-edge. There was a mossy bank there, and on it, under the shadow
of a spreading oak-tree, they fell and clung together.

“Neddy, my babe, my little woeful prince!” wept the mother. “There,
hide thee thy face within my bosom, and try to sleep. It shall force
my bursting heart to still itself to be thy quiet pillow.”

The boy obeyed, crying silently. Yet, so it happened that, spent with
emotion, in a little a merciful oblivion overtook him, and, listening
to his regular breathing as to soft music, the woman too sank
presently drowned in a sea of forgetfulness. And there they lay at
peace in the quiet night, with moss for their bedding and green leaves
for their canopy.

A sense of light, of human neighbourhood, awoke them almost at the
same moment, and they sat up together with a start. It was bright
morning in the forest, and three evil, uncouth men stood gloating down
upon them.

The woman’s heart seemed to stop. The rose and warmth of slumber,
mortal lures to villainy, froze upon her cheek. Instinctively her hand
stole to the haft of a little dagger stuck at her waist. For minutes
dead silence prevailed, and then she spoke, in a voice which strove
vainly to command itself:

“Pray you mercy, gentle sirs! What would you with us? O, not to betray
our weakness!”

Her very plea was provocation to such cattle--a reassurance and an
invitation. She had supposed them, in the first shock of discovery, to
be Yorkist soldiers, but a moment’s thought had undeceived her.
Shaggy, unkempt, grossly attired and rudely armed, there was nothing
to associate these with the bearing of regular troops. They were mere
prowling revers of the woods, beasts and marauders, who took their
toll of lonely travellers, and ravished and murdered as the chance
came to them.

One of the three, a huge, bull-like ruffian, in hood and battered
breastplate, rose from the bow on which he leaned, and turned to his
comrades.

“What say you, gossips--a pretty finch to pull? Their weakness, sooth!
Do we not love all weakness in such guise?”

One, who stood behind in a high scarlet cap, peering over his friend’s
shoulders, clucked in his throat, and cracked his fingers. He was
grotesquely tall, lean, misshapen, with long, hungry chaps and a
frosty nose.

“Gossips,” he said, in a thin, sharp-set voice, “shall we not pluck
this pigeon ere we feast on her? My blood is cold, and sack would be
very warming.”

The Queen wrenched a gold chain from her arm, and, rising hurriedly,
flung it to the ground.

“Take it, in God’s pity,” she said, “and let us go! Gentlemen--sweet
gentlemen! a broken woman throws herself upon your charity. O, teach
her that some mercy still remains to men!”

“A’s unprotected,” said the third fellow, his eyes burning--“likely
some little sow that flees and squeaks before the boars of York.”

“We’ll make her squeak, I warrant,” said the first speaker.

The lank creature skipped to the front, and snatched up the chain.

“Drink first,” he cried, “drink, drink! I’ll with this to the
‘Chequers’ and return anon with sack.”

The bull-headed man threw himself on him in a fury; in a second they
were all fighting together for possession of the chain. The strongest,
the first-mentioned, secured it.

“Drink,” he roared. “Much drink, I trow, for those remaining. Trust
_thee_ the chain, Jake Andrews? Marry I will when Tib’s eve is come.”

The other wriggled, cracking his finger-joints.

“Take it thyself, then, Cuckoo, only speed fast and bring us good
store.”

They wrangled yet awhile, but in the end the holder of the chain went
off, with threats of fierce reprisals should the two remaining venture
to take advantage of his absence. They leered at one another oddly as
he disappeared.

“A’ll claim, as ever, the first and the best of everything,” growled
the short, thick-set man under his breath.

“Shall he now, Thomas Kite, shall he?” answered the long scarecrow
eagerly. Bending with a grotesque writhe, he jerked himself suddenly
stiff again, a staring smile on his face. “Cometh our chance long
sought, Thomas Kite,” he whispered. “Shall the Cuckoo always claim the
Cuckoo’s share? Not if one be quick and clever, gossip.”

He squeaked, and leaping, dodged and screwed behind the other. The
Queen, knife in hand, her teeth set, her muscles rigid, was almost
upon them. As she lifted her arm, the stubby rogue ran under, and
caught her round the waist.

She struck and struck at him, but her shortened blows fell harmless.
She could not get one home so long as he held her thus, and he knew it
and cried out, straining:

“Cut me the whelp’s throat, Jake Andrews, and so get behind her.”

The boy, terror-struck and whimpering, held to his mother’s skirts.
With a mortal effort, she wrenched herself free from her captor, and,
throwing down her blade, which Jake instantly secured, seized the
child convulsively into her clutch.

“No, no!” she cried, “I am disarmed. In God’s name spare him! See, we
will stand like the wretched sheep, dumbly beseeching your mercy.
There, take all I have--my jewels----”

She began, with feverish fingers, to unclasp the collet from her neck.
Jake, leering and humping his shoulders, stopped her mid-way.

“What now,” growled the Kite; “shall they not be ours, then?”

“Patience, good gossip, patience!” said the other softly in his ear.
“Would not the Cuckoo, returning, note at once their absence, and so
be moved to fury? No suspicion, Thomas Kite--none. Lull him, lull him,
and then--one blow, and all is ours--wine, jewels, gold, and--hum!” He
hugged himself, gluttonously contorted. “Is not a half share better
than a third,” he said, “or none at all? And as for the little pretty,
pleasant tit-bit----”

The Kite roared out suddenly on the captives:

“Down with ye both asquat on grass bank yonder, and move so much as an
eyelid at your peril!”

Trembling and distraught, the Queen dragged the boy to a place beside
her on the turf, and so, clasped together, they cowered, awaiting the
end.

Despair was in her heart. So remote, so utterly unfriended, she knew
not where to look for hope or remedy. Cursed and proscribed in the
thick of enemies, no self-confession that she might venture but must
prove her worst damnation. Outlawed herself, she was the natural prey
to outlaws. To reveal her identity were to forgo the smallest
consideration a threat of vengeful justice might otherwise perhaps
enforce--were to unmuzzle these ravening beasts finally and
effectively. And yet she dared not threaten justice, lest passions so
reckless should be fired thereby to instant retaliation.

She could only pray to her gods in a dumb agony of supplication to
contrive some means for their escape; for herself she could think of
no possible way, unless at the last to snatch death from some
ill-guarded weapon.

What long torture of mind she endured while sitting there facing her
brutal captors, awaiting the Cuckoo’s return and thereafter the final
struggle, one may imagine in a measure. A suffocating lump seemed to
rise in her throat when at length she heard his footsteps on the
twig-strewn turf, and her arm tightened convulsively about her boy.

The returned ruffian, when he hove into sight, had been obviously
priming himself for the affray. He was not drunk, but his huge cheeks
were blistered red and a fire blinked in his eyes. He carried over his
shoulder a net containing a jar of sack and a couple of curved
drinking-horns, and, striding across to his comrades, he bent, with a
fierce inquiring oath, to sling his burden to the grass. As he thus
stooped, Jake and the Kite, standing on either side of him, drove each
a sudden knife, handle-deep, into the thick of his neck. The monster,
with one slobbering choke, heaved forward and went down like an ox.
His fingers raked, his legs jerked for a little, and then the whole
welter relaxed and subsided. Simultaneously with its cessation of
movement the two murderers, as if by one impulse, made for the
wine-jar. Their hands were shaking, their cheeks spotted with white.
They spilled as much as they gained, but each in the end succeeded in
gulping a hornful between his chattering teeth. And then!----

The woods echoed with their screeches; they writhed like scalded
snakes upon the grass. For the Cuckoo, coveting not a half but the
whole of the spoil, had gone even a step further than his
confederates, and had poisoned the wine he brought them with some
swift corrosive acid snatched up from the “Chequers” harness-room.

Was the biter bit ever mangled with a longer tooth? The pale Queen,
risen throughout this bloody drama, watching half-paralysed its
course, with but reason enough left to hold the child’s face hidden
from it, was even minutes in guessing the truth. But when at length
she realised it, with a sob of thankfulness she seized her boy’s hand,
and, avoiding those prostrate, faintly-gasping horrors, fled deep and
deeper into the forest, until, as history relates, she found that
chivalrous one whose generosity was to obtain her means to cross the
water.




 “KING COLLEY”

“We will now, my dear people,” said Mr. Cibber, “proceed to
investigate the ecclesiastical Phœnix which has reared its giant head
from the ashes of the conflagration, and to criticise its claims to a
greatness commensurate with its bulk.”

He spoke of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which, in this summer of 1721, had
stood some years completed, the stupendous “monument without a tomb”
to its creator’s genius.

Mr. Cibber had been entertaining a party of provincial actors and
actresses to luncheon at the “Globe” tavern, in Fleet Street, where,
amongst other things, they had consumed a half-gallon of arrack punch
at six shillings the quart. The company was in consequence very merry,
and, though still properly impressed with the magnitude of the
occasion, a little more inclined than heretofore, perhaps, to
familiarity with its host, and even to a touch of that professional
sportiveness whose cheap but characteristic quality seems somehow to
this day to suggest the missing link, much sought and unaccountably
overlooked, between men and monkeys. Mr. Cibber, however, genial as
always in self-sufficiency, recked nothing of the change. He walked at
the height of pompous good-humour, his usually pasty countenance
flushed, his hat under his arm, and his full wig pushed a trifle back
from his forehead. He wore a heavily embroidered claret-coloured coat
with stiff skirts, buttoned at the waist alone, black velvet breeches,
ruffles, and a “bosom” of Mechlin lace, pearl silk stockings with gold
clocks, and scarlet heels to his shoes. His magnificence put into the
shade the somewhat meretricious finery of his companions, and that was
exactly as it should have been. King Colley would have wished to
impress upon the public in general the fact that he was merely acting
cicerone, in a spirit of tolerant condescension, to certain country
insignificances whom it was his humour to patronise, and that there
was something a little fine in his taking these humble,
unsophisticated souls under his personal protection, and exhibiting to
them the lions of the Metropolis.

The party, chattering, laughing, and gaping, went down Fleet Street,
and paused a moment at the ruined gateway on Ludgate Hill. It had been
gutted by the great fire, but the mutilated statues of King Lud and
his sons still remained to its west front. Mr. Cibber pointed out the
middle figure.

“King Lud,” he said.

“Lud!” responded Mrs. Lightfoot, and Mr. Barney Bellingham, low
comedian, laughed suddenly, and then looked preternaturally solemn.

They were some five or six in all, including a “heavy father” and
spouse, “Sweet Corinna,” so called, the most affectedly rapturous of
_ingénues_, and the two above-mentioned. Mrs. Lightfoot, a faded
coquette in a soiled “paysanne,” had once played Hypolita in the
Laureate’s own “She Would and She Would Not,” and could claim some
kinship with genius.

“A fabulous monarch,” said Mr. Cibber grandiloquently, “and therefore
figuring not inappropriately on the portal, as one might call it, to
Pretence. Your servant, sir.”

He addressed a little old gentleman who at that moment had alighted
from a chair which had been deposited close beside the speaker. The
stranger was the most withered small creature it was possible to
conceive--a nonagenarian at least by his looks--a fledgling of second
childhood, his head, naked and skinny, in a great wig like a nest. His
eyes were dim, his nose was a rasped claw, his fingers were horny
talons. He was dressed very plainly, almost like a farmer, in a
drab-coloured coat and breeches; and something of rustic vigour showed
in the positive sprightliness with which, in spite of his years, he
stepped out upon the stones. Mr. Cibber, a practised reader of
character, distinguished the country cousin in him at once, and was
moved to some affable patronage.

“If you are going our way, sir,” he said, “and an arm would be of any
service to you? My name is Cibber--Colley Cibber, sir, of whom it is
just possible you may have heard.”

“O, indeed!” said the old gentleman, with a kindly, nervous lift of
his eyes. “Mr. Cibber is it? A very gratifying accident. I must live
remote beyond conception, sir, to be ignorant of that name. Thank you,
Mr. Cibber. You were saying, sir, as I alighted----?”

“I was saying, sir,” said the Laureate, “that a fabulous monarch, like
him above, fittingly adorns the portal to pretence.”

“Meaning----?” said the old gentleman, pointing forward with his
stick.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Cibber--“meaning the vast but ineffective fane
towards which we are now directing our steps.”

“Ah!” said the old gentleman. “It will have its faults, no doubt.”

“We will consider them,” said the poet loftily. “Is this possibly your
first visit, sir? Well, better late than never, as old Heywood has it.
You will find much to surprise and more to disapprove, or I am
mistaken in myself. I am doing showman at the moment, sir, to a party
of country cousins”--he whispered, “plain, unsophisticated folk, but
respectable--and if you care to join us----”

“With pleasure, Mr. Cibber,” said the old fellow. “It is a most happy
chance for me--and not less for the support of your arm than of your
opinion. I thought I should like to approach the Cathedral on foot--to
have its dimensions gradually revealed to me; but I find in good truth
the hill trying to my old bones. I am eighty-nine, Mr. Cibber. Would
you believe it?”

“It is a creditable venture, sir,” said the poet. “Ulysses himself in
his old age never made a bolder.”

They approached, as he spoke, the extended space on which the building
stood, and divers exclamations of wonder broke from the lips of the
little party--“My stars!” “Prodigious fine, on my word!” “’Tis mighty
likeable!” “Why--why, the sweetest regale!” “Are you not properly
struck, Barney, my boy?” “Mum, mum,” and so on. Mr. Cibber, with the
air of one magnificently responsible for the show, stood leaning
familiarly against one of the posts which encompassed the paved area
before the west door, and remained silent pending the recovery of his
company. But he took snuff, and laughed patronisingly from time to
time over the fervour of its ejaculations.

“Rat me, my dears,” he said by and by, when the volume of enthusiasm
had spent itself; “but your artlessness refreshes me--upon my soul and
honour, it refreshes me. This is the very respectable work of a
journeyman builder, and as full of holes as poor Tom’s coat.”

“La, Mr. Cibber!” said the sweet Corinna, with a giggle, “I always
thought the gentleman was at the top of his trade.”

“‘They say best men are moulded out of faults,’” murmured Mr.
Bellingham, with a wink at the heavy mother.

The poet saw the wink, and waxed a little emphatic. It was Dr. Johnson
who had once said of his art of conversation that “he had but half to
furnish, since one-half was oaths.” But he was after all a
good-natured man.

“Then, God judge me,” he cried, straining his voice, which was none of
the strongest, “if he hadn’t a title to be called perfection!”

Mrs. Lightfoot, alarmed by his heat, stopped a levity on her lips
half-way, and addressed the great man very soberly.

“I prithee, sir,” she said, “to correct our untutored visions,
naturally dazzled in their first contemplation of so unaccustomed a
sight.”

“Why, my dear,” said the Laureate, mollified at once, “I can quite
understand your naïve enthusiasm; but it is a fact that in order to
criticise an achievement one must know something of the principles of
the art which designed it.”

“No greater architect of his own fortune than King Colley!” cried Mr.
Bellingham.

“I thank you, sir,” answered Mr. Cibber stiffly; then added, blazing
out again, “You will oblige me by holding your damned tongue!”

The old gentleman, anxious and conciliatory, put in a word:

“Your professional knowledge, sir, must make your comments doubly
instructive. Pray inform us to what details of the building you take
particular exception.”

“That is a very reasonable demand, sir,” answered the Laureate, daring
the offending and rather elated low comedian from the corner of his
eye. “I have no doubt that to the uninformed in such matters the
magnitude of this conception palliates, or even overpowers, the
meretriciousness of its details. But you mistake me on one point. My
_profession_, though it embodies all the arts, specialises in none,
and if I claim a dictatorial right in this instance, it is simply
because as an actor I represent the trinity in unity of the creative
faculty.”

“I see, I see,” said the old gentleman. “It is merely accident which
has kept dormant your architectural proclivities.”

“Well, sir,” said the poet, with a smile, “I flatter myself I could
have evolved, under compulsion, a more faultless erection than this.”

The stranger nodded with an air of satisfied acquiescence.

“I shall be really grateful to Mr. Cibber,” he said, “if he will help
me to the right point of view. To my uninstructed intelligence, I
confess, the pile seems to stand well.”

The poet laughed tolerantly.

“A good fortune it owes to its site. O, you must really pardon me,
sir! It is in truth a cold, heavy, tasteless affair, imposing in no
more than bulk, lacking the inspiration of sacramentality. Bear with
me, now bear with me, while I strip off for your edification a little
of the monster’s pretence. You will observe its most prominent
feature, the dome? Very well, sir; that dome sums up in itself the
hollowness of the entire conception. It violates the first principles
of the art it professes, with a monstrous impertinence, to crown. Its
height bears no relation to the proportions of the structure within,
and is fixed thus arbitrarily for no other purpose than effect.”

“But is not the effect good?” ventured the old gentleman.

“Why, stap my vitals, sir!” said Mr. Cibber, “have you the assurance
to condone a whited sepulchre? The greater the audacity, the worse the
pretence. The cupola proper to this design lies within that external
sham like a head under a steel basinet. What we look on is a mere
exuberance, supporting nothing but itself. Will you tell me that that
is in accordance with the principles of art, which demand that each
part should naturally progress in lines of beauty from the parent
stock?”

“No,” said the stranger--“no. You teach me much, sir.”

“That pretence,” continued the poet triumphantly, “is not confined to
the head, though naturally it finds there its most swollen
expression.”

“By the Lord, that’s true,” murmured Mr. Bellingham, and the sweet
Corinna choked a little laugh into her handkerchief.

“Those side elevations, for instance,” went on Mr. Cibber, with a
doubtful glance askance at the lady, “concealing as they do the
buttresses and clerestory windows of the nave, constitute in their
upper order a mere mask to the real form and construction of the
building. Now, in a perfect design there should be no screening of
structural necessities, but an ingenious adaptation of all such to the
general conception. These, sir, are a few of the most patent defects,
upon which, saving your patience, I could enlarge at pleasure. But I
trust I have said enough to correct your point of view to its
necessary focus; and if some disenchantment is the result----”

“Well, well, Mr. Cibber,” interrupted the old gentleman--“well, well.
But I don’t know that I can quite confess to that.”

“O, very good, sir!” cried the poet ironically. “And according to what
impenetrable illusion, if you please, do you persist in your faith?”

“Why,” said the old gentleman--“why, you see, Mr. Cibber, I designed
the thing myself.”

“Sir Christopher, Sir Christopher!” cried a breathless gentleman who
came hurrying up at the moment. “We had lost you, sir. This was
naughty of you to venture up the hill alone.”

Mr. Bellingham, with one look at the rueful Laureate, sat flat down
upon the pavement and delivered himself to hysterics.




 THE SURGEON OF GOUGH SQUARE

He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His
face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by
daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are
substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The
fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for
him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without.
As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar
which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market
sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land.
He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no
prospect of release was ever more to be his.

He had started his professional career with high expectations and a
confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and
confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud.
What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own?
It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left
him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool’s paradise.
Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly
paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he
desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of
things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that
vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?

He recalled, in a sudden impotent fury, the occasion, or the suspected
occasion, which had marked him down for ruin. His capital had been all
invested in Bank of England stock, and the securities had been
deposited with Fauntleroy, the now notorious banker of Berners Street.
It had been this villain’s practice to forge powers of attorney
enabling him to dispose of his clients’ property, and the man’s cool
audacity had even, it was said, carried him so far as to the
occasional appending of a customer’s name to a fraudulent deed in the
customer’s own presence, and the then sending it, with its ink still
wet, as though from the visitor’s hand, into the clerks’ department.

Such, he fully believed, had been the case with him during a business
call he had made one day upon the head of the house. He remembered,
cursing the memory, the sleek, plausible figure in its black tights
and broadcloth, the spotless frill at its bosom, the smile on its
prosperous face, the pen travelling in its plump fingers while the
voice went on, even, polite, and interested. To be signing away so
inhumanly the fortune, the happiness, the soul of a fellow-creature,
and never all the while to flush or falter. Damn him!

Well, he was damned maybe. A glutton, a sybarite, a voluptuary, he had
come to the end of his feasting, and only for Lazarus remained the
scraps and dregs of the banquet.

A rap at the door broke in upon his miserable reverie, and a small
servant entered the room. Two gentlemen, she said, desired
particularly to see him. Who were they? She did not know, they would
give no name. Where were they? In the surgery, which opened on the
back. They had brought _something_ with them, _something_ on a
hand-cart, and then other men, who had deposited the something, had
left. She was used to the traffic, or had been, and showed no
agitation or alarm.

Resurrection-men! He had no desire to pay their price, and, if he had,
no means. The very house in which he lived, an inheritance, was
already under treaty for sale. Frowning and compressing his lips, he
descended to the room below. The _something_, stark and obvious under
a black cloth, was laid already on the dissecting-table. Two gentlemen
turned to greet him.

They were both grave, formal, unconvincing; yet perfectly refined in
manner. One, who constituted himself the spokesman, began to address
him at once in a low voice:

“You will please to pardon, sir, on the ground of extreme urgency,
this unceremonious visit. I must say at once that we do not wish to
state our names, and I will admit unhesitatingly that we are
disguised. This”--he signified the silent shape--“is the subject of
our visit. We desire your acceptance of it in the interests of
science. No return is required, and no condition made, save that you
undertake to convince yourself, beyond the possibility of a doubt, and
before proceeding to extremities, that no flicker of life survives to
it.”

Professionally self-possessed, the young doctor had yet to rally all
his nerve-power to meet so amazing a charge. He delayed to answer for
some moments.

“And if it did?” he said.

“Then you will have no reason to regret your caution,” answered the
gentleman.

“I cannot pretend to understand you.”

“I must urge upon you the necessity of a quick decision,” said the
stranger. “Will it satisfy you to be told that the subject”--he again
pointed to the hidden form--“expressly desired that this task should
be deputed to you?”

“Are you mad?” said the young surgeon, “or am I, or do you think me
so? What task--and who desired it?”

“The task,” said the gentleman, “of ascertaining, in the first
instance, that life is indisputably extinct, and of then devoting the
remains, at your complete discretion, to the interests of science. I
may tell you”--he seemed to hesitate a moment--“that the subject
suffered under a morbid apprehension of premature burial.”

“His apprehensions,” said the surgeon, “could be easily set at rest.”

“I hope so,” answered the stranger.

“But--but,” cried the surgeon in desperation--he made a movement as if
clutching at his hair--“you must see, gentlemen, that I cannot
possibly undertake the responsibility on these vague premises.”

“Question me, sir, if you will, and I will endeavour to answer to your
satisfaction.”

“Tell me then. Who is this man? What was his complaint--presumably
mortal? Was he a patient of mine that he selected me for this
extraordinary business?”

The gentleman again seemed to hesitate.

“He was,” he said, “--yes, I may call him a patient of yours, inasmuch
as you attended him during the course of a distemper or aberration
with which he was seized. He considered that he owed you a return for
his somewhat cavalier exploitation of your services, and, at the last,
these were the only means he could devise for giving some effect
to--well, shall we call it his remorse? The sentiment, combined with
the fact that his demise, or his assumed demise, occurred in this
neighbourhood, decided our choice.”

The young surgeon, forcing all his wits to a focus, fixed his eyes
searchingly on the speaker.

“He was murdered,” he said. “Is that it?”

The other shrugged his shoulders, with a scarce perceptible smile.

“O, sir,” he said, “if you take that view! But a moment’s examination
will convince you.”

“Let me make it, then.”

The stranger interposed his body, quietly but resolutely.

“After we are gone.”

“Why will you not give me your names?”

“Because, sir, we do not wish to associate ourselves with an act which
might prove difficult of explanation, and which, given publicity, must
most certainly defeat its own object. You must accept our word for it
that we were both close personal friends of the deceased, and that we
have undertaken this difficult charge out of pure regard for an
intimacy which contains for us many endearing recollections.”

“What was the cause of death? Will you tell me so much?”

“It was the result of a fall.”

The surgeon, wavering between conscience and professional
acquisitiveness, gnawed his forefinger in an agitated way.

“But why,” he said--“why should not a post-mortem examination at his
own house have sufficed for his apprehensions?”

“There is no calculating,” answered the stranger, “the lengths to
which such diseased imaginativeness will carry a man. Safety, no
doubt, to his mind, consisted in nothing short of dismemberment.” He
looked at his watch in a hurried way. “Time, sir,” he said, “presses.
If our natural scruples shrink, as I say, from association with this
business, no such sentiment need apply to you. Gentlemen of your
profession, I understand, are not expected to be over-inquisitive as
to the material provided for their anatomical studies. You may rest
completely satisfied that nothing discreditable to ourselves or
harmful to you attaches to this case. Very well. Subjects, I believe,
are costly. Here is one to your hand for nothing. But should our
friend’s terrors prove actually justified, and this to be a case of
suspended animation, in that event, sir, I will answer for it that the
patient’s gratitude would take a form upon which you would have
plentiful reason to congratulate yourself. And in the meantime every
wasted minute is a reproach to us. Answer, sir, will you accept the
conditions or not?”

“You will not tell me your name?”

“No.”

“Nor his there?”

“I must not, indeed.”

“Nor where to communicate with you, in case----?”

“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of
us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and
him.”

The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or
repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.

He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to
recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.

“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well,
indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart--hope; a vague,
indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of
the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and
perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.

With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the
surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling
awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.

It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight
in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.

Yes, something--the thing under the cloth!

Was he overwrought--victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn
it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it
might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.

Again!

With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and
revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.

The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and
with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied
ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been
executed that morning. Where had he heard it--that whisper, that
incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by
friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the
condemned gullet? A thing impracticable--preposterous--he had
dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished.
Either that way or another--what did it matter? The man had been
hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still
lived--only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the
pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little
either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.

Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his
emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity
from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already
forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very
clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness,
hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped
forward, his fingers crooked.

At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He
paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:

“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the
succour of his enemy.




 THE PRIOR OF ST. COME

A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden.
He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no
more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean
and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent
crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the
whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were
tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once
black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black,
ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like
hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte,
surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the
brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a
number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to
all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly
jewels hung about his neck.

As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips
perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy
leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This
figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of
a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and
blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious
merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were
gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what
Spurzheim would have called an “affective propensity to
acquisitiveness.” He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of
the King’s chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis
XI.

Presently the latter, pausing beside a pedestal on which stood a
statuette, none too unsuggestive, of the Paphian Venus, looked up in
an abstracted way.

“Still vacant, still vacant?” he said, lisping a little between his
toothless gums. “That was what you remarked, was it not, Père
Bonaventure?”

“Not in so many words, son Louis,” answered the chaplain. “But in very
truth the Priory of St. Come remains to this day a body without a
head. The severance, moreover, hath endured so long that I doubt if
any reunion of the parts, were that conceivable, could restore its
healthy circulation to the community. The good prior and his monks
have become estranged in this dull interval. His authority is out of
date. Were he yet to return--a wild hypothesis--he would think to take
them up where he left them, and, being disillusioned, chaos would
result.”

“You are convinced he is dead?”

“Either that, or held by the infidels in a captivity doomed to be
perpetual. No reasonable man can doubt it.”

“_Pasque-Dieu!_” said Louis, “that same reason is a good servant to
one’s interests. I myself am never so reasonable as when I cut off a
head that annoys me.”

He glanced, rasping his frosted chin, at the chaplain and down. He
could gauge this jocund suitor well enough; he knew him to be at heart
a libertine and self-seeker; but, inasmuch as his own faith was a
conglomeration of hypocrisy and abject superstition, he dreaded always
to question the casuistries of its anointed ministers. One could never
tell what might befall.

The matter under discussion turned upon the wisdom of appointing a new
head to the Priory of St. Come, an important foundation in the
southern quarters of the city. Long months past the King had granted a
reluctant permission to its aged chief to make a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land; and the old man had gone and he had not returned. Time went
by; no news had ever been received of the wayfarer; by degrees it had
come to be concluded that death or captivity had terminated his pious
adventure. The young monks of St. Come, freed from his restraining
hand, had begun to break bounds; scandals were getting rife;
interested observers impressed upon the King the moral certainty of
the old prior’s death, and the necessity of his bringing the monastery
again under the disciplinary control of a head. Amongst these the most
pertinacious, and, as possessing the royal ear, the most hopeful, was
the Chaplain Père Bonaventure, who greatly coveted for himself the
desirable office. It promised him almost illimitable opportunities for
the sort of life he favoured.

“This dream, father, of which you spoke,” said the King, without
raising his eyes--“it seemed to have its significance, you would
imply--some bearing on the case?”

“I would imply nothing of the sort,” answered the chaplain. “We are
expressly warned against attaching a prognostic value to these
figments--though, to be sure, we might claim our justification in Holy
Writ.”

“Given the seer,” said Louis. “Well, well; relate thy dream.”

“Methought,” said the priest, “that thou and I stood beside a church,
in the walls of which hard by appeared a little threatening fissure.
And the monks, instead of attending to their office, kept revelry; and
always with the sound of their roystering the fissure extended. But
thou, while I still urged upon thee the necessity of seeking and
amending from within the ever-widening evil, would persist in holding
me in converse, saying, ‘Patience yet a little, father, and we will
enter.’ And suddenly there came a clap of song surmounting all in
blasphemy, and with a roar the breach burst and the tower rocked and
the walls sank down upon us both, crushing out our lives.”

He ended, his eyes slewed craftily upon the other. “From Joseph,
through the royal succession,” he said, “descends the gift of
interpretation. To me it was just a dream.”

The King looked up. “_Pasque-Dieu!_” he said--“and to us a providence,
since it gives us a pretext for disposing of a pest. Go, go, in God’s
name”--he paused to raise his hat--“and be Prior of St. Come.”

He was rid at last of an importunity, though he was only to exchange
it for a worse.

He was walking in his garden one day weeks later, when there came
towards him an old, blanched figure, feverishly paddling with a
pilgrim’s crossed staff and mumbling as he approached. It was the aged
Prior of St. Come, delayed in his return by cross winds and crosser
ailments.

Louis, coming to a stop, stood conning the apparition half-petrified.
For a moment, indeed, he fancied it to be a veritable wraith, so
whitely emaciated looked the face, set in its cloudy fleece of beard
and hair, with the eyes like two black borings.

“_Adjuva nos, Domine, adjuva nos!_” he muttered, crossing himself.

The old man tottered forward, and cried in a shrill tone: “Restore to
me my fold, son Louis--restore to me my fold!”

The voice, and, more than it, the words, broke the spell. The King’s
lips tightened, shrewd and caustic. Not on such worldly interests were
a spirit bent.

“Welcome, father,” he said--“thou art welcome home.”

“No welcome,” cried the old man. “My children disown me; another sits
in my place. I but carried my pitcher to the well, and lo! when I
returned with it brimming, the door was locked against me. They feign
to know me not; they stand and revile me; let me in to them that I may
afford good evidence of my identity.”

He was a spirited ancient, and he shook his staff meaningly.

“That may not be,” said Louis smoothly, “since you are pronounced
deceased.”

“By whom?”

“By the King.”

“I am, nevertheless, very much alive.”

“Impossible, when the King himself has ruled you dead. Why else should
he have filled your office? As Prior, father, believe us, you are
hopelessly defunct; as priest and man you may yet exist on our
sufferance. We do not hold it altogether a capital offence, your thus
presuming to refute our conclusions by being alive; yet,
_Pasque-Dieu!_ the inconvenience you cause us by your
inconsiderateness is little less than monstrous. We should have liked
to hear some note of apology from you, some hint of regret for your
unconscionable survival; but there, it is a self-seeking world.”

The old man stood amazed and speechless; nor was his bewilderment
lessened by the kindness with which the King presently took his arm
and walked him off up the garden.

“A monarch’s word, father,” said Louis, “is sacred, as much to himself
as to another. Anything else that it is in our power to bestow upon
you we shall be happy to consider in the light of your palpable
deserts. Now we shall place you in the hands of M. de Comines, our
Secretary of State, with orders to him to attend to your interests.”

So, with a hundred questions as to the Grand Turk and the pilgrim’s
adventures by the way, he led him to the palace and got rid of him.

For good and all, as he supposed; but in that he was very quickly
disillusioned. The deposed prior was by no means the man to take his
cashiering meekly. Stubborn and masterful by nature, the authority of
his late achievement had but consolidated his sense of righteousness.
His interview with M. de Comines left him with no delusions. The
Secretary bowed him out with a whole bouquet of flowery phrases,
which, being cut for decorative purposes, were destined to bear no
fruit. Père Bonaventure, lolling in his chair at St. Come, laughed
securely. “_Rira bien qui rira le dernier!_” chanted his predecessor
with a bitter grimness.

He appeared at the next royal levée, and renewed his petition; his
Majesty was gentle but expostulatory. He sought to penetrate once more
into the Louvre garden, generally open to men of piety, but, being
repulsed by the guard, took his station at likely exits, and clamoured
when the King went by. His persecution of his monarch became by
degrees persistent and intolerable. Louis grew to dread the inevitable
apparition with its wail, monotonous and eternal, “Restore to me my
fold!” The creature got upon his nerves, and even threatened to spoil
his sleep. Then one day, quite suddenly and characteristically, he
resolved to rid himself of the incubus. He summoned his
provost-marshal, Tristan l’Hermite, and sitting humped in his chair,
closed one eye, and focussed the other shrewdly on his favourite.

“Tristan,” he said, “divinity utters itself in the mouths of kings--is
it not so?”

The officer, a thick-set, beetle-browed boar of a man, whose body was
encased in steel covered by a blue tabard embroidered with
fleurs-de-lys, grunted in reply. Louis remained silent.

“Why waste words, gossip?” said Tristan. “Tell me the job and the
man.”

His eyes, red and projecting, rolled in their sockets. He gave his
flock of coarse hair a contemptuous shake.

“Wherefore,” went on the other, contemplative, “to traverse a royal
decision is to commit treason against Heaven--a crime even the more
abhorrent in one who professes himself a minister of religion.”

“The man?” repeated Tristan.

“Hast thou heard speak, Tristan,” said the King, “of this troublesome
prior of St. Come?”

The Provost-Marshal turned and made for the door.

“Tristan!” cried the King; but without effect. He uncoiled himself
with a smile. “_Pasque-Dieu_,” he said, “what a precipitate fellow!
But at least I can sleep to-night with a peaceful conscience.”

And yet, when taking the air the next morning in company of this very
confidant, there, slipped in by the relaxed guard, was the familiar,
hated figure, pleading and clamouring.

“Hog! Dolt!” cried the King, maddened beyond all subterfuge, turning
on his henchman: “Did I not tell thee to rid me of the prior of St.
Come?”

“Highty-tighty, gossip!” answered the Provost--“what’s all this to-do?
And have I not?”

“The prior, I say--the prior?”

“Fast in a sack, gossip, and lying these ten hours past at the bottom
of the Seine.”

“Fool! But I meant this one!”

“Phew! Why didn’t you say so? The prior, quotha. This is not the
prior. But rest easy; the mistake is soon amended.”

“No,” said the King, who after all had a sense of humour; “this is
Heaven’s hand, and I but the poor tool in it. The prior claim is
his”--and he turned to the suppliant. “Go,” he said, “in peace, old
man. Return to thy flock. The seat is once more vacant, and thy
petition is granted.”




 CAPTAIN MACARTNEY

One dark November afternoon in the year 1712 a horseman, riding
westwards from Cobham village, in Surrey, pulled up at the junction of
the road with the Kingston and Guildford highway, and dismounted in
order that he might read the terms of a proclamation pasted upon the
signpost there.

“Whereas,” ran the advertisement, “Bernard Macartney, Captain in her
Majesty’s forces, stands charged with the wilful murder of James
Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, in Hyde Park on the 15th of this present
month, a reward of _two hundred pounds_ is hereby offered to any
person or persons who shall discover and apprehend, or cause to be
discovered or apprehended, the said Captain Bernard Macartney, to be
paid by the Lords Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury upon his
being apprehended and lodged in any one of her Majesty’s gaols.”

The traveller rose from his perusal with a grin.

“And so they bell the cat,” said he. “Now, if _I_ were this
Macartney--I say _if_ I were--methinks I should feign to be one of my
own pursuers lusting to gain the reward. There’s no disguise for some
men like honesty, nor, in certain cases, no self-help like
self-sacrifice.”

He remounted and pushed leisurely on his way, cutting across the
high-road, and taking the track for Byfleet, which ran herefrom over
Cobham Heath, a lonely and near treeless waste. Naturally, as he rode,
his mind was busy over the event which had produced the
proclamation--the recent fatal duel, that is to say, between the Lords
Hamilton and Mohun. The sensation the affair had caused was due as
much to the reputed foul play which had characterised it as to the
exalted rank of its principals and its tragic termination. The
meeting--ostensibly the result of a dispute concerning some family
property--had taken place at seven in the morning near the Ring in
Hyde Park--that fashionable “dusty mill-horse drive” which lay off
Tyburn Lane, about mid-way between the Tyburn and Hyde Park Gate
turnpikes--and there were six concerned in it, three of a side. The
provocation, given and accepted, had been, it was rumoured rightly or
wrongly, a mere blind to a premeditated murder. His Grace of
Hamilton--then on the eve of his departure for Paris as the Queen’s
Ambassador, and the holder of a watching brief, as it were, on behalf
of St. Germains--was notoriously obnoxious to Marlborough and the
Whigs, and the quarrel, the whisper went, had been thrust upon him at
the hands of a creature of the Duke’s, a discredited brute and
libertine, whose challenge, under the circumstances, he might very
well have ignored. But his Grace had an invincible spirit, and the
desire, perhaps, to rid the world of an intolerable ruffian; and so
the meeting had occurred. At its outset, without any feint of
punctilio, the two had rushed at one another more like hyenas than
men, a world of long-smothered exasperation, no doubt, nerving their
hands; and, amidst the rain of stabs and blows that followed, Mohun
had been the first to fall. And while he had lain on the ground,
gasping out his life, the other, also sorely wounded, leaning above
him, Macartney, it was said, had run up behind and, giving the Duke
his death-blow, had escaped with his surviving companion in iniquity.
The Duke had been helped towards the Cake-house--that little, pretty
rustic lodge, with its green trees and pond, whither fashion was used
to resort for its syllabubs and “pigeon-pie puff”--but had died on the
grass before he could reach it. And so the matter had ended for all
but the absconding seconds.

“And those,” thought the traveller, “can spell out proclamations, no
doubt, with the best of their pursuers. I put my money on Macartney.”

He was a spare, small-boned man, with a delicate, invalidish face and
an expression on it of impudent temerity. His voice cracked when he
raised it, and he was prone to spasms of laughter which hurt his
chest. His hat, his heavy surtout, his great jack-boots seemed all too
large for him, like a preposterous shell to a very little tortoise;
but he rode with spirit, making small account of his trappings and the
lonely road and sinister weather. In fact, as with many sickly
constitutions, his elasticity and muscular strength were, relatively,
abnormal.

The heath, desolation manifest, rolled on before him in brown,
wind-shivered billows; the sky was like a slab of grey stone, roofing
a dead world. There was a wolfish snarl in the air, a threat of coming
snow.

Suddenly, without a note of warning, a burst and ring of hoofs sounded
in the road close behind him. Wheeling on the instant, he observed a
stranger, the noise of whose approach had evidently fallen deadened on
the spongy turf-side by which he had ridden.

“How now!” demanded the traveller, in his quick little voice: “what
the devil do you, springing upon me like this?”

“Pardon, pardon,” cried the stranger. He rode up, breathing as if
winded. “I am a timid man, sir, and the prospect looked wicked, and,
seeing you going before, I ventured to push on to crave your company.
This place hath a dreary notorious reputation, I am told, and I am
very nervous.”

His jovial face, twinkling, for all the cold, with perspiration,
seemed to belie his assertion. It was broad, and flat of surface, with
the features in low relief; and its mouth was so wide that, when
distended in a smile, all above appeared detachable, like the lid of a
comic tobacco-jar. By the tokens of his greasy jasey, with the little
soiled round hat on top, and the clerical cut of his coat, he might
have been a damaged parson, who had taken the wrong turning and missed
his way to paradise.

The other conned him speculatively.

“What made you ride on the grass?” said he.

“Why, I feared to alarm ye,” answered the newcomer, “and so miss the
chance of a way-fellow.”

“Gad-so!” exclaimed the traveller. “And whither, by your leave, may
your road lead you over this same wicked heath?”

“Sir,” said the stranger, “if the question is scarce pertinent, the
candour of my cloth responds. I am riding to seek preferment of the
Queen’s own Majesty at Windsor. Is the confidence to be reciprocal?”

“I am escaping from my creditors,” said the small man. “Shall I turn
out my pockets, that you may witness to their emptiness?”

The stranger endeavoured to look grave.

“This suspicion,” he said, “is unworthy.”

“Of whom?”

“Of us both, sir. You make me fear I have misplaced my confidence.”

“In the richness of the bone you proposed to pick? Very possibly you
have.”

They were slowly pacing their horses all this time side by side. The
road was utterly deserted, the prospect of the dreariest. A straggle
of withered thorns, running darkly up the slope of a low hill to the
left, alone broke the almost treeless desolation.

“Ride on, sir, ride on,” said the stranger in an offended voice.
“Better my own fearful company than a comrade so mistrustful.”

He pulled on his rein and fell back. The other did the same.

“Great God!” cried the stranger. “Who’s this?”

Almost without a sound, it seemed, a horseman had broken from the
shelter of the thorns, and drawn up in the middle of the track,
barring their way. In the same instant, the clerical gentleman, who
had fallen again behind, whipped a pistol from his skirt-pocket and
shot his companion’s horse dead. The bullet entered behind the
shoulder, and the beast, doubling up its forelegs, pitched and
collapsed. Its rider, flung over its head, gathered his wits with
agility, and sat up to encounter the vision of a couple of rascal
faces looking down upon him.

“Do me the justice to attest,” he said to the pseudo-parson, “that I
never for a moment believed in you.”

The other beamed over him, his pistol still smoking in his hand.

“And be damned to your scepticism!” said he. “For may I never launch
soul on its flight again if I am not what I look, a broken
hedge-parson.”

“Enough of that, Tom,” said the second rogue, a most butchering,
determined-looking scoundrel. “His Honour’s swollen head calls for
some blood-letting. Stand away while I give him t’other barrel.”

“What! are you going to murder me?” cried the victim.

“Aye, we are that,” answered the ruffian. “A dead man’s easier
stripped than a live one, and makes less complaint after.”

“I’ll give you a hundred reasons for sparing me?”

“Hold, Jemmy!” said the parson. “The pick of a hundred will do. What
reason of reasons, Mr. Bankrupt?”

“Why, the money in my pocket, which, if it’s more than a beggarly five
guineas, may I eat my words.”

“That you shall, and well peppered, I warrant you.”

“I’ll give you my bond for fifty, to be paid on personal
presentation.”

“‘A bird in the hand,’ mister. Is that your best?”

“You’d never murder a man for five guineas?” cried the traveller, his
voice cracking.

“Five guineas!” echoed the parson with an oath: “five testers; five
groats; five copper farthings--what life is worth more? Give him the
lead, Jemmy.”

“Hold! I’m Captain Macartney!”

“Captain----! Phew--w--w!”

A moment’s intense silence followed. The two amazed ruffians looked at
one another with eyes into which a gleeful cupidity was slowly born.
“Captain!” Their gaze was transferred to the sitting figure. Jemmy
lowered his pistol. The parson was all one ineffable smile.

“It fits, by God!” said he. “Why did it never occur to me? Two hundred
pound, Jemmy, my boy! There’s Sir Townley Shore handy. We must risk
it. Up with him before you. You’ve given us the best reason the last,
Captain, my love. And you prefer the gallows to a bullet? Well, that’s
just a matter of taste.”

They bound his arms behind him, and Jemmy set him before him on the
big Flanders mare that he rode; and so they carried their prize,
choosing the obscure ways in preference, to the house of Sir Townley
Shore, the great county magistrate and magnate of Stoke d’Abernon,
which lay a couple of miles the other side of Cobham.

There was a fine excitement in the Court when it was known that the
notorious Captain was apprehended. Sir Townley, who was just come in
and sitting down to his dinner, ordered in his staff, with a stout
ranger or two for extra support, and sent for the prisoner and his
guard. But the moment he clapped eyes on the former: “Why, Jack,”
cried he in astonishment, “what the plague do you in this company?”

The two rogues, at that cry, stiffened aghast; but their captive
advanced with a grin.

“I’ll tell you, Townley,” said he. “I’d not left you and the White
Lion Inn a quarter of an hour, when, going on my way, these two
gentlemen shot my horse, and, falling upon me, would have murdered me
too had I not thought of the expedient of calling myself Macartney;
whereby I not only incited them, hoping for the reward, to carry me
into a place of safety, but I have the pleasure of presenting you with
a couple of very complete gallows-birds for your trussing.”

He turned on the paralysed ex-cleric with a little gasp of laughter.

“You have come the right road for preferment, parson,” said he. “You
are going to be exalted like Haman.”




 THE DUC DE GUISE

The Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, was giving a ball,
characteristically insolent in its conception, at the royal palace of
the Louvre. All the principal ladies of the Court were invited to
attend it, and each was to be accompanied by her _cavaliere-servente_,
wearing her mistress’s livery.

“I beg you, madam, to excuse yourself,” said the Duc de Guise to his
wife. “It is a censorious age, and your condescensions might be
misconstrued.”

He was a tall, well-figured man, with a somewhat supercilious
expression, emphasised by a prominent underlip. The cut of his face,
cold and aquiline, against his ruff, suggested a cameo in high relief.
His beard, of a bright brown, was “stilettoed”; a scar defaced his
left cheek near the eye, and, in its fading or flushing, betrayed the
degree of his emotions. It was curiously in evidence now, though his
voice and manner kept their measured quiet.

“Condescensions--to whom, _mon chéri_?” asked the Duchess, whisking
round as she sat under the hands of her tire-woman. She was a beauty,
once a princess of Cleves, and as saucy and wilful as she was
bewitching. Her husband, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the
attendant.

“To M. Saint-Mesgrin, madam,” he said.

She laughed. “Thou hast named my chosen cavalier, Henri. What an odd
chance!”

Saint-Mesgrin was one of the King’s mignons, and his name and the
lovely Duchess’s were too often associated of late for the Guise’s
tolerance.

“Is it not?” he said. “I cannot imagine what suggested it.”

He took a sweetmeat from a little gold box, in shape like a shell,
that he carried, and put it between his lips.

“I could not believe,” said the lady, pouting and in an aggrieved
voice, “that the Duc de Guise would condescend to jealousy.”

“Nor does he, madam,” answered the Duke. “It is his honour for which
he is concerned.”

She flounced a shoulder on him.

“O, very well, monsieur! You know best what is worth your
consideration. But, if I were a man, I should not, I think, consign my
honour to the keeping of a despised wife. Will you be pleased to call
back my maid?”

“You persist, then, in going?”

“Will you call Celestine?”

“Your mere presence there, and in such company, will be construed, you
must understand, into a justification for all the calumnies and
slanders which have pursued your name of late.”

“What matter, if you do not so construe it? You are not jealous,
_grâce à Dieu_. And as to that great matter of your honour, I will
put it for safe custody into the hands of Saint-Mesgrin, and you can
ask him for an account of it when you please.”

“To be sure I shall, and very soon perhaps. You will go to the ball,
then, madam?”

“You know I must not disappoint the Queen-Mother,” she said hotly; but
a certain trepidation was beginning to flutter her heart.

“You are resolved?”

“Will you stop me?”

“By no means.”

She laughed defiantly.

“O, most certainly I shall go then!”

The Duke rose, and bowed very gravely.

“I wish you a good night, madam,” he said. “Go, and enjoy yourself
while you may.”

She bit her lip as he left the room. For a moment she was half
resolved to yield her pride to the panic fear that had seized her; but
the perverse demon prevailed, and she called back her woman.

She went to the questionable ball, and the night passed for her in a
sort of conscious delirium peopled with shapes of gaudy terror. The
King, the Queen-Mother, even Saint-Mesgrin himself, seemed forms of
demoniac malice, luring her on to her damnation. She longed, and yet
feared, to fly the unreal pandemonium. Her own peaceful bed figured to
her as something pathetic beyond words--a haven of dear refuge which
she had forfeited for ever.

At length, at five o’clock in the morning, the ball broke up, and she
hurried home with what feverish haste the crowd would permit her. At
bed, in the Hôtel de Guise, she cowered beneath the coverlets, and,
the attendants dismissed, lay shivering like a mouse in a trap. She
hardly dared to breathe, for fear of evoking some menacing echo. She
could have thought that something horrible, like a monstrous cat,
crouched outside her door.

All of a sudden her heart seemed to stop. Quick, soft steps were
coming down the corridor, and the next moment her door opened, and the
Duke, followed by a servitor bearing a bowl of broth on a salver,
entered the room.

She uttered a little stifled cry. There was something even horrible
and suggestive in the choice of the attendant, who was a small,
vacant-faced deaf-mute much employed by her husband on secret
services. She sat up in her dishevelled beauty, white and panting.

“O, Henri, _mon ami_,” she whispered, “you have frightened me so!”

He locked the door behind him and came forward, his eyes brilliant,
his lips smiling.

“That is a sad result of my consideration,” he said. “I foresaw very
well that your heated blood would prevent you from sleeping, and that
a counter caloric would be necessary for your rest. Thank my
foresight, madam, and drink down this broth.”

“No, Henri--no, no!”

“_Peste!_ this is a peevish return, _ma mie_. Are you such a child to
cry at your draught, and when it comes in so pleasant a disguise? Why,
it needs no physician to see the excited wakefulness in your eyes.
Down with it, and you will sleep--take my word for it.”

“Henri, before God I have done no harm!”

“What resistance--out of all proportion with the act! Who said you had
done harm--or, if he thought it, would dream of retaliating with such
kindness. Come, shut your eyes and gulp.”

“I will not indeed.”

Desperate to run, she put a foot over the bedside. He held her back
with a force gentle but irresistible.

“Henri!” she cried in agony, “I was wretched all the evening--O,
believe me!”

“Ah! I thought you did a mistaken thing in going. What a pity you
rejected my advice!”

She shrank from him, her throat gulping, her eyes clouded with horror.

“Your voice is cold,” she whispered--“cold, cold as your eyes, as your
heart. O, Death! Will you have no mercy? Henri!”

“Why, you are overwrought, lady. This is foolish. Come, the broth is
cooling.”

“Must I drink it?”

“To please me.”

“My confessor first--only for five minutes.”

“What! for a dose of medicine? You speak as though it were poison--the
_morceau italianizé_! And even were it, what could lie to confess in
so clear a conscience?”

“You never loved me. Give me the bowl.”

“I will hold it to your lips.”

“No, no, you cannot, you will not.”

“You make me obstinate, madam. I am not wont to be disobeyed.”

“O, horror!”

“I never loved you, you say. Do you love me?”

“Before God, yes!”

“A little thing to refuse your love. Come now, it must be done!”

A shudder convulsed her whole frame; and then suddenly she stiffened,
white as ashes.

“I will drink it,” she said, “and then perhaps you will believe in
me.”

With a hand as steady as a rock he held the bowl to her lips. Her
teeth chattered on its rim a moment, and then she drank, and stopped.

“To the dregs,” he said quietly.

She took the cup from his hand, and, looking him straight in the eyes,
drained it, threw it from her, and closing her lids, lay back.

One moment he stood gazing down, then, beckoning to his attendant,
very softly left the room, locking the door behind him.

She never moved, she never opened her eyes. Still, as though death had
already seized her, she lay there, a creeping rigor seeming to
paralyse her limbs. Only her brain was busy, deliriously, unceasingly,
gnawing like a rat in an empty house. What conscious reason it
possessed was absorbed exclusively in the coming horror of her
passing. She was stunned beyond any thought of eternity, or of the
part her sinful soul must play in it. Love--the love of earth, of man,
of power--was a thing shrunk to insignificance, a dreary, discredited
enchantment. The thought of the poison that possessed her absorbed her
whole being. She had nothing left in common with that sweet, fantastic
conceit, a desirable woman. She was gold turned grey and acrid from
contact with mercury--a thing preposterous and contaminated. How was
the bane about to act, to assert its hideous mastery? Already strange
stings and tremors were apparent in her veins. Was she to be drugged
into a merciful oblivion, or wrenched and distorted out of all
semblance to humanity? Fearful memories of tales she had heard
whispered thronged into her mind. He would not have spared her the
worst; why should he, a vengeance revealed so soulless, so
calculatingly diabolic?

She felt the poison creeping up her veins. When it reached her heart,
it would seize on there, she knew, and tear her to death with its
red-hot fangs. A mortal terror throttled her; she was dying, helpless,
abandoned, alone to all eternity. With a supreme effort she struggled
momentarily out of the shadows, and uttered a choking scream.

The key turned in the lock and her husband entered.

“What is it, _ma mie_?” he said, and hurried to her side.

She turned a grey and ghastly face to him.

“The poison--O, the poison!”

“What poison?”

“The broth!”

“Foolish! It was just broth, no more. I swear it on my honour.”

“Henri!” Her hands began to tremble. He caught them in his own.

“I had hoped it would cure thy fever,” he said.

“It is cured,” she answered, and burst into overwhelming tears.

He took her into his arms. “Hush!” he said. “We have passed some
unhappy hours, _mignonne_, each for the other’s sake. Now shall we
call quits?”

 [The End]




 NOTE

These sketches, with a single exception, appeared originally, under
the covering title “Historical Vignettes,” in _Truth_, to whose Editor
the author’s thanks, for most kind permission to reprint, are given.

The fancy entitled “Fouquier-Tinville” was first published in the
_English Review_, and is here included with due acknowledgments to the
Editor.




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The author produced two books titled _Historical Vignettes_: one in
1910 (T. Fisher Unwin, London), and the other in 1912 (Sidgwick &
Jackson, London). Being the former, “1st Series” has been appended to
the title to distinguish it from the later (_i.e._ “2nd Series”).

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ bascinet/basinet,
mountain-crag/mountain crag, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

[Title Page]

Add “1st Series” to the book title. (See above).

 [End of text]






*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL VIGNETTES, 1ST SERIES ***


    

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