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.