“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.