LEONORA OF TOLEDO
“For the fruit of the blood belongs to those who bring the price of love.”
So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of Florence.
The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept, burning to pay it—indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what was her desire? Only for mercy—only for life, shameful and abandoned if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!
And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril. The Duke himself——
She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling to eternal forgetfulness!
Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands, and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.
* * * * *
Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora (daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo, niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual cavaliere-servente—in this case one Alessandro Gagi—more, it would seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence. The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was not asleep because his eyes were shut.
The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her husband.
This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard—all had been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:
“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter air will restore to you your health.”
And she had looked at him, with a sudden catch at her heart, though the flame of defiance in her still flickered.
“I thank you, Messer. For when is my doom pronounced?”
Whereat the envoy had raised one white hand ineffably.
“Alas, Madonna! Is our dear prince’s tender consideration so hurtful? Even now he waits to welcome you.”
Then she had put out entreating arms to him.
“Messer—a little time to prepare—to say goodbye. I have a son, Messer, a very little child. Look, this is the Vecchio, is it not—the Duke’s palace? I am quite alone in my corner of it, caged, shunned like a leper, yet my every exit from it is guarded. Give me this night in which to part seemingly with all I have left to love on earth.”
His laugh had sounded like the tinkle of ice on glass.
“Love? You wilfully postpone it, madam. Yet will I venture to enlarge upon my credentials to the extent your Grace demands. To-morrow——”
“I will deliver myself without fail to the sacrifice, Messer.”
And, with a patient, deprecating shrug, in which shoulders, eyebrows, and lips were all included, he had made his profound obeisance, and left her. And then!
It came upon her like a stroke, electric, instant, agonising out of numbness. She did not want to die; she had only been tricking herself in the trappings of tragedy; like the spoiled beauty she was, she had believed herself irresistible though playing with devils; and each day’s grace had but confirmed her in her wilful self-delusion. And now at last she was awake and mad with fear—confessed now to herself for the unheroic creature of selfishness and vanity which her deeds had already proclaimed her to the world.
Passion, indeed, often speaks big until it finds itself trapped. Its artificial heat is very susceptible to chills. Then, in proportion as it has burned furious, is the abjectness of its relapse. I speak of it as an emotion apart from love. This poor Leonora, in her craven frenzy, condoned in her mind the offences of the monster in whose relentless grasp she now felt herself writhing. Her leaning towards him, her desire to propitiate, was like a lust. She would swear herself his creature, his sympathiser, his fellow-passionist, if only he would accept and spare her as such. Do not blame her over-harshly. The spirit crazed with fear of darkness has no volition but towards the light. Moreover, the catalogue of the deadly sins was much confused in her time, and some crimes which in our day would be held unpardonable were avowed pleasantries. The butterfly bred to carrion is not easily weaned to honey—our own fair Purple-Emperor is an example—and grapes fattened on bullocks’ blood wither deprived of it. What wonder that this poor lovely creature, bred on corruption, confessed her tastes vitiated? It was life she wanted, and, at the last, even with Pietro da Medici for her boon-fellow. The woman was debased; yet the mother remained. It had been already dusk when the envoy withdrew. Now, with streaming eyes and labouring bosom, she hurried to spend her last night on earth by the cradle of her little Cosimo.
* * * * *
With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment, she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes, lovely submission and lovely solicitation—so she acted the part of a prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.
In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical, she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt over his face as she kissed him.
“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”
It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her, and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness, rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She was never denied; she was humoured—and watched—in everything. A subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion; but these common minds had not the savoir faire to throw off the weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they left the city behind, and came into the open country—an abandonment which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as possible.
And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers—for the month was July—and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the attendants came round to the door to help her alight.
She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and shrank back.
“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.
“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.
Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned. The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road they had come. She tried to call to them—her dry throat would not articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again. They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite alone and unprotected in that deserted place.
There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow, palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them, watching for her descent—eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule, melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and deserted.
Hush! a whisper—a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below. Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as her only resource. There was a room above—a room she knew and had slept in—and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight, she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of terror!
She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation, made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven picture—Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand seemed empty—the head had run to a point—in a sudden sick fascination she peered forward to examine it.
God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a dagger!
And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.
Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning, soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.
“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.
He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands, besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to marry again.
With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.
That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.
CHARLES IX
“Scatter them, scatter them ere the Death cometh! They are like black crows seeking carrion, and where they watch some soul is doomed to hell. From afar they spy their prey, and on the roof they gather, waiting till it fall.”
These words of a fanatic priest, denouncing the Huguenots, were for ever in his brain from the moment of the rising of the dark bird. They had rung in its haunted corridors before, had he known it; but it was the rising of the bird which had doomed it to their eternal possession. It had happened in this way:
With the first weak breaking of dawn, three pallid, guilty figures came stealing into a little chamber of the Louvre which overlooked the basse-cour notched into that angle of the palace which faced towards St. Germain l’Auxerrois. They were the King, his mother, and his brother the Duc D’Anjou. An unnatural quiet brooded over the city. It suggested the paralysed horror of a sleeper awakened to sudden consciousness of some ghastly presence in his room. They stood, in a little quaking group, peering from the window upon the courtyard and the quay of the Louvre, both in seeming dark and empty, and in seeming uncannily close beneath. What if some tigerish bound were to clear that interval, and they, the gloating Cæsars of the arena, be made the sport of their own blood-lust? The King’s hand twitched on the musquetoon he carried.
The river, a livid tongue, lapped up the blackness; the wind fell all in a moment, like a shot bird, and rustling its wings a little on the pavement, died and gave place to silence utter and profound. Suddenly in the distance a pistol rattled out.
It was followed by the bells. At first it was only the tocsin of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the shattering boom of the great bronze dome shouting death from its tower. But soon other bells took up the tale, the signal leaping on from height to height, as warning beacons are fired, and in the same breath the streets were full of armed men. They seemed to spring from the ground, like the dragon men of Thebes, and to fall as instantly to slaughter and destruction. Every second they gathered, and roaring and sweeping on, crashed in the last defences of sleep and woke the city to pandemonium. And then came the King’s madness.
He had fought against it to the end. Even in the little ghostly chamber his soul had risen, in a final revolt of sanity, against the merciless policy which had set itself deliberately to undermine his reason. But he had not the strength to escape. His hand, with the dagger in it, had been held from first to last by his mother Catherine, as mothers of a human mould direct the little stumbling hands of their children in forming letters with a pen; and not to him was due the significance of the characters which that bloody stylus had written upon the wall. His old nurse, indeed, whom next to Marie Touchet and her child he most dearly loved, was a staunch Huguenot. And he kept the wit to save her; but he could not save the good Admiral Coligny whom he honoured. His mother had her way with him at last, and was herself panic-struck by the fury of the blaze she had fuelled.
Having once tasted blood, he cried for it, for more and more until the gutters choked; insulted the fallen who appealed to him for mercy; decoyed the partisans of Condé and Navarre into his toils with cunning messages, and chuckled to see them butchered in the Court below. The roar, the rushing tumult of the quays, the yells of the pursuers, the screams of agony of the smitten, the bells and the guns, all danced in his mad veins and wrought him to frenzy. He outscreamed the victims; he fired at the corpses floating in the river; he laughed and stared alternately. Once, early in the business, a boatful of Huguenots, coming across the water from the opposite faubourg, was emptied out in a twinkling, and its human load dragged for slaughter across the stones. They had believed it all an affair of the Guisea, and had come to beg protection of the King. The King! what shadow of justification was theirs? A King of shreds and patches! He cursed their monstrous credulity; he pointed his piece and fired straight into the breast of the tallest fool of them all, who had fallen on his back on the stones immediately below. With the sound of his shot a great black bird rose straight from out the dead man, and flapping upwards with solemn wings, disappeared over the roof of the Louvre. The King threw down his musquetoon, and stood staring.
They said that it was a raven, its master’s constant companion, his pet, his mascot, which he seldom let from his bosom when he went abroad. The King did not contradict them; the mortal distress in him found even some solace in the fable. But in his deep heart he knew that the apparition had been none other than the black soul of the Huguenot, and that it had flown to settle on the roof, to watch for the passing of another soul, his own, already doomed by it to hell. “Ere the death cometh!” From that moment, as he believed, he was marked down; and the thought of how he might elude the bird on the roof never left him. If he could only circumvent it, he might yet be saved.
He was sitting with his suite, days after the massacre, in a chamber of the palace, when a sudden uproar overhead startled them all. It was evening, but the tapers were not yet lit. The sound was hideous—a sound as of a multitude of lost spirits screaming and blaspheming in the upper air. It was the eve of St. Bartholomew all over again, the pent-up terrors of it broken loose and re-enacted, Even in their graves, it seemed, the ghosts could not be held down, but had burst their bloody cerements and risen in an uncontrollable agony of memory. Where would it end? Where could it? There was no mowing down spirits by sword and fire; they had the upper hand now, and the minds and reasons of the living were their ghastly prey. Rising, as they looked at one another with grey faces, the group one and all sought the open air.
What was it? A black cloud of crows, no more; a flock in constant motion, circling, settling and resettling—calling for a second glut of victims. They had learned to imitate the voices of the massacre, screeching, sobbing, praying—a horrible thing. They were the souls of the murdered, ministers of hell, come to await their turn on the roof. The King said no word, but that same night, after he had slept a little from exhaustion, he rose suddenly in a horror too great for speech, and sat staring and listening. His good old nurse hurried to him; he whispered to her, Did she not hear it? Those haunted chambers of his brain were full of wild trampings, and execrations, and the hubbub of a mad conflict. He declared there was a riot in the town, that he would have his guard dispatched to end it, that he wanted no more murder. They returned in a little to say that the whole city slept peaceful in the moonlight, though it was true that the air was curiously agitated, as by the hot vapour above an oven. He dismissed them, and dropped his weary head upon his nurse’s bosom. He was her child again, her nursling, her little frightened dreamer waking in the dark.
“They shall not touch thee, Charlot,” she whispered. “Thou didst not mean it, thou.”
For seven nights was this repeated, the noises, the horror, the collapse; and then the crows departed. Like a black cloud they gathered in a moment, and drifted away northwards to wait for the coming of the Armada.
“Are they all gone?” asked the pallid King. He would trust to nobody but his nurse. She went out, and looked along the ridge of the roof, and returned.
“All but one,” she said; “and he is hurt belike, and will not last out the night.”
“That is the one,” he answered, “and he will last out the night of my life. O, nurse! he waiteth for my soul, and, so he marketh its passage hence, he will seize it, and I am damned for ever.”
“That then shall he never do, Charlot,” she exclaimed; “for I will have him shot here and now.”
The King shook his head; and, indeed, he expressed what he knew. The crow was never shot; the bird seemed to bear a charmed life; but all of a sudden one day it was gone.
To say that he breathed again would imply but a qualified respite, inasmuch as his every breath was a pain to him. Through all that autumn and through all the ensuing year he was a dying man, and in the May that followed he lay down on his bed for the last time. At the end he spoke little but with the shapes that haunted him. He lay on his couch, wrapped in a robe that, for all its lightness, it hurt his chest to lift. He suffered intolerably, both mentally and physically. His faithful little wife, whose love he had neglected, came and sat by his side, silent, with large haunted eyes, and prayed for him, and wept secretly, and blew her little red nose softly to explain her need for a handkerchief. And Marie Touchet came with their child, and wondered how, at the last, the wreck of sweet royalty differed so little from all other human wrecks. He made his peace with these, but he could not with himself. The vision of the crow was eternally in his mind; his atom of trust in the strong faith of his nurse was his solitary grain of comfort in a world of terrors. He floated in crimson streams, and rose choking from them, foul and horrible. “Ah, nurse,” he sighed perpetually, “what blood and what murders!”
She was always ready with the faith, with the triumphant word that touched like a healing judgment.
“Let them that called the feast answer for the reckoning.”
And so the hours crept on to the end.
One day, as she watched alone beside him, he fell asleep. He had made his testament that morning, had committed the sore destinies of his kingdom to his mother and his brother of Navarre, and, exhausted with the effort, had fallen back on his pillow, breathing out the last words he was ever to utter on earth:
“I thank my God that I leave no male child behind me to wear my crown!”
It was as still as death. The sunshine came through the open window, and threw a patch of light on the floor. As the tired nurse sat watching this, half hypnotised by the glow, of a sudden she saw it blotted by a soft shadow. She raised her eyes quickly, and there on the windowsill, black and motionless, was perched a great crow.
She did not even start; but she turned her head and looked at the King’s face. The sign of the awful change was overspreading it; the nostrils pulsed; the fingers below picked feebly at the silken robe. In a few moments, she saw, he would be gone. She rose quickly, and moved across to the window. The dark bird never stirred. There seemed a deep, unearthly movement in the sleek gloom of its eyes, and that was all. It was absorbed in watching, but not her. She flung out her hands, and caught it in a grip of iron.
“Charlot!” she cried, “my babe! Die while I hold him!”
There was a rustle behind her, a sudden cry, a drumming as of feet running, speeding from the earth and life; and then all fell silent. But not the bird. He leaped and battled in her hands. His beak was an inky dagger, his talons rakes of steel. His screams seared her heart—they seemed uttered in it; his pinions beat on her brain. But she held on, driving in her nails, her teeth set and her resolution. She felt the blood pouring down her wrists, and she cared no whit, so long as she could keep the horror from pursuing her nursling. And presently the struggles slackened, and she felt the bird die in her hands.
Holding it thus away from her, she went to the window and flung it forth. It dropped without sound, like a shadow that had suddenly been blown from her brain. She looked at her hands—they were unhurt; at the King—he lay with a smile on his dead lips.
THE KING’S CHAMPION
“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the goronation?”
It was his Majesty King William III. who spoke, crumpled back into his big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from the nest of an enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive frame, and legs like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might have thought, to carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He appeared, indeed, to be always lost in it, and as if just on the point of finding his way out. Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would hardly have sufficed for his spirit.
The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch mynheers—D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject, long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.
It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor, offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens, and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied commode of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away, melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before any one could think of interposing.
The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion, had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and re-deliver his cartel.
But it had not passed unobserved by the King himself or by those around him. Extinguished as he had appeared to be in his panoply of purple and ermine and embroidered scarlet, looking, as he had risen at the great table to drink his Champion’s health, for all the world like a little over-swaddled Greek Icon elevated against a background of glittering stained glass, his diminutive Majesty had had an ear and an eye for everything within the longest range of either. His birdlike optics, bright as twin buttons sunk amid that pomp of raiment, had been fully cognisant of the little episode, and had watched the after-approach of his Champion with an unwinking interest, which had seemed to concentrate itself to such a challenging focus on the flushed face of the knight as he came near, that that doughty Paladin had fallen into confusion and had something botched the business of the toast that followed. However, he had managed, though crestfallen, to retire presently with sufficient aplomb and his perquisite of a golden beaker; and there for the moment the matter had ended.
“Sir Charles Dymoke,” began Lord Halifax——
“Who is dat man?” interrupted the King. “Vat is his title to the bost?”
“It is claimed by him, sire,” answered the peer, “in his right of the Manor of Scrivelsby. The office was originally deputed, I understand, to Sir Richard de Marmyon by the Conqueror, and hath descended by virtue of that tenure to this day. Sir Charles is its legitimate representative.”
“Well,” said the King, “broduce him before us.”
“Why,” said the Marquis feebly, “that is the odd thing. Sir Charles is nowhere to be found.”
The three Dutch mynheers uttered guttural sounds in their throats, and looked at one another and at the King significantly.
His Majesty’s brows knotted.
“Dat is very vonny,” he said. “Not to be vound, mein vrent?”
“It has been ascertained, your Majesty,” said Lord Denby wearily—he was a picked white bone of a man, with no stomach and yet a perpetual stomach-ache, which naturally aggrieved him—“that Sir Charles rode, immediately after the ceremony, to the ‘Cock’ hostelry in Tothill Street, whence, having disencumbered himself of his panoply, he continued his way to the riding-school of one Dobney, near Islington, where he delivered up his horse and disappeared. Since when he has neither returned to his inn nor vouchsafed the least token of his existence.”
The King considered the matter very glumpily within himself. It appeared a trifle; yet trifles might easily be under-estimated in the existing state of things. The incident was something or nothing—a mere meaningless frolic, or a challenge to his title bearing a certain significance. The land swarmed with Jacobites of more or less power and prominence. What if one of them were to meet and defeat his Champion? How, in that event, would his claim stand? What was the procedure? It was an odd contingency, and he put it rather acridly to my Lord Privy Seal.
“He drow de gage; anodder agcept it; dey vight; my man vall. Vat is to vollow?” he demanded.
“Ja! Dat is vat strike idself into me bom-bom,” said Schomberg the warrior.
Lord Halifax smiled rather sheepishly. He was a large, tolerant soul of sixty, repudiating all sentiment and subject to much. He had been called the “Trimmer”; but, then, no man of humour can ever be a man of convictions. Kind, witty, and cynical, he was yet so fond of Reason that he could make a fool of himself with her. He was even worked upon to do so in the present case.
“There is positively no precedent, sire,” he said. “To my certain knowledge the thing has never happened before.”
“Bot zhould it jost zo happen?” insisted his master.
“Ach!” said D’Auverquerque penetratingly.
“With deference, sire,” said his lordship, “is it not something premature to assume any hostile intent in the matter? The good lady——”
“Posh!” put in the King irritably. “Neither goot nor lady.”
“Zo it strike itself into mein head bom-bom,” said Schomberg.
“Dat dress vas a masgerade,” said William—“a vact, we zhould haf gonsidered, blain to the stupidest indelligence.”
“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Lord Halifax nervously.
“Vell, sir—vat den?”
“Ach! vat den?” demanded D’Auverquerque cunningly.
“I vill dell your lordship,” said Schomberg. “Dere was a vine swordsman gonzealed under dose bettigoats.”
The Lord Privy Seal, considering the subject, woke to a certain trepidation.
“It is impossible,” he admitted, “to avoid attaching a measure of importance to the affair, or to gauge its consequences should it be carried through. Surely Sir Charles could not be so foolish as to risk a serious encounter? But he must be found and warned at all costs.”
His mood communicated itself to the others. The matter began to assume with them all an increasingly sinister aspect. Majesty was not yet so safe on its throne that omens could be disregarded. The King, prompt and tireless, for all his sickly constitution, in business—the little man who was to regain for England her reputation for workaday sanity—had yet, at this beginning, a vast estate to recover from chaos, and his path was beset with perils. The country was still in two minds, and each distracted; a trifle might upset the balance. Deliberating in this sort, a species of hysteria communicated itself after a time from one to another of the little Council, until it definitely came to perceive in the episode a daring ruse for bringing about a reaction in popular sentiment. What if the meeting were actually to occur, and the Champion to be overthrown? It was not to be doubted that the event would have been provided for, and those engaged in bringing it about forearmed. Defeat might result in riot, and riot in revolution. Arrived at that pitch of the debate, the six gentlemen, including his Majesty, were all speaking together in considerable agitation.
It was the personality of the mysterious Mohock, once convicted of masculinity, which most exercised their minds. He was certainly an individual of importance, as so momentous a mission would hardly have been entrusted to a nonentity. But who? A dozen names suggested themselves. Berwick, Tyrconnel, Lord Henry Fitzjames, the ex-monarch’s natural son, Marlborough himself, and others. It was Zuylestein, speaking for the first and last time, who finally put the spark to all this accumulating tow. “Vat,” he said, “if it is James himselv, zegretly gom over from St. Germains and resolved upon venturing dis bigduresque abbeal to de poblic?”
“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg.
He rose, Halifax rose, they all rose, and faced the King.
“Ik dank U, mijnheer,” said his Majesty; “it is a very blausible suggestion.”
The words were equivalent to a bid to action. The Council broke up hurriedly, and within an hour the Dutch troops had been beaten to arms, the militia called out, the magistrates warned, and the whole city placed under a surveillance of the most searching description. It was at this momentous pass, when panic was in the air, that Sir Charles Dymoke walked unconcerned into the “Cock” tavern, in Tothill Street, and was immediately arrested by the guard set to watch that hostelry, and conveyed in a state of complete stupefaction to Whitehall. He was taken at once before the King sitting in Council.
“Vere haf you been?” demanded William sternly.
“Your Majesty!” gasped the Champion, a sturdy gallant of middle age.
“Answer, sir,” said the monarch—“and vidout eguivocation.”
“I have been with a friend,” stammered Sir Charles, all amazement.
“Ach!” exclaimed his Majesty sarcastically. “The vrow, vas it, vat returnt you your gage in the Hall yesterday?”
“Certainly not, sire,” said the Champion, the flush of outrage on his cheek.
“Not?” said the King. “Who vas she, den, dat voman?”
“The wife of Dobney, the horse-tamer, sire.”
“The vife—vat! Vat had she said to you?”
“She said, your Majesty, ‘Didn’t I warn you not to throw it down in front of her nose, unless you want her to kneel and pick it up?’”
“She? Who?”
“The mare, sire. She performs at Islington.”
“Your Majesty,” said the Lord Privy Seal very softly, “shall we thank Sir Charles and proceed to the order of the day?”
“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg under his breath.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
“What was that?”
“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”
“Methought it was a footstep.”
“No, madam.”
“There, heard you it not—the sound of some one running?”
“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”
“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”
“Your Highness is overwrought.”
“Will some one speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”
The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.
“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”
The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees and over the palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed no sign of life anywhere.
Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood. The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.
Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her. She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if they were no more than inarticulate animals—wistful dumb affections on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their unconscious understanding.
Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awe-struck a moment, then bent and whispered to her mother: “O, madam, the Tower gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”
The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions, self-communings.
“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh—he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no courtier—the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”
The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed her.
“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.
“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too honest—the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”
“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day of February.”
She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the horror of this coming day had brooded—this ghastly morning when on Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex—he was but thirty-four—was to pay the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one tranced.
“Never flattered,” she repeated—“a bad policy where a woman reigns. The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or writes.”
“Yes, madam—O, yes, indeed!”
The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.
“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”
“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”
“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead—no longer dub my mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with the years, striving to slough its vesture, like a snake. A fool, that cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper. Shall I not be Dian still to him?”
She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge—an old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened teeth—little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories. Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.
“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.
“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown. When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless woman—barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly alone—no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince and curst to flattery?”
She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.
“Truth!” she cried—“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned and struck it down.”
“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.
“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think you?”
“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare, that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy with him because he saw your Highness so distorted—not to extenuate the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon me, madam!”
The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears regarded the import of her speech.
“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on his forehead, child?”
“O, madam! Your Grace!”
“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash and headstrong fool! To think to overbear us!—teach our displeasure a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp, and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord—his lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy—a man of men, brave, honest, generous, and a fool.”
“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”
“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love that made him but to ruin?”
“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”
“What for?”
“The ruin followed on the treachery.”
“Was he a traitor?”
“O, Madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot and league to win him the succession?”
“Yes, he’s a traitor.”
“Your Grace forgive me.”
“And I’m a woman.”
“Madam!”
“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”
“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, Madam.”
“I swear I heard him.”
“No, Madam.”
“Pride! Will he not meet us so far—but to crave our clemency? He knows the way, and, not taking it, must die. What o’clock is it? O, God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready. Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”
She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek; she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition beyond their ken:
“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long? A viper in our bosom—O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So pale?—the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you not send it—prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O, I have waited, dear my love—have waited dying for this token. Speak—utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel so and bow thy comely head——”
A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her hands before her eyes:
“O, God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”
Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.
“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.
“Your Majesty!”
“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is he?”
“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”
The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.
JANE SHORE
It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones about St. Paul’s Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare footsteps that were to follow.
It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag, soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass, wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement, waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul’s, surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy, or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps to it.
Whether from the weather, or the day, or the occasion, the crowd was a curiously quiet one. The weight of the new King’s authority, no doubt, rested upon it heavily. A general air of numbness and stupefaction appeared to prevail. Events of late had come, matured, and yielded to others so rapidly. Edward’s death in April; the disappearance of the young princes, his sons, in June; the new coronation in July; Buckingham’s short abortive conspiracy and execution in October; finally, in this very first month of the new year, the passing of the Titulus Regius, or Act which bastardised the late King’s issue and confirmed the crown to his usurper—such was the astonishing tale. Nothing was evident for the moment but that this crooked fellow could see clearly and strike quickly; that he was bold, unscrupulous, and strong. He was not unpopular for that, or for certain manly attributes which the crowd admire. The difficulty was, as in all sudden coups d’état, to adapt oneself politicly to the fresh conditions, while awaiting security from retaliation by the old. The twisted King was not so firm in his seat as a Pope of Rome. There was a certain risk in subscribing even to his pleasantries, among which the present show might be counted.
No one had properly believed in the worser guilt of poor Mistress Shore, the late Prince’s naughty, good-hearted mistress. The indictment which charged her with complicity in the asserted attempt of Lord Hastings, her second protector, to destroy the present King’s life by witchcraft, had succeeded in proving nothing but her lovable qualities of mind and heart; whereby the Court was obliged to fall back upon her frailty, which was notorious and undeniable. It made no point, indeed, of the real tragedy of her sinning, which lay in her desertion of a young husband—a good, honest, uncorrupt fellow, a prosperous goldsmith of Lombard Street—whose happiness she had done her best to wreck, and whose name she had not had the grace to exchange for another. It was really only concerned, at bottom, with proving what an obnoxious libertine had been the fourth Edward, and how sweetly the crooked one shone by contrast. And so, to make all this clear, it washed, Pilate-like, its hands of the beautiful frailty, and handed her over to the Churchmen for chastisement. They were prompt to deliver it, and not altogether inhumanly. The concubine was sentenced to make public confession of her fault, in the prescriptive deshabille of sheet and candle, and thereafter depart in peace and mend her ways. The penalty, in fact, was in process at the moment.
There was not much gossip. The crowd, penned within the multitude of low buildings which surrounded the old Cathedral, showed more curiosity, even sympathy, than hostility towards the delinquent. Its constituents were much the same as when it had listened six months before to Dr. Shaw’s famous sermon at the Cross, and that truckling divine had first broached the question of the last two Edwards’ illegitimacy. It had acquiesced then, in the insensibility following exhaustion; it had not yet recovered from that condition. This present matter, or the sin which had procured it, was not of a nature wont to excite much comment or reproof; but the undoubted popularity of the usurper was confusing all issues. It supposed he had a reason for humiliating pretty Mrs. Shore, who had been as notable for her kindness as her beauty; and so it accepted his ruling as part of the perplexity of things, which some day must be going to lighten.
She came out in a minute, a half-dozen of acolytes preceding, a group of priests following her. As she appeared on the steps, a waft of wind took the hem of the white sheet, which was her sole drapery, and blew it aside from her knees. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed to an instant pink, which never thereafter deserted it. She clapped down her hand in a haste which extinguished the taper she held; whereat a cold voice halted the procession, and she must stand in her shame while the light was being rekindled. And as they came on again she hung her head and her lip trembled.
“Her stature,” says an eye-witness, “was meane [signifying short]; her haire of a dark yellow; her face round and full; her eye grey, delicate harmony between each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s colour; her body white and smooth ... she went in countenance and pase demure, so womanlie, that albeit she were out of all araie save her kirtle onlie, yet went she so faire and lovelie, namelie, while the woondering of the people cast a comelier rud in her cheeks (of which she before had most misse), that hir great shame was hir much praise among those that were more amorous of hir bodie than curious of hir soule. And manie good folks that hated hir living (and glad were to see sin corrected), yet pitied they more hir penance than rejoised therein, when they considered that the King procured it more of a corrupt intent, than anie virtuous affection.”
“Proper she was and fair; nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would, have wished her somewhat higher”—no romancer can better that description, and so it shall stand.
She came down the steps so shamed that she seemed insensible to the weather. It was snowing again, and the flakes kissed her pink feet as if in pity, and kissed her neck, and cried into her cold bosom. She tried to shake her long, loose hair before her face.
Round by the north side they turned; and so to the pulpit, where she knelt; and all the way the people were silent. And the Bishop mounted into the tribune, and, sheltered in his snuggery, delivered a long harangue on the iniquity of loose living. And at the end he demanded of her if she confessed and repented; whereat she answered, in a voice all little and shrunken: “I do own my fault, and ask pardon for it.” At which he raised his tone and bade her depart where she would, and mend her ways and live cleanly; only first he pronounced the King’s mandate, that no man should relieve or succour her on pain of death, which set many marvelling over the reason which could deliver with one hand and deprive with the other.
Now, Jane Shore rose like one dazed, and the lighted taper fell from her hand, and she looked hither and thither, as if seeking where she could escape in her misery and confusion. And all of a sudden the cold seemed to smite her, and she gathered the sheet about her tender limbs and gave a single cry like a lamb. And in its very utterance she had a desperate inspiration, which was to follow a tall man who all this time had stood close by among the crowd. Something—the shadow of a gesture, the look in his eyes, close under which his hand had gathered his cloak—had seemed to invite her, and when he moved, without appearing to pursue him she followed—on the road to clean living. But was she the first or the only woman helplessly abandoned to the paradoxes of life?
The crowd made way for her, and no man durst follow. Soon she was upon the outskirts of the throng, soon quit of it altogether. Some whispered ribaldries, some rude touches she had to endure, and that was all. She believed that the lure would not have let her lose sight of him; and sure enough there he was going on in front, a noble by token of his jewelled bonnet, with the long pendant gathered from it about his neck, and the rich scarlet hose which showed under his cloak. She thought well, desperate as she was, not to compromise him, and she followed at a distance. He went round by the deserted east end of the church, through the place that was called Old Change, and so, turning sharp down towards the river, made a sudden twist among the confusion of buildings there, and wheeled into a narrow way known as Sermon Lane, where he loitered just sufficiently to enable her to see him disappear into a certain house. Clutching her sheet about her, and watchful of suspicious eyes, she stole on, hesitated a moment, and hurried in his footsteps. She may have been observed or not; in any case she was a contagion whom all avoided. The door closed behind her as she entered and sank against the wall.
“Rise, madam,” he whispered. He was close beside her. His voice was quick and strange.
She burst into tears at once, passionate, heart-rending, exhausting. He let her weep herself out, while she crouched against the wall. Presently, the storm subsiding, she looked half up.
“Will you not give me your cloak?” she said. “I am cold.”
“For no other reason?” he asked.
She slunk down again.
“No,” she said. “That were a poor pretence, and meet for your mockery. I must barter a private place with you against raiment. Even a whore must go covered.”
He stooped and took her, unresisting, in his arms, though she held her face averted. He carried her impassive up the stairs of that dark, unknown house, and all the way there was passion in his hold and grief in his labouring sighs. She knew that they had entered a warm room, that he had shut the door, had placed her gently on a couch by the fire.
“Jane!” he said.
She uttered a quick, wild cry, and started erect, so that the sheet fell from her shoulders.
“Cover them, in mercy to me,” he said.
She stared at him a moment, then went into a sudden hysteric laugh. It stabbed him to the heart to hear her, for her voice had ever been merry and sweet.
“O!” she cried, “that a woman should be so used by her own husband!”
“Nay,” said he—“but that I might know you still not dead to shame.”
The ripple of her laugh stopped as it had begun.
“Why are you so richly dight, Harry?” she said.
“A lure,” he answered, “to lead thee hither. Who would win a King’s mistress must borrow peacock’s plumes.”
She shivered a little, looking down, then whispered hoarse:
“Well, I am well answered. Yet you look like a noble. O, Harry, speak like one!”
“God forbid it, Jane! I will speak like Harry Shore.”
“He loved me once.”
“Aye; he is risking death to prove it.”
She looked up quickly; but before she could speak the door opened, and a little boy peeped into the room. He was caught away in a moment by an unseen hand, and the door closed; but in that instant the woman had snatched her drapery about her nakedness, shamed as she had never been yet.
“A wretch!” she said, her face on fire.
“Saw’st thou his blue eyes and pretty curls?” said the goldsmith. “He is son to my master-setter, whose house this is. I had dreamed once of such a babe, mine own and thine.”
She rose and crept to him, looking in his face. It was a bronzed and honest one, though drawn with pain.
“Harry,” she whispered, “find me clothes and bid me begone—in memory of our once kisses, Harry.”
“They are here,” he said. “Everything is prepared for thee—the means to lead a blameless life henceforth. Summon the woman when I’m gone. I would not have them say I left my wife to starve.”
He put out his arms, passion in his eyes, but withdrew them resolutely.
“Nay,” he said; “in heaven—not yet.”
He fell back a little, and cried out suddenly:
“Your foot, Jane! Poor foot; it bleeds!”
He motioned her to the couch, knelt, lifted the wounded limb, and with his napkin staunched the trickling blood. He held it to his breast, and at last, with a long, yearning sigh, put his lips to it.
“This hath atoned,” he said—“so far I shame myself,” and he rose. “Little sinful wife,” he whispered, “he loved thee once; he loves thee ever; else could he leave thee thus? Now, let me never hear thy name again—for love’s sake do I ask it.”
She had buried her face in the cushions. And there she lay, long after he had gone, weeping out her soul.
THE CHAPLAIN OF THE TOWER
“My son!”
The kneeling figure started slightly, hearing the whisper in its ear, and half turned its face.
“Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Ricardum, my son.”
The Benedictine had stolen list-footed from among the shadows of the great pillars, and stood, a blacker shadow, bending over the solitary worshipper in the darkening chapel of St. John. It was a breathless August evening of the year 1483, and not a sound penetrated to this remote fastness of the Keep.
“God save the King, Father!” answered the suppliant. It was Brackenbury himself, Lieutenant of the Tower, and a sore matter of conscience had brought him to this place. He rose instantly to his feet.
“I say it with all my heart,” quoth he. “God save the King—from numbering himself among his worst enemies.”
“Sh—sh!” whispered the chaplain. “Sh—sh! good Sir John.” He put a finger to his lips, and, motioning the other forth, held him on the outer threshold.
“To ensure the pure succession,” he said low. “This bastard boy, Sir John—a canker that would eat into the State. No safety but in his excision.”
“For the second time,” replied the knight sternly, “take my answer. Question, if you will, the blood that courses in his veins; question not mine. That stoops to no midnight butchery.”
He waved his hand, as if in appeal or protest, towards the chapel, and turned to go. But the priest detained him.
“A moment, good Sir John. The King wills it.”
“He must find a baser instrument.”
“Well so,” said the Benedictine, “well so, good Sir John. Only keep your back to us, saving your honour, and see nothing for a little space.”
The Lieutenant, without another word, strode away, his harness clanging in the vaults.
The covert priest stood listening, a smile, small and hungry, on his lips. He hungered, indeed, had always hungered, for many things—preferment, power, the good immoral gifts of life and indulgences other than Papal. And suddenly, amazingly, it appeared, they were all come within his grasp. He had only to persuade this master of his to a certain deed, by absolving him for it before committed, and a mitre awaited him. It had been whispered in his ear, as he had whispered in Sir John’s. The abbot of his own Order at Westminster was deeply involved with the Queen-Dowager, to whom he had given sanctuary. The crooked King disliked people who sheltered his enemies. A motion of his hand and the chaplain was in the abbot’s place. The seat awaited him—it was stupendous, actual—and, while reaching for it, to be baulked by a scruple of conscience not his own! The thing was intolerable.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! His lips watered, thinking of it; his eyelids blinked and reddened. He was a lean, famished-looking body, with sharp-set features, and a smile perpetually on his mouth between propitiatory and craving. One might have counted his ribs, and never guessed at the dreams of surfeit that wantoned under them. He turned and crept away.
That night a messenger rode from the Tower, following in the wake of the royal progress northwards. He found the King where he lay at Warwick Castle, and, entering to him at midnight, whispered of Sir John’s obstinate density and of the chaplain’s better understanding. A few minutes later Sir James Tyrrell, Master of the King’s Horse, started on his way back to London. He took with him a brace of confidants, fat trusty fellows, whose names should be pilloried throughout the ages. They were John Dighton and Miles Forrest, sinewy miscreants, as callous to suffering as Smithfield butchers. He took also a royal warrant, entrusting to him, for one night only, the custody of the fortress, its keys and passwords; and finally he took, for his personal comfort in the business, a sure conviction of his own damnation. Reaching the Tower, he displayed his commission, locked away all troublesome witnesses, emptied the outer ward, to which the public had access, of its loiterers, and had the place to himself. Having done which, he hastened with his two ruffians to the gate-house where the princes lay.
It was a close, windless night, with thunder brooding over the river. Every stone that slipped under the assassin’s feet jarred his nerves intolerably. He muttered to himself as he walked, wringing his wet forehead. The shadow of a figure that rose upon him from the shadowy porch brought an oath from his lips.
“Who’s that? Answer, and be damned!”
“Hist, good Sir James!” whispered the crawling priest. “Curse not thine own absolver.”
“A blasphemy,” answered Tyrrell; “or God Himself is a villain. Come,” he said intolerantly: “show us the way to hell.”
The Benedictine crossed himself.
“Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordium tuam,” he murmured. “Direct our stumbling feet who seek the light by dubious ways. Give me the key, soldier. It were well that I ascended first to report if the children sleep. The better for them, the better for us.”
Bending under a low doorway in the wall of the passage, he disappeared. Tyrrell let out a quaking groan.
“Trip his heels, trip his heels, O, devil my master!” he sighed between his teeth.
The shadow went up the stairs, paused at a certain door, fitted a key into its lock with stealthy caution, listened, and glided into the room beyond. It was small, and fast locked in stone ten feet in thickness. There were windows front and back. Through the former a cresset burning on St. Thomas’s Tower across the ward cast a red flicker upon a couple of pallets standing near side by side against the wall. A sound of unconscious breathing came from these. The evil shadow crept on and stooped.
Blood on the young white face! Fool! it was the painting of the cresset. This deed might seem a pitiful thing were it not for the hunger that seemed a pitifuller. To be abbot—to be bishop—to be cardinal even! Who knew? He glanced down. His own inky cassock was smeared with the scarlet fire. To wade through blood to the Sacred College! Why not? The end expiated all means thereto. There were a score of precedents to justify him. The Abbacy once gained, his power for good would be multiplied a hundredfold. He raised his eyes. The red glare seemed to fill them from within. Something in his interposing shadow appeared to make the younger child behind him uneasy. He stirred and moaned in his sleep. Presently he murmured, with a whimper:
“Take it away, mother!”
He was always her Saxon darling, with the head of gold. She used to call his eyes like cockles in the corn. The shadow stole apart, and, with a sigh, he breathed warm again.
To be abbot! What surer justification of his right than to dispatch these innocent souls to God? They would thank him in the end for much peril spared them. He hesitated no longer, but, leaving the door ajar, descended as he had come.