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 anyone 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 underestimated 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 masguerade,” 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.
George I
“Halt!” The voice of an officer rang out in the heavy twilight, and with a sudden scream of brakes and jangle of harness the cavalcade came to a stand.
“Tell the Herr von Gastein his Majesty desires to speak with him.” The name ran up the long line, quick and sharp, like a rattle of musketry, and passed out of hearing of him who had uttered it. “Tell the Herr Captain to come at once.”
The Herr Captain was already, on the word, spurring back from the head of the cortège, which was of royal extent. It stood upon a flat road in a flat country, covering more ground than and including almost as many human souls as a modern mail-train. There was the King’s coach for principal item—a veritable little room slung on straps and drawn by eight horses; and there were carriages—seven or eight, and each holding as many people—for his retinue, and baggage-wagons, and a troop of fifty sabres to escort the whole. It took so much, or more, to carry this little corpulent apoplectic on his annual visit to Herrenhausen, whither he had already travelled to within a league or so of Osnabrück and a much-needed night’s rest.
The Captain von Gastein, having dismounted and thrown his reins to a groom, stood at stiff attention by the coach door. He was a patient, somewhat exhausted-looking man of fifty, spare-bodied, and with stone-blue eyes which rather matched the dusty Hanoverian blue of his uniform. His expression at the moment was one of a quiet fatality, as if the summons had not been altogether unforeseen by him.
A preternatural silence seemed to have succeeded the tumult of hoofs and wheels. There was a soundless blink of lightning in the sky, and a windmill on the flat roadside blackened and paled alternately in its flicker, as if it palpitated. It was late June, and the air seemed to have come out of a limekiln. The dust rolled up into it began to settle down sluggishly.
The door of the great travelling-coach opened, and a little bewigged gentleman, who had been peering from behind the glass, descended. His manner was dry, self-important, professional; he was the King’s English physician.
“His Majesty, my dear Captain,” he whispered, “is in a strange mood. You are commanded to ascend and converse with him—you may guess why. The affair of last year—you understand? Old associations are reawakened, old injuries re-exposed—you were intimately acquainted with their subject. Bear in mind that this sad event has interposed itself between his last departure from and his present revisit to his paternal dominions, and venture upon nothing in the nature of a reminder. If you find him fanciful, excited——”
A querulous voice, breaking from the interior of the carriage, interrupted him:
“Der Herr Jesus! What is all this chatter? Tell the man to enter.”
The physician, placing a warning finger on his lips, skipped to one of the supplementary coaches; the Captain von Gastein climbed into the royal vehicle. A postillion put up the steps; the door was closed, the word given, and the cavalcade lurched on. “Sit,” motioned the King; and the Herr Captain, with what steadiness he could command, settled himself on the edge of the broad seat backing upon the horses, and awaited, rigid and upright.
He was quite alone with his Majesty, and there was plenty of room for them both. The interior of the coach was like a cabinet, and luxuriously upholstered. There were accommodations for writing, card-playing, shaving, coffee-making, and other conveniences. The pace was leisurely, the motion restful; the great wheels turned outside the windows with little apparent sound. The King of England lay in his padded corner opposite, a very weary, moodish little old man. His cheeks bagged, his eyes goggled, strained, and anxious; the silk travelling-cloak in which he was wrapped only partly concealed his immense corpulence, and his thick legs and stumpy feet dangled short of the floor. His head was unwigged, and enveloped in a close cap with a fur border which came down over his eyes.
The officer, observant of everything, for all the respectful rigidity of his vision, could not but be conscious of a certain feeling of repulsion in this his first close contact with the prince to whose unwelcome service, in one most tragic direction, he had devoted the best twenty-five years of his life. Twenty-five years it was since he had been ordered, a young impecunious captain, to the lonely Castle of Ahlden on the Aller, where lived, already seven years incarcerated, the beautiful young wife of the then electoral Prince George—Sophia Dorothea, accused, rightly or wrongly, of misconduct with a Swedish adventurer. She was fair; unhappy; her husband had not loved her; the cold cruelty of his temperament had been confessed in this his consignment of her to a living grave. Had she not lain in his arms, borne him children? Gastein had needed no more to inflame his chivalry. Thenceforth he had given himself to the service of this lady, to ameliorate, to the best of his power, her bitter fate. His partiality, his sympathy, being, no doubt, reported, had kept him poor and unpromoted. For a quarter of a century he had shared his princess’s exile, and had only returned to the world when death had ended that, less than a twelve-month ago. After thirty-two years! And this was the unlovely Rhadamanthus who had condemned her, this little, wheezy, pot-bellied old frog of a man, who had become Elector of Hanover and King of England in the interval! The Captain had been educated to the right divine succession; but something monstrous in the picture struck him. His convictions and his emotions hurt one another in their efforts at a reconciliation. It was somehow not right that tragic beauty should lie at the mercy of this commonplace. He sat as stiff as a ramrod.
It is one of the most grotesque privileges of royalty to command silence. No one must address it unless addressed. Then, at its word, its gesture, the empty brass pot ceases to tinkle or the golden vessel overflows. This seems an unnatural impost, like taxing a man’s daylight or his drinking-water. It gives an uncanny self-possession to the mortal who levies it. The little swollen tub of a creature, glowering in his corner, mutely discussed the figure opposite for as long as it pleased him, with no more concern, probably less, than he would have shown in regarding a black-beetle; and when he spoke at last it was even with some grudging in his cold, guttural voice.
“You are of the escort, then, mein Herr?”
The Captain, stiffening yet a trifle, saluted. “As your Majesty commanded,” he said.
The other shrugged fretfully.
“I am glad,” he said, “to find something surviving to your sense of duty.”
Von Gastein made no answer. He ought not; he could not, indeed. That sense of warring emotions hurt him like a violent indigestion.
The King, for some minutes, condescended to speak no more, but sat looking out of the window upon the darkening flats and the white ribbon of the road reeling under him. What was in his mind? He had always declared, for some reason, that he would not long survive his wife; and she had died six months ago. Had he somehow cheated Fate—or might he have cheated it had he remained in England? This was his first visit to his patrimony since her death. Her death, her released spirit—turn the coach!
No, his beloved Herrenhausen! The stout little Guelph was no coward for all his love of life and good-living. A murrain on this old wives’ trash of spectres and premonitions! He glanced at the figure opposite—it sat up rigid and grey like a signpost—and, with a scowl, looked out of the window again.
Thirty-two years—a woman of sixty, and she had been a fresh, blooming young wife of twenty-eight when he had consigned her to her living death! Much water, as they said in England, had flowed under London Bridge during that interval—the highways of life had been paved and repaved. Thirty-two years! The Schloss was a dead, dreary place, situated in a dead, dreary country—a mere lonely manor-house in the wilds, good enough for a month’s stay; but—thirty-two years! Gott in Himmel! And she had been vivacious, worldly, sparkling with the glory of being and doing when he had last seen her!
A vision of the castle, as he had known it once or twice in the old, far-off days, rose before him. He saw again the leagues of flat marshland which surrounded it, the reedy river crawling by its walls, the grey alders shivering in the wind, and the wheeling of lonely plovers. He saw the sad towers, the cold, undecorated rooms, the windows looking out upon the lifeless waste of road. The road! the livid unfruitful highway, upon which, for hours at a time, it had been said, dry burning eyes had been set, despairing for the mercy, the deliverance, which never came! For thirty-two years! God in heaven! while the frost of age slowly settled on the beautiful eyes, the deep black hair, the breaking heart! With a writhe, as of physical suffering, the old man turned from his window.
“The life was dull at Schloss Ahlden?” he said.
“Dull, sire.”
The correct, impassive attitude of the Captain maddened while it half cowed him. For a minute he held his breath—only to release it in a sudden question, unexpected, astounding:
“In your eyes, soldier, she was innocent?”
Von Gastein started under the shock—and recovered himself.
“During the twenty-five years, sire, I had the privilege of attending on her the Princess of Ahlden did not fail weekly to take the Sacrament, and on each occasion to avow her innocence before the altar.”
The King stared, then mumbled from loud to low.
“They will avow it,” he began, and broke off quickly. Some words reported to him, as having been uttered by her to one seeking to bring about a reconciliation before his enthronement, recurred to his mind: “If I am guilty, I am not worthy to be your Queen; if I am innocent, your King is not worthy to be my husband.”
A casuistry, feminine, non-committing—hedging, in the true sporting sense. He hardened. This fate had not after all seemed so merciless to one so guilty.
“She had liberty,” he said, as if appealing to his own conscience.
The Captain made a frigid reverence, acquiescing in the enormous lie.
“I say, she had liberty,” repeated the King—“permission to drive abroad.”
“For six miles, sire, back and forth,” answered the soldier, as if he accounted himself addressed: “for six miles west, to the old stone bridge on the Hayden road. So much and no more. At the bridge the escort turned her. On fine days she would drive herself—fast and faster, till the stones spun from the wheels. She would seem to madden for freedom, to outstrip her misery. Many times she would traverse the distance, the lady-in-waiting sitting, the troop spurring at her side; and at the stone bridge it would be always the same. ‘No further?’ ‘No further, madam.’ ‘Ah! but death will release me!’”
He stopped, conscious of his own emotion. He had served the lovely sorrow so long that its tragedy had become part of himself.
“I crave your Majesty’s forgiveness,” he muttered in a broken voice.
The King spoke up harshly:
“She was limited to that road by necessity.”
“During life, sire.”
The response came swift and involuntary. The soldier gasped, having made it.
“You will stop the coach, and return to your duty,” said the King, blue in the face.
The former commotion was repeated; the physician returned to his patient; the cavalcade rolled on. His Majesty spoke not a single word further, but sat staring from the window. It was deep dusk now without, and the lightning flickered with a ghastlier brilliancy. But still the King would give no order to have the lamps lighted. Instead, he lay with his livid face and protruding eyes addressed to the heavens and the horror of a thought incessant in his mind. The road was open to her at last, and she was driving to cut him off from Osnabrück, the city in which he had been born. She knew that a man could not die in the room where he was born; and she was coming to forestall him with the dread summons to appear before his Maker, and answer for the thing he had done.
* * * * *
Much agitated, von Gastein remounted his horse, and spurred on to his place in the front. He did more; he drove ahead of all, and took the lead on the solitary road making for Osnabrück. The lights of the city were already faintly starring the distance, when a sound coming from in front startled and then thrilled him. Swift wheels, and the hoofs of a tearing horse! There was nothing uncommon in that; and yet his heart went cold to hear it. “God have mercy on me!” he muttered: “I am a fool!”
Nearer and nearer came the sound—it was close—it was upon him—and there rushed past the shadow of a cabriolet, with a wild woman on the seat flogging a wild black horse. The night of her hair streamed behind like a thin cloud dusted with diamonds, and there was a frenzy of triumph in her eyes, and on her lips a smile. And so she passed and was gone.
The Captain turned his horse’s head, and drove back upon the van.
“Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too late!”
They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented.
“What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this way.”
And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind, and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step by the open door.
“His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a stroke, and is dead!”
George III
His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision. They were shadows, no more—little blots of bile, too minute to intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a bodily condition, a source of irritation.
The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King’s heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He talked incessantly to himself—prayers, expostulations, even blasphemies—though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting him persistently—the thought that his reason was once more succumbing to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that apprehension. Providence had then thought fit to restore him, after a few terrible weeks of possession; would not a renewed attack signify his proved unworthiness of Its favours, and his abandonment by It to the powers of darkness, this time for all eternity?
He uttered a sudden cry, and, sinking into a chair, covered his face with his hands. The storm screamed above him, dashing its torrents on the glass. Only that fragile glaze stood between him and the besieging horrors. In a minute, in a moment, they must be through, and he would be claimed by them and damned for evermore.
He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny! Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He should never call him a coward.
He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and kin—torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing visages.
To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it not appalling to be a king!
Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled. He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage from his head and stood erect.
The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky. And in their blossoming the faces were gone.
And then in a moment he saw and understood. The wind had fallen, the sky was full of stars: they laughed and twinkled above the twinkling city. He was looking from a window of St. James’s Palace across the Mall——
What had happened? What had been affecting him a moment ago? He breathed a prayer of fervid thanksgiving to Heaven for his quick emergence from that terrific shadow—called down by what? He believed he penetrated the cause. It was only yesterday that the pourparlers for his marriage had been begun; and was he so inhuman, or so superhuman, that, unlike all other men, he might experience no shock, no temporary unbalance of reason, in the immediate prospect of that tremendous change? Nay, was not the prospect more distracting for him than for most? seeing that no sentiment warmer than duty—duty to his people, duty to his succession—coloured its cold inevitability. He had heard of men, though bond-slaves to love, killing themselves in their inability to face that more lifelong bondage. What wonder that, in his case, a contract so based on policy should have terrified his reason in the thought?
Well—he was well now, he was well. The loveless lot of kings? That had been the chimera of a fancy momentarily diseased. No love for kings? He laughed softly to himself, and, crossing his arms on the sill, leaned down his face into them.
And then instantly a dream came to him. The stars of the sky—first one, then another, then dripping streams of them—descended from their high places and, enshrining themselves in crystal, became the lamps of the city. Faster and faster they poured, until he was treading a very milky-way of radiance. He could hardly see his path for the brightness as he walked—for, yes, he was walking! Half dazzled, with the glowing smile of all things reflected on his face, he pushed his way through the golden mist. It was jewelled and spangled everywhere with glittering thoughts; one might hardly know it for the London of one’s daily experience. He remembered when he had first encountered this transformation—he, a serious, well-intentioned young prince, resolute, in his sober, unimaginative way, to justify his election before the face of Heaven—and how of a sudden some spirit exquisite beyond conception had usurped in him the place of duty.
No, not usurped, but sanctified. Self-fulfilled through love, his debt to Heaven and his country would find him tenfold strengthened in its discharge.
Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his meanest subject?
His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle of the Market—throughout the whole short route it was always the same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet, possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain it.
And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty place.
With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and choked over the whispered daring. And what then—what thereafter? Surely no dream?
Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him again—faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and all congregated without relation to the sequence of time. Time?—Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married, he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and beat with frantic hands upon the closed door——
A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped gentleman paused beside the King.
“What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control yourself.”
His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle, beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement—an old, old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the world.
“You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is it you need?”
The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head, muttering and mumbling.
“I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little—only a new suit of clothes. But they must be black—black, in memory of George the Third.”
The Hero of Waterloo
Colonel Manton put up his rod and demanded to be set ashore. It had been his first experience of coarse fishing on the river, and it had not proved to his taste. It was not that the perch had been distant or the chub unapproachable. On the contrary, the place having been ground-baited overnight, the sport had been excellent. It was the worms and one other thing which decided him. He had been present at Talavera, at Ciudad Rodrigo, at Badajos, at Vittoria, at Quatre Bras, at Waterloo; he had seen as much carnage as most men, but this bloodless impaling of lob-worms on hooks, and then casting them, so transfixed, to lie writhing on the river bottom for an indefinite period at the end of a ledger-line, offended his sense of fitness. It was not, it seemed to him, playing the game. The worms had no chance, and they could not bite back. He hated to sit there and think of what was going on under the quiet water, and the reflection gained nothing in relish from the fact that, by refusing to soil his own hands with the viscous contortions of the creatures, he must appear, in delegating that operation to the boatman, to torture by deputy, like the most cowardly of Eastern despots. And so when, as presently happened, this same stolid deputy, in “disgorging” an obstinate hook from a barbel’s throat, tore away—— But it is enough to say that the Colonel put down his rod and demanded there and then to be set ashore.
There was no gainsaying him, of course. It was sufficient that he was the guest of a distinguished General living at Datchet; but in addition to this the Colonel’s personal actions invited no criticism. He fished—as he walked, as he rode, as he appeared on all secular occasions—in a dark blue wasp-waisted frock-coat with frogs, in tight nankeen trousers strapped under neat insteps, in a stiff collar and full black stock, in a tall hat with a brim so crescented that its front peak looked like the “nasal” of a Norman helmet. And for the rest he carried himself and his white moustache with the conscious authority of a cock of a hundred fights.
The boatman put him ashore on the riverbank some half-mile below Datchet, towards which village he immediately addressed his steps. The path was lonely and unfrequented, and it gave the Colonel some surprise to observe, as he turned a clump of bushes, a fashionable old beau toddling along it in front of him. In a few moments the latter paused, nonplussed, at a stile, and the Colonel came up with him.
The pedestrian was a man of uncouth bulk but distinguished mien. He wore a black frock-coat of a somewhat military cut, with a rich fur collar. Curly auburn locks, obviously artificial, showed beneath the brim of his glossy hat, and accented somewhat ghastfully the puffy pallor of a face whose texture betrayed its age. His eyes had a glutinous, half-blind appearance; his loose lower lip perpetually trembled. He peered at the new-comer, panting a good deal, as if the sudden apparition had shaken his nerves.
“If I may venture, sir,” said Colonel Manton, and proffered his arm. The other accepted it to mount the stile. It was an ungraceful business, and, once over, he stood, with his hands to his sides, vibrating heavily, like a worn-out engine, to his own respirations. Presently he was sufficiently recovered to speak.
“A damned obstruction—a damned obstruction! Cannot I leave my carriage a moment to walk round by the water but this annoyance must appear in my path?”
“A villainous stile,” said the Colonel. “We will indict it for a trespass.”
He was a reasonable man, and he felt the absurdity of the complaint. But, to his surprise, his sarcasm missed fire.
“Do so, do so,” said the old gentleman, and took his arm again, as it might have been his own walking-stick. They went on together, and in a little the stranger had opened a conversation with all the effrontery in the world.
“My boy, what’s your rank?” said he. “I perceive you are a soldier.”
The officer stared, and drew himself up.
“Colonel Manton, sir, at your service,” he answered distantly.
He was surprised; but the man was old, near seventy by his appearance, and very possibly from his cut a retired veteran like himself. Familiarity from a general, say, would be pardonable, and even kindly. Besides, he did not dislike the implied suggestion of juniority.
“Hey!” said the stranger—“retired?”
“Yes, sir, retired.”
“Brevet rank?”
“Brevet be damned!” said Colonel Manton hotly. “I owe my promotion, sir, if you wish to know, to Waterloo.”
The stranger glanced at him with a curiously sly look, and pinched the arm on which his own fingers rested.
“What!” he said, “were you there?”
“I had the honour, sir,” said the Colonel grandiloquently, “of playing my little part in that Homeric contest.”
“Whose division, hey?”
“Picton’s—Pack’s brigade. You are a little—you will excuse my saying it—particular.”
“Certainly I will, my boy. Wounded—hey?”
A distinct flush suffused the Colonel’s cheek.
“Wounded—yes,” he replied shortly.
The old fellow nudged him confidentially.
“Tell me,” he said—“how?”
“Look here—you must forgive me, you know,” exploded the Colonel; “but I must point out that we are strangers. Still—as a fellow-campaigner—if that is the case—may I ask, sir, if you were at Waterloo?”
The other laughed enjoyingly.
“Was I?” he said. “To be sure I was. You had all good reason for knowing it.”
Colonel Manton’s eyes opened. Here was a momentous implication. Evidently he had to do with some great general of division, though the boast sounded a little extravagant and unmilitary. He ran over in his mind a dozen possible names, but without success. And then the thought occurred to him: “Good reason for knowing it? What the devil! Is it possible he was on the other side?”
The idea seemed too preposterous for belief; the stranger was so obviously British. Who, in wonder’s name, could he be, then? Hill, Macdonnell, Saltoun, Uxbridge, Vandeleur, Somersett, Hackett—all divisional or brigadier-generals? He could not identify him, of his knowledge, with any one of these. The Iron Duke himself? He had never been brought into very close personal contact with the great man, but naturally he was familiar with his features. Could it be possible that time had so fused and blunted those that their characteristic contour had degenerated into this scarce distinguishable pulp? Prosperity, he knew, could play strange tricks with countenances, yet a volte-face so revolutionary seemed incredible. And yet who else but the Duke had been on that day as indispensable as implied? But it was conceivable that some might have so regarded themselves—that certain heads might have been turned by their share in the success of so stupendous a victory.
Colonel Manton had been living abroad on his half-pay for some years, and, until the occasion of this visit during the summer of 1830, had dwelt for long a stranger to his native land. He could but suppose that he had in a measure lost the clue, through subsequent developments, to old events. It remained clear only that he was in the presence of one who had, or believed himself to have, contributed signally to the success of the epoch-making battle. And that must be enough for him. He spoke thenceforth as a subordinate to his commanding officer.
“I beg your indulgence, sir,” he said. “I have been absent from my country for a considerable time, and features once familiar elude me. You asked about my wound. It is a ridiculous matter, and I recall it without enthusiasm. The fact is that, when d’Erlon’s guns were pounding us before the advance, a ball smashed the head of a sergeant standing near me, and one of the fellow’s cursed double-teeth was driven into my neck. It was not enough to cripple my fighting power, but I would have given a dozen of my own to boast a more honourable scar.”
The stranger chuckled.
“Scars are not the only guarantee of valour,” he said.
The Colonel ventured: “You brought away some of your own, sir?”
“No,” said the old fellow. “No; Wellington and I got off scot-free.”
The Colonel dared again: “Were you, may I ask, on his personal staff?”
“Well, yes,” said the stranger, chuckling still more, “I suppose you might call it that.”
Suppose? Colonel Manton gaped. It was positively a matter of history that not one of that staff had escaped death or mutilation. The other may have noticed his perplexity, for he turned on him with an air of sudden annoyance.
“You haven’t the assurance to question my word, I hope, sir?” he demanded.
“Certainly not,” answered the Colonel.
“I could give you convincing proof,” said the stranger. “Did the Commander-in-Chief—now did he or did he not—visit General Blücher at Wavre the night before the battle to make sure of his co-operation?”
“It is a disputed point, sir,” said the Colonel. “I believe that even his Grace has been known to contradict himself in the matter, saying at one time that he would never have fought without Blücher’s explicit promise to back him up, at another flatly contradicting the report that he saw the Prussian general on the night before the battle.”
“And he did not, my boy,” sniggered the old fellow triumphantly, “for his interview with him was after midnight, and therefore on the day of the battle. I ought to know, for I sent him off there myself.”
He cackled into such a spasm of laughter that the convulsion caught his wind.
“O, my chest!” he wheezed and gasped, “my miserable chest! I’m the most wretched creature on earth. But it’s nothing, nothing—the youngest fellows are subject to it.” He coughed and wiped his eyes with a heavily scented handkerchief. “Yes,” he said presently, “yes, Wellington was a sound workaday general, a fine soldier, an inspired commissary, but, of genius—h’m! We need only suggest, Manty my boy, that he was well advised. The man at his elbow, hey? You need not mention it, you know, but the real hero of Waterloo—hey, d’ye see? Keep it to yourself; there were reasons against its being divulged—you understand? What, my boy!”
The Colonel stared before him as if hypnotised; he stumbled in his walk. Was it possible to mistake the implication—that the laurels ought by rights to have adorned the brow of this stranger beside him? He felt like one whose faith had suddenly exploded of its own intensity, leaving his breast a blackened shell. Could there actually have been another, of whom he had never heard, at the Duke’s right hand on that tremendous day, the presiding but unconfessed genius of it? He had heard speak of the Corsican’s little red familiar. Was his great rival, were possibly all commanding intellects, so supernaturally provided?
He was really a simple man, with a mind ruled to certain prescriptive lines of conduct. He glanced askance at his companion, who was smiling and murmuring to himself. Who in Heaven’s name could he be? and why had he selected him for his astounding confidences? For all his own fearless rectitude, an uncanny feeling began to possess him. He was glad, in turning a corner, to see the end of the path, and the head of a waiting coachman showing above the hedge. And the next moment they had emerged on to the village green.
A barouche stood there, with a bare-headed gentleman standing at its door. The liveries of the servants were scarlet, and a mounted man in a scarlet embroidered coat waited a little apart. The gentleman came forward.
“Will your Majesty be pleased to ascend?” he asked.
The King dropped the Colonel’s arm, and appeared on the instant to forget all about him.
“Yes, Watty; yes, certainly, my boy,” he said. “Is that the fiery chariot?”
Beau Brummell
George Bryan Brummell, Esq., his Britannic Majesty’s Consul in the Norman city of Caen, was about to entertain. He had given instructions to his attendant that great company was expected, together with a list of the distinguished names to be announced; and by eight o’clock his room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre was prepared, the tables for whist were set out and the bougies lighted. Staring, half hypnotised, into the radiance of one of these placed on the mantelpiece, the Beau’s eyes blinked, and the Beau himself faced about with a puzzled look and a suspicious sniff.
“What is that smell, Loustalot?”
He spoke to the attendant, who in his little black jaquette and blue apron looked very much like what, in fact, he was—a waiter at the hotel. The expression on this man’s face scintillated between gravity and mockery; the tone of his voice hovered between audacity and deference.
“It will doubtless be the soot in the chimney, Monsieur,” he said coolly.
“H’m! You are sure it is not a candle in need of snuffing?”
“The best wax, Monsieur? Monsieur speaks as if he burnt filthy tallow. Monsieur’s nostrils are more sensitive than discriminating. A, là! What it is to be bred to this imperishable refinement!”
He was busy while he spoke in snuffing the wick, and in privately depositing the reeking instrument on the hob.
“I go to announce the company, Monsieur,” he said. “In the meantime, if I were Monsieur, I would not spit too much on the carpet.”
“An insolent rascal!” muttered the Beau to himself as the man disappeared. “I shall have to discharge him.”
He had, however, so completely forgotten his resolve the next minute, that when Loustalot, returning, thrust his head round the door, he could not for the moment recall who he was.
“O! by the by, Monsieur,” said the man, “Monsieur Magdelaine, the confectioner, desires to know if you will settle with him your little account for Maraschino and Biscuits de Rheims.”
The Beau smiled, waving his hand.
“To be sure—when it is full moon. Tell him so, my friend.”
“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I cannot reproduce it.”
Brummell burst into a scream of rage.
“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”
The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls, the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes—all with an expression of the most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked a positive sigh of transport.
“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish! But it’s devilish expensive—devilish.”
He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:
“Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,
At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;
Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,
For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!”
He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.
“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye—the poor butterfly, and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best—to fold one’s plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time yet—poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”
But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate! What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness, perhaps?—O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such possible demoralisation.
Loustalot threw open the door wide, and announced in a loud voice, “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire!”
With a bright smile and extended hands the Consul tripped forward.
“Ah! my dear Duchess,” he said, “you are welcome a thousand times. A chair, Loustalot.” (He seated himself close beside the lovely visitor.) “I was dreaming of old age,” he said, “and imperishable youth comes to rebuke me. Your Grace, more loving-kind than Aurora, once bestowed immortality on me, but with a better percipience than the goddess when she doomed her poor Tithonus to perpetual dotage. This is no dry grasshopper’s note, but the same liquid cackle that greeted our sallies at Chatsworth. Do you remember the French Marquis, whose hair-powder we dusted with sugar, and how at the breakfast-table, the heat and sueur having melted it, the flies settled until the poor man’s head was like a plum pudding? Hélas! the jocund spirit survives; only the environment dejects. But now that your Grace——”
“Milord Byron!” announced Loustalot at the door. The Beau rose, and advanced with infinite courtesy. Always the pink of breeding, he had yet an especial part to play before this pale, distinguished guest, whose compliment on the “exquisite propriety” of his dress and conduct had once reached his ears, never to be forgotten.
“I greet your lordship,” he said, “with a particular confidence, since for the nonce a goddess does the honours of my poor abode. Ah! that Sèvres biscuit figure—a girl bathing, after Falconet. It will appeal to you—a new acquisition. You know my fancy for canes and snuff-boxes and china—trivial pursuits, but more profitable than fox-hunting.”
“His Grace the Duke of Bedford!” bellowed Loustalot.
Brummell, having deposited the poet in a third seat, hurried to the door.
“Bedford, my dear fellow,” he whispered, horrified, “do you realise that the collar of your coat is turned up at the back? It recalls to me the most supreme moment in my life. I was due at Lady Dungannon’s reception, and circumstances had forced me—hush! the admission is inexpressibly painful—to, to take a hackney coach. However, I believed that I had successfully evaded detection, and had mounted the stairs into full view of the drawing-room, when a servant whispered in my ear, ‘Sir—do you know that you have got a straw in your shoe?’ Conceive, if you can, my horror. I shall never forget that moment.”
The memory, indeed, appeared so to weigh upon him, that for a little he forgot his company, and sat apart from it in dreary abstraction. The name of Mr. Chig Chester being called withdrew him from it, and he rose gaily.
“Our redoubtable gamester and sportsman,” he said, returning with the visitor. “We have material here for a table, Duchess. But remember, in Caen we play only for love and crackers.”
He dissolved into a fit of chuckling laughter, until the Lady Jersey was announced. And then came others—my Lord Petersham, the Duke of Rutland, Scrope Davies, Mrs. O’Neill, the Duchess of Gordon, and half a dozen more. The little room was soon too full for its capacity; but the spirits of the courtly host surmounted all difficulties and made a positive grace of inconvenience. He tripped, he chatted, he was perpetually talking and on the move, exchanging badinage with one, recalling incidents of past happy days with another, pointing out the treasures of his modest sanctum to a third—a picture by Morland, a clock by Verdier, a Louis XV bonheur du jour. Exile, he wished to show, had not dulled his appreciation of the beautiful, or shaken his position as a wit and supreme arbiter of the elegancies. Now as always it was a privilege to claim his acquaintanceship, to be seen on his arm; now as always his smile or his frown could make or break.
In the midst, a candle guttered heavily on the mantelpiece, and a little girl, the landlord’s petted one, ran into the room.
“Monsieur Brummell,” she cried, “Monsieur Brummell, you have not yet given me the sou you promised for nanan.”
He caught her by the arm.
“Hush!” he said. “Do you not see the company?”
She stared round with wide, wondering eyes.
“What company, Monsieur? I see only a row of chairs!”
“Look again, Babette.”
“I am looking hard, Monsieur.”
The Beau, releasing his grip, sank into a seat. Before him on the wall loomed a cheap mirror. He saw the reflection in it of a broken, toothless old man, semi-palsied, dirty, degraded. His scratch-wig, poked awry, was foul with rancid grease; his shoes were lustreless and in holes. He raised dim, wandering eyes, and marked the squalid, unfurnished walls, the one whist-table with a broken leg, the three common shells on the mantelpiece flanked by a couple of reechy tallow candles in brass sconces. And—yes, the row of empty chairs. Staring like one awakened, he uttered a dreary little laugh, and beckoned to the child.
“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing, child—playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers, which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”
Paganini
It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of melody, that monster Paganini—and more astounding, more inexplicable than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo; he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate solution of the mystery.
What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers—nothing more nor less. But, for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul for full ten months—ever since that night, in fact, when he had first heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing and lusting at once.
Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one listened, but temptation—melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master, it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.
And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.
It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel, like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild apostrophisings of the thing, held up in worshipping hands before two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the mystery—only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.
One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always, among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend. It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man, her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable disappearance of the two. He believed the story—and he did not believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil, to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of being the instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.
And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before the expectant house.
Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion associated with its production—an impossible grotesque, like a clown got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular; his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle, dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.
Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.
Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch, alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself—somehow this thing must end, and to-morrow.
In the late morning he rose—to ominous skies and a sensation of stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs—to fast at times, to gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage northwards. He hesitated a moment—then started in pursuit.
Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men—an itinerant butcher, a bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap, carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered prayer, sprang back into the roadway—and collided with Baronte, who pushed him aside and sped on.
“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed deridingly.
“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said he. “The second was the true devil.”
He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with what purpose he himself did not know.
It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him, gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.
A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte, panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies; it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an answering cry the young man ran round—and staggered to a stop before the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the black Master himself.
It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.
“Ah, póvero me!” screamed Paganini. “Why did I forget the bag! Eccomi perdûto! I am lost—I am lost!”
With a gasp Baronte stepped back, undiscovered of the other. The next moment he was racing down the hill towards Florence.
At the door of the hotel, wild and drenched, he ran upon young Varano, and, clutching him by the shoulders, glared into his eyes.
“Quick!” he panted. “He is up there on the hill—I have seen him—and without his fetish. Quick! Our opportunity has arrived.”
Varano nodded pallidly.
“I know,” he whispered. “I was coming to look for you.”
Together they stole up to the Maestro’s chamber; opened the unlatched door like thieves; entered, and discovered the forgotten bag lying upon a chair. Dreading he knew not what terrific revelation, Baronte pressed the snap and disclosed——
Down in the vestibule a moment later they ran upon the landlord.
“Benedetto, mi’ amico,” said Varano smoothly, “can you tell us what is ‘Leroy’?”
“Of a verity, Signore,” answered the man. “‘Leroy’ is a quack remedy, a sedative, and very good for relieving pain. You should ask the great Maestro Paganini, whom it is my distinction to lodge, and who applies it to a bowel complaint from which he has long suffered terribly. He is never without a bottle or two of it in his little black bag.”