CHAPTER IX

CHRISTMAS EVE

Kensington House was hushed and dark; in only one room did a light burn, and that was where the Queen of England sat alone in her cabinet with the door locked and two tapers burning on her desk.

It was long past midnight on Christmas Eve, and she supposed in bed; the stillness was intense; the ticking of the little brass clock sounded loud and steady--a solitary noise.

Mary sat at the desk with her papers spread before her; she had burnt many of them in the candle-flame, and a little pile of ashes lay on the cold hearth.

It was four days since she had first sickened, and the doctors said this and that, disagreeing with each other, and constantly changing their opinion; but Mary had never been deceived; she had cheated herself, she had cheated the King, into a belief that she was lately better, but from the moment in her bedchamber at Hampton Court when the thought of her danger had first flashed on her, she had had an absolute premonition that this was the end. All her life had been coloured by the sense she would not live past youth. The first shock over, she did not grieve for herself, but terribly, more terribly than she had conceived she could, for the King.

At first a kind of wild joy had possessed her that she would go first; but the agony of leaving him alone was almost as awful as the agony of being left.

Because she could not endure to face his anguish she had so far concealed from him both her certainty of her own approaching end and her own belief as to her malady. Dr. Radcliffe alone among the physicians had said smallpox, and been laughed at for his opinion, but the Queen knew that he was right. "Malignant black smallpox," he had said, and she knew he was right in that also.

Few recovered from this plague; few lived beyond the week.

Alone in the little cabinet, consecrated by so many prayers, meditations, and tears, the young Queen faced her fate.

"I am going to die," she said to herself. "I am going to die in a few days."

She sat back in her chair and caught her breath. The stillness seemed to ache in her ears. So little done, so much unfinished, so many storms, troubles, attempts, poor desperate endeavours, and now--the end.

She recalled that when the King had been last on the Continent she had been ill of a sore throat, and been so melancholy on account of the dismal state of public affairs, the ingratitude and malice of the people, that she had wished to die, but checked that thought, believing that she could still be of service to her husband. And now it was no wish or idle fancy, but the very thing itself.

And she must leave him.

Her deep piety made her think the agony she endured at that thought a punishment for having so deeply loved a human creature. She tried to fix her mind on God, but earthly affection was stronger. The image of heaven became dim beside the image of him to whom her whole heart had been given; the very tenderness that had been provoked in him by her illness made it harder.

At last she rose and went over to a little gilt escritoire in the corner; there were locked away all the letters she had ever had from the King, some from her father, a Prayer Book of her mother's before her conversion, some of her own meditations and prayers, her diary, and various little trifles with poignant associations.

With the keys in her hand she hesitated, but courage failed her to open any of the drawers; she returned to the large bureau and took up a sheet of paper.

She felt ill and cold; her limbs were heavy, her eyes ached, and her head was full of pain. She made a strong effort of will to take up the quill and write; at first the pen shook so there were mere ink-marks on the paper.

What she wrote were a few last requests to the King: that her jewels and clothes might be given to her sister Anne, that her servants might be looked after, that he would remember his promise with regard to the hospital at Greenwich, and that if Leeds was disgraced the King would deal mildly with him--"for he hath ever been a good servant to us."

She did not trust herself to add words of affection, but wrote beneath, "The Lord have thee in His keeping," folded it up with the ink scarce dry, and rose to unlock the top drawer of the escritoire and place the paper within.

That done she relocked it and placed the key in her bosom.

All her other papers and letters she had destroyed; her private affairs were in order; she had not a debt nor an obligation in the world. There was nothing more to do.

She put her hands before her eyes and endeavoured to settle her thoughts, to dismiss earthly matters and think only of God, but she could not put the King out of her heart. Her thoughts ran past her own death, and saw him lonely amidst his difficulties, without her aid to smooth over little frictions, without her company in his infrequent leisure, without her sympathy in his disappointments; in a thousand little ways he scarcely knew of she had been able to help him, and now there would be no one--no one to watch and notice and understand as she had done; she could not trust even Portland to do what she had done.

"God forgive me for this weakness," she murmured, in great distress. "God strengthen and make it easy for us both."

She rose and went to the window; she could see the black sky pierced here and there by a few stars as the clouds parted--nothing else.

On an instant the deep silence was rent by a clamour of sweet sound; the sharp strong pealing of church bells rang out over the sleeping city.

Mary knew that it was the village church of Kensington practising for Christmas; she sank into the window-seat and fixed her eyes on those few distant pale cold stars.

She could not steady her thoughts. Old memories, pictures of dead days, arose and disturbed her. She saw the sunlight on the red front of the house at Twickenham and the little roses growing over the brick, herself as a child playing in the garden, and the figure of her father standing by the sundial looking at her, as he had stood once on one of his rare visits--very handsome and tall and grave with long tasselled gloves in his hand, she saw the hayfields beyond St. James's and the summer-tanned labourers working there and a little girl in a blue gown asleep on a gathered sheaf and Lady Villiers pointing out the last swallow and how low it flew--so low that the light of the setting sun was over its back and it was like a thing of gold above the rough stubble--she saw pictures of The Hague--that beautiful town, and her own dear house, and the wood...

She remembered her presentiment, before William left for England, that they were looking at the wood together for the last time.

All over now, mere memory, and memory itself soon to end; she would never see the flowers again either in England or Holland; she had looked her last on blue sky and summer sun; she would never more go down to Chester to welcome the King home from the war; she would never again cut the sweet briar roses to place in the blue bowls at Hampton Court.

It frightened her that she thought so of these earthly things, that she could not detach her mind from the world. She endeavoured to fix her attention on the bells, and they seemed to shake into the words of an ancient hymn she had known as a child--

"O Lord, let Thou my spirit rise From out this Press of turning Strife. Let me look into Thy awful eyes And draw from Thee Immortal Life."

The bells seemed to change into one of the endless little Dutch carillons that she heard so often in her dreams; she put her hands before her face--

"Take, dear Lord, the best of me, And let it, as an Essence pressed Like unto Like, win Immortality Absorbed in Thy unchanging rest."

The bells paused and shuddered as if a rude hand had checked them; the melody hesitated, then changed rhythm; a single bell struck out from the rest in clear ringing, then stopped.

For a little space the air was full of echoes, then a mournful stillness fell. The Queen remained in the window-seat with her hands before her eyes.

When she raised her head one of the candles had guttered out and the other was near its end.

She had lost the sense of time, almost of place; it would have given her no surprise to find she was sitting in the garden at The Hague or going down the waterways of Holland in her barge; she did not notice the darkness so ill-dispersed by that one flame burning tall, ragged, and blue in the great silver stick; she began to say over her prayers in a kind of exaltation; she went on her knees and pressed her face against the smooth wood of the window-frame; she was murmuring to herself under her breath as if she tried to lull her own soul to sleep; she got up at last, not knowing what she did, and unlatched the window.

She looked out on a ghastly dawn, pallid above the leafless trees, against which a few flakes of snow fell heavily. The Queen stared at this picture. The cold wind entered the chamber and a snowflake lightly drifted in and changed to a crystal drop on the window-seat.

She latched the window again and turned into the room; the last candle had been out hours; the wax was hard round the frozen wick; a whole night had passed with the drawing of a breath, and this was Christmas morning.

Above the chimney-piece was a mirror in a gold and ebony frame; the Queen stepped up to it and looked at herself; she beheld a woman without colour; her gown was black and her face and throat indistinguishable from her crumpled lace collar; her hair was dark and without a glint in the dead light; the pearls in her ears were ghostly pale; she thought her features were very changed, being hollowed and sunk.

"They cover the faces of the dead," she thought curiously; "they will soon cover mine." She put her hand delicately under her chin. "Poor face, that will never laugh or blush--or weep again!"