Part 13

The matter under discussion turned upon the wisdom of appointing a new head to the Priory of St. Come, an important foundation in the southern quarters of the city. Long months past the King had granted a reluctant permission to its aged chief to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the old man had gone and he had not returned. Time went by; no news had ever been received of the wayfarer; by degrees it had come to be concluded that death or captivity had terminated his pious adventure. The young monks of St. Come, freed from his restraining hand, had begun to break bounds; scandals were getting rife; interested observers impressed upon the King the moral certainty of the old prior’s death, and the necessity of his bringing the monastery again under the disciplinary control of a head. Amongst these the most pertinacious, and, as possessing the royal ear, the most hopeful, was the Chaplain Père Bonaventure, who greatly coveted for himself the desirable office. It promised him almost illimitable opportunities for the sort of life he favoured.

“This dream, father, of which you spoke,” said the King, without raising his eyes--“it seemed to have its significance, you would imply--some bearing on the case?”

“I would imply nothing of the sort,” answered the chaplain. “We are expressly warned against attaching a prognostic value to these figments--though, to be sure, we might claim our justification in Holy Writ.”

“Given the seer,” said Louis. “Well, well; relate thy dream.”

“Methought,” said the priest, “that thou and I stood beside a church, in the walls of which hard by appeared a little threatening fissure. And the monks, instead of attending to their office, kept revelry; and always with the sound of their roystering the fissure extended. But thou, while I still urged upon thee the necessity of seeking and amending from within the ever-widening evil, would persist in holding me in converse, saying, ‘Patience yet a little, father, and we will enter.’ And suddenly there came a clap of song surmounting all in blasphemy, and with a roar the breach burst and the tower rocked and the walls sank down upon us both, crushing out our lives.”

He ended, his eyes slewed craftily upon the other. “From Joseph, through the royal succession,” he said, “descends the gift of interpretation. To me it was just a dream.”

The King looked up. “_Pasque-Dieu!_” he said--“and to us a providence, since it gives us a pretext for disposing of a pest. Go, go, in God’s name”--he paused to raise his hat--“and be Prior of St. Come.”

He was rid at last of an importunity, though he was only to exchange it for a worse.

He was walking in his garden one day weeks later, when there came towards him an old, blanched figure, feverishly paddling with a pilgrim’s crossed staff and mumbling as he approached. It was the aged Prior of St. Come, delayed in his return by cross winds and crosser ailments.

Louis, coming to a stop, stood conning the apparition half-petrified. For a moment, indeed, he fancied it to be a veritable wraith, so whitely emaciated looked the face, set in its cloudy fleece of beard and hair, with the eyes like two black borings.

“_Adjuva nos, Domine, adjuva nos!_” he muttered, crossing himself.

The old man tottered forward, and cried in a shrill tone: “Restore to me my fold, son Louis--restore to me my fold!”

The voice, and, more than it, the words, broke the spell. The King’s lips tightened, shrewd and caustic. Not on such worldly interests were a spirit bent.

“Welcome, father,” he said--“thou art welcome home.”

“No welcome,” cried the old man. “My children disown me; another sits in my place. I but carried my pitcher to the well, and lo! when I returned with it brimming, the door was locked against me. They feign to know me not; they stand and revile me; let me in to them that I may afford good evidence of my identity.”

He was a spirited ancient, and he shook his staff meaningly.

“That may not be,” said Louis smoothly, “since you are pronounced deceased.”

“By whom?”

“By the King.”

“I am, nevertheless, very much alive.”

“Impossible, when the King himself has ruled you dead. Why else should he have filled your office? As Prior, father, believe us, you are hopelessly defunct; as priest and man you may yet exist on our sufferance. We do not hold it altogether a capital offence, your thus presuming to refute our conclusions by being alive; yet, _Pasque-Dieu!_ the inconvenience you cause us by your inconsiderateness is little less than monstrous. We should have liked to hear some note of apology from you, some hint of regret for your unconscionable survival; but there, it is a self-seeking world.”

The old man stood amazed and speechless; nor was his bewilderment lessened by the kindness with which the King presently took his arm and walked him off up the garden.

“A monarch’s word, father,” said Louis, “is sacred, as much to himself as to another. Anything else that it is in our power to bestow upon you we shall be happy to consider in the light of your palpable deserts. Now we shall place you in the hands of M. de Comines, our Secretary of State, with orders to him to attend to your interests.”

So, with a hundred questions as to the Grand Turk and the pilgrim’s adventures by the way, he led him to the palace and got rid of him.

For good and all, as he supposed; but in that he was very quickly disillusioned. The deposed prior was by no means the man to take his cashiering meekly. Stubborn and masterful by nature, the authority of his late achievement had but consolidated his sense of righteousness. His interview with M. de Comines left him with no delusions. The Secretary bowed him out with a whole bouquet of flowery phrases, which, being cut for decorative purposes, were destined to bear no fruit. Père Bonaventure, lolling in his chair at St. Come, laughed securely. “_Rira bien qui rira le dernier!_” chanted his predecessor with a bitter grimness.

He appeared at the next royal levée, and renewed his petition; his Majesty was gentle but expostulatory. He sought to penetrate once more into the Louvre garden, generally open to men of piety, but, being repulsed by the guard, took his station at likely exits, and clamoured when the King went by. His persecution of his monarch became by degrees persistent and intolerable. Louis grew to dread the inevitable apparition with its wail, monotonous and eternal, “Restore to me my fold!” The creature got upon his nerves, and even threatened to spoil his sleep. Then one day, quite suddenly and characteristically, he resolved to rid himself of the incubus. He summoned his provost-marshal, Tristan l’Hermite, and sitting humped in his chair, closed one eye, and focussed the other shrewdly on his favourite.

“Tristan,” he said, “divinity utters itself in the mouths of kings--is it not so?”

The officer, a thick-set, beetle-browed boar of a man, whose body was encased in steel covered by a blue tabard embroidered with fleurs-de-lys, grunted in reply. Louis remained silent.

“Why waste words, gossip?” said Tristan. “Tell me the job and the man.”

His eyes, red and projecting, rolled in their sockets. He gave his flock of coarse hair a contemptuous shake.

“Wherefore,” went on the other, contemplative, “to traverse a royal decision is to commit treason against Heaven--a crime even the more abhorrent in one who professes himself a minister of religion.”

“The man?” repeated Tristan.

“Hast thou heard speak, Tristan,” said the King, “of this troublesome prior of St. Come?”

The Provost-Marshal turned and made for the door.

“Tristan!” cried the King; but without effect. He uncoiled himself with a smile. “_Pasque-Dieu_,” he said, “what a precipitate fellow! But at least I can sleep to-night with a peaceful conscience.”

And yet, when taking the air the next morning in company of this very confidant, there, slipped in by the relaxed guard, was the familiar, hated figure, pleading and clamouring.

“Hog! Dolt!” cried the King, maddened beyond all subterfuge, turning on his henchman: “Did I not tell thee to rid me of the prior of St. Come?”

“Highty-tighty, gossip!” answered the Provost--“what’s all this to-do? And have I not?”

“The prior, I say--the prior?”

“Fast in a sack, gossip, and lying these ten hours past at the bottom of the Seine.”

“Fool! But I meant this one!”

“Phew! Why didn’t you say so? The prior, quotha. This is not the prior. But rest easy; the mistake is soon amended.”

“No,” said the King, who after all had a sense of humour; “this is Heaven’s hand, and I but the poor tool in it. The prior claim is his”--and he turned to the suppliant. “Go,” he said, “in peace, old man. Return to thy flock. The seat is once more vacant, and thy petition is granted.”

CAPTAIN MACARTNEY

One dark November afternoon in the year 1712 a horseman, riding westwards from Cobham village, in Surrey, pulled up at the junction of the road with the Kingston and Guildford highway, and dismounted in order that he might read the terms of a proclamation pasted upon the signpost there.

“Whereas,” ran the advertisement, “Bernard Macartney, Captain in her Majesty’s forces, stands charged with the wilful murder of James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, in Hyde Park on the 15th of this present month, a reward of _two hundred pounds_ is hereby offered to any person or persons who shall discover and apprehend, or cause to be discovered or apprehended, the said Captain Bernard Macartney, to be paid by the Lords Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury upon his being apprehended and lodged in any one of her Majesty’s gaols.”

The traveller rose from his perusal with a grin.

“And so they bell the cat,” said he. “Now, if _I_ were this Macartney--I say _if_ I were--methinks I should feign to be one of my own pursuers lusting to gain the reward. There’s no disguise for some men like honesty, nor, in certain cases, no self-help like self-sacrifice.”

He remounted and pushed leisurely on his way, cutting across the high-road, and taking the track for Byfleet, which ran herefrom over Cobham Heath, a lonely and near treeless waste. Naturally, as he rode, his mind was busy over the event which had produced the proclamation--the recent fatal duel, that is to say, between the Lords Hamilton and Mohun. The sensation the affair had caused was due as much to the reputed foul play which had characterised it as to the exalted rank of its principals and its tragic termination. The meeting--ostensibly the result of a dispute concerning some family property--had taken place at seven in the morning near the Ring in Hyde Park--that fashionable “dusty mill-horse drive” which lay off Tyburn Lane, about mid-way between the Tyburn and Hyde Park Gate turnpikes--and there were six concerned in it, three of a side. The provocation, given and accepted, had been, it was rumoured rightly or wrongly, a mere blind to a premeditated murder. His Grace of Hamilton--then on the eve of his departure for Paris as the Queen’s Ambassador, and the holder of a watching brief, as it were, on behalf of St. Germains--was notoriously obnoxious to Marlborough and the Whigs, and the quarrel, the whisper went, had been thrust upon him at the hands of a creature of the Duke’s, a discredited brute and libertine, whose challenge, under the circumstances, he might very well have ignored. But his Grace had an invincible spirit, and the desire, perhaps, to rid the world of an intolerable ruffian; and so the meeting had occurred. At its outset, without any feint of punctilio, the two had rushed at one another more like hyenas than men, a world of long-smothered exasperation, no doubt, nerving their hands; and, amidst the rain of stabs and blows that followed, Mohun had been the first to fall. And while he had lain on the ground, gasping out his life, the other, also sorely wounded, leaning above him, Macartney, it was said, had run up behind and, giving the Duke his death-blow, had escaped with his surviving companion in iniquity. The Duke had been helped towards the Cake-house--that little, pretty rustic lodge, with its green trees and pond, whither fashion was used to resort for its syllabubs and “pigeon-pie puff”--but had died on the grass before he could reach it. And so the matter had ended for all but the absconding seconds.

“And those,” thought the traveller, “can spell out proclamations, no doubt, with the best of their pursuers. I put my money on Macartney.”

He was a spare, small-boned man, with a delicate, invalidish face and an expression on it of impudent temerity. His voice cracked when he raised it, and he was prone to spasms of laughter which hurt his chest. His hat, his heavy surtout, his great jack-boots seemed all too large for him, like a preposterous shell to a very little tortoise; but he rode with spirit, making small account of his trappings and the lonely road and sinister weather. In fact, as with many sickly constitutions, his elasticity and muscular strength were, relatively, abnormal.

The heath, desolation manifest, rolled on before him in brown, wind-shivered billows; the sky was like a slab of grey stone, roofing a dead world. There was a wolfish snarl in the air, a threat of coming snow.

Suddenly, without a note of warning, a burst and ring of hoofs sounded in the road close behind him. Wheeling on the instant, he observed a stranger, the noise of whose approach had evidently fallen deadened on the spongy turf-side by which he had ridden.

“How now!” demanded the traveller, in his quick little voice: “what the devil do you, springing upon me like this?”

“Pardon, pardon,” cried the stranger. He rode up, breathing as if winded. “I am a timid man, sir, and the prospect looked wicked, and, seeing you going before, I ventured to push on to crave your company. This place hath a dreary notorious reputation, I am told, and I am very nervous.”

His jovial face, twinkling, for all the cold, with perspiration, seemed to belie his assertion. It was broad, and flat of surface, with the features in low relief; and its mouth was so wide that, when distended in a smile, all above appeared detachable, like the lid of a comic tobacco-jar. By the tokens of his greasy jasey, with the little soiled round hat on top, and the clerical cut of his coat, he might have been a damaged parson, who had taken the wrong turning and missed his way to paradise.

The other conned him speculatively.

“What made you ride on the grass?” said he.

“Why, I feared to alarm ye,” answered the newcomer, “and so miss the chance of a way-fellow.”

“Gad-so!” exclaimed the traveller. “And whither, by your leave, may your road lead you over this same wicked heath?”

“Sir,” said the stranger, “if the question is scarce pertinent, the candour of my cloth responds. I am riding to seek preferment of the Queen’s own Majesty at Windsor. Is the confidence to be reciprocal?”

“I am escaping from my creditors,” said the small man. “Shall I turn out my pockets, that you may witness to their emptiness?”

The stranger endeavoured to look grave.

“This suspicion,” he said, “is unworthy.”

“Of whom?”

“Of us both, sir. You make me fear I have misplaced my confidence.”

“In the richness of the bone you proposed to pick? Very possibly you have.”

They were slowly pacing their horses all this time side by side. The road was utterly deserted, the prospect of the dreariest. A straggle of withered thorns, running darkly up the slope of a low hill to the left, alone broke the almost treeless desolation.

“Ride on, sir, ride on,” said the stranger in an offended voice. “Better my own fearful company than a comrade so mistrustful.”

He pulled on his rein and fell back. The other did the same.

“Great God!” cried the stranger. “Who’s this?”

Almost without a sound, it seemed, a horseman had broken from the shelter of the thorns, and drawn up in the middle of the track, barring their way. In the same instant, the clerical gentleman, who had fallen again behind, whipped a pistol from his skirt-pocket and shot his companion’s horse dead. The bullet entered behind the shoulder, and the beast, doubling up its forelegs, pitched and collapsed. Its rider, flung over its head, gathered his wits with agility, and sat up to encounter the vision of a couple of rascal faces looking down upon him.

“Do me the justice to attest,” he said to the pseudo-parson, “that I never for a moment believed in you.”

The other beamed over him, his pistol still smoking in his hand.

“And be damned to your scepticism!” said he. “For may I never launch soul on its flight again if I am not what I look, a broken hedge-parson.”

“Enough of that, Tom,” said the second rogue, a most butchering, determined-looking scoundrel. “His Honour’s swollen head calls for some blood-letting. Stand away while I give him t’other barrel.”

“What! are you going to murder me?” cried the victim.

“Aye, we are that,” answered the ruffian. “A dead man’s easier stripped than a live one, and makes less complaint after.”

“I’ll give you a hundred reasons for sparing me?”

“Hold, Jemmy!” said the parson. “The pick of a hundred will do. What reason of reasons, Mr. Bankrupt?”

“Why, the money in my pocket, which, if it’s more than a beggarly five guineas, may I eat my words.”

“That you shall, and well peppered, I warrant you.”

“I’ll give you my bond for fifty, to be paid on personal presentation.”

“‘A bird in the hand,’ mister. Is that your best?”

“You’d never murder a man for five guineas?” cried the traveller, his voice cracking.

“Five guineas!” echoed the parson with an oath: “five testers; five groats; five copper farthings--what life is worth more? Give him the lead, Jemmy.”

“Hold! I’m Captain Macartney!”

“Captain----! Phew--w--w!”

A moment’s intense silence followed. The two amazed ruffians looked at one another with eyes into which a gleeful cupidity was slowly born. “Captain!” Their gaze was transferred to the sitting figure. Jemmy lowered his pistol. The parson was all one ineffable smile.

“It fits, by God!” said he. “Why did it never occur to me? Two hundred pound, Jemmy, my boy! There’s Sir Townley Shore handy. We must risk it. Up with him before you. You’ve given us the best reason the last, Captain, my love. And you prefer the gallows to a bullet? Well, that’s just a matter of taste.”

They bound his arms behind him, and Jemmy set him before him on the big Flanders mare that he rode; and so they carried their prize, choosing the obscure ways in preference, to the house of Sir Townley Shore, the great county magistrate and magnate of Stoke d’Abernon, which lay a couple of miles the other side of Cobham.

There was a fine excitement in the Court when it was known that the notorious Captain was apprehended. Sir Townley, who was just come in and sitting down to his dinner, ordered in his staff, with a stout ranger or two for extra support, and sent for the prisoner and his guard. But the moment he clapped eyes on the former: “Why, Jack,” cried he in astonishment, “what the plague do you in this company?”

The two rogues, at that cry, stiffened aghast; but their captive advanced with a grin.

“I’ll tell you, Townley,” said he. “I’d not left you and the White Lion Inn a quarter of an hour, when, going on my way, these two gentlemen shot my horse, and, falling upon me, would have murdered me too had I not thought of the expedient of calling myself Macartney; whereby I not only incited them, hoping for the reward, to carry me into a place of safety, but I have the pleasure of presenting you with a couple of very complete gallows-birds for your trussing.”

He turned on the paralysed ex-cleric with a little gasp of laughter.

“You have come the right road for preferment, parson,” said he. “You are going to be exalted like Haman.”

THE DUC DE GUISE

The Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, was giving a ball, characteristically insolent in its conception, at the royal palace of the Louvre. All the principal ladies of the Court were invited to attend it, and each was to be accompanied by her _cavaliere-servente_, wearing her mistress’s livery.

“I beg you, madam, to excuse yourself,” said the Duc de Guise to his wife. “It is a censorious age, and your condescensions might be misconstrued.”

He was a tall, well-figured man, with a somewhat supercilious expression, emphasised by a prominent underlip. The cut of his face, cold and aquiline, against his ruff, suggested a cameo in high relief. His beard, of a bright brown, was “stilettoed”; a scar defaced his left cheek near the eye, and, in its fading or flushing, betrayed the degree of his emotions. It was curiously in evidence now, though his voice and manner kept their measured quiet.

“Condescensions--to whom, _mon chéri_?” asked the Duchess, whisking round as she sat under the hands of her tire-woman. She was a beauty, once a princess of Cleves, and as saucy and wilful as she was bewitching. Her husband, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the attendant.

“To M. Saint-Mesgrin, madam,” he said.

She laughed. “Thou hast named my chosen cavalier, Henri. What an odd chance!”

Saint-Mesgrin was one of the King’s mignons, and his name and the lovely Duchess’s were too often associated of late for the Guise’s tolerance.

“Is it not?” he said. “I cannot imagine what suggested it.”

He took a sweetmeat from a little gold box, in shape like a shell, that he carried, and put it between his lips.

“I could not believe,” said the lady, pouting and in an aggrieved voice, “that the Duc de Guise would condescend to jealousy.”

“Nor does he, madam,” answered the Duke. “It is his honour for which he is concerned.”

She flounced a shoulder on him.

“O, very well, monsieur! You know best what is worth your consideration. But, if I were a man, I should not, I think, consign my honour to the keeping of a despised wife. Will you be pleased to call back my maid?”

“You persist, then, in going?”

“Will you call Celestine?”

“Your mere presence there, and in such company, will be construed, you must understand, into a justification for all the calumnies and slanders which have pursued your name of late.”

“What matter, if you do not so construe it? You are not jealous, _grâce à Dieu_. And as to that great matter of your honour, I will put it for safe custody into the hands of Saint-Mesgrin, and you can ask him for an account of it when you please.”

“To be sure I shall, and very soon perhaps. You will go to the ball, then, madam?”

“You know I must not disappoint the Queen-Mother,” she said hotly; but a certain trepidation was beginning to flutter her heart.

“You are resolved?”

“Will you stop me?”

“By no means.”

She laughed defiantly.

“O, most certainly I shall go then!”

The Duke rose, and bowed very gravely.

“I wish you a good night, madam,” he said. “Go, and enjoy yourself while you may.”

She bit her lip as he left the room. For a moment she was half resolved to yield her pride to the panic fear that had seized her; but the perverse demon prevailed, and she called back her woman.

She went to the questionable ball, and the night passed for her in a sort of conscious delirium peopled with shapes of gaudy terror. The King, the Queen-Mother, even Saint-Mesgrin himself, seemed forms of demoniac malice, luring her on to her damnation. She longed, and yet feared, to fly the unreal pandemonium. Her own peaceful bed figured to her as something pathetic beyond words--a haven of dear refuge which she had forfeited for ever.

At length, at five o’clock in the morning, the ball broke up, and she hurried home with what feverish haste the crowd would permit her. At bed, in the Hôtel de Guise, she cowered beneath the coverlets, and, the attendants dismissed, lay shivering like a mouse in a trap. She hardly dared to breathe, for fear of evoking some menacing echo. She could have thought that something horrible, like a monstrous cat, crouched outside her door.