Part 4

With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment, she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes, lovely submission and lovely solicitation--so she acted the part of a prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.

In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical, she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt over his face as she kissed him.

“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”

It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her, and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness, rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She was never denied; she was humoured--and watched--in everything. A subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion; but these common minds had not the _savoir faire_ to throw off the weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they left the city behind, and came into the open country--an abandonment which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as possible.

And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers--for the month was July--and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the attendants came round to the door to help her alight.

She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and shrank back.

“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.

“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.

Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned. The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road they had come. She tried to call to them--her dry throat would not articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again. They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite alone and unprotected in that deserted place.

There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow, palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them, watching for her descent--eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule, melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and deserted.

Hush! a whisper--a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below. Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as her only resource. There was a room above--a room she knew and had slept in--and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight, she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of terror!

She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation, made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven picture--Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand seemed empty--the head had run to a point--in a sudden sick fascination she peered forward to examine it.

God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a dagger!

And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.

Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning, soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.

“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.

He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands, besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to marry again.

With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.

That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.

CHARLES IX

“Scatter _them, scatter them ere the Death cometh! They are like black crows seeking carrion, and where they watch some soul is doomed to hell. From afar they spy their prey, and on the roof they gather, waiting till it fall._”

These words of a fanatic priest, denouncing the Huguenots, were for ever in his brain from the moment of the rising of the dark bird. They had rung in its haunted corridors before, had he known it; but it was the rising of the bird which had doomed it to their eternal possession. It had happened in this way:

With the first weak breaking of dawn, three pallid, guilty figures came stealing into a little chamber of the Louvre which overlooked the _basse-cour_ notched into that angle of the palace which faced towards St. Germain l’Auxerrois. They were the King, his mother, and his brother the Duc D’Anjou. An unnatural quiet brooded over the city. It suggested the paralysed horror of a sleeper awakened to sudden consciousness of some ghastly presence in his room. They stood, in a little quaking group, peering from the window upon the courtyard and the quay of the Louvre, both in seeming dark and empty, and in seeming uncannily close beneath. What if some tigerish bound were to clear that interval, and they, the gloating Cæsars of the arena, be made the sport of their own blood-lust? The King’s hand twitched on the musquetoon he carried.

The river, a livid tongue, lapped up the blackness; the wind fell all in a moment, like a shot bird, and rustling its wings a little on the pavement, died and gave place to silence utter and profound. Suddenly in the distance a pistol rattled out.

It was followed by the bells. At first it was only the tocsin of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the shattering boom of the great bronze dome shouting death from its tower. But soon other bells took up the tale, the signal leaping on from height to height, as warning beacons are fired, and in the same breath the streets were full of armed men. They seemed to spring from the ground, like the dragon men of Thebes, and to fall as instantly to slaughter and destruction. Every second they gathered, and roaring and sweeping on, crashed in the last defences of sleep and woke the city to pandemonium. And then came the King’s madness.

He had fought against it to the end. Even in the little ghostly chamber his soul had risen, in a final revolt of sanity, against the merciless policy which had set itself deliberately to undermine his reason. But he had not the strength to escape. His hand, with the dagger in it, had been held from first to last by his mother Catherine, as mothers of a human mould direct the little stumbling hands of their children in forming letters with a pen; and not to him was due the significance of the characters which that bloody stylus had written upon the wall. His old nurse, indeed, whom next to Marie Touchet and her child he most dearly loved, was a staunch Huguenot. And he kept the wit to save her; but he could not save the good Admiral Coligny whom he honoured. His mother had her way with him at last, and was herself panic-struck by the fury of the blaze she had fuelled.

Having once tasted blood, he cried for it, for more and more until the gutters choked; insulted the fallen who appealed to him for mercy; decoyed the partisans of Condé and Navarre into his toils with cunning messages, and chuckled to see them butchered in the Court below. The roar, the rushing tumult of the quays, the yells of the pursuers, the screams of agony of the smitten, the bells and the guns, all danced in his mad veins and wrought him to frenzy. He outscreamed the victims; he fired at the corpses floating in the river; he laughed and stared alternately. Once, early in the business, a boatful of Huguenots, coming across the water from the opposite faubourg, was emptied out in a twinkling, and its human load dragged for slaughter across the stones. They had believed it all an affair of the Guisea, and had come to beg protection of the King. The King! what shadow of justification was theirs? A King of shreds and patches! He cursed their monstrous credulity; he pointed his piece and fired straight into the breast of the tallest fool of them all, who had fallen on his back on the stones immediately below. With the sound of his shot a great black bird rose straight from out the dead man, and flapping upwards with solemn wings, disappeared over the roof of the Louvre. The King threw down his musquetoon, and stood staring.

They said that it was a raven, its master’s constant companion, his pet, his mascot, which he seldom let from his bosom when he went abroad. The King did not contradict them; the mortal distress in him found even some solace in the fable. But in his deep heart he knew that the apparition had been none other than the black soul of the Huguenot, and that it had flown to settle on the roof, to watch for the passing of another soul, his own, already doomed by it to hell. “_Ere the death cometh!_” From that moment, as he believed, he was marked down; and the thought of how he might elude the bird on the roof never left him. If he could only circumvent it, he might yet be saved.

He was sitting with his suite, days after the massacre, in a chamber of the palace, when a sudden uproar overhead startled them all. It was evening, but the tapers were not yet lit. The sound was hideous--a sound as of a multitude of lost spirits screaming and blaspheming in the upper air. It was the eve of St. Bartholomew all over again, the pent-up terrors of it broken loose and re-enacted, Even in their graves, it seemed, the ghosts could not be held down, but had burst their bloody cerements and risen in an uncontrollable agony of memory. Where would it end? Where could it? There was no mowing down spirits by sword and fire; they had the upper hand now, and the minds and reasons of the living were their ghastly prey. Rising, as they looked at one another with grey faces, the group one and all sought the open air.

What was it? A black cloud of crows, no more; a flock in constant motion, circling, settling and resettling--calling for a second glut of victims. They had learned to imitate the voices of the massacre, screeching, sobbing, praying--a horrible thing. They were the souls of the murdered, ministers of hell, come to await their turn on the roof. The King said no word, but that same night, after he had slept a little from exhaustion, he rose suddenly in a horror too great for speech, and sat staring and listening. His good old nurse hurried to him; he whispered to her, Did she not hear it? Those haunted chambers of his brain were full of wild trampings, and execrations, and the hubbub of a mad conflict. He declared there was a riot in the town, that he would have his guard dispatched to end it, that he wanted no more murder. They returned in a little to say that the whole city slept peaceful in the moonlight, though it was true that the air was curiously agitated, as by the hot vapour above an oven. He dismissed them, and dropped his weary head upon his nurse’s bosom. He was her child again, her nursling, her little frightened dreamer waking in the dark.

“They shall not touch thee, Charlot,” she whispered. “Thou didst not mean it, thou.”

For seven nights was this repeated, the noises, the horror, the collapse; and then the crows departed. Like a black cloud they gathered in a moment, and drifted away northwards to wait for the coming of the Armada.

“Are they all gone?” asked the pallid King. He would trust to nobody but his nurse. She went out, and looked along the ridge of the roof, and returned.

“All but one,” she said; “and he is hurt belike, and will not last out the night.”

“That is the one,” he answered, “and he will last out the night of my life. O, nurse! he waiteth for my soul, and, so he marketh its passage hence, he will seize it, and I am damned for ever.”

“That then shall he never do, Charlot,” she exclaimed; “for I will have him shot here and now.”

The King shook his head; and, indeed, he expressed what he knew. The crow was never shot; the bird seemed to bear a charmed life; but all of a sudden one day it was gone.

To say that he breathed again would imply but a qualified respite, inasmuch as his every breath was a pain to him. Through all that autumn and through all the ensuing year he was a dying man, and in the May that followed he lay down on his bed for the last time. At the end he spoke little but with the shapes that haunted him. He lay on his couch, wrapped in a robe that, for all its lightness, it hurt his chest to lift. He suffered intolerably, both mentally and physically. His faithful little wife, whose love he had neglected, came and sat by his side, silent, with large haunted eyes, and prayed for him, and wept secretly, and blew her little red nose softly to explain her need for a handkerchief. And Marie Touchet came with their child, and wondered how, at the last, the wreck of sweet royalty differed so little from all other human wrecks. He made his peace with these, but he could not with himself. The vision of the crow was eternally in his mind; his atom of trust in the strong faith of his nurse was his solitary grain of comfort in a world of terrors. He floated in crimson streams, and rose choking from them, foul and horrible. “Ah, nurse,” he sighed perpetually, “what blood and what murders!”

She was always ready with the faith, with the triumphant word that touched like a healing judgment.

“Let them that called the feast answer for the reckoning.”

And so the hours crept on to the end.

One day, as she watched alone beside him, he fell asleep. He had made his testament that morning, had committed the sore destinies of his kingdom to his mother and his brother of Navarre, and, exhausted with the effort, had fallen back on his pillow, breathing out the last words he was ever to utter on earth:

“I thank my God that I leave no male child behind me to wear my crown!”

It was as still as death. The sunshine came through the open window, and threw a patch of light on the floor. As the tired nurse sat watching this, half hypnotised by the glow, of a sudden she saw it blotted by a soft shadow. She raised her eyes quickly, and there on the windowsill, black and motionless, was perched a great crow.

She did not even start; but she turned her head and looked at the King’s face. The sign of the awful change was overspreading it; the nostrils pulsed; the fingers below picked feebly at the silken robe. In a few moments, she saw, he would be gone. She rose quickly, and moved across to the window. The dark bird never stirred. There seemed a deep, unearthly movement in the sleek gloom of its eyes, and that was all. It was absorbed in watching, but not her. She flung out her hands, and caught it in a grip of iron.

“Charlot!” she cried, “my babe! Die while I hold him!”

There was a rustle behind her, a sudden cry, a drumming as of feet running, speeding from the earth and life; and then all fell silent. But not the bird. He leaped and battled in her hands. His beak was an inky dagger, his talons rakes of steel. His screams seared her heart--they seemed uttered in it; his pinions beat on her brain. But she held on, driving in her nails, her teeth set and her resolution. She felt the blood pouring down her wrists, and she cared no whit, so long as she could keep the horror from pursuing her nursling. And presently the struggles slackened, and she felt the bird die in her hands.

Holding it thus away from her, she went to the window and flung it forth. It dropped without sound, like a shadow that had suddenly been blown from her brain. She looked at her hands--they were unhurt; at the King--he lay with a smile on his dead lips.

THE KING’S CHAMPION

“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the goronation?”

It was his Majesty King William III. who spoke, crumpled back into his big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from the nest of an enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive frame, and legs like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might have thought, to carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He appeared, indeed, to be always lost in it, and as if just on the point of finding his way out. Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would hardly have sufficed for his spirit.

The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch mynheers--D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject, long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.

It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor, offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens, and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied _commode_ of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away, melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before any one could think of interposing.

The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion, had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and re-deliver his cartel.

But it had not passed unobserved by the King himself or by those around him. Extinguished as he had appeared to be in his panoply of purple and ermine and embroidered scarlet, looking, as he had risen at the great table to drink his Champion’s health, for all the world like a little over-swaddled Greek Icon elevated against a background of glittering stained glass, his diminutive Majesty had had an ear and an eye for everything within the longest range of either. His birdlike optics, bright as twin buttons sunk amid that pomp of raiment, had been fully cognisant of the little episode, and had watched the after-approach of his Champion with an unwinking interest, which had seemed to concentrate itself to such a challenging focus on the flushed face of the knight as he came near, that that doughty Paladin had fallen into confusion and had something botched the business of the toast that followed. However, he had managed, though crestfallen, to retire presently with sufficient aplomb and his perquisite of a golden beaker; and there for the moment the matter had ended.

“Sir Charles Dymoke,” began Lord Halifax----

“Who is dat man?” interrupted the King. “Vat is his title to the bost?”

“It is claimed by him, sire,” answered the peer, “in his right of the Manor of Scrivelsby. The office was originally deputed, I understand, to Sir Richard de Marmyon by the Conqueror, and hath descended by virtue of that tenure to this day. Sir Charles is its legitimate representative.”

“Well,” said the King, “broduce him before us.”

“Why,” said the Marquis feebly, “that is the odd thing. Sir Charles is nowhere to be found.”

The three Dutch mynheers uttered guttural sounds in their throats, and looked at one another and at the King significantly.

His Majesty’s brows knotted.

“Dat is very vonny,” he said. “Not to be vound, mein vrent?”

“It has been ascertained, your Majesty,” said Lord Denby wearily--he was a picked white bone of a man, with no stomach and yet a perpetual stomach-ache, which naturally aggrieved him--“that Sir Charles rode, immediately after the ceremony, to the ‘Cock’ hostelry in Tothill Street, whence, having disencumbered himself of his panoply, he continued his way to the riding-school of one Dobney, near Islington, where he delivered up his horse and disappeared. Since when he has neither returned to his inn nor vouchsafed the least token of his existence.”

The King considered the matter very glumpily within himself. It appeared a trifle; yet trifles might easily be under-estimated in the existing state of things. The incident was something or nothing--a mere meaningless frolic, or a challenge to his title bearing a certain significance. The land swarmed with Jacobites of more or less power and prominence. What if one of them were to meet and defeat his Champion? How, in that event, would his claim stand? What was the procedure? It was an odd contingency, and he put it rather acridly to my Lord Privy Seal.

“He drow de gage; anodder agcept it; dey vight; my man vall. Vat is to vollow?” he demanded.

“Ja! Dat is vat strike idself into me bom-bom,” said Schomberg the warrior.