Part 5

Lord Halifax smiled rather sheepishly. He was a large, tolerant soul of sixty, repudiating all sentiment and subject to much. He had been called the “Trimmer”; but, then, no man of humour can ever be a man of convictions. Kind, witty, and cynical, he was yet so fond of Reason that he could make a fool of himself with her. He was even worked upon to do so in the present case.

“There is positively no precedent, sire,” he said. “To my certain knowledge the thing has never happened before.”

“Bot zhould it jost zo happen?” insisted his master.

“Ach!” said D’Auverquerque penetratingly.

“With deference, sire,” said his lordship, “is it not something premature to assume any hostile intent in the matter? The good lady----”

“Posh!” put in the King irritably. “Neither goot nor lady.”

“Zo it strike itself into mein head bom-bom,” said Schomberg.

“Dat dress vas a masgerade,” said William--“a vact, we zhould haf gonsidered, blain to the stupidest indelligence.”

“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Lord Halifax nervously.

“Vell, sir--vat den?”

“Ach! vat den?” demanded D’Auverquerque cunningly.

“I vill dell your lordship,” said Schomberg. “Dere was a vine swordsman gonzealed under dose bettigoats.”

The Lord Privy Seal, considering the subject, woke to a certain trepidation.

“It is impossible,” he admitted, “to avoid attaching a measure of importance to the affair, or to gauge its consequences should it be carried through. Surely Sir Charles could not be so foolish as to risk a serious encounter? But he must be found and warned at all costs.”

His mood communicated itself to the others. The matter began to assume with them all an increasingly sinister aspect. Majesty was not yet so safe on its throne that omens could be disregarded. The King, prompt and tireless, for all his sickly constitution, in business--the little man who was to regain for England her reputation for workaday sanity--had yet, at this beginning, a vast estate to recover from chaos, and his path was beset with perils. The country was still in two minds, and each distracted; a trifle might upset the balance. Deliberating in this sort, a species of hysteria communicated itself after a time from one to another of the little Council, until it definitely came to perceive in the episode a daring ruse for bringing about a reaction in popular sentiment. What if the meeting were actually to occur, and the Champion to be overthrown? It was not to be doubted that the event would have been provided for, and those engaged in bringing it about forearmed. Defeat might result in riot, and riot in revolution. Arrived at that pitch of the debate, the six gentlemen, including his Majesty, were all speaking together in considerable agitation.

It was the personality of the mysterious Mohock, once convicted of masculinity, which most exercised their minds. He was certainly an individual of importance, as so momentous a mission would hardly have been entrusted to a nonentity. But who? A dozen names suggested themselves. Berwick, Tyrconnel, Lord Henry Fitzjames, the ex-monarch’s natural son, Marlborough himself, and others. It was Zuylestein, speaking for the first and last time, who finally put the spark to all this accumulating tow. “Vat,” he said, “if it is James himselv, zegretly gom over from St. Germains and resolved upon venturing dis bigduresque abbeal to de poblic?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg.

He rose, Halifax rose, they all rose, and faced the King.

“Ik dank U, mijnheer,” said his Majesty; “it is a very blausible suggestion.”

The words were equivalent to a bid to action. The Council broke up hurriedly, and within an hour the Dutch troops had been beaten to arms, the militia called out, the magistrates warned, and the whole city placed under a surveillance of the most searching description. It was at this momentous pass, when panic was in the air, that Sir Charles Dymoke walked unconcerned into the “Cock” tavern, in Tothill Street, and was immediately arrested by the guard set to watch that hostelry, and conveyed in a state of complete stupefaction to Whitehall. He was taken at once before the King sitting in Council.

“Vere haf you been?” demanded William sternly.

“Your Majesty!” gasped the Champion, a sturdy gallant of middle age.

“Answer, sir,” said the monarch--“and vidout eguivocation.”

“I have been with a friend,” stammered Sir Charles, all amazement.

“Ach!” exclaimed his Majesty sarcastically. “The vrow, vas it, vat returnt you your gage in the Hall yesterday?”

“Certainly not, sire,” said the Champion, the flush of outrage on his cheek.

“Not?” said the King. “Who vas she, den, dat voman?”

“The wife of Dobney, the horse-tamer, sire.”

“The vife--vat! Vat had she said to you?”

“She said, your Majesty, ‘Didn’t I warn you not to throw it down in front of her nose, unless you want her to kneel and pick it up?’”

“She? Who?”

“The mare, sire. She performs at Islington.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Lord Privy Seal very softly, “shall we thank Sir Charles and proceed to the order of the day?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg under his breath.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

“What was that?”

“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”

“Methought it was a footstep.”

“No, madam.”

“There, heard you it not--the sound of some one running?”

“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”

“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”

“Your Highness is overwrought.”

“Will some one speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”

The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.

“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”

The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees and over the palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed no sign of life anywhere.

Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood. The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.

Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her. She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if they were no more than inarticulate animals--wistful dumb affections on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their unconscious understanding.

Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awe-struck a moment, then bent and whispered to her mother: “O, madam, the Tower gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”

The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions, self-communings.

“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh--he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no courtier--the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”

The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed her.

“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.

“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too honest--the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”

“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day of February.”

She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the horror of this coming day had brooded--this ghastly morning when on Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex--he was but thirty-four--was to pay the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one tranced.

“Never flattered,” she repeated--“a bad policy where a woman reigns. The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or writes.”

“Yes, madam--O, yes, indeed!”

The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.

“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”

“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”

“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead--no longer dub my mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with the years, striving to slough its vesture, like a snake. A fool, that cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper. Shall I not be Dian still to him?”

She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge--an old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened teeth--little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories. Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.

“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown. When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless woman--barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly alone--no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince and curst to flattery?”

She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.

“Truth!” she cried--“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned and struck it down.”

“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.

“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think you?”

“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare, that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy with him because he saw your Highness so distorted--not to extenuate the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon me, madam!”

The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears regarded the import of her speech.

“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on his forehead, child?”

“O, madam! Your Grace!”

“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash and headstrong fool! To think to overbear us!--teach our displeasure a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp, and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord--his lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy--a man of men, brave, honest, generous, and a fool.”

“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”

“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love that made him but to ruin?”

“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”

“What for?”

“The ruin followed on the treachery.”

“Was he a traitor?”

“O, Madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot and league to win him the succession?”

“Yes, he’s a traitor.”

“Your Grace forgive me.”

“And I’m a woman.”

“Madam!”

“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”

“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, Madam.”

“I swear I heard him.”

“No, Madam.”

“Pride! Will he not meet us so far--but to crave our clemency? He knows the way, and, not taking it, must die. What o’clock is it? O, God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready. Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”

She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek; she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition beyond their ken:

“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long? A viper in our bosom--O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So pale?--the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you not send it--prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O, I have waited, dear my love--have waited dying for this token. Speak--utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel so and bow thy comely head----”

A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her hands before her eyes:

“O, God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”

Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.

“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.

“Your Majesty!”

“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is he?”

“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”

The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.

JANE SHORE

It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones about St. Paul’s Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare footsteps that were to follow.

It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag, soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass, wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement, waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul’s, surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy, or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps to it.

Whether from the weather, or the day, or the occasion, the crowd was a curiously quiet one. The weight of the new King’s authority, no doubt, rested upon it heavily. A general air of numbness and stupefaction appeared to prevail. Events of late had come, matured, and yielded to others so rapidly. Edward’s death in April; the disappearance of the young princes, his sons, in June; the new coronation in July; Buckingham’s short abortive conspiracy and execution in October; finally, in this very first month of the new year, the passing of the _Titulus Regius_, or Act which bastardised the late King’s issue and confirmed the crown to his usurper--such was the astonishing tale. Nothing was evident for the moment but that this crooked fellow could see clearly and strike quickly; that he was bold, unscrupulous, and strong. He was not unpopular for that, or for certain manly attributes which the crowd admire. The difficulty was, as in all sudden _coups d’état_, to adapt oneself politicly to the fresh conditions, while awaiting security from retaliation by the old. The twisted King was not so firm in his seat as a Pope of Rome. There was a certain risk in subscribing even to his pleasantries, among which the present show might be counted.

No one had properly believed in the worser guilt of poor Mistress Shore, the late Prince’s naughty, good-hearted mistress. The indictment which charged her with complicity in the asserted attempt of Lord Hastings, her second protector, to destroy the present King’s life by witchcraft, had succeeded in proving nothing but her lovable qualities of mind and heart; whereby the Court was obliged to fall back upon her frailty, which was notorious and undeniable. It made no point, indeed, of the real tragedy of her sinning, which lay in her desertion of a young husband--a good, honest, uncorrupt fellow, a prosperous goldsmith of Lombard Street--whose happiness she had done her best to wreck, and whose name she had not had the grace to exchange for another. It was really only concerned, at bottom, with proving what an obnoxious libertine had been the fourth Edward, and how sweetly the crooked one shone by contrast. And so, to make all this clear, it washed, Pilate-like, its hands of the beautiful frailty, and handed her over to the Churchmen for chastisement. They were prompt to deliver it, and not altogether inhumanly. The concubine was sentenced to make public confession of her fault, in the prescriptive deshabille of sheet and candle, and thereafter depart in peace and mend her ways. The penalty, in fact, was in process at the moment.

There was not much gossip. The crowd, penned within the multitude of low buildings which surrounded the old Cathedral, showed more curiosity, even sympathy, than hostility towards the delinquent. Its constituents were much the same as when it had listened six months before to Dr. Shaw’s famous sermon at the Cross, and that truckling divine had first broached the question of the last two Edwards’ illegitimacy. It had acquiesced then, in the insensibility following exhaustion; it had not yet recovered from that condition. This present matter, or the sin which had procured it, was not of a nature wont to excite much comment or reproof; but the undoubted popularity of the usurper was confusing all issues. It supposed he had a reason for humiliating pretty Mrs. Shore, who had been as notable for her kindness as her beauty; and so it accepted his ruling as part of the perplexity of things, which some day must be going to lighten.

She came out in a minute, a half-dozen of acolytes preceding, a group of priests following her. As she appeared on the steps, a waft of wind took the hem of the white sheet, which was her sole drapery, and blew it aside from her knees. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed to an instant pink, which never thereafter deserted it. She clapped down her hand in a haste which extinguished the taper she held; whereat a cold voice halted the procession, and she must stand in her shame while the light was being rekindled. And as they came on again she hung her head and her lip trembled.

“Her stature,” says an eye-witness, “was meane [signifying short]; her haire of a dark yellow; her face round and full; her eye grey, delicate harmony between each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s colour; her body white and smooth ... she went in countenance and pase demure, so womanlie, that albeit she were out of all araie save her kirtle onlie, yet went she so faire and lovelie, namelie, while the woondering of the people cast a comelier rud in her cheeks (of which she before had most misse), that hir great shame was hir much praise among those that were more amorous of hir bodie than curious of hir soule. And manie good folks that hated hir living (and glad were to see sin corrected), yet pitied they more hir penance than rejoised therein, when they considered that the King procured it more of a corrupt intent, than anie virtuous affection.”

“Proper she was and fair; nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would, have wished her somewhat higher”--no romancer can better that description, and so it shall stand.

She came down the steps so shamed that she seemed insensible to the weather. It was snowing again, and the flakes kissed her pink feet as if in pity, and kissed her neck, and cried into her cold bosom. She tried to shake her long, loose hair before her face.

Round by the north side they turned; and so to the pulpit, where she knelt; and all the way the people were silent. And the Bishop mounted into the tribune, and, sheltered in his snuggery, delivered a long harangue on the iniquity of loose living. And at the end he demanded of her if she confessed and repented; whereat she answered, in a voice all little and shrunken: “I do own my fault, and ask pardon for it.” At which he raised his tone and bade her depart where she would, and mend her ways and live cleanly; only first he pronounced the King’s mandate, that no man should relieve or succour her on pain of death, which set many marvelling over the reason which could deliver with one hand and deprive with the other.

Now, Jane Shore rose like one dazed, and the lighted taper fell from her hand, and she looked hither and thither, as if seeking where she could escape in her misery and confusion. And all of a sudden the cold seemed to smite her, and she gathered the sheet about her tender limbs and gave a single cry like a lamb. And in its very utterance she had a desperate inspiration, which was to follow a tall man who all this time had stood close by among the crowd. Something--the shadow of a gesture, the look in his eyes, close under which his hand had gathered his cloak--had seemed to invite her, and when he moved, without appearing to pursue him she followed--on the road to clean living. But was she the first or the only woman helplessly abandoned to the paradoxes of life?