Part 6

The crowd made way for her, and no man durst follow. Soon she was upon the outskirts of the throng, soon quit of it altogether. Some whispered ribaldries, some rude touches she had to endure, and that was all. She believed that the lure would not have let her lose sight of him; and sure enough there he was going on in front, a noble by token of his jewelled bonnet, with the long pendant gathered from it about his neck, and the rich scarlet hose which showed under his cloak. She thought well, desperate as she was, not to compromise him, and she followed at a distance. He went round by the deserted east end of the church, through the place that was called Old Change, and so, turning sharp down towards the river, made a sudden twist among the confusion of buildings there, and wheeled into a narrow way known as Sermon Lane, where he loitered just sufficiently to enable her to see him disappear into a certain house. Clutching her sheet about her, and watchful of suspicious eyes, she stole on, hesitated a moment, and hurried in his footsteps. She may have been observed or not; in any case she was a contagion whom all avoided. The door closed behind her as she entered and sank against the wall.

“Rise, madam,” he whispered. He was close beside her. His voice was quick and strange.

She burst into tears at once, passionate, heart-rending, exhausting. He let her weep herself out, while she crouched against the wall. Presently, the storm subsiding, she looked half up.

“Will you not give me your cloak?” she said. “I am cold.”

“For no other reason?” he asked.

She slunk down again.

“No,” she said. “That were a poor pretence, and meet for your mockery. I must barter a private place with you against raiment. Even a whore must go covered.”

He stooped and took her, unresisting, in his arms, though she held her face averted. He carried her impassive up the stairs of that dark, unknown house, and all the way there was passion in his hold and grief in his labouring sighs. She knew that they had entered a warm room, that he had shut the door, had placed her gently on a couch by the fire.

“Jane!” he said.

She uttered a quick, wild cry, and started erect, so that the sheet fell from her shoulders.

“Cover them, in mercy to me,” he said.

She stared at him a moment, then went into a sudden hysteric laugh. It stabbed him to the heart to hear her, for her voice had ever been merry and sweet.

“O!” she cried, “that a woman should be so used by her own husband!”

“Nay,” said he--“but that I might know you still not dead to shame.”

The ripple of her laugh stopped as it had begun.

“Why are you so richly dight, Harry?” she said.

“A lure,” he answered, “to lead thee hither. Who would win a King’s mistress must borrow peacock’s plumes.”

She shivered a little, looking down, then whispered hoarse:

“Well, I am well answered. Yet you look like a noble. O, Harry, speak like one!”

“God forbid it, Jane! I will speak like Harry Shore.”

“He loved me once.”

“Aye; he is risking death to prove it.”

She looked up quickly; but before she could speak the door opened, and a little boy peeped into the room. He was caught away in a moment by an unseen hand, and the door closed; but in that instant the woman had snatched her drapery about her nakedness, shamed as she had never been yet.

“A wretch!” she said, her face on fire.

“Saw’st thou his blue eyes and pretty curls?” said the goldsmith. “He is son to my master-setter, whose house this is. I had dreamed once of such a babe, mine own and thine.”

She rose and crept to him, looking in his face. It was a bronzed and honest one, though drawn with pain.

“Harry,” she whispered, “find me clothes and bid me begone--in memory of our once kisses, Harry.”

“They are here,” he said. “Everything is prepared for thee--the means to lead a blameless life henceforth. Summon the woman when I’m gone. I would not have them say I left my wife to starve.”

He put out his arms, passion in his eyes, but withdrew them resolutely.

“Nay,” he said; “in heaven--not yet.”

He fell back a little, and cried out suddenly:

“Your foot, Jane! Poor foot; it bleeds!”

He motioned her to the couch, knelt, lifted the wounded limb, and with his napkin staunched the trickling blood. He held it to his breast, and at last, with a long, yearning sigh, put his lips to it.

“This hath atoned,” he said--“so far I shame myself,” and he rose. “Little sinful wife,” he whispered, “he loved thee once; he loves thee ever; else could he leave thee thus? Now, let me never hear thy name again--for love’s sake do I ask it.”

She had buried her face in the cushions. And there she lay, long after he had gone, weeping out her soul.

THE CHAPLAIN OF THE TOWER

“My son!”

The kneeling figure started slightly, hearing the whisper in its ear, and half turned its face.

“_Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Ricardum_, my son.”

The Benedictine had stolen list-footed from among the shadows of the great pillars, and stood, a blacker shadow, bending over the solitary worshipper in the darkening chapel of St. John. It was a breathless August evening of the year 1483, and not a sound penetrated to this remote fastness of the Keep.

“God save the King, Father!” answered the suppliant. It was Brackenbury himself, Lieutenant of the Tower, and a sore matter of conscience had brought him to this place. He rose instantly to his feet.

“I say it with all my heart,” quoth he. “God save the King--from numbering himself among his worst enemies.”

“Sh--sh!” whispered the chaplain. “Sh--sh! good Sir John.” He put a finger to his lips, and, motioning the other forth, held him on the outer threshold.

“To ensure the pure succession,” he said low. “This bastard boy, Sir John--a canker that would eat into the State. No safety but in his excision.”

“For the second time,” replied the knight sternly, “take my answer. Question, if you will, the blood that courses in his veins; question not mine. That stoops to no midnight butchery.”

He waved his hand, as if in appeal or protest, towards the chapel, and turned to go. But the priest detained him.

“A moment, good Sir John. The King wills it.”

“He must find a baser instrument.”

“Well so,” said the Benedictine, “well so, good Sir John. Only keep your back to us, saving your honour, and see nothing for a little space.”

The Lieutenant, without another word, strode away, his harness clanging in the vaults.

The covert priest stood listening, a smile, small and hungry, on his lips. He hungered, indeed, had always hungered, for many things--preferment, power, the good immoral gifts of life and indulgences other than Papal. And suddenly, amazingly, it appeared, they were all come within his grasp. He had only to persuade this master of his to a certain deed, by absolving him for it before committed, and a mitre awaited him. It had been whispered in his ear, as he had whispered in Sir John’s. The abbot of his own Order at Westminster was deeply involved with the Queen-Dowager, to whom he had given sanctuary. The crooked King disliked people who sheltered his enemies. A motion of his hand and the chaplain was in the abbot’s place. The seat awaited him--it was stupendous, actual--and, while reaching for it, to be baulked by a scruple of conscience not his own! The thing was intolerable.

Abbot of St. Peter’s! His lips watered, thinking of it; his eyelids blinked and reddened. He was a lean, famished-looking body, with sharp-set features, and a smile perpetually on his mouth between propitiatory and craving. One might have counted his ribs, and never guessed at the dreams of surfeit that wantoned under them. He turned and crept away.

That night a messenger rode from the Tower, following in the wake of the royal progress northwards. He found the King where he lay at Warwick Castle, and, entering to him at midnight, whispered of Sir John’s obstinate density and of the chaplain’s better understanding. A few minutes later Sir James Tyrrell, Master of the King’s Horse, started on his way back to London. He took with him a brace of confidants, fat trusty fellows, whose names should be pilloried throughout the ages. They were John Dighton and Miles Forrest, sinewy miscreants, as callous to suffering as Smithfield butchers. He took also a royal warrant, entrusting to him, for one night only, the custody of the fortress, its keys and passwords; and finally he took, for his personal comfort in the business, a sure conviction of his own damnation. Reaching the Tower, he displayed his commission, locked away all troublesome witnesses, emptied the outer ward, to which the public had access, of its loiterers, and had the place to himself. Having done which, he hastened with his two ruffians to the gate-house where the princes lay.

It was a close, windless night, with thunder brooding over the river. Every stone that slipped under the assassin’s feet jarred his nerves intolerably. He muttered to himself as he walked, wringing his wet forehead. The shadow of a figure that rose upon him from the shadowy porch brought an oath from his lips.

“Who’s that? Answer, and be damned!”

“Hist, good Sir James!” whispered the crawling priest. “Curse not thine own absolver.”

“A blasphemy,” answered Tyrrell; “or God Himself is a villain. Come,” he said intolerantly: “show us the way to hell.”

The Benedictine crossed himself.

“_Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordium tuam_,” he murmured. “Direct our stumbling feet who seek the light by dubious ways. Give me the key, soldier. It were well that I ascended first to report if the children sleep. The better for them, the better for us.”

Bending under a low doorway in the wall of the passage, he disappeared. Tyrrell let out a quaking groan.

“Trip his heels, trip his heels, O, devil my master!” he sighed between his teeth.

The shadow went up the stairs, paused at a certain door, fitted a key into its lock with stealthy caution, listened, and glided into the room beyond. It was small, and fast locked in stone ten feet in thickness. There were windows front and back. Through the former a cresset burning on St. Thomas’s Tower across the ward cast a red flicker upon a couple of pallets standing near side by side against the wall. A sound of unconscious breathing came from these. The evil shadow crept on and stooped.

Blood on the young white face! Fool! it was the painting of the cresset. This deed might seem a pitiful thing were it not for the hunger that seemed a pitifuller. To be abbot--to be bishop--to be cardinal even! Who knew? He glanced down. His own inky cassock was smeared with the scarlet fire. To wade through blood to the Sacred College! Why not? The end expiated all means thereto. There were a score of precedents to justify him. The Abbacy once gained, his power for good would be multiplied a hundredfold. He raised his eyes. The red glare seemed to fill them from within. Something in his interposing shadow appeared to make the younger child behind him uneasy. He stirred and moaned in his sleep. Presently he murmured, with a whimper:

“Take it away, mother!”

He was always her Saxon darling, with the head of gold. She used to call his eyes like cockles in the corn. The shadow stole apart, and, with a sigh, he breathed warm again.

To be abbot! What surer justification of his right than to dispatch these innocent souls to God? They would thank him in the end for much peril spared them. He hesitated no longer, but, leaving the door ajar, descended as he had come.

The human dogs below were straining in their leashes. At a sign Tyrrell motioned them to their work. The two stole up, while their master remained to hold the door. And then came the awful interval.

The blood on the white face! The priest blinked at the cresset flaming high across the yard. Surely it burned with a lurider glow? It was the wind fanning it. Wind? there was no breath of wind in all the dead night. What, then, if not the pipe of wind in passage or keyhole, was that sudden whine which rose upon the silence? With the sweat breaking out on his forehead, he seized a mattock, one of several which had been laid ready, and began frenziedly striking at the ground under the wall. Tyrrell, with a gasping oath, came hurrying to join him.

They dug like madmen, against their own terror and the vision to come. And when at last it announced itself with heave, and shuffle, and the grunting of brute lungs, they would not pause for a moment, but, reinforced, wrought and wrought until the grave was made, and closed in, and their sin covered. And then Tyrrell, summoning his vile grooms, delivered up his trust and rode away for York, with his soul rattling like a dried kernel within him.

The chaplain thought of a prayer for the dead, and bending, with an abject face, to kneel by the grave, saw dark stains on his sandalled feet. He glanced at the burning cresset, stooped and, touching them, looked at his fingers. To wade through blood! With a shudder he thrust his hands out of sight into the wide sleeves of his cassock, and went hurriedly away, drifting across the open ward like the black shadow of a cloud.

But the morning found him restored and unrepentant.

Abbot of St. Peter’s! Day by day, while that preferment was delayed, the hunger ravened in him and the conscience hardened, until his crime, going unrewarded, filled him with an insane and rageful joy. But one evening there came a secret message to him that the King, superstitious after the fashion of the sceptical and world-serving, had taken exception to the place of burial, and desired that the dead should be privately exhumed and reinterred in a place less unconsecrate. Flushed with renewed hope, then, he hugged his confidence, and went with burning eyes about his task.

God knows how he managed to perform it, and alone, and without exciting suspicion. He was lord of his own sacred domain. But, working with demoniac energy, he got out the spoiled young bodies, and conveyed them one by one to the new grave he had himself opened for them under the chapel stairs. There they might repose within sound of the Mass, at peace and at rest for evermore. His imagination, as with monomaniacs, could flow only in one direction. Each day he trod upon the stones that hid his secret, and never faltered or feared. And each day he waited, hungering, for his summons to Westminster.

It came at last--the prize for which he had wrought, and suffered, and bartered his priestly soul. He was in the chapel at the time, and he heard the voice of the Lieutenant calling to him. He hurried out, and saw Sir John standing, citation in hand, at the foot of the stairs.

“Hail, Father Abbot!” quoth the knight, in that derisory tone he had ever assumed towards him since their last interview.

The chaplain, his thin lips chewing out a smile, lingered on the top of the flight. And then, all in a moment, his eyes were seen to fix themselves in a stare of horror, as if some terrific vision opposed them.

“What’s this?” he whispered. “Who put it here?”

The other answered, startled: “I see naught.”

“Ah-ha!”

He threw up his hands with a screech and fell headlong. His neck, as he pitched, doubled under him with a crack, and the body, bowling down, was flung at Sir John’s feet. There, with its head fallen back upon the very stone which locked away its secret, it relaxed and settled.

_He had received the wages and paid the price of blood in one and the same instant._

So died that chaplain of the Tower who alone, out of all the kingdom, could have solved the mystery of the tragic dead. When, on the accession of Henry, it became necessary, for reasons of high policy, to disinter the bodies, the grave under the wall was found to have been violated--only rumour could whisper by whom. One of the actual murderers was dead; the other, together with the late Master of the Horse, being seized and questioned, could throw no light upon the matter. Not until two hundred years had passed was the secret to be unearthed by some masons engaged in repairing the chapel stairs.

And the priest? There was a legend once current of an odd little detail connected with his end. And that was that the body, when picked up, exhibited no marks of injury about the head and neck, only the feet were bloody. It might well have been, seeing whereon they had trodden those many days past.

LADY GODIVA

“Will you not, Leofric?”

“Hence! You weary me.”

“Dear lord?”

“Dear lady. So you plead like a child, the gold circlet in thy hair, the gold hem at thy robe, the gold garters about thy knees. Remission of these dues, quotha! Are gems got with forbearance? Go to! you talk. Wouldst sacrifice one garnet in thy brooch to ease these churls of mine?”

“O, yes! and more.”

“More, more! What more? The garnets of thy lips, perchance, thine eyes’ amethysts, the whole treasury of thy love?”

“Nay, for that is my dear lord’s.”

“What so? You are considerate.”

“Leofric, they come crying at my stirrup: ‘While you lie soft, O lady, we cannot sleep for cold; while you toy with profusion, our children moan for bread. We toil to keep, not pay, a tithe of what we earn. We may not eat the swine we rear, the eels we net. The taxes crush us; pray you our good lord to lift the heavy burden. Our lives are his.’”

“Do they say so? They shall answer for it for thus importuning you.”

“God forbid! Leofric, hear me! For the love of God, Leofric.”

“Away!”

“Of the sweet Virgin----”

“Will you tempt me too much!”

“For thy love of poor Godiva.”

The Earl turned with a roar.

“_My_ love! What of thine, so to scheme to rob me?”

“O, not rob, but give. I would have them love thee as I love.”

“By robbing me. That is a one-sided compact. I see naught but my own loss in it.”

“Alas! I would give my all.”

“A vain boast. What is thine to give?”

She sighed.

“_My_ love, perhaps?” he said, mocking.

She shook her head.

“What is thy dearest possession?” he asked, still bantering. “Most women count their modesty. Wouldst thou give that?”

She said, weeping, “I would trust in Mary.”

He stamped down his foot.

“Trust, then! Strip off thy robe, ride naked through the town--so then I will believe thee.”

She looked up at him amazed. The colour flushed and waned in her round cheek, leaving it a lily white.

“_But will you give me leave to do so?_” she whispered.

“Aye,” he said, breathing scorn.

“And, being done, remit the tolls and set thy people free?”

“On my knightly oath,” he swore, and, in a sudden tickle of humour, chucked her soft chin, and went off between anger and hard laughter.

She was of the stock of Thorold, this young wife, sheriffs of Lincolnshire and a devout and noble family. It had been like garlanding of a bull with flowers, this wedding of her sweet gentleness with the stormy Saxon earl. Yet from the first she had had influence with him. He bore her humorously, one moment reverencing her, the next loving to bring the shameful scarlet to her cheek, and then to crush her about with his arms in mighty protection and ownership. She had a soft white beauty like a rose, and it was good thus to hold her full fragrance against his breast.

Now, trembling a little and her eyes cast down, she sought Father Thomas, the chaplain of the house, and told him all. Was she justified in the venture? she asked him, her voice scarcely audible.

The man was young and erotic, under his habit a sickly craver of emotions. He would often in his inmost soul gloat upon a dream, a thought--wild and scarce conceivable; yet the authority of his cloth was potent. It was a swooning experience to him to be near her day by day, to feel the leaning of her soul towards his, to handle the soft places of her conscience. Accepting what was regard for his office as regard for the priest, he would whisper to himself: “Even greater miracles have come to pass.” Wherefore now, moistening his dry lips and thinking of her loveliness, he answered her with the Greek proverb: “A little evil is a great good. You are justified, my daughter.”

She turned and fled from him with a strangled cry. Perhaps she had hoped against hope to find her venture banned by Mother Church; perhaps, unrecognised by herself, the pure spirit in her had recoiled from contact with a thing unclean. Yet he was God’s servant, and he had spoken.

For days after, awaiting the ordeal, she walked as in a nightmare, a rose of fever in her cheek. She named the hour of her trial, and sent her herald forth to cry it, and to pray all human creatures of their love to spare her shame, since she was consecrating her womanhood to their salvation, and offering herself for their sakes to be exposed on this pillory. And a sound like a wind went throughout the town, and each soul there, from thrall to freedman, kindled like dull fire blown upon, and dropped upon his knees to call the bitter curse of Heaven on him that should prove a traitor to such trust. And Godiva heard and sighed; yet she could not escape that sense of soilure in her, since to a spotless soul it is defilement enough to be outraged in a dreamer’s thought. “O, Mother Mary, ward and hide me!” she prayed perpetually.

Her lord learned the truth amazed. She was resolved, then, after all? She would take him at his word to browbeat and defy him? Yet he would not interfere, nor move one step to control her. But ever in his frowning eyes was a shadow like death, and on his lips a muttered curse: “Will she do it? Will she do it? A wanton--no wife of mine.” And, thinking so, he let her have her way, even to the brief command of all his house and borough.

Now, on that day of sacrifice, by noon all Coventry was like a city of the dead. The last step had echoed from its streets; the voice of lean barter was hushed; behind veiled windows a thousand ears were strained in thrill and ecstasy to hear the tinkle of a palfry’s feet upon the stones without. Only one sacrilegious hound, doomed to eternal infamy, could be found to slur the honest record--a small, livid-faced man, slinking like a fearful thief, his cowl pulled over his eyes, up the steps of the Byward tower by the castle gate. Father Thomas it was, who had left Godiva in the chapel prostrate before the figure of the Virgin, praying for strength to do her part. It was only right, he told himself, licking his pale lips, that the Church should sanction this live-offering by its presence.

The Castle had fallen as silent as the town. Its inmates whispered apart, or wept if they were women. Its great gate was flung open, its battlements were deserted, its windows stopped and eyeless; only in the courtyard a single creamy jennet, fastened to a pillar, champed and fretted for her rider.

The frowning Leofric, his ear bent to a curtain close at hand, fingered his sword-hilt as he waited listening. His fair Saxon face, clean-shaved but for the corn-coloured beard which forked from its chin like a swallow’s tail, was flushed a deep red; the muscles of his bare arms and thighs, white against his purple gold-hemmed tunic, twitched spasmodically; the leggings of twisted gold upon his calves seemed to undulate like snake-skin.

“She shall die first!” he kept muttering to himself. “She shall die first!”

A soft step whispered on the stones; he heard the mare whinny, her trappings clinked. “Now!” he muttered, and, drawing his blade, parted the curtain noiselessly and looked forth. In the very act he staggered and flung his hand across his face.