Part 8

So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she read it. She knew at once what it was--a mortal Arab poison, given long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King. It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the gift--to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her, proposing, half-playfully, that they should pledge one another in its Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.

And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them, the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover, between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.

She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name on them.

That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.

But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.

And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.

THOMAS PAINE

“Ah, monsieur!” said the tall, nervous prisoner with the ravaged face, “the rights of one man are very well the wrongs of another--that is a new discovery; but you did not make it. Even God--who, nevertheless, does not exist just at present--could not invent a gale that would favour all ships; and yet you have thought yourself cleverer than God.”

“I do not know you,” interrupted his hearer and fellow-captive peevishly. “Why do you presume to address yourself to me?”

“Why?” The other lifted a little broken plaque or medallion which hung by a spoiled tricolour ribbon from his neck. “Do you observe this, M. Paine? I am one Garat, ex-President of the Sectional Committee of the Bonnet-Rouge, and this is my badge of office--or what remains of it. It represented the table of the law, _en précis_, as revealed to Mr. Paine on Sinai. Wearing it, I symbolised the Rights of Man. Well, what I say is, ‘Damn the Rights of Man!’”

“O! certainly, if you wish,” responded Mr. Paine coolly.

“They are fragile, are they not?” said the ex-President, with feverish derision; “they are apt to be broken in any scuffle. And where is there not a scuffle where opinions differ--which they always do? The _Rights_ of Man have not, I perceive, altered the _nature_ of man, which is to have his way wherever he can get it. Observe: I desired to do justice according to this tablet, but the mob would not permit me. Instead they haled away their suspect, unheard; and I, because I would not commit him unheard, was pronounced a traitor to the principles I represented and was despatched to this Luxembourg, where, to my profound amazement, I find incarcerated before me the lawgiver himself! Now I think I begin to understand everything. Your Rights of Man could not even save yourself. What the devil did you want redeeming others with them? For me, I would welcome all my ancient wrongs to find myself once more a prosperous barber in the Marche Neuf.”

* * * * *

In Paris on the 28th July, 1794, at six o’clock in the evening, ended at a stroke the Terror, lopped off by the head. It had been virile and active up to that last moment, prepared with its daily _fournée_, all chosen and set out for the baking; only in the result the order had been somewhat changed. Messieurs the Triumvirs and their following had been called upon to take the place of their destined victims--that was the difference.

But the evening before the death-carts had jolted as usual on their monotonous way to the Place du Trône; and therein surely the insensate tragedy of the guillotine had found its crowning expression. For at that time the dissolution of the Terror had actually begun, and the smallest gift of fortune or of foresight might have saved the lives of a half-hundred innocents. There is no sorrier fate than to perish in the lash of a just expiring monster’s tail.

There was one man appointed to figure in those tragic last tumbrils who had the best reason in the world for considering himself a spoilt child of Fortune. This was Mr. Deputy Thomas Paine, some time fallen from his popular estate, and since January imprisoned in the Luxembourg. We see him, as he stands in the courtyard of the old palace nominally taking exercise, an aloof, self-complacent little man of fifty-seven, dressed in plain brown, and wearing his own brown hair, which nature has curled. His eyes are large, dreamy, and bagged underneath; his drooping nose has a suggestion of red in its fall; he has a moist, temulent mouth, rather weighed down at the corners by pursey cheeks.

It is evening of the 26th July, and the prisoners, their brief liberty ended, are filing back to their cells. There is an unwonted excitement abroad. Some rumour of it has penetrated the walls, and fluttered the breasts of the poor caged birds within. A change is imminent; they know not what; but scarce any could be for the worse. Meanwhile, nevertheless, Fouquier’s emissary is up above, condemned list in hand, waiting to prick off the names for the morrow’s batch. The procedure is quite simple; it consists in a chalk-mark made on the door of each victim’s cell, whence on the following morning its inmate will pass to the Conciergerie, to the Revolutionary Tribunal, back to the Conciergerie, and thence the same evening to the scaffold. That is a predestined course, which much treading has made monotonous and much philosophy smoothed. It is possible even to walk it with a gay fatalism--under prescriptive circumstances. Supposing, however, that there _be_ truth in the reports; that the Triumvirs are threatened and the Terror itself doomed? What tragedy on tragedy, then, to drown in the turn of the tide! The prisoners, yesterday resigned, to-day are pacing their cells like wild beasts. Yet nothing will avail them. The last tumbrils must have their load.

Paine was sensible of their misery; he believed in the imminence of a political _volte-face_, and he pitied them. For himself he had not, nor ever had had, the least apprehension. As he lingered in abstraction, the last to withdraw, his own security, his own importance, were the first of convictions in his mind. As a moderate, he was unacceptable to the extremists--it amounted to no more than that. He had been put out of the way because he was in the way. But they would never dare more than to coerce into silence so notable an apostle of liberty. He reviewed, with some smug satisfaction, the processes of his own career. By origin a Norfolk staymaker, by chance an exciseman, by nature a demagogue, his inherent force of character had lifted him to a position which suffered at the moment only a temporary eclipse. Was it to be believed that he who had forcibly contributed to the Declaration of American Independence, who had been honoured and rewarded by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, who had earned Franklin’s friendship and Burke’s hostility, who had been elected by the Department of Calais to sit in the French Convention, and whose bold assertion of the Rights of Man had been accepted for the very ritual of the Revolution, would be let to be snuffed out by the dirty fingers of a murdering attorney? Fouquier dare not do it; Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, the all-powerful Triumvirate, were not assured enough for such a venture. Besides, they represented, in an age of reason, the crowning expression of reason--that government by minority which had always been a pet theory of his.

He frowned, then lifted his eyebrows with a smile. Something in the connection, a memory of his own once discomfiture on a certain occasion, had recurred to him. It had happened in London, in a Fleet Street tavern, two or three years before. How remote it all seemed! Dr. Wolcot--he who called himself Peter Pindar--had been there--a huge, overbearing old voluptuary, with flashing eyes, and a flashing wit, and a scurrilous tongue. Paine had been discoursing to an admiring audience on the reasonableness of deciding questions in Parliament by minorities instead of majorities, “since,” said he, “the proportion of men of sense to ignoramuses is but as one to ten. Wherefore the wisest portion of mankind are always in the minority in debate”--a statement which the Doctor disputed. “Still,” said the latter, “I will assert nothing for myself, but leave the question to the company.”

Now, at that, Paine, confident of his surroundings, had risen, and put the question to the vote, those who agreed with him to hold up their hands. Whereupon every hand had gone up, and the Doctor had arisen, with a bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I thank you for this decision in my favour. The wise minority, as represented in my person, carries the vote. I pronounce Mr. Paine wrong.” And he had swallowed his glassful and lumbered out.

Somehow the prisoner remembered that occasion with pleasure. It suggested a form of liberty much more in accord with his real nature than a world of abstract utilitarianisms. The wine in the Luxembourg was thin; indulgences were few; they often dined off stale sprats. The end of his own nose, touched by a ray of the slanting sun, caught his eye as with the glint of a ruby. He pished under his breath.

“Bah!” he muttered. “He was a domineering beast; but I wish I were with him now at Dick’s in Fleet Street.”

He sighed and stirred; and it was at that moment that the stranger of the broken plaque had approached and accosted him. He was a newcomer, and unknown to the ex-Deputy.

“To the devil with your Rights of Man!” ended the tall prisoner. He caught at Paine, who had turned an angry shoulder to him and was going. “Is it not so?” he demanded. “They are just one’s right, it appears, to run with the crowd the crowd’s way. If one takes the _Liberty_ to pause a moment for reflection, one is trampled underfoot by _Fraternity_ and packed off to discuss _Equality_ with the other heads in the basket.”

“I would have you observe,” said Paine frigidly, “that the turnkey is summoning us to return to our cells.”

He moved away, but the other followed close beside him, agitated and voluble.

“Cells!” he cried--“cells! But is not that a fine comment on your propaganda? I interpret your Rights according to the tables, and you send me to the guillotine for it.”

“_I?_” said Paine. He stopped in desperation.

“Is not your emissary up there now,” cried Garat, “marking off the doomed?”

“_My_ emissary?” said Paine.

“You are as responsible as any for him,” said the ex-President, kneading his damp palms together. “If you _would_ try to blow east and west at once, meddling with unknown forces. You should have remembered, monsieur, that the first right of man is to existence. There would have been a fine air of originality about that precept. It has always been the easiest thing in the world to solve human problems by killing.”

The demagogue took refuge behind derision.

“I perceive you are simply a coward,” he said.

“Yes,” cried Garat, his lips trembling. “I am simply that. What can you expect, who have decreed us annihilation for our despair? Our ancient wrongs conceded us a heaven after all; your modern rights have taken it away. It is all very well for you, safeguarded by your position, to pretend to despise death; it would be another matter, I expect, if you feared, like me, to find the chalk-mark on your door.”

“Rest assured,” said Paine contemptuously. “If you have sought to serve Justice, Justice will not destroy her own.”

“But there are accidents.”

“I answer for her, I say,” insisted the demagogue, with an air of pompous finality. “You may, trust to my own share, citizen--grossly as you libel it--in her modern scheme, which provides against such possibilities. No trick of Fortune is permitted nowadays to spare the guilty or condemn the innocent.”

“But are you sure, monsieur? Monsieur, in God’s name!”

Paine waved the creature aside with a peremptory gesture, and continued his way across the yard. They were the last to enter the prison, and they mounted the naked stairs almost together. In the same corridor above were their cells situated, and Torné, the surly gaoler, was already holding half-closed the door of Garat’s, which came first. It was bare of the fatal sign, and Garat ran into his fold with a bleat like a comforted sheep.

Mr. Thomas Paine, with a shrug and sneer, tripped on his way to his own cell. Reaching it, he raised his eyes, staggered slightly, and gave a single gasp. Its door was flung back against the outer wall, _and the mark was on it_.

_Inside!_ He had but to close it upon himself, and the mark would vanish. Fouquier’s hurrying emissary, not being of the wise minority, had overlooked that contingency.

Torné, having locked in Garat, was coming down the corridor. Screening the sign with his arm, the ex-Deputy swung round the door and shut himself in.

He died a dozen deaths before he heard the key turn in the lock outside--a hundred before the news of next day’s _coup d’état_ came to restore life to ten thousand withering hopes.

But the tumbrils went on the morrow, and for the last time, all the same--only he was not a passenger by them. It was just his luck that Fortune was offered such a characteristic way of retaliating upon him for his boasted command of her.

FAIR ROSAMOND

A lady, accompanied by a small armed retinue, rode out of a forest glade near Woodstock, and, pausing beside the waters of the Glyme, which here came tumbling in a little weir, smooth as a barrel of glass, over an artificial dam, reined in her steed, and sat gazing, in the full glow of noon, upon the scene before her.

It was a scene of perfect pastoral quiet--woodland and meadow as far as the eye could reach, broken by green hillocks and dominated by a solitary keep of stone set on a leafy height in the foreground. To the right a film of floating vapour showed where a hidden hamlet smoked. There was no other token of human life or habitation anywhere.

The lady, halting a little in advance of her party, made a preoccupied motion with her hand, whereupon there pushed forward to her a certain horseman, who dragged with him a churl roped to his saddle-bow. The knight was in bascinet and chain-mail like the others, but his shield and _pavon_ were emblazoned with arms betokening his higher rank.

“Messer de Polwarth,” said the lady, “is not this in sooth Love’s paradise?”

“Certes, madam,” he answered grimly; “it is the King’s Manor of Woodstock.”

She laughed; then, stiffening suddenly in her saddle, pointed upwards.

“Look!” she said.

A poising kite, as she spoke, had dropped to the wood-edge, and thence rose swiftly with a dove beating in its talons.

“Behold a fruitful omen,” she cried, and turned on the hind: “Dog! where lies the garden?”

De Polwarth struck the fellow a steely blow across the scruff.

“Answer, beast!”

The man, a sullen, unkempt savage, pointed with an arm like a snag.

“Down yon, a bowshot from the lodge. Boun by the waterside.”

The lady nodded, her eyes fixed in a sort of smiling trance. She was Eleanor of Aquitaine, no less, the divorced wife of France, the neglected and embittered Queen of England, and she was at this moment on the verge of flight to those rebellious sons of hers who conspired in Guienne against their father.

But, before she fled, she had just one deed of savage vengeance to perpetrate, and of that she would not be baulked, though to accomplish it she must ride across half England. Somewhere, she knew, in this place was situated that “house of wonderful working--wrought like unto a knot in a garden,” where lived her hated child-rival, that beautiful frail rose of the Cliffords who had borne the King a son. So much the worse for her--so much the worse.

The Queen descended to earth, spiritually and literally. She was dressed like a queen in a belted blue robe latticed with gold, and a long purple cloak over. A jewelled coronet embraced her headcloth and the headcloth her face. The rim of hair that showed under was still, for all her fifty odd years, crow black. Her colour was high, her frame masculine; the prominence of her lower lip gave her a cruel expression, and without belying her.

“Nay, de Polwarth,” she said, as the knight made a movement to dismount. “No hand in this but mine.”

He retorted gruffly: “The place is reputed impenetrable.”

She smiled. “Hate will find out a way. Rest you here till I return.”

Never to be gainsaid, she went off alone by the streamside, and soon disappeared among the trees beyond.

Her way took her under the slope of the hill which ran up to the King’s Manor. At first, looking through the branches, she could catch glimpses of the strong, irregular pile, butting like a mountain crag from the forehead of the green height; but, in a little, the density of the trees increasing, the house was hidden from her view, and she had only the thick, towering woods and the little stream for company.

On and on she went, resolute to her purpose, thrilled with some presentiment of its near accomplishment--and suddenly a white rabbit ran out from the green almost under her feet.

She stopped dead on the instant, and, as she stood motionless, the thicket parted near the bole of a great beech-tree hard by, and a little boy slipped out into the open. He was pink-cheeked, Saxon-haired and eyed--a shapely manikin of five or so. Intent on recapturing his pet, he did not at first notice the stranger; but when he turned, with the bunny hugged in his arms, he stood rosily transfixed. In a swift stride or two the Queen was upon him, cutting off his retreat.

She stooped, with a little exultant laugh.

“What is thy name, sweet imp?” she said.

He pouted, half-frightened, but still essaying the man, rubbing one foot against the opposite calf.

“Willie Clifford, madam,” he said, wondering for a moment at her crown; but then panic overtook him.

“Nay, Willie,” said the Queen, holding him with a hand that belied its own softness; “I like thy tunic of white lawn and thy pretty shoon so latched with gold. Hast a fond mother, Willie--whose name I will guess of thee for Rosamond? And for thy father, Willie--do you see him often?”

“He hath a crown like thine, but finer,” said the child; “and when he comes he puts it on my head.” Something in the staring face above him awoke his sudden fear. He began to struggle.

“Let me go!” he cried--“I want to go back to my minny.”

“Thy minny?” said the Queen. “One moment, child. Is that thy secret way behind the tree there?”

“I will not tell thee,” cried the boy. “I want my minny! Let me go!”

With one swift movement she tore the rabbit from his arms, and holding it aloft with her left hand, with her right whipped a jewelled bodkin from its sheath at her waist, and stabbed the little white body, stabbed it, stabbed it. Then she flung the convulsed encrimsoned thing to the ground, and, resheathing the weapon, held the child with a stare of fury.

The swiftness, the savagery, the dreadful novelty of the act had had their purposed effect on him. His eyes widened, his throat swelled; but the scream to which he was on the instant impelled never came. His little soul was paralysed; he was utter slave to horror. If she had told him at that moment to lie down and go to sleep, he would have tried to obey her will, though the unuttered sobs were half-bursting his bosom.

“Now,” she said, “now!” panting a little. “Seest, thou harlot’s whelp? Cross me again, and so shalt thou be served. Wait here--move one step hence an thou darest--until I come again.”

She cast one final look of menace at him, then, stepping to the beech-tree, parted the green and disappeared.

It was a cunning blind, as she had expected. The great trunk was so packed amongst the thickets of the hillside that none would have guessed its concealment of a scarce-discernible track which threaded the matted growths above and behind it. Mounting by this, the malign creature came suddenly upon a broken opening in the rock, so mossy and so choked with foliage that its presence would have been quite unsuspected from the glade below. She stopped; she uttered a little gloating exclamation; for there, looped over a projection of the stone, was the end of a strong green thread hanging out of the darkness. The clue, of which she had heard whisper with but small faith, was actually in her hand. Providence had doomed the foolish mother to permit her child to sport with the very means designed against her own destruction.

The cavity led into a ramification of passages, roughly trenched and hewn out of the calcareous slate of the hill. Occasionally roofed, mostly open, always tangled in foliage, and so cunningly devised to mislead that it had been near humanly impossible to resolve its intricacies without such guide to follow, the labyrinth led the Queen by a complicated course to a sense of approaching light and release. And then all in a moment the thread had come to an end against a stake to which it was fastened; and there was a pleasant garden sunk in a hollow of the hill, and a fair young woman, with an awaiting, somewhat troubled expression on her face, standing hard by. She had evidently spun the clue, and returned the first by it from the glade, to make sport for her little man.

The intruder took all in at a glance--the expectant figure, the quiet, inaccessible pleasaunce, the roof of a gilt pavilion rising, a long stone’s-throw away, above the branches of a flowering orchard; dominating all, and hiding this lovely secret in its lap, the wooded hill crowned by its protecting keep.

The young woman, with one startled glance, turned to fly; but in the very act, staggered by a recollection, turned, and came towards the Queen, a hand pressed to her bosom. She was a frail thing, in the ethereal as well as the worldly sense--fragile, it seemed, as china, and as delicately tinted. All pink and cream, with pale golden hair, her darker eyebrows were the only definite note of colour in a thin face. Even her long robe of pale green suggested the anæmia of tulip-leaves forced into premature growth.

“A weak craft to have borne so huge a sin,” said Eleanor, as the girl approached. She eyed her with malignant scorn, her under lip projecting. “So, wanton,” she said, “dost know the wife thou hast wronged?”

The other gave a little mortal start and cry: “The Queen!” and could utter no more.

A small, hateful laugh answered her.

“The wife, fool! the she-wolf against whom you thought to guard your fold with straws. Why, look at you--I could peel you in my hands--a bloodless stalk, without heat or beauty!”

“Spare me!”

“Aye, as the wolf spares the lamb, the hawk the wren. Let me look on you. So this is a King’s fancy. I could have wrought him better from a kitchen-scrub. Quick! I am in; I have no time to lose, and thine has come. Poison or steel--make thy choice.”

“O, madam, in pity! My heart--I have been weak and ill--I shall not vex thee long!”

“God’s blood! And baulk my vengeance? Come--poison----”

“O! What poison?”

“Why, that thou art betrayed--supplanted. Another leman lies in thy bed--wife to one Blewit, a willing cuckold. Drink it, thy desertion, to the dregs.”

“Sin must not beshrew sin. It is bitter to the death; but I drink it.”