Part 9

“O, thou toad! Thou wilt not die, for all thy stricken heart? Will this kill thee then?”

She whipped out the red stiletto. Rosamond uttered a faint shriek.

“Blood!”

The Queen brandished it before her eyes.

“I met thy whelp in the glade. It was he who betrayed the way to me.”

The girl gasped and tottered forward.

“I let him to his death. Monster, thou hast killed my Willie--my boy, my one darling!”

She made an effort to leap forward--swayed--and fell her full length upon the grass.

The Queen, softly replacing her blade, stood staring down. No sound or movement followed on the fall. Stooping, she gazed long and silently into the thin face, then, without a word, turned and retreated as she had come.

The boy was standing, white and tearless, by his dead rabbit as she parted the leaves and slunk forth.

“Go to thy mother, child,” she whispered, hoarse and small. “She is ill.”

THE GALILEAN

A solitary goatherd sat crouched on a slope above the Sea of Galilee. It was approaching morning, and he had lit a little fire on the rocks in order to roast his breakfast of fish. It was still dark, though the embroidered velvet canopy overhead was beginning to reveal a grape-like bloom along its eastern verge. Seven miles across, on the opposite shore, the lamps of Tiberias, minute and liquid, dripped threads of gold into the motionless lake; to the north the snows of Mount Hermon lay like a pillow to the quiet hills; everywhere was the swoon and stillness which characterise that last deep hour of slumber when sleep itself sleeps.

The smoke of the goatherd’s fire rose in a thin, unbroken shaft; the hiss and explosion of its thorns were uttered in a subdued voice; he himself sat like a figure carved in old ivory. His arms and legs were bare; his only garment was a tunic of brown sackcloth; he was the gauntest man of his race in all Galilee. He suggested some grotesque vulturine fledgling rather than a human being, in his leathery skin, denuded scalp, prominent eyes, and great horny beak of a nose. Whatever juice there was in him must have been as brown and acrid as a walnut’s.

He had laid his sticks upon a little ledge or plateau where the green of the banks, rising some fifty feet or so from the margin of the lake, first strayed to lose itself among the waste and tumble of the sandstone heights above. Scattered among the bents and yellow boulders from which he had descended lay his silent flock. He was the only soul awake, it seemed, in all that heaped-up solitude.

Suddenly he raised his head. The sound of a footstep, distant at first, but regularly approaching, penetrated to his ears. It fell low and loud, unmistakably human, until it resolved itself into the tramp of a worried man coming over the hills from the south. The goatherd was not interested or concerned. He sat apathetic, even when the traveller, appearing round a bend of the rocks, walked grunting into the firelight and revealed himself a Roman soldier.

The newcomer had a heavy, colourless face with thick black eyebrows. The close chin-piece of his small cap-like helmet gave his lower jaw a bulldog look. His body to the hips was cased in a laminated cuirass of brass, epaulets of which covered his shoulders, and his short tunic was garnished with hanging straps of leather plated with strips of the same metal. Skin-tight drawers descended to the middle of his calves, and were succeeded by puttees of pliant felt, which ended in military caligæ with spiked soles. A short, double-edged sword hung in a sheath at his right side, and in his hand he carried a javelin of about his own height, the shaft of which had served him for a staff. Weary and benighted as he appeared to be, his speech and bearing expressed the arrogance of the dominant race.

“Ho!” he said, “ho!” and stretched himself relieved. “Food and fire, and a respite at least from his cursed chase. What lights are yon across the lake, goatherd?”

“Tiberias.”

It might have been an automaton speaking. The soldier swore by all his gods.

“Eighty miles from Jerusalem--a land of rogues and fools! Now directed this way, now that, mountains where I was told valleys, and torrents for fords, and to find at last that I have taken the wrong bank! Harkee, thou wooden Satyrus: my horse fell foundered among the hills, and I saw thy fire and made for it on foot. Well, I carry despatches for thy Tetrach, and thou tellest me that is Tiberias yonder. Should I not do well to beat thee for it?”

The large eyes of the goatherd conned the speaker immovably.

“Tiberias,” he repeated. And then he added: “With dawn will come the fishermen.”

The soldier cursed: “What, calf!” and checked himself. “Thou meanest,” he said, “a boat to carry me across?” He heaved out a sigh. “Well, goatherd, so be it; and while I wait I starve. Dost thou not hunger too?”

“Aye,” said the goatherd, “always and for ever.”

The fish were spluttering on the embers. The soldier speared one with his javelin, and, blowing on it, began to eat unceremoniously.

“I would not concede so much to _my_ Fates,” he said. “I would rob sooner. Besides, here is proof plenty that you lie, old goatherd.”

The goatherd bent forward, and prodded the speaker once with a finger like a crooked stick.

“How old wouldst call me?” he said.

“A hundred.”

“I am seven and twenty, Roman.”

The soldier laughed and stared.

“Bearest thy years ill. Since when beganst to age?”

“Since I began to starve.”

“And when was that?”

“When one said to me: ‘Feed on the illusions of the flesh until I come again.’”

“One--one? What one?”

“A strange white man. They called him Jesus of Nazareth about here.”

The soldier, his cheek bulged with fish, stopped masticating a moment to stare, then burst into a hoarse laugh.

“Ho ho! my friend! Art in a sorry case indeed! Thou shalt starve and starve, by Cæsar. Tell me the story, goatherd.”

The gaunt creature mused a little.

“Why, there is none, Roman, but just this. I had heard of him and scoffed--I, a practical man--and one day (it was many seasons back) he came across the water to these hills, and a great multitude followed and gathered to him from all sides. And they brought with them a number that were maimed and sick, and the man touched them and they appeared healed, rising and blessing his name, so that I, though counting it an illusion of the spirit, could not but marvel in his magic and the people’s blindness. Now the crowd abode here into the third day, and they felt neither thirst nor hunger; but I, that durst not leave my flock, waiting for them to go, was like a ravenous wolf. And on the third day this Jesus called for food to give to his followers, and some that were his went down to the boat, and I with them. And, lo! there were but a few loaves and fishes--nothing at all for such a multitude. But I helped to carry these up, and on the way the largest fish of all I hid beneath my tunic, for I thought: ‘Great he may be, but nothing is lost that I take precautions against his failure to assuage my hunger.’ Then did he bid us all to sit upon the ground, and he blessed and brake the fish and bread; and so it happened--account it to what you will--for every soul there was a meal and to spare. But when it came to my turn he would give me none; only, gazing on me, he bade me, since faith I had not, to feed on the illusions of the flesh until he came again. And I laughed to myself, thinking of the fish; but, Roman, that fish when I came to devour it was like a shadow in the water, having form but no substance, and so it is with all food to me since. Though I behold it, handle it, I put a shadow to my lips. Yet every day do I prepare my meal, hoping the curse removed, and knowing always it shall not be until he come again.”

The soldier broke into a roar of laughter.

“Until he come again!” he cried, “until he come again! O, a jockeyed Jew, a poor deluded Jew!”

He was so gloriously tickled that he had to gasp and choke himself into sobriety.

“Harkee, goatherd,” he said presently; “there was a day, not long past, in Jerusalem--a lamentable day for thee. It thundered--gods, how it thundered, rattling the Place of Skulls! I ought to remember, seeing I was on duty there. Nazareth was it, now? Why, to be sure--I know my letters, and it was writ plain enough and high enough. Jesus of Nazareth, who saved others, but could not save himself--that was it--one of three rogues condemned. Well, he laid an embargo on thee, did he? You see this spear----”

He paused, in the very act of lifting his javelin, and sat staring stupidly at it. Its point was tipped with crimson.

“The rising sun!” muttered the goatherd, and, getting suddenly to his feet, stood gazing seawards. The soldier came and stood beside him.

The whole wide valley, while they spoke, had opened to the morning like a rose, the clustered hills its petals, its calyx the deep lake, the lights upon it dewdrops shining at its heart. And there upon the dim waters, swinging close inshore, was a fisherman’s boat, its crew gathering in an empty net.

Now the two on the hill stood too remote to distinguish sounds or faces, while the conformation of the rocks hid the shore from their view. But of a sudden, as they looked, the forms in the boat started erect, and, all standing in a huddled group, appeared to gaze landwards. And instantly, as if they had received therefrom some direction, they seized and cast their net the other side of the boat and drew on it, and the watchers saw by their straining muscles that the net was full. Perceiving which, one of the fishermen, a burly fellow, quitted his hold of the cords, and, leaping into the water, floundered for the shore and disappeared.

“What now?” said the soldier. “Do they spy and seek us?” He muttered vacantly, and glanced again at his spear-head, and shook the haft impatiently. But the sunrise would not be detached from it.

Now the goatherd ran to a cleft which commanded the shore below, and, glaring a moment, returned swiftly, his face alight.

“Rabboni,” he said excitedly, “it is the man of Nazareth himself come back, and he ascendeth the hill towards us, and the spell will be removed from me so that I shall taste fish once more.”

But the words were hardly out of his mouth when the soldier seized his arm, and, dragging him to the shelter of a great boulder at a distance, forced him to crouch with him behind it, so that they might see without being seen. And so hidden, they were aware of a shape that came into the firelight, and it was white like a spirit of the hills and waters, and it stretched its hands above the embers, so that they leaped again.

And the goatherd heard the soldier mutter in his ear:

“A practical man--you say you are a practical man! Now, who is it?”

“Jesus of Nazareth,” he answered.

But the soldier looked at his javelin and it ran with sunrise.

“That cannot be,” he said, “for seven days ago I opened his side with this spear as he hung upon the cross, and there is the blood to testify to it.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the goatherd; “my palate is sufficient evidence for me. Look where they come and lay their fish upon my embers. The very savour of their cooking tells me I can taste again. It is Jesus, sure enough!”

THE BORGIA DEATH

“This is the house, father,” muttered the Benedictine.

His companion, like himself, wore the black habit of the Order, and his cowl so shrouded his face that little of that was visible but a short white beard fringing a mouth and jaw of singular grimness.

The two stood before the door of a common dwelling situated in a block of buildings near the Ponte Sisto, and almost under the shadow of the Castle of the Capoferri. It was a June evening of the year 1504, and already the seven hills of Rome were like seven burning kilns. The heat radiated from them, even at midnight, would have sufficed a reasonable land for its summer.

The door was opened to the low knock of the friar by a scared-looking young girl. She wore a simple dress of green frieze, the bodice of which, unlaced to the heat, had slipped about her shoulders. The light of the lamp she carried rounded upon her full lower lip, and gave a dusky mystery to her wide animal eyes. The older man, regarding the child a moment, raised his hand and fondled her chin and neck, deliberately, and like a privileged connoisseur.

“Balatrone’s daughter?” he asked.

The girl answered “Yes” with a motion of her lips. Taking him for the prior of some great community, she never even thought of resenting his caress.

“It may count to thy father for a score of indulgences,” said the monk. “We shall see. Now take us to him.”

She went before, and they followed her into a little stifling chamber looking on a small courtyard where a scrap of fountain tinkled. Tiny as its voice was, it conveyed a thought of refreshment to the sick man who lay on a couch against the wall beside.

The face of this man already bore the shadow of coming dissolution. He had been fat once, and so recently that his skin had had no time to adapt itself to the waste within, but hung in folds like wrinkled tripe. His eyes had a haunted, pathetic look in them, for he had lived his later time with a damning secret for company, and he dreaded unspeakably the mortal moment which should find him still unrelieved of its burden. Wherefore he had provisionally, and with a reservation in favour of his own possible recovery, confided to his confessor enough of the business to awaken that cleric’s lively interest, and to send him off in search of one more fitted, by virtue of his canonical rank and authority, to accept contrition and deliver judgment on a momentous matter. The two lost no time in preliminaries.

“This is one, Balatrone,” said the friar, “endowed with the highest gift for absolution. I am about to make known to him the substance of the report you have committed to me.”

“_Bene, bene_,” said the sick man, nodding exhaustedly. “I ask the good father to purge my soul.”

The “good father” mentioned had seated himself in an obscure corner, his face bowed and concealed by his hood. The other monk took a parchment from his bosom, and referred to it.

“These are the depositions,” he said softly, “of one Andrea Sfondrati, late page to his Holiness Alexander VI. The man died recently under suspicion of poison, and the document came into the hands of Balatrone here.”

“I stole it from his chamber,” declared the patient, in a tremulous but resolved voice, “after I had poisoned him. None but I and he knew of its existence. It is all true. No alternative was left me.”

“Continue,” said the seated monk passionlessly. “Continue, brother. So far this implies nothing beyond your province.”

The Benedictine, unperturbed, unfolded the parchment.

“The statement, Father,” he said, “covers the night of his late Holiness’s mortal sickness, which in a few hours left the throne of St. Peter vacant.” He glanced significantly towards the other, who silently motioned him to proceed. “There were present with his Holiness on that occasion,” he went on, “his son the Don Cesare Borgia and his Eminence the Cardinal Adriano of Corneto. The narrator takes up the tale at the moment when a certain dish was placed before his Eminence during the feast served privately in his honour.”

He shifted, so as to get the light upon the document, and began to read in a clear, low voice:

“‘We all knew well enough,’ says Sfondrati, ‘what was going to happen. When I took the dish from Torelli at the door, I thought to myself, “Here ensues a vacancy in the Sacred College.” There had been so much purring and fondling, such solicitude about the Cardinal’s health, such brotherly frankness, such plans for the morrow. That was the Borgia way, the one they always followed by choice. Though they might cut throats under provocation, to take a man by the hand, to praise and flatter and applaud him, to caress his prosperous fatness, as it were, while studying in his face the working of the poison they had already insinuated into his belly--that was the sport of sports to them. And this Cardinal had loggias and vineyards and much oil and corn. He was a wealthy prince, a succulent mouthful, and it was his turn to be swallowed. “How,” I thought, “can any one, not a credulous ass, be brought to commit himself to these gloved tigers? Has not Corneto heard, like the rest of us, of the Orsini, of Vitellozzo, of Oliverotto, of brother Gandia and brother-in-law Biseglia, of Peroto, the Holy Father’s little favourite, whose wisand was split by Cesare as he clung screaming to the arms of his old patron? Has he not heard of these and a hundred others; of the mysterious illnesses, of the stabs in the dark, of the bodies tipped into the Tiber, of that charcoal-burner, witness to Gandia’s murder, who excused himself for not having reported the matter to the Governor on the ground that such affairs had grown too common o’ nights to excite interest? Has he not heard, in short, of these Spaniards their little ways, that he can thus voluntarily venture himself within reach of their covetous grip? Or does he throw up the game in despair, and yield his money-bags incontinent to the Vatican exchequer?”

“‘I judged his Eminence wrongly, as the sequel will show; but the belief was in me at the moment, and pretty contemptuously, that the man was a fool.

“‘Well, I took the dish, I say, from Torelli, and Nicandro took it from me. We were supping in the garden-house, in Apollo’s bower, for the month was August; and Nicandro was our Ganymede and little Lisetta our Hebe. They made a pretty couple, and may have shared something less than a shirt between them. Nicandro placed the dish before his Eminence. It was confetti of creamed fruit, and a perfume like ambrosia rose from it. I had never seen the handsome, devilish face of Don Cesare look more gentle and ingratiatory than it did at that moment. Its expression put to rebuke the Holy Father’s, which was as sick and flabby as a skinned calf’s. The old devil had not the nerve of his whelp--that is the truth. The dish was placed before his Eminence, I say, and its fellow before each of the other two.’”

“He was the very maestro of confetti, that cook,” broke out the sick man feebly from his couch. “His designs in gilt and coloured sugar were sheer masterpieces!”

The monk glanced dumbly at him a moment, then continued his reading:

“‘Lisette hung over the Cardinal, with the flagon of wine in her hand. Her bosom pressed his neck; she laid her cheek upon his bald head, and, so standing, filled his glass. But Corneto put neither his hand to the dish nor his lips to the beaker. Instead he rose, and so suddenly, that he bruised the child’s lips.

“‘“Blood!” said Cæsar softly, and with a smile. “That is a harsh retort on love, Prince.”

“‘Then, in one instant, I recognised that I had misjudged his Eminence, that he knew or guessed, and that a crisis was upon us. His eyes were like black glass in stone; he looked into the black, excited eyes of his host. The two white, black-eyed faces, the one awful, the other wet and piteous, opposed each other.

“‘“Is it your will, Borgia, that I eat of this dish?” he said.

“‘The Pope strove to reply, and no word could he articulate. But his son answered for him: “What distemper is this, Corneto? Come, rally thee, man, nor leave the feast uncrowned. One effort more; see, we will give thee the lead!”

“‘He ate himself, and made his father eat. When the two were finished, the Cardinal addressed the Pope. “God forgive thee, Borgia,” he said, “and prosper thy design for all its worth.” And he, in his turn, ate of his sweet, and flung the dish from him. “_Consummatum est_,” he said. “I have my peace to make with Heaven. I crave your Holiness’s permission to withdraw.”

“‘Now Don Cesare rose laughing, and rallying their guest for his weak stomach, saw him for a distance through the gardens and then himself returned. And there were we, the frightened witnesses, whispering half tearful now the thing was done, yet dreading that he should see and resent our tremors.

“‘But the Pope sat staring with a ghastly face; and Don Cesare sat down beside him, and the two fell murmuring together. And suddenly, in one moment, his Holiness uttered a mortal cry: “Corneto, I am poisoned! He hath retorted on us with our own!”

“‘It was true. The Cardinal, well foreseeing his fate, had prevailed, by bribes and prayers and promises, over the conscience of his Holiness’s cook, and had induced the man to serve to his masters the poison intended for himself. The Borgia took the Borgia’s own prescription, and died that night in torture. Cæsar hung between hell and earth awhile, and presently escaped. This is all true as I record it.’”

The monk ceased reading, and looked towards the couch. For a little no sound broke the stillness but the faint gasping of the patient and the noisome droning of a fly about the room.

“Balatrone?” whispered the Benedictine.

“I was that cook!” cried the dying man in a fearful voice. “Sfondrati read my secret, and recorded it, and bled me with it till he ruined me. I had to poison him to still his tongue and secure the record.”

The seated monk arose, and came with a fierce stride to the bed.

“Thou hast killed a Pope,” he said. “Yield up the secret of that poison--the Borgia death.”

“Absolve me first.”

“None but a Pope can do that.”

“Then I must take it with me to the grave.”

“Hark ye, fellow--I am Julius; I am the Pope.”

“It is his Holiness indeed, Balatrone,” cried the friar.

The man screamed and writhed.

“It is the foam of swine, poisoned with arsenic and then whipped to frenzy. Absolve me, Holy Father, absolve me!”

“Ha!” exclaimed the Pontiff, in the voice of a long-covetous man satisfied.

He heard a choke behind him, and turned to find the girl close by. His face softened. “What, little Hebe,” he said. “Wouldst like to come and serve the wine to Papa Julius? But, wait.”

He turned, with hand uplifted, to give the blessing; but Balatrone was dead.

“DEAD MAN’S PLACK”

Elfrida, wife of Athelwold, the King’s favourite, and daughter and heiress to Olgar Earl of Devonshire, was a beauty of the true Helena complexion. To see her, for most men, was to covet; to possess her, for the one, was to wear a crown of exquisite thorns. The orchard needs most watching when the fruit is ripe, and Elfrida hung at perpetual ripeness, maddening to parched lips without. The keeper of this garden of sweet things might hardly enjoy it for his fear of robbers. And the worst of it was that, to maintain so ravishing a possession in its perfection, no warning as to its own irresistible witchery must be so much as hinted to it, lest the blue innocence of two of the most lovely wondering eyes in the world should be impaired thereby, and self-consciousness usurp in them the place of _naïveté_. Gazing into those artless depths, if one had the privilege, one presently recognised in their little floating motes and shadows the souls of the many who had drowned themselves therein. Was Elfrida conscious of the tragic secrets hidden away under those azure waters? Her husband at least thought her the most loving, the most unsophisticated, the most trustworthy of wives; and if the wish was very particularly the father to the thought, the thought was none the less for that sincere.