Part 12

As for Enguerrand, he was struck full into his heart. Involuntarily he straightened his hand and the empty phial fell lightly on the carpet. He remained a moment staring into nothingness; then slowly raised his eyes, and met the King’s eyes in the Venetian mirror.

Charles’s face in the glass … his glance was terrible! Terrible, too, was his voice as he spoke again, though it was lower than usual, and very distinct, very quiet:—

“Bring me that cup, Little Satan.”

And as the boy mechanically lifted the dragon goblet and turned round, holding it in both hands, for it was brimming, Charles leaned across the table and passed the twin cup, his own, toward Rockhurst, who sat in wonder.

“The King should have the fuller draught,” he said. “Why do you wait there, Little Satan?—Bring me that cup, that I may pledge my noble friend the Lord Constable.”

With this Enguerrand heard his doom. Had the King ordered him to torture and death he could not have punished him so mortally as by this quiet order.

A second more he stood, with fascinated eyes, staring at his beloved master: there was not the faintest answer in Charles’s relentless gaze. Then a dreadful smile broke on the young face. Without a word Enguerrand de Joncelles lifted the beaker to his own lips and drank.

It was a long draught, and every gulp was an effort to the constricted throat. Yet there was no interruption; and for a seemingly endless span of silence and tension the boy stood and drew the death into himself—his eyes, over the lovely, fragile rim, fixed in agony upon the King.

Charles made no sign, but waited.

When the last drop was drained, Enguerrand unclasped his fingers on either side. The dragon glass fell and was shivered.

Here Rockhurst leaped to his feet.

“Good God, your Majesty!” he exclaimed. “What is this?”

“Sit down again,” said the King, coldly. “The Vidame de Joncelles has voluntarily assumed to-night a new service about our person. It is a service which hath fallen into desuetude at the Court of England. And the young gentleman has proved a greedy taster and a clumsy one.—I am still waiting for my wine.”

Rockhurst’s gaze went in deep uneasiness from Charles’s face, set in lines of unwonted severity, to the livid countenance of the boy, who leaned back against the sideboard, scarce able to support himself.

“Your pardon, sire,” he began, pushing back his own cup—“the matter can scarce remain.…”

But his sovereign again interrupted him, this time with the royal peremptoriness which admits of no discussion:—

“There is but one thing we will not pardon, and it is that you add to our tedium: we commanded your presence here to-night that you might share it, not to increase it. But, meanwhile we are waiting,—Monsieur de Joncelles,”—and for the first time he raised his voice sharply,—“we are waiting.”

The boy passed his hand across his forehead and dashed back the curls that were already growing damp. That the King should have no pity on him, and yet spare him thus—it was befitting one whom he had worshipped from the very first for his true royalty. A kind of fierce pride awoke in him and spurred him to meet his death in a manner worthy of such clement cruelty. Though the lights were beginning to swim before his eyes and he rather groped than saw, he contrived to open a second flask and fill another of the Venetian beakers.

Then—for French Joan had been faithful, and swift was the working of her gift—he had to make a heroic effort to bring the glass to the King. But the very fierceness of the effort, final flare of an indomitable spirit, carried the failing body through.

Enguerrand came to the table with measured step, although it seemed to him he trod illimitable air; went down slowly on one knee and uplifted his rigid hands, clasping the substance he no longer felt. The ultimate action of his life was the yielding of the cup into the King’s hand.

As the King took and drank, the boy fell.

“Why, the lad has swooned…! some aqua vitæ!” exclaimed Rockhurst.

But Charles flung out his hand with his rare gesture of command:—

“Nay, my lord.—He is dead, or dying. Little Satans do not do their work by halves. He is dead or soon will be.—Odd’s fish!” added the King, after a moment’s frowning meditation, “when you lured that linnet, his sister, to sing for you in the Tower, Harry, you little thought her song was to have such an echo!”

Rockhurst stared for a moment horror-stricken—his glance roamed from the broken beaker to the cups on the table and thence to Enguerrand’s convulsed face. A glimmering of the truth began to dawn upon him; the mystery was dissolving before a tragic and dreadful light. Even in the midst of the King’s words he dropped on one knee to raise the prone figure. The livid head fell limply back over his arm. The King cast one look down and averted his eyes.

“Away with him!” he cried, in an explosion of nervous irritability. “Away with him! Call whomsoever you want to carry him, do what you list, get what physician you wish,—the lad’s dead, and ’tis the end of it! You understand, I’ll not hear another word about the matter.… Gadzooks! what a finish to a tedious day! Away with him, I command you, my Lord Rockhurst!”

Rockhurst, who had half risen at the King’s sharp tones, now bent once more down and gathered the inert form into his arms.

“Will your Majesty, then, open the door for me?” he said, in a low voice.

The King sprang up from his chair, dashing his napkin on one side, and flung open the door with an angry hand.

The slam of its closing echoed down the great corridors. So would Charles ever shut the unpleasant episode out from his life. Yet he had not quite succeeded: as he went moodily back to the table, his foot struck against the empty little phial. With precaution, placing the napkin between it and his palm, he held it to the light. It was wrought of Italian glass, with twisted lines of blue and red, not much larger than a filbert nut.

A vision swam before his eyes: Rockhurst’s face, upturned as he had but just now seen that of his French page; and, like it, livid in the hues of death.

“Little Satan! …” he said aloud.

It was the last time that the words were ever to cross his lips. He cast the phial out through the open window and heard the faint splintering crash echo from the flags below.

* * * * *

Rockhurst had taken but a few steps down the passage, when some inexplicable impression bade him pause and glance down at his sad burden.

The light from one of the wall sconces fell full on the boy’s face: a subtle change, that was scarcely so much a quiver as a composing of all the features, was passing over it, driving away the terrible pinched look of agony and restoring something of its youthful beauty. Then Enguerrand opened his eyes and stared up into the Lord Constable’s countenance. Rockhurst had never before met those eyes but that he had found hatred in them. At this supreme moment there was no hatred, only a kind of desolate wonder. Then, even as their gaze met, the soul that seemed to seek his was gone; the eyes wondered no more.

Rockhurst stood still, an intolerable pain at his heart. It was almost as if he held his own son’s dead body on his breast. The ring of the yeoman’s halbert, the tramp of his heavy foot, roused him from the revery. He strode forward a few steps more.

“Ho, Ashby,” he called, “I have need of thee!”

“Nay, in God’s mercy,” cried the old man, drawing near, “that is never the French lad!”

He laid the halbert against the wall, and hastened to relieve his captain from the burden. Then, as he felt one of the small hands, cold and limp:—

“Dead, and dead in very surety! Why, ’tis not an hour since he passed me, singing like a swallow on the wing, and hopping for all like a squirrel.”

* * * * *

Very serious was the face of the King’s physician, and pale his cheek, as he lifted himself suddenly from the examination of the corpse that had been laid on my Lord Constable’s bed, in the room by the gateway.

He turned hastily and, forgetting all decorum, pushed not only the yeoman, who was awaiting his orders, but my lord himself, from the chamber.

“We can do nothing—the boy is dead!”

Then he leaned over and breathed rather than spoke into Rockhurst’s ear the single word, “Plague.” Adding aloud, the while fumbling in his pocket for his pomander box:—

“One of those monstrous, sudden cases we are told of—but which I confess I have never seen! Merciful heavens … in Whitehall! Your lordship must submit instantly to fumigation. Aye, and yonder yeoman, too, who carried the body.” This between prolonged sniffs at the pierced lid of his pomander box. “Pray, my lord, inhale of this, deep—and you, too, fellow, after his lordship! And the burial must be early in the morn—poor lad! And, my lord, I beseech let it be in secret. Oh, we must hold our tongues about this, my Lord Constable! The sickness in Whitehall, and in his Majesty’s very apartment!… Not a word to his Majesty! The lad has died of a fit—a rush to the head. Tut, tut—the truth must be kept secret indeed!”

Rockhurst had listened with immovable countenance.

“Aye,” he said gravely, “it shall be kept secret.”

And, after inhaling the pomander box with due solemnity, he handed it to yeoman Ashby. But as soon as the physician, taking a hurried _congé_, had left the anteroom, he laid his hand on the old soldier’s shoulder:—

“Never fear, man, neither you nor I shall catch the sickness whereof this poor youth died, you can take your captain’s word for warrant. Nevertheless, I charge thee, speak no word, but, as the physician hath it—a rush to the head!”

* * * * *

Yet rumour ran abroad, as rumour will. And Sir Paul Farrant, hearing of his whilom friend’s tragic death, had never a doubt that it was in those haunts of Alsatia that he had first met the distemper—and himself started off to the pure airs of Farrant Chace, where he spent a dismal month watching for symptoms.

Over the grave, in Tothill Fields, where the passionate, revengeful heart lay now in quietude, a stone was erected by the Lord Constable’s order, which set forth the Vidame de Joncelle’s names and titles, and recorded he had died in the flower of his age, honoured by the King’s regard.

LADY CHILLINGBURGH’S LAST CARD-PARTY

LADY CHILLINGBURGH’S LAST CARD-PARTY

I

LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS

Lionel Ratcliffe closed behind him the gate of the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he had his lodging. He crossed the road, then paused to survey the desolate scene.

The day was drawing to a close, but sullen fires of sunset were still burning low under a leaden, cloudy sky. Beneath his feet the grass was parched, the ground everywhere leprous grey. Though it was only early July, the foliage of the trees hung limp and sick-hued; there was not a flicker of life among the branches—indeed, hardly a stir anywhere in the languid atmosphere. Sky seemed to brood over earth, earth to lie paralysed, awaiting some moment of catastrophe, and heavy vapours to be fusing them together. The heat was a palpable presence. An anguished expectation caught the throat as with an actual pressure. The plague held all London in its grip.

Men can walk with fortitude under the wings of the Angel of Destruction, when the death he brings is a clean one, honourable, seemly; but this horrible Demon of Corruption that now spread its shadow over the world made its victims loathsome in each other’s eyes and infected them with coward selfishness and panic fears.

The Court had gone at last, though Charles was no poltroon. Half the population was in flight along country roads; blind terror was upon most of those whom circumstances retained within the doomed circle. Among the well-to-do only three classes still lingered in the town: those whom a sense of duty kept at their post; those again who, with a strange but not unknown faculty of self-deception, chose to ignore the visitation rather than to face the appalling presence; and lastly, those few strong natures who, for purposes of their own, found it worth while to set danger at defiance.

To these last belonged Lionel Ratcliffe. Fully aware of the peril, he challenged it deliberately. He knew that those yellow vapours were the very breath of the pestilence; that the smell everywhere meeting his nostrils was that of death; that among yonder prostrate figures reclining beneath the trees many were doubtless stricken, dying, or dead. He kept on, nevertheless, calm if wary, at a masterful gait, across the fields.

In his hand he swung a loaded cane of such proportions as almost to rival a watchman’s staff—one which could keep at a distance or at one stroke lay low the sturdiest onslaught. For it was well known that many of the pest-stricken in their delirium rushed into the street to die; that the passer-by might at any moment be confronted by some miserable wretch who, seized with madness, would rise and clasp him in an embrace of hideous contagion.

As for the mumpers and rufflers, who were wont to emerge at the darkening hours in the Fields—like night-moths, no one knew where from—one glance of this gentleman’s eye, not to speak of the knowing gesture of the staff hand, would have sufficed to bid even the stoutest of them pause and be wiser than to meddle.

And so Lionel Ratcliffe passed on, without undue haste, leaving the closed theatre on his left, making westward toward Arch Row. And presently, as he emerged from the shadow of the trees, he sighted the mansion that was his goal, Chillingburgh House, with its sharp roof, its coping balustrade and urns rising in relief, black against the lurid orange of the sky.

As he approached the gateway a sedan chair, escorted by a couple of armed footmen, was just depositing a lady voluminously wrapped in a silk cloak before the double flight of steps. He halted for a second to watch her begin the ascent on the right. She went slowly, as one fatigued; he swiftly entered the flagged courtyard, took the opposite side of the stairs, and reached the landing just before her.

“Madame de Mantes! … your servant—! Punctual to the moment!” cried he, bowed and clapped the feathered hat against his breast.

She halted on the last step and raised her handsome head slowly toward him, ignoring his hand. The light was growing dim, and the rosy folds of her hood looked grey; but even under its shadows and in spite of the rouge on her cheek he had an uncomfortable impression of her pallor.

“_Oui_,” she said tonelessly, “_me voici_.” Then, with sudden petulance, “Ouf! but one suffocates in this air!”

She caught at the strings of her cloak and tore them apart; the light silken thing slipped from her shoulders, but she hurried into the house as one unseeing. Ratcliffe picked up the garment alertly, and followed, just in time to offer his hand again at the foot of the great staircase. The touch of her fingers struck chill. His first misgivings deepened; but he quickly dismissed the rising thoughts. Bah! a woman in love (what was there about this Rockhurst, curse him! that all the fair should thus run mad upon him?)—a woman hopelessly in love, and a Frenchwoman at that! There would sure be scenes with the faithless lover, and she was even now rehearsing them in her agitated imagination. Well might her hands be cold.

“Are you ill at ease?” he whispered, with a perfunctory show of solicitude as they passed a couple of anxious-looking servants and drew closer together on the stairs.

“_Mon Dieu!_ but not at all!” she mocked him irritably. “Neither ill in my ease, nor my heart, nor—oh, tranquillise yourself—nor in my head! Besides, who could be but well and happy in this merry London of yours?”

They had reached the gallery. She snapped her hand from his and dropped him a courtesy. He wondered to have thought her pale; now she seemed to him unwontedly flushed. Her heavy eyes shot fire. Appraising her critically, he approved. There were jewels at her ears and throat; her gown had the impress of French taste, and became her every beauty.

The grey-haired butler who flung open the doors of the drawing-room at her approach looked after the swaying, shimmering figure with melancholy approval.

“’Tis almost like old times, Master Lionel,” he whispered, as Ratcliffe passed in, “to see a Court lady about the place again.”

“Aye, from Court she is,” said Lady Chillingburgh’s grandson, halting on the threshold to let his gaze roam thankfully over the great white-and-gold room, which had a sense of coolness and repose about it, even on such a night. “But she had her reasons for not hasting off with the rest of them this morning.”

“Eh—but they must be weighty reasons!” murmured the old servant, with a sigh.

“No doubt the lady thinks them so,” said Lionel Ratcliffe, with his detached laugh.—“We are full early here, ’twould seem,” he added in louder tones, advancing toward the card-table in the window before which the Frenchwoman had already taken seat.

But she disdained to cast toward him even the flutter of an eyelid. Her fingers were moving restlessly among the cards and dice.

“_Zero … zero! Hein? Non-zero. Ah … mal-chance!_”

The man stood over her a second or two in silence. Then sat down in his turn and faced her. His voice rang out with a kind of empty cheeriness:—

“What! to the dice already?—Nay,” here he leaned across the narrow space and whispered, “Remember, it was to play another game that I brought you here.”

She turned petulantly from him; then her eye became fixed, staring out through the unshuttered window.

“What a strange red moon is rising!” she cried. “Would to God, Monsieur Ratcliffe, you had never come to me this morning, tempting, tempting.… My boxes were packed: I should be now far from this pit of pestil—”

“Hush! hush!” he warned, finger on lip. “Not here! Do not forget my instructions.” Then, in his low, mock-gallant accents: “How now? Is the game, then, no longer worth the hazard?”

She caught up the dice-box again, feverishly:—

“Yes—yes. But I have no luck to-night!”

She muttered and cast. “Naught again!”

“Expect you luck at the game of chance,” quoth he, catching the dice-box from her hand, “when you are so lucky at the game of love?”

“I? I, lucky?”

“Yes,” proceeded he; “and have you not had Cupid’s best cards in your hand, since the very hour of your landing with Madame de France? First the King—King of Trumps himself, and eke the Queen.—Gad, she’d have loved you, were it but to spite the Castlemaine.—Then—”

“Tush!” she interrupted angrily. “Cards?—’Tis not all to hold the cards—one must play them. I held them all, in truth—” she put her hand to her throat with a little choking sob. “But—”

“You threw them all down!” he laughed.

“Ah, _ciel_!—When the heart begins to take a part in this game of love, then all goes astray.”

“Aye,” repeated the man, steadily, his hard eyes upon her, “you threw your cards away—and all for love of this Rockhurst, the greatest knave in the pack.”

She turned with sudden anger:—

“Knave, sir? Sho!… King of you all!” Then, with equally sudden change of mood, “Oh, he _is_ a villain!” she moaned, and her lip trembled upon tears.

“And so you have not seen him,” said he, altering his tone to one of elaborate sympathy, “since he returned to town, escorting to his house my fair cousin, Diana Harcourt? What—not once, after all you have given up for him?—Faith, ’tis ungallant of him!”

Her elbows on the table, her chin sunk in her hands, she was now staring fiercely into his eyes.

“Your promise, sir, that I meet him here to-night?…”

“Nay, I can only tell you, my fair Jeanne, that he journeys hither from the Tower or Whitehall twice a day—when ’tis not thrice.”

“_Mon Dieu!_ …” she breathed between her clenched teeth.

Satisfied with the temper he had aroused in her, the man withdrew his eyes, turned sideways on his chair, and crossed his legs.

“I fear you’ve been too cool with him,” he remarked airily. “Our ‘merry Rockhurst,’ as his Majesty calls him, is used to a vast deal of warmth.”

“I—too cool!” She laughed hysterically. “Oh, yes, it was that, of course, with this heart and brain of mine on fire!”

“Then I fear,” said Ratcliffe, on the edge of a yawn, “you’ve been too hot. The Lord Constable of his Majesty’s Tower is a man of niceties.”

“Monsieur Ratcliffe,” cried Jeanne de Mantes, beating the table with her palm and darting her head toward him like a pretty serpent, “you are the Devil!”

“And your very good friend, madam.” He smiled with a charming bow. “Come, come! Smooth that fair brow. Do you doubt but you can hold your own against a mere country widow?”

She fixed him with suspicious eyes.

“Aye, and now it comes to me,” she cried resentfully. “What is your motive in all this, Monsieur Ratcliffe? Not simply sympathy for me?”

“Come, come! Be calm.” There was authority under his blandness. “Be calm,” he repeated, “and let me whisper in your ear.—I will even trust you with my innermost thought. Diana Harcourt shall not be for my Lord Rockhurst, but for your humble servant.”

“Aye,” she commented, a twist of scorn upon her lips; “the lady, I was told, is passing rich.”

“Even so,” returned he, unmoved. “’Twould indeed be impossible to conceal aught from your perspicacity!—Now Mistress Harcourt, by an odd trick of fate, has become affianced to Harry Rockhurst, the virtuous, innocent country son of this most reprobate nobleman. The which, however, would be but a small matter (for she loves not the green lad, mark you, nor ever will), were it not the spur to other feelings.”

“I fail to follow you, sir,” she said wearily.

“Nay, a moment’s patience, pretty huntress, then you will come full on the scent. My Lord Rockhurst has had the singular maggot of playing a game of parental virtue with his heir.—But you are not listening.”

She was pressing her temples with the tip of her fingers, as one who fights a stabbing pain. At his words, she looked up again and nodded; and he went on:—

“He has pledged himself to guard the goddess for his lad in the maze of the town. Mistress Diana has seen naught of my Lord Constable but the high-souled knight, the King Arthur of romance, and so he would fain remain in her eyes even as in those of his son; and thus he, whom the town has dubbed Rakehell Rockhurst, caught in his own springe, must go on playing the pattern of chivalry, the virtuous gentleman, the devoted father—play his part out, in fact, or else be dubbed now prince of hypocrites! Aye, and the cream of the jest is that they have fallen both so mad in love with each other, aha! that each can scarce breathe in the other’s presence for the weight of the secret!”

He laughed, but she brooded darkly, nibbling at her little finger.

“And so,” she said after a pause, “you count upon me to lure back my lord?”

“Aye,” retorted he, with a great show of ease. “That—or else to pluck the mask of grave virtue from his face … in Mistress Harcourt’s presence. Was it not agreed? Either course, I take it, will serve your purpose as well as mine. Why—I deemed you subtler, madam! Upon my Lord Constable’s discomfiture; upon the opening of my fair prude’s eyes, strikes my hour, I say. And, zounds, I take it!—Strikes your moment, too, so you know how to clutch it! Do you not see that?”

She made no answer. A meaningless laugh was on her lips; it died in a sigh. A strange feeling as of soaring and undulation had come upon her, and a splitting of her thoughts as though she were in two places at once. Her mind was wandering oddly, beyond her control, to the cool meadows of her childhood’s home, to the days when she plucked daisies with her baby brother in the dew-wet grass. Lionel Ratcliffe was still speaking; she caught a word here and there. One phrase at last fixed her attention.

“’Twill go hard,” he was saying, “if Lionel Ratcliffe comes not to his own to-night!”