Part 14

Whereupon Lionel, coming forward with his usual coolness, ran his fingers, with a movement the sinister significance of which most people had learned to interpret these days, under the fair curls of the bent head, feeling behind the ears.

“Pshaw—’tis nothing!… Sheer poltroonery,” cried he, and laughed loudly, and struck his cousin’s hunched shoulders with no gentle hand. “Art a pretty fellow to come thus, bellowing like a calf, into the presence of ladies!”

“Curse it!” moaned the lad. “I have just knocked against two women carrying a coffin! They howled like sick cats.” Sinking his head on his hands once more, he rocked himself backward and forward. “Oh, this wicked London! Oh, the judgment of God!”

“Edward!” cried Lady Chillingburgh imperiously. Her voice dominated the horrified whispers of Sir John and Foulkes, Madame de Mantes’s hysterical cries, young Edward’s obtrusive groans.

But there was a force stronger than her in her house that night. Sir John Farringdon unceremoniously poured himself a bumper of wine, drank it hastily, his eye on the door toward which Foulkes was already uneasily edging. Madame de Mantes, who had been sobbing out inarticulate words in her own tongue, broke into babbling laughter.

Edward sprang to his feet, thrusting aside his cousin’s restraining hand.

“I will speak! Grandam shall hear the truth at last! ’Tis everywhere! Every one is getting it! Lord Marsham, ill at noon, dead at four! Mistress Hill, well yesterday, buried to-night!”

“I command you to silence, Edward!”

The quavering voice rose high, catching painfully at lost authority; the palsied hand aimed a feeble blow at the table.

“Why must we stay, because of the old woman’s whimsy?” continued the boy in fury. “Zounds! I go to-night, and sister with me. D’ye hear, grandam! I’m only come here to get the travel money from you, and I’ll have it. I’ll go, and sister with me!”

But the aged queen was not yet dethroned. Her spirit asserted itself in a supreme effort. Life seemed to come back to her paralysed limbs; she flung out one hand in a gesture of authority; this time it scarce trembled.

“Diana, your brother is drunk. I order him to be expelled. Mr. Foulkes, the game is not concluded; resume your seat!”

She broke off. Sir John Farringdon had made a sudden unmannerly dash from the room. Foulkes stood at command with a sickly smile; but his friend’s example, the open passage, were too much for him; stealthily the door closed upon his retreat.

Only by a rigid aversion of her head did Lady Chillingburgh betray her knowledge of this double defection.

“Grandson Lionel, your cousin Edward is drunk. Conduct him, I say, from this apartment and let him be physicked. Madam, I am surprised you find amusement in such an indecorous scene. Foh! It seems truly that we shall have no cards to-night. Diana, child, take your guitar and sing for us. Sing that old sweet song of Master Herrick’s.—My Lord Rockhurst, have you yet heard this new instrument?”

But the Lord Constable had followed Diana as she moved across the room to seek the guitar. They stood together a second; he saw her hand tremble over the olive-wood case.

“Nay, child, you can never sing to-night!” he whispered.

“My lord, I must—anything to soothe her. Oh, the physicians have ever warned us of the danger of agitation for her!”

“Diana!” Lady Chillingburgh’s voice was weak and strained; her face seemed to have suddenly shrunk; extinct was the fire in the eyes. Yet the will still struggled. “Sing!”

Rockhurst stood behind Diana, a strong, quiet presence, watchful, comforting. She smiled at him over her shoulder. He bent to her, and under cover of the first chords:—

“You, at least, are not afraid?” he asked.

“No, my lord.”

Lionel Ratcliffe had taken no pains to fulfil his grandmother’s behest; and already she seemed to have forgotten it; but he had soothed Edward Hare after his own fashion—by a bumper of wine and a whispered promise to provide the travel money himself. Now in the lull he took a seat behind Madame de Mantes and, his eyes on Rockhurst and Diana, began in a fierce undertone:—

“Do you not see how it is with them? Why, in this evening’s folly everything conspires to give them to each other. You wait the ripe moment, say you? Gad! Look there, I say: there is that other woman with the man you love—claim him now! ’Tis your last chance!”

Madame de Mantes, who, since Lady Chillingburgh’s rebuke, had been sitting, her chin propped up on her hands, her curls concealing her face, turned slowly toward him. He started. For all his fortitude a shudder ran through him.—Through her mad eyes the Pestilence was looking upon him!

* * * * *

Diana’s voice rose faint but sweet:—

_Ask me why I send you here_ _This sweet infanta of the year?_ _Ask me why I send to you_ _This Primrose thus bepearled with dew?_

Lady Chillingburgh, with closed lids, beat time vaguely on the arm of her chair; Edward Hare pondered over his last mouthful of wine; the Frenchwoman was muttering to herself and drawing, under the shadow of the curls, restless patterns on the table with her forefinger. Lionel sat beside her, his starting eyes upon her face.

_I will whisper to your ears:_ _The sweets of Love are mixed with tears!_

sang Diana, in a voice that had grown firmer and clearer.

And now, so faintly at first as to be almost imperceptible, something began to mingle itself with the music. The clang of a bell struck at intervals, followed by a long, monotonous call. The sound drew ever nearer. Diana faltered, took up her song again bravely, failed once more, struck a broken note; then hand and voice fell mute. Stillness held them all within the great room, which seemed to wait doom the more inevitably for its bright lights, for its futile air of indifference and gaiety.

Through the open window, out of the darkness, gathered a heavy rumble of wheels; then again uprose the call of the bell, the cry of the hoarse voice:—

“Bring out your dead!”

In the breathless pause, Lady Chillingburgh, rising upon those feet that had been dead to motion so long, stood erect, and flung out her arm with an angry cry; and then it seemed there was naught in the big chair but a huddled heap of drapery. The Terror, petrified on young Hare’s lip, broke out roaring:—

“She’s dead also! Grandam’s dead! The plague! She’s dead of the plague!” He made one leap for the door, his screams awaking confusion in the house.

Within Lady Chillingburgh’s drawing-room the drama was quickly played.

Diana bent in anguish over her grandmother, crying:—

“She has swooned! For Heaven’s sake, madame, as you are a woman, give me your assistance!”

But Lionel had sprung to her side:—

“Back, Diana! Away out of this room. Our grandmother is dead.”

“The—the sickness?” she faltered, with white lips.

“The plague? Not here—” he answered her. “But there!” He flung his pointing finger toward Jeanne de Mantes, who turned her face with a crazy laugh toward them.

Diana recoiled a pace, threw out her hands as if seeking support, and Rockhurst, ever close to her, caught her in his arms as she swooned. A sudden, blind, all-encompassing fury fell upon Ratcliffe.

“Stay, my Lord Constable!” he cried fiercely, and made a spring to wrest the unconscious burden from the hated man’s embrace. “Ah, Rakehell Rockhurst, not so fast!”

The table was between them. He was wrenching at his sword as he dashed round it, pushing Jeanne de Mantes aside; when, with her soft, bare arms, she clutched his throat from behind.

It was perhaps his horror of the embrace that robbed him of the power of resistance; perhaps it was the strength lent by the delirium that rendered her burning clasp irresistible. He struggled, yet was powerless. His starting eyes beheld the Lord Constable pass out of the room to the garden, bearing Diana into the night. He gathered his energy for a last shout in the hope of raising the household to his help; but the hot arms were writhing closer about him, the scented curls beat softly against his cheek. The creature was laughing, pressing upward her disfigured face, devouring him with her mad, unseeing eyes, striving to reach his lips for the kiss of death.—And she was raving:—

“At last, O Rockhurst!… _O mon beau Démon!_”

He never knew how he loosed himself—that moment was blank, stamped with too deep a horror to be ever recalled.

He found himself as in a nightmare rushing blindly through the blackness of the fields, feeling as if he could never escape from that lingering touch of contamination, as if no waters could ever lave him from the taint!

* * * * *

It was only when he was brought to a standstill by the edge of the river, by the Essex stairs, that he realised where his frenzy was taking him, and awoke, as it were, to sanity. But it was with a trembling in every limb and a weakness that forced him to sit on the steps. The water lapped at his very feet, shivering in a little circle of light cast by the stair lantern. He dipped his hand in the dark ripple and began mechanically to lave his brow—to lave, above all, his lips.

Thought took coherent shape again.—This was the end of his close-set plans. Madame de Mantes had failed him with a completeness it seemed that must have required Satan’s own ingenuity to devise. Lord Rockhurst had not been unmasked, Diana was with him in his power,—and he, Lionel Ratcliffe (God, with what appalling reason!), was at last afraid of the plague!

BROKEN SANCTUARY

BROKEN SANCTUARY

I

THE HAVEN OF REFUGE

A red dawn was breaking over London; through the undrawn curtains of the parlour in Lord Rockhurst’s small house in Whitehall, abutting by the Holbein gateway, the first rays darted in to mingle with the dying gleam of a pair of candles that guttered in their sockets.

Chitterley—my lord’s old confidential servant, who had shared with him all fortune’s vicissitudes, through prosperity and peace, through war and exile, since the last reign—rose from the high-backed chair upon which he had been dozing, and stretched his stiffened limbs wearily. Muttering to himself, as old people will, he fell with sudden alacrity to replenishing (only just in time, for it was fast going out) the small cresset which burned at his hand.

“All good spirits praise the Lord!… Now I pray no misfortune may have happened this night!… Heaven be merciful to us; these be times of terror!”

He flung a new handful of herbs upon the rekindled embers, and watched with satisfaction the column of fragrant smoke that rose circling, now blue, now white, to hang in clouds under the ceiling. “’Twas your only remedy against the tainted air,” had said Dr. Garth; and Dr. Garth was the King’s physician.

“Morning already—and no sign of his lordship! Had it been a year gone, now, I had got me to my bed, and ne’er a qualm. But these be no times for frolic—and e’en if they were, my lord has had little stomach for it these weeks agone.”

He shook his head, moved to the window, groaning for the aches in his joints, and peered into the street, in the hope of catching at last a glimpse of his beloved master, striding down Whitehall. Dim though Chitterley’s eyes might be, he would know a furlong away the swing of the tall figure, the cock of the sword under the folds of the cloak, the proud tilt of the hat. But the street was deserted.

It seemed as if the day was rising again over the stricken city but to make visible its desolation. The unwholesome mists of the night still stagnated under the reddening light; there was none of that air of rejuvenescence, of waking life-cheer, which morning ought to bring. The stillness was not of repose, but of hopeless expectancy.

One of those street fires, which were kept burning at all cross-roads, to combat the pollution, could be seen in the distance, toward Charing Cross, smouldering fitfully, unattended, the last thin shafts of tar smoke rising straight, dismal, through the heavy air. Somewhere in the palace, behind the banquet hall, a bell rang the hour—it sounded like a knell for those that were that day to die. Presently, in this solitude, a woman’s figure appeared, creeping round a corner, holding on to the walls, dragging herself painfully; the only living creature, it seemed, left besides himself in this vast city. Presently even she disappeared from the purview.

Chitterley shuddered; and muttering his haunting “Lord have mercy upon us!” drew back from the windows to go tease again the reeking herbs in the cresset, and shift needlessly my lord’s chair.

“Not even a pomander could I persuade him to take with him…!”

He went over to extinguish the candles and stood awhile painfully musing.

There came a knock at the outer door. Hardly trusting his deaf ears, he turned to listen—everything, anything, was an added terror these days of terror. The knock was repeated, faintly, then vehemently.

“’Tis not my lord—he hath the house key. Pray heaven this be no ill news!—Coming, coming!” he cried shrilly, as yet another summons rang.

Hardly had the door rolled back under his feeble hands when he found himself thrust on one side: a woman in low-cut dress, with dishevelled laces hanging in shreds at her shoulders, brushed past him and walked tottering into the room beyond, to sink upon the great chair.

Like an old watch-dog’s, Chitterley’s first thought was of his duty.

“Madam—madam!” he protested. “His lordship is not within—” Then, as she turned upon the querulous sound, and looked vacantly at him, he staggered back, “God ’a’ mercy; Madam Mantes!”

An ice-cold clutch seemed to be at his heart. Madame de Mantes it certainly was, the grand French lady of the Court, whom Lord Rockhurst had many a time entertained in days (alack, how far off they seemed!) when people laughed and made merry; and among the gay she had been the gayest, among the bright and beautiful the brightest and most fair. Chitterley could remember how, in this very room, in that very chair—which they called the King’s chair, for his Majesty always sat in it when he visited, as he loved to do, his neighbour, “my Merry Rockhurst,” for an hour of pleasant converse—she had sung fit to make his old heart young again.

Yet, in sooth, this was Madame de Mantes. Torn and haggard, through the strands of her uncurled hair, her glazed eyes looked at him from red and swollen lids, piteously, scarcely as if she could see. Except for a patch of rouge, her face was livid.

He thought of the figure he had seen crawling along the walls, and dread was upon him.

“How hot it is—” she complained, in a dry, whispering voice. “Fires, fires everywhere!—Give me to drink!”

The man hesitated a moment, upon the blind impulse of flight. But the long habit of fidelity was stronger even than fear of the pestilence. He took up a flask from a table,—the _en cas_ after the foreign manner, awaiting the master’s return,—poured out a glass of wine and tendered it to her.

“Hot? Eh—but your hand is cold, my lady!”

She drank; seemed to gain a little strength.

“Cold?” she took up the word with an inconsequent laugh. “So would you be, _mon ami_, had you been roaming the streets, for months … years … as I have been, to-night! You are a kind old man. The others ran from me … one robbed me and beat me, then he, too, ran away.…”

And then Chitterley marked how cruelly, in sooth, the woman had been dealt with; her gown and bodice rent where seemingly the jewels had been snatched; and there was blood on her neck, trickling from the torn lobe of her little ear.

“_Mon beau Rockhurst!_” she went on, in that loud whisper, as of one light-headed. “I drink to you, to you.” She lifted the cup again, but stopped, catching at her throat: “It is fire—why did you give me fire to drink?”

He seized the glass from her failing hand.

“God ’a’ mercy! you are raving, madam!—you must.…”

She turned her red glance to him, then beat the air with a fierce gesture, imposing silence, and seemed to strain her ear to sounds inaudible:—

“Oh, don’t laugh, Rockhurst, don’t laugh…! Oh, if you like not a salt cheek, I can be merry—”

Chitterley had drawn back, step by step, to the farther end of the room. Then, of a sudden, very loud and angrily, he spoke:—

“Madam, you are ailing. You are ill. You must go home!”

She came back to her surroundings with a start and a cry:—

“_Mon Dieu_, where am I? Ill? Yes, I am ill! I am strangling, I can’t breathe!” She clutched at her throat with both hands, feeling for something with frantic fingers; then, with a scream that rose and seemed to circle about the silent room like some phantom bird: “_Miséricorde!_ they are there!… _La peste!_ I have the _peste_.…”

Chitterley’s grey hair bristled on his head.

“A physician!” he cried, and turned to fly.

But, in her delirium, she was quicker than he in his senile confusedness. She caught him by the wrist with both her hands, now burning as though, indeed, she had drunk fire:—

“No! You shall not leave me! I am dying.… I will not die alone!” The fleeting of madness returned to her fever-wasted brain: “We are put in this world with five senses—and ’tis but common sense to pleasure them. Aye, Rockhurst … but when it comes to dying!…” Her grip relaxed; she wrung her hands. “How can such as we die? Old man, a priest, a priest!”

He felt that he would be less than man if he did not help her. Priest and physician, she should have both,—poor soul, poor soul!

He tried to make her understand him—speaking loud as to the deaf, in little words as to a child. The priest, the physician—aye, she should have them—quickly—she might trust to him. But she looked at him, uncomprehending, with eyes ever wilder. A step farther on her awful journey; she seemed already a world away from her fellow-humans.

Then, as if his meek, aged countenance, all puckered in distress, were a spectacle of unspeakable horror, she flung out both arms to ward him from her; stared round the room like a hunted thing, and, ere he could call or arrest her, had darted through the half-open door of the inner room and flung it, clapping, into the lock between them.

“My lord’s own room!”

Chitterley stood a second helplessly; then came a groan from within; the sound of a heavy fall. The old man called upon Heaven and ran on his errand of mercy.

* * * * *

The wretched woman found herself in a darkened room, with heavy curtains closely drawn, illumined only by a dying night-lamp. She staggered toward a couch, fought for a moment vainly for breath. Then strength, and with it, mercifully, consciousness, gave way; she fell face downward, clutching the silken hangings.

* * * * *

It seemed as if it had become suddenly broad day in that room where Chitterley had kept his night’s vigil—that room, famed once in Whitehall for those gatherings of wit and beauty, convened for his Majesty’s pleasure. A shaft of sunshine, yellow through the sullen mists, struck the chair where Charles had been wont to sit; where but a few moments ago had agonised one whose gay winsomeness and bird-song he had so often commended.

The vapour of Sir George Garth’s sovereign remedy rose but in feeble wisp-like exhalations, ever fainter and wider apart—like to the breath of some dying thing. Occasionally a sigh, or a groan and a muffled word or two, came dully from the neighbouring room. But after a while these ceased; and the only sound to be heard was that of a blue fly, bloated and busy, circling about, emphasising the stillness, to settle ever and anon with a heavy buzz on the wine which Jeanne de Mantes had spilled from her last cup.

II

THE GOLD WHISTLE

Presently there approached, along the flags of Whitehall, the sound of steady footfalls. They mounted the steps and halted before the door; a key grated in the lock, and Lord Rockhurst led Mistress Diana Harcourt across the threshold.

She entered without a word, let herself fall in her turn like one worn out, into the King’s chair, and lifted her face toward him—a face blanched indeed with the miseries of the night, its terrors, the long vigil, the weary wandering, yet full of a brave, sweet strength.

None of her serenity was reflected on Rockhurst’s countenance. His face was dark as with an inner conflict; he averted his eyes as hers sought them. There was a moment’s heavy silence. He broke it, at length, standing over the fireless hearth, without looking at her.

“Now that you are under my roof, Diana, I trust you will consider yourself as if already—” he hesitated, and then brought out the words harshly, “as if already in your father’s house.—I fear me,” he went on, after a pause, “you are dead weary after our wanderings this night … fruitless search for shelter—the flaming cross barring us from every threshold … when it was not mean selfishness and childish fears that drove us to the street again!—Your brother fled basely.…”

She interrupted, wincing under the bitterness of his accents.

“Ah, poor Ned,” she pleaded; “he is but a boy. And his wits are never of the strongest.… In his way, he loves me. And, truly, I am glad he has escaped.”

“You have a strong heart, child!”

Though the words were kind, voice and look were hard. She shivered and drooped her head.

“You are cold,” he went on, with a sudden softening in his tone. “Indeed, ’tis the chill hour of the day.” He glanced hastily round the room, and catching sight of the spilt wine and the soiled cup, frowned, then laughed contemptuously. “So—even old Chitterley hath forgot his duty! These, in sooth, are days of test. I will rouse him, and you shall have fire and refreshment.”

She heard his tread on the stairs, the opening and shutting of doors within the house. Quickly he came back to her.

“Aye, even my old Chitterley gone! …” he cried, with a bitter twist of the lip. “Neither brotherly love, nor life-long service and companionship.… Nay, what should still hold, these times, when no man knows the hour when his life will be withdrawn? Oh, are you human—you, Diana, who sit so still and have no woman’s plaint?”

His voice broke with sudden passion. She raised her eyes and strove to smile; but the shudder of fatigue seized her.

Without another word he lifted the cresset of charcoal from its stand, blew upon the expiring glow, cast fresh fuel upon it; then, the flame once more enkindled, flung the whole on the hearth. She watched him, and gave a little feminine cry of protest as he next seized the first thing at hand, a couple of books, and tore them up ruthlessly to feed the fire.

“O, my lord!” she began, as the flame roared up the chimney. But the faint laugh died on her lips when she met his glance.

“I must leave you,” he said, when he had thrown in a couple of logs. “I must leave you; it will go ill indeed, if, within the hour, I return not with coach and horses. If I have to plead King’s Service, I shall carry you out of the infection.”

* * * * *

The door closed on him. Left alone, Diana sighed deeply. All the bright look of courage faded from her face. How harshly he had spoken! how coldly he had looked upon her—when not averting his eyes as from something troubling!…

Diana Harcourt, widow of twenty, bound by a freak of fate, through the merest impulse of womanly pity, to Rockhurst’s young son,—so faithful a lover, so gallant a youth,—knew her heart given to Rockhurst himself! What shame—what treachery! Moments were when she thought to guess her hidden love as returned; and then she felt herself strong and proud, and took a kind of high spiritual glory in the thought of how true they both would remain to honour and plighted troth. “Loved he not honour more,” as the chivalrous song had it, she would have none of his love.… But, to feel it in this sacred silence, in this noble self-denial, that was a kind of pain more exquisite than any joy she had ever known.