Part 19

“Didn’t you?” she said, gathering the folds of her cloak about her. “Well, supposing you didn’t, what then? You ain’t goin’ to forego your principles for a sentiment like that--don’t tell me.”

“If you won’t believe me”--I murmured despairingly.

“Why look here, Madame Lavasse, or Please, or whatever your damned name is,” she said, shaking a hectoring finger at me, “one may help a girl, but a woman helps herself, which I make no bones of guessing you’ve managed to do pretty free. The question with you is whether Jacobinism or royalty is going to pay best; and if you’re proposin’ to change about and turn informer, no better moral than profit is at the bottom of your little game, I’ll vow. Well, I don’t say but in that case we’re open to treat; only I’ll ask you to drop the artless girl, which don’t sit well on you at your age, and talk with me like one woman of the world to another.”

I rose to my feet with a burning face.

“Go!” I said, with an imperious gesture; “insult me no more. Have I not suffered wrong and outrage enough, but my heart must be made the sport of every common”--

“Highty-tighty, miss!”

She rose in astonishment. For a moment she stood conning me, my quivering lips and heaving bosom. Then of a sudden she smiled.

“Well, perhaps”--she said. “There, I’ve a way of letting my tongue run away with me; but it’s no example for you to follow. I should have remembered the glass houses in the sayin’ before I twitted you with your past. Only for sure, Diana Please, it can never be said against me that I betrayed my love that betrayed me.”

My rage was all gone. I dropped my head, with a sad little cry. The sound of it brought her to my side.

“Was he not your love,” she whispered--“him that came with you?”

And I answered, “He was my love.”

“Was--was,” she repeated. “Well--I see. They take other fancies.”

“You was sold yourself--is it not true?” I muttered.

“Ay,” she answered, and sighed. “But it was for gold.”

“_You_ can forgive, then, and forget,” I said; “but not I--no, never.”

“You would ruin him?”

“Yes, and her.”

“Bring him to the gallows?”

“That is why I sent for you. You can trust me.”

“And in the meantime you fear for yourself?”

“I struck her. He tried to stab me. I cried, _Vive le Roi!_ You know what that means.”

“Cry _Vive la Reine_ for the future. ’Tis the sweet saint who suffers most. Well, it seems the truth at last; and you have your provocation--by God, you have! Only for me, having one different, to help myself by you?--it goes against my stomach somehow. I wish it was your principles instead of your jealousy.”

“Help me in nothing but to some place of safety, where I can inform and direct the court. _It_ will not be troubled with your ladyship’s scruples.”

“How do you know? ’Tis so you have been taught to regard my sweet queen, I suppose?”

“O, madam!” I cried, “you know what made me an ardent pupil.”

She stood musing upon me long and earnestly.

“Yes, perhaps,” she said at length, and sighed; “what a fool preacher is Love, not to be able to keep his own faith! To drive woman for refuge on woman--’tis like banishing your physician to the enemy’s camp. Well”--she took my hands; I thought she was going to kiss me, but she made no offer--“for myself, I don’t want to hear none of your inculpations; but I’ll put you in train to satisfy your passions on others that may. Will that suit you?”

She turned before I could answer, and was going.

“It must be soon,” I urged hoarsely, following her; “O, madam! don’t you understand that it must be soon?”

“Within an hour or two,” she said, over her shoulder. “Have no fear. You are already protected--and watched.”

I set myself, with what self-control I could, to await her return; for, after our emotional confidences, I expected nothing less than that she would come for me presently in person. But in that I was mistaken, as was made evident in the ushering up to me by and by of a very courtly young gentleman, of a shrewd, sallow visage, who informed me, with a bow, that he was Love’s emissary.

“His Majesty, sir,” I said, with a faint smile, and some intentional ambiguity, “is well represented. Do we go to the palace?”

“We go,” he said, “_to_ the palace. Will madam be pleased to accept my escort?”

I took the arm he offered me. In view of some such contingency, I had spent the interval in making my toilette agreeably to it.

He conducted me out by the back way to the stables, where, in a little court, we found an ordinary post-chaise, with two horses, awaiting us.

“_Faire comme on le juge à propos_,” murmured my companion; and, seeing my trunk (pregnant with damning evidence) well secured in front, he handed me in, followed himself, pulled down the blinds, and gave the word. In an instant we were rolling over the stones.

It was a very roundabout way, it seemed to me, that we took to the palace; yet for long--so potent was my trust in myself as an emissary of vengeance, and so engaging the chatter of my comrade--I suspected no treachery. But at length, losing conscious sense, through the thunder of the wheels, of a roar and racket which had once accompanied it, I started as it were awake, and, in an immediate panic, peeped from behind the blind nearest me. And then I saw that we had already left the town, and were tearing along country roads.

I half rose, with a cry: “The palace! This is not the way to it!”

My companion seized my wrist in a grip of steel, forcing me to reseat myself.

“The very nearest, I can assure you, madam.”

“You are taking me to prison?”

“My faith! a prison that some would like,” he said, showing his teeth.

I struggled with him. “Let me out! I will raise the country else!”

He released me at once.

“As madam wills. Madam will claim protection of her friends the Jacobins? For me, I consult only her safety.”

“What!” I panted at him, sinking back. “Tell me who are you?”

“Luigi de’ Medici, at madam’s service,” he said, with a bow; “a name, at least, that should be a guarantee of some worth.”

“No doubt, sir; but, as a stranger, at your mercy”--

“I have the honour to be, madam, the chief of the police.”

The word awoke new frenzy in me.

“My God! I am betrayed. For pity’s sake, sir, tell me where we go.”

“I answered, madam, to the palace. I am a man of my word.”

“What palace?”

“Ah! At length madam talks reason. To the Palace of Caserta, ten leagues away.”

I stared at him aghast.

“To be immured there?”

“Truly,” he said, “to be immured in a paradise, amongst fountains and flowers! It is not like the inside of a wall.”

“You are pleased to mock me, sir. But why am I brought so far?”

“Madam shall ask of her mirror,” he said, with a charming grin. “Shall I so abuse my office as to admit that His Majesty is susceptible; and that Madame the English Ambassadress--who, nevertheless, is of a perfect honour--is jealous for her friend the queen, and, perhaps, for her own pre-eminence in beauty? Certainly not. It is quite enough to say that Madame Lavasse, being in some danger of assassination in Naples, is removed to a distance for her own security; to a place, in short, whence she can direct the lightning, without exciting suspicion of collusion with Jupiter.”

He bent and looked into my face.

“I vow, madam,” he said, “that the last frost of discretion must melt in the fire of such beauty. Take my word for it, that the Queen of Olympus never of her will would have admitted Venus to be of her court.”

This was very disarming, to be sure; and already, before we reached Caserta, Signor de’ Medici was in possession of some preliminary information that proved useful to him.

XXVII. I KNOW HOW TO WAIT

Caserta Palace was a sort of Versailles to the Palazzo Reale. It was a fine, long, rectangular building, lofty and imposing in the eighteenth century style of grand architecture, with marble colonnades and innumerable windows. The town it dominated, being a royal town _par excellence_, was comparatively clean and reposeful; and the palace gardens were as extensive and as beautiful as any in the world.

It was not, however, to a corner of this stately pile that I found myself committed, but to rooms in the Casino of St. Lucius, which stood in the park some two miles north of the main building, and commanded a noble view, not only of the surrounding country, but of the dark pruned alleys beset with white statues, and the terraces and fountains and cascades of the gardens themselves--a lovely spot. And here, for the moment secure and at peace, I resolved upon a life of placid enchantment, treated like a queen’s hostage, and biding the development of events.

I had my little sleepy, soft-footed household--an old groom, a pretty maid or two, and a quite delectable cook. No restrictions were placed upon me; I was free to wander as I listed, and, indeed, had no inducement to venture without the cordon of sentries who were my best protection. The month was April, the most lovely in all Naples; and, save when Capri, showing near and blue, gave indications of the scirocco, I spent all my days out of doors. So tranquil was it, so remote from the centres of ferment, I could have thought myself in Avalon, though all the while and around the clouds of a coming tempest were gathering to burst. As I loitered by those empty corridors of green, smiling back the smiles of the unruffled statues, listening to the drowsy thunder of the waters, seeing only for all tokens of human life the little marionnettes of place swarming, quite distant and minute, about the steps of the palace, France was preparing to launch her legions on Naples both by land and sea; scared refugee cardinals were trotting by the dozen into the city; Nelson, off Toulon, was shaping his course, by way of Aboukir, to the arms of Mrs. Hart; Ferdinand was tremblingly fastening his warlike greaves on his fat shins; and, finally, Maria Carolina was making her bloody tally for the hangman. And only of the last was I actively cognisant, seeing that it was there alone lay my concern with the outer world.

From time to time M. de’ Medici would visit me in this connection, coming ingratiatory and quite lover-like to refresh his portfolio with new names from my list, or to examine my correspondence, which was entirely at his service. I had taken no half-measures. The spared assassin comes to strike again, was my motto.

“Have I not proved myself a sincere convert?” I said to him once.

“Assuredly, most beautiful,” he answered; and fell to counting on his fingers. “You have given us already certain proof of the guilty complicity of--One: Signor Domenico Cirillo, professor of botany, arborist, edenist, pupil of Jean Jacques, too delicate a flower for this climate; two: Francesco Conforti, court theologian, a priest and ambitious--nothing singular, but he will be beaten in the race for power by a neck; three: Carlo Muscari; four: his excellency the Marquis of Polvica, a lamentable case; five: Pasquale Baffi, professor of dead languages, for which he will soon be literally qualified; six: Gennaro Serra di Cassano, a very pretty young gentleman, late released from confinement--but it is sometimes policy to spare the cub, if one would learn the way to the dam; seven:--but, ’tis enough, madam: those six will vindicate you.”

“You are welcome to them, monsieur,” I said, “if only you would exchange against them all my dear, indispensable Gogo.”

At which, as usual, he shook his head, tightening his lips.

“A bond of sentiment. You are better apart.”

“At least you might acquaint me where he is?”

“As to that, he is very safe and well cared for.”

“In prison?”

“Nominally--nominally, _ma belle_. But, observe--so are you, you know. What then? There are prisons and prisons.”

“Well, if he is as well off as I?” I sighed. And, indeed, the assurance was a wonderful comfort to me.

As a matter of course he kept me constantly informed--though I never questioned him--as to the career of the Pissanis, the head and front of all offending.

“Signor Nicola is our bell-wether,” he would say. “We have hung a little invisible cymbal about his neck, which has the strange quality of sounding only to us. O, we police are the latter-day fairies, believe me! All unconsciously to himself, he calls the flock about him; and we--we have nothing to do but keep count of them, till the season of the butcher arrives. Then we shall see. I shall want, perhaps, all the fingers of my own hands, and of yours too--my God, a dainty tally! And madam, you ask--though your lips do not move? It is very laughable, take my word. At once, since her marriage, the dear little frog emulates the bull. O, fie, fie! Madam misreads me. Such a scandal! I would say only that it has inoculated her with her husband’s ambition; that she is become an enthusiast in the cause, attending meetings, distributing tracts, haranguing multitudes in her sweet round voice, that is like pelting giants with sugar-plums. Yes, as madam implies, it is marvellous. What will not love do? But for me, I am susceptible: I adore all beauty. I could wish the poor child another embrace than the hangman’s.”

“Well, sir,” I answered, “you will have occasion, perhaps, to offer her the alternative.”

“O, fie!” he said. “Is not my heart engaged immutably? Otherwise--who knows? It is a sad world.”

It was a very dark and bitter one to me from the moment of his revelations. So, she could be independent of me, and happy in her independence! What a world of hypocrisy and double-dealing was exposed in this her easy repudiation of my claims upon her! During all these years that I had counted her my slave, she had been nursing her schemes of treachery--been manœuvring, probably, to make me the instrument of her conveyance to her lover’s arms. And now, no doubt, they were laughing over their outwitting of me. Well, who laughs last laughs best.

One day I had a notable visit. Two ladies, walking through the grounds, came upon me where I was seated in a grove of myrtle. One was Lady Hamilton, very great and gorgeous in a shell-shaped hat _de sparterie_, trimmed with butterflies and a violet ribbon knotted under one ear; while the other, whom I did not know, a dowdy, ignoble old figure with watery eyes, wore a plain _fichu-chemise_, and an immense bonnet with a veil thrown back over it. They both stopped upon seeing me, and Lady Hamilton beckoned. I rose, advanced, and curtsied.

“Here, your Majesty,” said my friend, “is the very person herself.”

Her Majesty! I paled and trembled; then ventured a glance from under my lashes. Sure I was not to blame for my remissness. I vow I could have thought my lady had brought her monthly nurse with her for an airing in the country. The poor woman looked steeped in caudle, flocky with child-beds, and no wonder. In some two dozen years out of her forty-five or so she had borne near as many children. She had prayed for an heir, and Heaven had sent her a tempest. The eternal lyings-in had soured her temper, which was not further improved by neuralgia and opium. Nursing, as she did, outside her litter, a perpetual ambition to wear the breeches of government, it had been characteristically mean of her husband to adopt this method to correct it. Yet, in spite of all she had borne both from and to her lord, her vigour remained unquenchable. Indeed, in a kingdom which annually abandoned some twenty-five thousand babies to the foundlings, a child was the cheapest present one could make to one’s favourite of the moment. Yet, as I saw her now, she was the farthest from imposing or attractive. Her legs were short, and her upper lip so long that her nose stood nearer her forehead than her chin, on the former of which she wore a single fat curl like a clock-spring. She put a hand to it two or three times, before she addressed me, very quick and hoarse, in French.

“_Maria! Mais elle fait une bonne mine à mauvais jeu!_ Come hither, child. So this is our redoubtable little _moucharde_? We have need of her in these days of the devil’s advocacy.”

Her eyes looked injected; her flabby face puckered at the temples like yellow milk skin. As I approached, she turned away in evident pain. Lady Hamilton was all effusive attentions at once. She waved me to stop, and supported her friend to the seat I had just occupied, commiserating, explaining, and fondling in one.

“O, my darling queen! It is the neuralgia that worries my sweet like a dog. Lean on your Emma. Have you nothing, child--no salts, no drops?”

I fetched a certain vinaigrette from my pocket, and bending before the royal knees, snapped the stopper once or twice under the royal nose. The effect was instantaneous. An expression of maudlin relief succeeded to the strain. She lay breathing peacefully, with a smile on her lips, until, after some minutes, she aroused herself with a sigh.

“What was it, then? It is a Circe, with her witch’s face and her potions!”

But this was to trespass on the other’s domain.

“Give it to me, if you please,” said Mrs. Hart coldly. “Her Majesty would prefer to take it from my hand.”

I returned it quietly to my pocket.

“Nay, madam,” I said; “it is a remedy that must not be repeated.”

She looked at me astounded; then broke into a forced laugh. “Hey-day! We are pretty absolute, are we not?” But the queen, grown suddenly very affable and communicative, put her aside with a hand which she laid upon my arm--

“We will not quarrel with our physician. She knows what she knows. Moreover, for all her long exile and the little errors which she has redeemed, she is of the great nation which we love. Is it not so, child? and hast thou heard what are the best and latest news? None other than that thy glorious captain, the supreme Nelson, has within the last few days annihilated the French fleet at Aboukir! Ah! that rose is from thy heart. It speaks the proud blood, the red rose of England, mantling above all foolish sophistries. Thou canst not but rejoice with us in the destruction of the enemies of thy race--of all the world!”

And then she and the other began a little litany of excommunication:--

“Dogs and assassins!”

“Despoilers of churches and women!”

“Hordes of anti-Christ vomited from hell!”

“Scum and rabble of an infamous democracy!”

“Monsters of sacrilege!”

“Cowards curst of God!”

“Whom to slay is righteousness!”

“To whom to give quarter is deadly sin!”

“Subverters of all order and decency!”

“The devil hang the lot!” said Lady Hamilton.

The queen rose, quite refreshed and reinvigorated. Suddenly she was holding me with a piercing look. Craft and villainy peeped out of her little inflamed eyes.

“I come to put a question to you, madam,” she said. “There is a lady of our retinue--the Signora de Fonseca Pimentel. Your correspondence contains no proof of her disloyalty to us?”

“No, madam, or I should have informed M. de’ Medici,” I answered, in a faint terror; but rallied immediately. “I know only that she is in communication with the Signor Carafa since his escape.”

“Ha!”

The red eyes of the ferret closed a moment, then reopened to an ineffable smile. She held out her hand to me to kiss.

“We find you an invaluable physician, Madame Lavasse. To have eased a poor queen--it is something; but to cure this land of its headache”--

“Ah, madam!” I said, “there I yield to the hangman.”

Both ladies burst out laughing as they moved away. The queen turned and waved her hand.

“You shall not be forgotten,” she cried; and I curtsied.

A few days later M. de’ Medici called upon me. He read out a little indictment he had prepared for my behoof--

“Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, wife to Pasquale Tria de Solis, Neapolitan officer, noble, now deceased: emotional; authoress of some panegyrical sonnets to royalty and the age of gold; since suspect of schemes for the education of the populace; shows a partiality for red; advocates an appropriation of the Punch and Judy shows to the lessons of national virtue; claims the liberty of the press to print her halting rhapsodies;” (Monstrous!) “imputed sympathiser with Ettore Carafa (son to the Duke of Andria, the king’s major-domo, and to the duchess, Her Majesty’s mistress of the robes) in said Ettore’s late conspiracy to print and distribute an Italian version of the ‘Rights of Man,’ which conspiracy resulted in the execution of some companion malignants, and the escape from Naples of said Ettore; finally, convicted of corresponding with said fugitive, to the end of His Majesty’s overthrow and the subversion of his government!”

“Not convicted, M. de’ Medici.”

“That is all one, most beautiful,” said the chief of police, folding his paper. “Madame Lavasse’s word is as good as her bond.”

Within a week the Pimentel was lodged in the prison of the Vicaria.

That was in October; and thenceforward things moved fast, though scarce quick enough for me, who was beginning to beat my wings against the gilded bars of my cage. For what was all the national excitement to me but a means to my personal vengeance? And I feared, feared that while I lay aside for others’ use, my prey would find a means to escape me.

On the 22nd of September I had heard the guns of the citadels down below in the bay welcoming Nelson’s arrival. The sound shook every nerve in my restless heart, so that I could hardly eat or sleep that night; and I laughed myself into hysterics over my little maid Martita’s description of how Madame l’Ambassadrice d’Angleterre had flown up the side of the _Vanguard_, and cast herself upon the breast of her hero, who was a very little man, and quite unable to support so much emotion.

Still, thereafter, as day by day drums beat, and recruits were gathered, and men hanged themselves to avoid serving, and the English admiral was urging upon the poor fat, wind-blown king one of three alternatives: To advance upon the French, and conquer; to die sword in hand; or to remain and be kicked out--while all Naples was seething and roaring in a vortex about my garden, the garden itself remained silent and empty, an island in the midst of a whirlpool.

But at last His Majesty _did_ set out, and reaching actually as far as Rome, while the republican general Championnet was falling back for a spring, blustered naughtily for a little, killing a few Jews, threatening the wounded enemy in the hospitals, committing to sack and pillage the very sacred city he had come to relieve, and finally, upon the approach of the concentrated French, deserting his demoralised army, and pelting back, with all the might of his perspiring legs, to where?--why, to Caserta.

It was evening of the 19th of December, and a thunderstorm, to terrify one to death in that desolate park, had broken over the town. All the imprisoned electricity of months past seemed to me, as I stood fascinated at an upper window of the Casino, to have torn itself free, and to be hunting in and out of the trees for fugitives from its fury. Far away and below the thousand eyes of the palace shut sickly to each blaze, and blinked and were staring frightened again in the crash that followed. The hand of an incensed God bent the proud necks of the trees, and His wrath drove a roar of leaves and twigs criss-cross about the alleys. It was the anarchy beginning.

In the midst I saw two figures, cloaked and dusk, butt their way to the door below; and a moment later Martita summoned me to receive messengers from the palace. I went down, and found two officers, pale and glaring, awaiting me in the parlour. The rain dripped from their unbonneted locks; their hands were restless with their hats and sword-hilts. I curtsied in wonder; and the elder, with a shaky, conciliatory smile, addressed me.

“You will pardon this intrusion, madam. The occasion is our excuse. You have in your possession some charm, some restorative, by which Her Majesty the queen has already greatly benefited?”

“Assuredly, monsieur. It is in my pocket now.”

“It is much needed at the moment. You will vouchsafe us the loan?”