Chapter II: Part 2

That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding distractions--one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals, the forges, the rope walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents, the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those wounded at Aspern--limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood; thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had all that hideous picture a place in the background of the master-mind, or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost out of all the multitudes--the figure of his old comrade Marshal Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and muskets on the fatal day--one shattered horror more to feed the carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield but as a map, so clear to his mind, that, as the opposing troops manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,” and as such superhuman--or superdiabolic.

As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles, soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the shores.

In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent--it might have been a trodden bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he, vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his feet.

“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”

The man saluted.

“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry--thus; and I saw him fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the closeness, the thunder----”

The officer interrupted him:

“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”

The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix bent over the fallen man.

“How is it, Lebrun?”

The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged, toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the coming end. He struggled to speak.

“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”

De Sainte Croix took the livid head on his knee. The posture somewhat eased the fighting heart.

“Courage, comrade! This fit will pass with the oppression. Why, I myself feel it--I. When the storm breaks----”

The blue lips caught at the word.

“When the storm breaks! What will he have answered?”

“He? Who?” said the young officer.

The dying corporal, twisting in his arms, made an awful gesture towards the Emperor’s tent.

“As always,” said de Sainte Croix, “with the cry to victory.”

The other clutched his hand with a grip like madness.

“I believe it, monsieur. He will have renewed the compact.”

“What compact, my poor friend?”

“With the red man.”

De Sainte Croix could hardly catch the answer.

He laughed--men must laugh, though they died for it--and spoke a soothing word. He believed the poor fellow delirious.

“I have laughed too, I have scorned, I have feigned to disbelieve,” said Lebrun, thickly and passionately. “I laugh no longer. Marengo, Hohenlinden, Jena, Austerlitz--what mortal brain unassisted could have so added victory to victory, could so, and for so long a time, have held the world’s destinies in the hollow of one hand? I am a soldier, monsieur, a simple, uneducated man, and yet I know things and I have seen things that would make the wise falter in their wisdom.”

“This red man, amongst others,” said the young officer conciliatingly.

A quiver of lightning at the moment glazed the dying face. Great drops stood on it; the fallen cheeks were filling with shadow; the eyeballs shone like porcelain. In spite of himself, a shiver ran down de Sainte Croix’s spine. There was certainly something uncanny in the night, even to war-toughened nerves. Lebrun’s voice had sunk to a whisper as he answered:

“Didst thou never hear of the General’s proclamation in Egypt to the Ulemas and Shereefs? He stood then on shifting sand--the English sea-captain had just beaten us. A false step, and he were engulfed for ever. And, to gain the people, he told them that their God had sent him to destroy the enemies of Islam and to trample on the cross.”

“Policy, Lebrun,” said de Sainte Croix, lifting his hand to wipe his own wet forehead. “He never meant it.”

“Then why, monsieur, did this blasphemy follow immediately on the visit of the red man? There had been no hint of it before--and afterwards he swore to them that their false bible was the true word.”

De Sainte Croix snapped somewhat fretfully:

“This red man? Who the devil is he?”

A shudder quite convulsed the corporal.

“Thou hast spoken it, monsieur.”

“A figment of your excited fancy, soldier.”

“With these eyes I saw him, monsieur. It was ten years ago. I was on guard in a corridor of the palace at Cairo, _and there came out of the General’s cabinet one who had never gone in_. Little he was, like a child of a hundred years, and he had on a blood-red bernous, and his face was black as a Nubian’s. Only at the lips it pulsed with fire, and fire, dim and wavering, travelled under his cheeks. One moment thus he stood--I could have touched him--and, behold! he was a little draped black figure of bronze that stood on a pedestal by a red curtain. It had always been there--I rubbed my eyes----”

“Voilà la chose!”

“Monsieur, I dared. I listened at the General’s door, and I heard him laugh softly to himself--he who never laughs--and he said: ‘Greet thee, Zamiel! Ten years I have given thee to make me a god, or our compact is ended!’ Monsieur, the ten years are passed, and to-night he stands again, as he stood then, at the parting of the ways.”

A flash, more brilliant than any that had yet shown, weltered and was gone. The dying soldier lifted his head quickly, with a fearful cry:

“Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer! I saw him again--but now, before I fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!”

The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the island.

“Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!”

The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash.

And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French upon the opposite shore--and victory.

A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the thunder’s.

It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice speaking close by:

“I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to renew my compact with Destiny.”

He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor himself.

“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.

“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.

LEONORA OF TOLEDO

“For the fruit of the blood belongs to those who bring the price of love.”

So, but in a less rapt and mystical sense than that in which the holy virgin of Siena had poured out her soul, thought the young Duchess Leonora, wife of Pietro, second son of Cosimo da Medici, Grand Duke of Florence.

The price of love, the price of love! For eleven days she had wept, burning to pay it--indignant, passionate, heart-broken, she had told herself. And now that the altar was ready and the blade bared, what was her desire? Only for mercy--only for life, shameful and abandoned if needs must be, but life on any terms, the least regarded, the most despised. She was so young, so untutored; she had been so led astray by the casuistries of gallantry in this city of profligates. She would confess her sin, plead its extenuations, abase herself before the knees of the father of her child. That at least existed in pledge of her wifely loyalty; no man else could boast so much of her. She had borne that agony, that rapture, with a pure conscience. Surely the father would not murder the mother of his babe! So monstrous a deed would cry aloud for vengeance even in this place of monsters!

And even while she sat with white face and staring eyes, gnawing a tumbled strand of her beautiful auburn hair, she knew that all the extenuations she could plead were but so many aggravations of her crime; that the reptile she had been forced into marrying had insidiously encouraged her infidelity with this very purpose of ridding himself of her; that all the light and flower of her youth were but incentives to the lustful cruelty of one destitute of compassion and nobility. She was to die, somewhere, somehow; and in all that city she had no one courageous friend to whom to turn, no hope anywhere of refuge or escape. Policy, the policy of the devil in this cursed Gehenna, must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye to her peril. The Duke himself----

She shuddered from the very poison of his name. The base emotions it recalled robbed death for the moment of its worst terrors, picturing its shadowy arms the sole merciful asylum from memories too dreadful for endurance. Death, no grisly phantom, but the kind mother, lulling to eternal forgetfulness!

Ah! but she was so young, so young! She buried her face in her hands, and rocked herself to and fro, moaning.

* * * * *

Cosimo, the first of the junior branch of the house of Medici, had come to reign in Florence as absolute Duke in 1537. His wife, Leonora (daughter of Don Pedro de Toledo, Spanish viceroy at Naples), had died twenty-five years later, after having borne him several children, of whom Pietro was the second son. Within a month or two of her death the Duke was involved in an intrigue with a second Leonora de Toledo, niece of the first, a beautiful child who had been placed at the Tuscan Court under her aunt’s care. The circumstances of the liaison being revealed caused such a scandal that Cosimo, in order to quiet it, married the girl to his son Pietro, a libertine of the sickliest odour. The inevitable result followed in that city of furious passions and perverted morals. The young wife, despised and neglected by her husband, robbed, moreover, of her self-respect, accepted the usual _cavaliere-servente_--in this case one Alessandro Gagi--more, it would seem, out of pique than inclination. At least, when, the flirtation having been noted, Gagi, privately warned of its danger, had elected to resolve a poignant difficulty by retiring into a monastery, Leonora had had no difficulty in transferring her affections to an object more daring, or less discreet, than her melancholy new-fledged young Capuchin. The fresh fancy was a youthful blood of Saint-Étienne, and this time it was a case of genuine passion into which she rushed headstrong. She may have affected to believe that indifference was the worst thing she had to fear from her husband; if she did, she lied to herself, as women will when their desire runs ahead of their prudence. The case of Alessandro Gagi was her sufficient admonition. The dog was not asleep because his eyes were shut.

The lovers met; and this time there was no hint of espionage vouchsafed. But quite suddenly St. Étienne, as we must call him, was ordered off to the Island of Elba. The pretext for his banishment was a fatal duel in which he had lately been engaged with a young nobleman, Francesco Ginori; the real object, undoubtedly, was the procuring of incriminating evidence of the liaison in the shape of written correspondence. St. Étienne, recklessly enamoured, was not long in providing this, or the spies of the husband in intercepting it. The guilty lover was seized, brought back privately to the prison of the Bargello, and there at dead of night strangled. The news of his death was conveyed to Leonora, whether in malice or sympathy, by Francesco, her brother-in-law; and for eleven days thereafter she wept, heedless of consequences, abandoned to her grief. She dreamed in that time that she had the stuff of heroism in her; and her illusionment only came to vanish utterly with the withdrawal of the envoy who, on the twelfth day, had brought her a message from her husband.

This envoy’s voice, his figure, each as chill, as precise, as faultless as the other, still vividly haunted her as she sat. Not a word or tone of his had been ill-considered; not a hair had been out of place in his little pointed black beard, which had lain upon a ruff like biscuit china. His cold, exquisite hands, his jerkin and trunk hose of white silver-sprigged satin, his ivory sword-scabbard--all had been so many graduated harmonies in a picture of icy perfection. He had looked a man built out of frost; and from the heart of frost had come his words, keen, dispassionate, killing:

“His Grace, Madonna, much concerning himself with a distemper into which he hears you reported to be fallen, entreats your company at his Villa of Cafaggiodo, where he is in hopes the silence and the sweeter air will restore to you your health.”

And she had looked at him, with a sudden catch at her heart, though the flame of defiance in her still flickered.

“I thank you, Messer. For when is my doom pronounced?”

Whereat the envoy had raised one white hand ineffably.

“Alas, Madonna! Is our dear prince’s tender consideration so hurtful? Even now he waits to welcome you.”

Then she had put out entreating arms to him.

“Messer--a little time to prepare--to say goodbye. I have a son, Messer, a very little child. Look, this is the Vecchio, is it not--the Duke’s palace? I am quite alone in my corner of it, caged, shunned like a leper, yet my every exit from it is guarded. Give me this night in which to part seemingly with all I have left to love on earth.”

His laugh had sounded like the tinkle of ice on glass.

“Love? You wilfully postpone it, madam. Yet will I venture to enlarge upon my credentials to the extent your Grace demands. To-morrow----”

“I will deliver myself without fail to the sacrifice, Messer.”

And, with a patient, deprecating shrug, in which shoulders, eyebrows, and lips were all included, he had made his profound obeisance, and left her. And then!

It came upon her like a stroke, electric, instant, agonising out of numbness. She did not want to die; she had only been tricking herself in the trappings of tragedy; like the spoiled beauty she was, she had believed herself irresistible though playing with devils; and each day’s grace had but confirmed her in her wilful self-delusion. And now at last she was awake and mad with fear--confessed now to herself for the unheroic creature of selfishness and vanity which her deeds had already proclaimed her to the world.

Passion, indeed, often speaks big until it finds itself trapped. Its artificial heat is very susceptible to chills. Then, in proportion as it has burned furious, is the abjectness of its relapse. I speak of it as an emotion apart from love. This poor Leonora, in her craven frenzy, condoned in her mind the offences of the monster in whose relentless grasp she now felt herself writhing. Her leaning towards him, her desire to propitiate, was like a lust. She would swear herself his creature, his sympathiser, his fellow-passionist, if only he would accept and spare her as such. Do not blame her over-harshly. The spirit crazed with fear of darkness has no volition but towards the light. Moreover, the catalogue of the deadly sins was much confused in her time, and some crimes which in our day would be held unpardonable were avowed pleasantries. The butterfly bred to carrion is not easily weaned to honey--our own fair Purple-Emperor is an example--and grapes fattened on bullocks’ blood wither deprived of it. What wonder that this poor lovely creature, bred on corruption, confessed her tastes vitiated? It was life she wanted, and, at the last, even with Pietro da Medici for her boon-fellow. The woman was debased; yet the mother remained. It had been already dusk when the envoy withdrew. Now, with streaming eyes and labouring bosom, she hurried to spend her last night on earth by the cradle of her little Cosimo.

* * * * *

With dawn came hope, came the jocund reassurance of the sun, of the familiar greetings and services and customs. It seemed impossible that tragedy could be lurking behind that kindly commonplace. Leonora’s spirits rose with the morning, heightened with the glowing day. Had the conquering glory of her beauty served her hitherto so implicitly to fail her now? If jealousy were at the bottom of this resentment, she carried the sweetest antidote to it in her bosom. Imploring eyes, lovely submission and lovely solicitation--so she acted the part of a prostitute in her soul, and almost counted the hours to the end.

In the late afternoon she was informed, unasked, that a carriage and escort awaited her in the court by the Via de Leone. Half hysterical, she sought her little boy for the last time, and her tears ran salt over his face as she kissed him.

“Love mummia, bambinetto, always, always!”

It was the attitude of her escort that first struck a chill into her, and caused a declension in her high spirits. They may have been ignorant of her purposed fate; but she was under a ban, and they were under orders. These, it was evident, included uncommunicativeness, rigid surveillance, impassive force. The Villa Cafaggiodo lay at some distance beyond the walls in a lonely country. The young Duchess employed every artifice to delay the journey, now a purchase she must make, now a friend she must speak to, now a church she must visit. She was never denied; she was humoured--and watched--in everything. A subtler treatment had, perhaps, allayed her alarms entirely, as it was evidently the object of the escort to evade attention or suspicion; but these common minds had not the _savoir faire_ to throw off the weight of responsibility under which they laboured. At length they left the city behind, and came into the open country--an abandonment which the girl had dreaded unspeakably, and resisted as long as possible.

And here Madama must alight to pick the wayside flowers--for the month was July--and again, and yet again when she saw one more beautiful than the rest; so that dusk was beginning to fall, windless and melancholy, when they came in sight of the villa. But there was no thought of flowers in her soul, then or at any time; and the loveliest of all the blossoms lay crushed in her little hand when at last the carriage rolled into the courtyard of the Villa Cafaggiodo, and the attendants came round to the door to help her alight.

She looked up at the frowning portal, at the lifeless galleries, and shrank back.

“My lord does not entertain?” she whispered.

“It is his will to be alone, Madonna,” they answered low.

Hardly conscious of her limbs, swaying a little, she mounted the steps, and saw an open door before her. Standing there, as in a fearful dream, she heard a sudden sound below, and started and turned. The carriage, the escort, were all in retreat, returning by the road they had come. She tried to call to them--her dry throat would not articulate; she made a panic move as if to descend, and paused again. They had closed and bolted the gates behind them; she was left quite alone and unprotected in that deserted place.

There was no voice of anything but a little garrulous fountain, which giggled and choked in the courtyard. The cold, grey house-front rose above her; behind and to either side the cypresses reared their inky minarets against an empty sky. In the spaces between, the bushes and flowering shrubs were already clouds of impenetrable shadow, palpitating with suggestion. What might not be beyond or within them, watching for her descent--eyes, horrible eyes! With a shudder she turned to the door, and saw the vast spaces of the vestibule, melancholy, cavernous, waiting to engulf her. But not a sound came from them, or from anywhere. The place seemed wholly vacant and deserted.

Hush! a whisper--a footstep creeping on the stones of the court below. Without pausing to look or convince herself, she fled into the great hall, and found herself at the foot of the staircase, breathing in a mortal fear, clutching at the balustrade for support. A faint glow from the dying day smeared the marble walls, and illumined the limbs of a dozen statues as if with phosphorescence. But the pits of blackness between, more dense in consequence, were dreadfully potential of evil, and, half swooning, she turned to the staircase as her only resource. There was a room above--a room she knew and had slept in--and thither, as to her one ark of refuge in that mad flight, she instinctively made. If she could only reach it before she died of terror!

She was there, had put out a shaking hand to part the tapestry on the wall, when something, unfamiliar to her even in her blind agitation, made her shrink back with a shock like death. She knew the woven picture--Herodias’s daughter, and the dark arm of the executioner holding the bleeding head over the charger. But now the poised hand seemed empty--the head had run to a point--in a sudden sick fascination she peered forward to examine it.

God in heaven! the arm was actual and living; the fingers gripped a dagger!

And, even as she uttered a little whining cry, “Pero! per pietà!” she saw a mad gleam at the crevice, and the arm struck down.

Her scream was still echoing through the empty house as a grinning, soft-snarling beast parted the arras, and, leaping over the prostrate body, turned and bent gloatingly to view it. His poniard stood buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of the shoulder-blade.

“Pietro’s tooth!” he shrieked; “Pietro’s tooth!” His laugh reeled and babbled among the galleries as if scores of invisible feet were suddenly running down to the scene of the crime.

He paused, he listened; with an awful look he suddenly cast himself on his knees by the murdered child, and, raising his bloody hands, besought, in a shaking voice and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Heaven’s pardon for his crime, vowing, in expiation of it, never to marry again.

With moans and sobs he then raised the poor body, silent to his remorse as to his hate, and, passionately kissing the lips, grown desirable to him only in death, with his own hands laid it in the coffin he had ready prepared for it in the very chamber to which the living soul had fled, in thought, for refuge.

That same night it was secretly conveyed to Florence, and buried in the Church of San Lorenzo. The murderer married Beatrice de Menesser seventeen years later. But, no doubt, by then, as a great romancer remarked, he had not only forgotten his vow, but that any reason had ever existed for his making one. God, in mediæval Italy, was credited with as short a memory as man, and with a much more amiable credulity.

CHARLES IX

“Scatter _them, scatter them ere the Death cometh! They are like black crows seeking carrion, and where they watch some soul is doomed to hell. From afar they spy their prey, and on the roof they gather, waiting till it fall._”

These words of a fanatic priest, denouncing the Huguenots, were for ever in his brain from the moment of the rising of the dark bird. They had rung in its haunted corridors before, had he known it; but it was the rising of the bird which had doomed it to their eternal possession. It had happened in this way:

With the first weak breaking of dawn, three pallid, guilty figures came stealing into a little chamber of the Louvre which overlooked the _basse-cour_ notched into that angle of the palace which faced towards St. Germain l’Auxerrois. They were the King, his mother, and his brother the Duc D’Anjou. An unnatural quiet brooded over the city. It suggested the paralysed horror of a sleeper awakened to sudden consciousness of some ghastly presence in his room. They stood, in a little quaking group, peering from the window upon the courtyard and the quay of the Louvre, both in seeming dark and empty, and in seeming uncannily close beneath. What if some tigerish bound were to clear that interval, and they, the gloating Cæsars of the arena, be made the sport of their own blood-lust? The King’s hand twitched on the musquetoon he carried.

The river, a livid tongue, lapped up the blackness; the wind fell all in a moment, like a shot bird, and rustling its wings a little on the pavement, died and gave place to silence utter and profound. Suddenly in the distance a pistol rattled out.

It was followed by the bells. At first it was only the tocsin of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the shattering boom of the great bronze dome shouting death from its tower. But soon other bells took up the tale, the signal leaping on from height to height, as warning beacons are fired, and in the same breath the streets were full of armed men. They seemed to spring from the ground, like the dragon men of Thebes, and to fall as instantly to slaughter and destruction. Every second they gathered, and roaring and sweeping on, crashed in the last defences of sleep and woke the city to pandemonium. And then came the King’s madness.

He had fought against it to the end. Even in the little ghostly chamber his soul had risen, in a final revolt of sanity, against the merciless policy which had set itself deliberately to undermine his reason. But he had not the strength to escape. His hand, with the dagger in it, had been held from first to last by his mother Catherine, as mothers of a human mould direct the little stumbling hands of their children in forming letters with a pen; and not to him was due the significance of the characters which that bloody stylus had written upon the wall. His old nurse, indeed, whom next to Marie Touchet and her child he most dearly loved, was a staunch Huguenot. And he kept the wit to save her; but he could not save the good Admiral Coligny whom he honoured. His mother had her way with him at last, and was herself panic-struck by the fury of the blaze she had fuelled.

Having once tasted blood, he cried for it, for more and more until the gutters choked; insulted the fallen who appealed to him for mercy; decoyed the partisans of Condé and Navarre into his toils with cunning messages, and chuckled to see them butchered in the Court below. The roar, the rushing tumult of the quays, the yells of the pursuers, the screams of agony of the smitten, the bells and the guns, all danced in his mad veins and wrought him to frenzy. He outscreamed the victims; he fired at the corpses floating in the river; he laughed and stared alternately. Once, early in the business, a boatful of Huguenots, coming across the water from the opposite faubourg, was emptied out in a twinkling, and its human load dragged for slaughter across the stones. They had believed it all an affair of the Guisea, and had come to beg protection of the King. The King! what shadow of justification was theirs? A King of shreds and patches! He cursed their monstrous credulity; he pointed his piece and fired straight into the breast of the tallest fool of them all, who had fallen on his back on the stones immediately below. With the sound of his shot a great black bird rose straight from out the dead man, and flapping upwards with solemn wings, disappeared over the roof of the Louvre. The King threw down his musquetoon, and stood staring.

They said that it was a raven, its master’s constant companion, his pet, his mascot, which he seldom let from his bosom when he went abroad. The King did not contradict them; the mortal distress in him found even some solace in the fable. But in his deep heart he knew that the apparition had been none other than the black soul of the Huguenot, and that it had flown to settle on the roof, to watch for the passing of another soul, his own, already doomed by it to hell. “_Ere the death cometh!_” From that moment, as he believed, he was marked down; and the thought of how he might elude the bird on the roof never left him. If he could only circumvent it, he might yet be saved.

He was sitting with his suite, days after the massacre, in a chamber of the palace, when a sudden uproar overhead startled them all. It was evening, but the tapers were not yet lit. The sound was hideous--a sound as of a multitude of lost spirits screaming and blaspheming in the upper air. It was the eve of St. Bartholomew all over again, the pent-up terrors of it broken loose and re-enacted, Even in their graves, it seemed, the ghosts could not be held down, but had burst their bloody cerements and risen in an uncontrollable agony of memory. Where would it end? Where could it? There was no mowing down spirits by sword and fire; they had the upper hand now, and the minds and reasons of the living were their ghastly prey. Rising, as they looked at one another with grey faces, the group one and all sought the open air.

What was it? A black cloud of crows, no more; a flock in constant motion, circling, settling and resettling--calling for a second glut of victims. They had learned to imitate the voices of the massacre, screeching, sobbing, praying--a horrible thing. They were the souls of the murdered, ministers of hell, come to await their turn on the roof. The King said no word, but that same night, after he had slept a little from exhaustion, he rose suddenly in a horror too great for speech, and sat staring and listening. His good old nurse hurried to him; he whispered to her, Did she not hear it? Those haunted chambers of his brain were full of wild trampings, and execrations, and the hubbub of a mad conflict. He declared there was a riot in the town, that he would have his guard dispatched to end it, that he wanted no more murder. They returned in a little to say that the whole city slept peaceful in the moonlight, though it was true that the air was curiously agitated, as by the hot vapour above an oven. He dismissed them, and dropped his weary head upon his nurse’s bosom. He was her child again, her nursling, her little frightened dreamer waking in the dark.

“They shall not touch thee, Charlot,” she whispered. “Thou didst not mean it, thou.”

For seven nights was this repeated, the noises, the horror, the collapse; and then the crows departed. Like a black cloud they gathered in a moment, and drifted away northwards to wait for the coming of the Armada.

“Are they all gone?” asked the pallid King. He would trust to nobody but his nurse. She went out, and looked along the ridge of the roof, and returned.

“All but one,” she said; “and he is hurt belike, and will not last out the night.”

“That is the one,” he answered, “and he will last out the night of my life. O, nurse! he waiteth for my soul, and, so he marketh its passage hence, he will seize it, and I am damned for ever.”

“That then shall he never do, Charlot,” she exclaimed; “for I will have him shot here and now.”

The King shook his head; and, indeed, he expressed what he knew. The crow was never shot; the bird seemed to bear a charmed life; but all of a sudden one day it was gone.

To say that he breathed again would imply but a qualified respite, inasmuch as his every breath was a pain to him. Through all that autumn and through all the ensuing year he was a dying man, and in the May that followed he lay down on his bed for the last time. At the end he spoke little but with the shapes that haunted him. He lay on his couch, wrapped in a robe that, for all its lightness, it hurt his chest to lift. He suffered intolerably, both mentally and physically. His faithful little wife, whose love he had neglected, came and sat by his side, silent, with large haunted eyes, and prayed for him, and wept secretly, and blew her little red nose softly to explain her need for a handkerchief. And Marie Touchet came with their child, and wondered how, at the last, the wreck of sweet royalty differed so little from all other human wrecks. He made his peace with these, but he could not with himself. The vision of the crow was eternally in his mind; his atom of trust in the strong faith of his nurse was his solitary grain of comfort in a world of terrors. He floated in crimson streams, and rose choking from them, foul and horrible. “Ah, nurse,” he sighed perpetually, “what blood and what murders!”

She was always ready with the faith, with the triumphant word that touched like a healing judgment.

“Let them that called the feast answer for the reckoning.”

And so the hours crept on to the end.

One day, as she watched alone beside him, he fell asleep. He had made his testament that morning, had committed the sore destinies of his kingdom to his mother and his brother of Navarre, and, exhausted with the effort, had fallen back on his pillow, breathing out the last words he was ever to utter on earth:

“I thank my God that I leave no male child behind me to wear my crown!”

It was as still as death. The sunshine came through the open window, and threw a patch of light on the floor. As the tired nurse sat watching this, half hypnotised by the glow, of a sudden she saw it blotted by a soft shadow. She raised her eyes quickly, and there on the windowsill, black and motionless, was perched a great crow.

She did not even start; but she turned her head and looked at the King’s face. The sign of the awful change was overspreading it; the nostrils pulsed; the fingers below picked feebly at the silken robe. In a few moments, she saw, he would be gone. She rose quickly, and moved across to the window. The dark bird never stirred. There seemed a deep, unearthly movement in the sleek gloom of its eyes, and that was all. It was absorbed in watching, but not her. She flung out her hands, and caught it in a grip of iron.

“Charlot!” she cried, “my babe! Die while I hold him!”

There was a rustle behind her, a sudden cry, a drumming as of feet running, speeding from the earth and life; and then all fell silent. But not the bird. He leaped and battled in her hands. His beak was an inky dagger, his talons rakes of steel. His screams seared her heart--they seemed uttered in it; his pinions beat on her brain. But she held on, driving in her nails, her teeth set and her resolution. She felt the blood pouring down her wrists, and she cared no whit, so long as she could keep the horror from pursuing her nursling. And presently the struggles slackened, and she felt the bird die in her hands.

Holding it thus away from her, she went to the window and flung it forth. It dropped without sound, like a shadow that had suddenly been blown from her brain. She looked at her hands--they were unhurt; at the King--he lay with a smile on his dead lips.

THE KING’S CHAMPION

“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the goronation?”

It was his Majesty King William III. who spoke, crumpled back into his big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from the nest of an enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive frame, and legs like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might have thought, to carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He appeared, indeed, to be always lost in it, and as if just on the point of finding his way out. Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would hardly have sufficed for his spirit.

The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch mynheers--D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject, long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.

It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor, offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens, and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied _commode_ of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away, melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before any one could think of interposing.

The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion, had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and re-deliver his cartel.

But it had not passed unobserved by the King himself or by those around him. Extinguished as he had appeared to be in his panoply of purple and ermine and embroidered scarlet, looking, as he had risen at the great table to drink his Champion’s health, for all the world like a little over-swaddled Greek Icon elevated against a background of glittering stained glass, his diminutive Majesty had had an ear and an eye for everything within the longest range of either. His birdlike optics, bright as twin buttons sunk amid that pomp of raiment, had been fully cognisant of the little episode, and had watched the after-approach of his Champion with an unwinking interest, which had seemed to concentrate itself to such a challenging focus on the flushed face of the knight as he came near, that that doughty Paladin had fallen into confusion and had something botched the business of the toast that followed. However, he had managed, though crestfallen, to retire presently with sufficient aplomb and his perquisite of a golden beaker; and there for the moment the matter had ended.

“Sir Charles Dymoke,” began Lord Halifax----

“Who is dat man?” interrupted the King. “Vat is his title to the bost?”

“It is claimed by him, sire,” answered the peer, “in his right of the Manor of Scrivelsby. The office was originally deputed, I understand, to Sir Richard de Marmyon by the Conqueror, and hath descended by virtue of that tenure to this day. Sir Charles is its legitimate representative.”

“Well,” said the King, “broduce him before us.”

“Why,” said the Marquis feebly, “that is the odd thing. Sir Charles is nowhere to be found.”

The three Dutch mynheers uttered guttural sounds in their throats, and looked at one another and at the King significantly.

His Majesty’s brows knotted.

“Dat is very vonny,” he said. “Not to be vound, mein vrent?”

“It has been ascertained, your Majesty,” said Lord Denby wearily--he was a picked white bone of a man, with no stomach and yet a perpetual stomach-ache, which naturally aggrieved him--“that Sir Charles rode, immediately after the ceremony, to the ‘Cock’ hostelry in Tothill Street, whence, having disencumbered himself of his panoply, he continued his way to the riding-school of one Dobney, near Islington, where he delivered up his horse and disappeared. Since when he has neither returned to his inn nor vouchsafed the least token of his existence.”

The King considered the matter very glumpily within himself. It appeared a trifle; yet trifles might easily be under-estimated in the existing state of things. The incident was something or nothing--a mere meaningless frolic, or a challenge to his title bearing a certain significance. The land swarmed with Jacobites of more or less power and prominence. What if one of them were to meet and defeat his Champion? How, in that event, would his claim stand? What was the procedure? It was an odd contingency, and he put it rather acridly to my Lord Privy Seal.

“He drow de gage; anodder agcept it; dey vight; my man vall. Vat is to vollow?” he demanded.

“Ja! Dat is vat strike idself into me bom-bom,” said Schomberg the warrior.

Lord Halifax smiled rather sheepishly. He was a large, tolerant soul of sixty, repudiating all sentiment and subject to much. He had been called the “Trimmer”; but, then, no man of humour can ever be a man of convictions. Kind, witty, and cynical, he was yet so fond of Reason that he could make a fool of himself with her. He was even worked upon to do so in the present case.

“There is positively no precedent, sire,” he said. “To my certain knowledge the thing has never happened before.”

“Bot zhould it jost zo happen?” insisted his master.

“Ach!” said D’Auverquerque penetratingly.

“With deference, sire,” said his lordship, “is it not something premature to assume any hostile intent in the matter? The good lady----”

“Posh!” put in the King irritably. “Neither goot nor lady.”

“Zo it strike itself into mein head bom-bom,” said Schomberg.

“Dat dress vas a masgerade,” said William--“a vact, we zhould haf gonsidered, blain to the stupidest indelligence.”

“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Lord Halifax nervously.

“Vell, sir--vat den?”

“Ach! vat den?” demanded D’Auverquerque cunningly.

“I vill dell your lordship,” said Schomberg. “Dere was a vine swordsman gonzealed under dose bettigoats.”

The Lord Privy Seal, considering the subject, woke to a certain trepidation.

“It is impossible,” he admitted, “to avoid attaching a measure of importance to the affair, or to gauge its consequences should it be carried through. Surely Sir Charles could not be so foolish as to risk a serious encounter? But he must be found and warned at all costs.”

His mood communicated itself to the others. The matter began to assume with them all an increasingly sinister aspect. Majesty was not yet so safe on its throne that omens could be disregarded. The King, prompt and tireless, for all his sickly constitution, in business--the little man who was to regain for England her reputation for workaday sanity--had yet, at this beginning, a vast estate to recover from chaos, and his path was beset with perils. The country was still in two minds, and each distracted; a trifle might upset the balance. Deliberating in this sort, a species of hysteria communicated itself after a time from one to another of the little Council, until it definitely came to perceive in the episode a daring ruse for bringing about a reaction in popular sentiment. What if the meeting were actually to occur, and the Champion to be overthrown? It was not to be doubted that the event would have been provided for, and those engaged in bringing it about forearmed. Defeat might result in riot, and riot in revolution. Arrived at that pitch of the debate, the six gentlemen, including his Majesty, were all speaking together in considerable agitation.

It was the personality of the mysterious Mohock, once convicted of masculinity, which most exercised their minds. He was certainly an individual of importance, as so momentous a mission would hardly have been entrusted to a nonentity. But who? A dozen names suggested themselves. Berwick, Tyrconnel, Lord Henry Fitzjames, the ex-monarch’s natural son, Marlborough himself, and others. It was Zuylestein, speaking for the first and last time, who finally put the spark to all this accumulating tow. “Vat,” he said, “if it is James himselv, zegretly gom over from St. Germains and resolved upon venturing dis bigduresque abbeal to de poblic?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg.

He rose, Halifax rose, they all rose, and faced the King.

“Ik dank U, mijnheer,” said his Majesty; “it is a very blausible suggestion.”

The words were equivalent to a bid to action. The Council broke up hurriedly, and within an hour the Dutch troops had been beaten to arms, the militia called out, the magistrates warned, and the whole city placed under a surveillance of the most searching description. It was at this momentous pass, when panic was in the air, that Sir Charles Dymoke walked unconcerned into the “Cock” tavern, in Tothill Street, and was immediately arrested by the guard set to watch that hostelry, and conveyed in a state of complete stupefaction to Whitehall. He was taken at once before the King sitting in Council.

“Vere haf you been?” demanded William sternly.

“Your Majesty!” gasped the Champion, a sturdy gallant of middle age.

“Answer, sir,” said the monarch--“and vidout eguivocation.”

“I have been with a friend,” stammered Sir Charles, all amazement.

“Ach!” exclaimed his Majesty sarcastically. “The vrow, vas it, vat returnt you your gage in the Hall yesterday?”

“Certainly not, sire,” said the Champion, the flush of outrage on his cheek.

“Not?” said the King. “Who vas she, den, dat voman?”

“The wife of Dobney, the horse-tamer, sire.”

“The vife--vat! Vat had she said to you?”

“She said, your Majesty, ‘Didn’t I warn you not to throw it down in front of her nose, unless you want her to kneel and pick it up?’”

“She? Who?”

“The mare, sire. She performs at Islington.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Lord Privy Seal very softly, “shall we thank Sir Charles and proceed to the order of the day?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg under his breath.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

“What was that?”

“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”

“Methought it was a footstep.”

“No, madam.”

“There, heard you it not--the sound of some one running?”

“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”

“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”

“Your Highness is overwrought.”

“Will some one speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”

The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.

“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”

The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees and over the palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed no sign of life anywhere.

Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood. The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.

Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her. She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if they were no more than inarticulate animals--wistful dumb affections on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their unconscious understanding.

Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awe-struck a moment, then bent and whispered to her mother: “O, madam, the Tower gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”

The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions, self-communings.

“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh--he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no courtier--the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”

The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed her.