Chapter XXX: I Am Justified in My Policy

It was a dark and gusty night when I issued forth with de’ Medici from a side door of the palace.

“She is condemned,” he had whispered to me a minute earlier.

A needle of ice had seemed to enter my heart. The question my lips could not ask had flown to my eyes. Comprehending it, he had caught at his throat and lolled out his tongue grotesquely. To the same dumb inquisitors he had answered, as confidently as if I had spoken, “To-morrow.”

Then I had found my voice, as if after a fit of choking--

“And she has not spoken?”

“And she has not spoken.”

He had hesitated, before suggesting deprecatingly, “There remains only to make your appeal to her in person.”

I had struck my hands together, hearing that.

“You might have forced her, had you chosen. Now, leaving it to me, our bargain is dissolved.”

“Madonna, you will not so requite my faithful services?”

“I will answer nothing till I have seen her.”

“Then what time like now?” he had replied desperately, “when she sits buried alive in the darkness, with the spectre of to-morrow whispering in her ear.”

“It is well spoken, then. I will go.”

The town was so full of reek and passion, that, most in the low quarters it was necessary for us to traverse, I doubt if I could have survived without him. But he was too well known and feared to leave my safety much in question. Then the Lazzari and their allies of the conquering army were such sworn blood-brothers, that it needed never more than the smallest bone of dispute to set either tearing at the other’s throat, whereby a flying petticoat, circumnavigating both, was able to avoid shipwreck between. Indeed, we had committed more than one red scrimmage to our wake by the time we were arrived, breathless but whole, at the door of the Carmine.

A roar and drift of torches surged upon us from a side alley at the moment that we reached our goal. Here was a wave of passion broken from the main wastes, and bearing forward on its crest a single victim to its fury, whom it seemed about to fling against the sullen walls of the prison. He was a mere boy, and his face as white as wax. By the door stood a Calabrese sentry, armed with a musket and a great sabre, and a rose in his hand, the gift thorn and all of some amorous _contadina_. As the boy was hurled up the steps, “Smell to this, poor lad,” said he; “art faint?”--and he thrust the rose violently against the victim’s nostrils. The poor wretch staggered back, uttering a horrible scream, his face bathed in blood. There had been a long pin concealed among the petals, which had stung him almost to the brain. I am not sentimental, but I shall hope some day to be to that Calabrese in the relation of Lazarus to Dives. The mob, however, roared laughter over the jest, clapping their victim with a certain good-humour on the back, as we were all carried together in a confused struggle up the steps and into a vaulted stone hall beyond.

This stronghold, massive and mediæval, had only lately been the scene of the treacherous massacre of a patriot garrison, and its stones were yet mapped and mottled with the story of the deed. And since, being made a State butchery, without regard to accommodation or cleanliness, from every carrion Jacobin, it seemed, had emerged a living swarm, predestined children of the grave, who haunted the corridors with unclean cries, and showed ghastly visions of wounds and suffering at the grates as we hurried by. It was a catacomb, in whose rotting lanes of stone walked a hundred vampires, gloating over their huddled pens of victims.

Typical of the worst was the gaoler who, at de’ Medici’s summons, had risen to attend us. This was a creature, like an obscene lank bird, who hopped before us chuckling and pecking forward with his long nose, as if as he went he sought the corners for offal. At his waist jingled a bunch of keys, and often he cracked, after the Italian habit, a thong of leather with a lash which he carried in one hand, his other being occupied in holding aloft a flaring taper. He led us by a descending passage, so narrow and so low that the flame of his torch made sooty blotches on the roof as he advanced, into a murmuring drain, at whose termination he at length paused before a door sunk in the wall.

“_Guái a lei_, Messer de’ Medici,” he chuckled, as, groping for the lock, he leered round at us. “Wait till, having opened, I can block the passage. There is another here besides our little bird.”

“Another?”

“Courage, most excellent; ’tis but half a man when all’s said. He was a State prisoner in the Vicaria, until the mob released him with the rest. Then he disappeared, God knew whither; but he was retaken, with a few more, in the prisoner Pissani’s company. Well then, his day will come, no doubt; and in the meantime, waiting orders, we keep them caged together.”

De’ Medici grunted, rubbing his chin, “I should have been told; but, hurry, friend.”

The man waved him back.

“Let me entreat messer, in case of an attempt.”

The chief withdrew a little.

“Open, and come thou too,” said he. “Madam would speak alone with the condemned.”

The key grated in the lock; the creature flung wide the door.

“Pissani!” cried he, on a sharp note; and that was all.

Even as he retreated, having uttered his cry, she stood in the opening. A dank and mortal odour came with her, a reel of filthy darkness unbroken but by the dim splotch of a tiny grating, which, set in the wall opposite, made an aureole behind her head as she stood.

God of mercy! It was a spectre from which I shrunk in instinctive loathing. Had it ever been one with beauty, and with me? Its very tattered gown seemed fallen into harsh, lean folds. Love must have trodden, not sat, in those hollow eyes, so to discolour and bury them. It was a just retribution--the more providential in that so squalid a vision sickened my heart from sympathy.

Yet, to break this withered reed! It seemed a despicable task for my strong hands. They must withhold a little, caress a little first, with whatever reluctance to themselves. Nevertheless, I could not but be conscious how forced and artificial rung the tenderness I sought to convey into my voice.

“Patty--Patty Grant! I have come to offer you life and liberty!”

The tiny smile that broke then from her lips was my first earnest of her reality. The sigh she gave was such as a dead sleeper might yield to the dawn of Judgment. Yet she did not move, or come to me, or show one sign of the collapse I had expected and calculated on. And, as the light of the flaring taper fell upon her figure, a new hate and loathing surged in me, so that the persuasiveness with which I sought to dress my tones shivered into a mockery of itself--

“Did you not expect me? Did you not know that I hold your life in my hands?”

“Else why should you have left me to come to this, Diana?”

I shrunk back. What new knowledge of herself, or me, was implied in the chords of that wasted voice? Yet she smiled still, like one waking out of a frightful dream.

“Is it not strange, Diana, this end to all we have known and experienced together? Do you remember the sundial, and the old green garden, and the nuns in the sleepy village? We are Englishwomen, after all, Diana. I should like to rest in England.”

“It lies with yourself,” I answered, half choking. “You have but to speak--I tell you, it needs but a word from you, and all this false sacrifice is passed by and forgotten.”

Her eyes had been fixed on some vision beyond me. Now in a moment they were scorching my soul.

“Yes,” she said, “and the word?”

The shame of its utterance should be mine, she meant. If I had shrunk from the challenge, it would have been to discredit my claim to the greater wrong.

“Where your husband lies hidden?” I said, with a cold fury at my heart.

“God forgive you,” she answered only, and fell back.

Her assumption of the holier strength, of the worser grievance, stung me to madness. I leapt and clutched her by the wrist.

“Fool!” I shrieked; “do you know what you are bringing on yourself? Do you know how they will kill you? It is not, as in Paris, a shock, and a sob, and forgetfulness. They will push you from a ladder, and one will spring and swing himself by your feet, and another leap upon your shoulders, and squat there like a hideous toad, making sport for the crowd. And you will be minutes choking and dying, and not one to pity or relieve you!”

Her eyes had a smile of agony in them; but still it was a smile, and I could have torn myself in my impotence to change it.

“Ah, yes, one!” she said; “my little unborn baby.”

I sprang back.

“Wretch! Your obstinacy murders it!”

“It gives its life for its father!”

Without sound or warning, she sank at my feet, and lay motionless, her white face turned upward.

A harsh jest was uttered at my shoulder.

“Bravo! It is so they always think to sport with our feelings. But we have an infallible medicine”--and the gaoler, coming from behind me, cut across the senseless face with his whip.

With a roar, a figure bounded out of the darkness of the cell, and whirling long arms about the beast, fell with and upon him, and battered out his brains upon the stone floor. It all passed in a moment; and in that moment I knew my lost monster again, gaunt and foul and tattered, yet even in his wasted strength a god, and glorious. Then against a coming tumult and scurry of feet I flung my body.

“Back!” I shrieked; “the king gives me a life! I claim his--do you hear? If by a hair it is injured, the bitter worse for you all!”

Sobbing, burning, in a flurry of passion, I threw myself, an hour later in the palace, at the king’s knees.

“Sire,” I cried, “I claim your royal promise. I ask mercy for a friend.”

Taken off his guard, bewitched, perhaps, “It is granted,” he said.

Then he recovered himself, and laughed, and patted my shoulder.

“_Enfin_,” he said; “what has he done?”

“He has killed a gaoler who was ill-treating a prisoner.”

He startled, frowned, then laughed again, but less easily.

“O, well,” he said, “a gaoler is no great matter. But I must know his name first.”

“Sire, it is my own servant Gogo, that you have robbed me of this long time.”

“O, him!” he said, relieved. “Well, perhaps, after all, we owe him a gaoler or two.”