As they emerged into the gentler stream beyond, there was a moment’s pause, and every man of the crew, dashing the salt sweat from his eyes, turned involuntarily toward the royal visage. The slight smile of approbation on Charles’s lips seemed ample guerdon for the feat; indeed, as in the case of most saturnine countenances, its momentary relaxation had a rare charm. They fell upon the oars again, and presently the mighty pile of the Tower seemed to engulf them into its dark shades.
If Whitehall, stained with the blood of a king, shed a gloom about it, even while holding the most irresponsible court in the world, what sinister shroud enveloped these walls to every imaginative mind. The stones of the dungeon, tradition said, had been first cemented in lime and blood; and enough blood had since been poured out within those gates to stain the moats forever crimson.
The water gates swung back, and the King’s barge glided in. Charles’s face bore an air of pleasant anticipation, unwonted good fortune. He was certain to be amused, whichever way events turned; certain at least of some novel sensation.
III
THE LINNET’S SONG
Jeanne de Mantes sat sidewise in the deep window-seat of the parlour in the constable’s Tower, her dark eyes roaming about her with a curiosity not unmixed with a kind of awe. The room, dark with ancient oak to its blackened ceiling, with its huge depth of wall, its aspect of strength, silence, antiquity, resembled no apartment that she had ever entered. True, she had never penetrated into the Bastille, and true, she was here of her own free will and free to leave at her caprice; yet a small shiver crept over her. There seemed to her something ominous, something fated, about the place. All said and done, it was a prison. What should bring hither those who lived for freedom and joy?
She glanced almost timidly at the man who stood, one elbow propped on the embrasure, gazing down at her with inscrutable yet perhaps mocking eyes. He matched his Tower, she thought, in the something dark and melancholy which, though he might smile and court, yet remained as undisturbed as the sombreness of the room by the leaping firelight or the early spring flowers on the table.
Their glances met. In the light that fell upon her from grey skies and grey wall, the texture of her face showed flawless; richly coloured, at once soft and firm, it glowed like some southern fruit out of the cold setting. Her lips were parted: forgotten, in the momentary feeling of strangeness, all the modish airs and graces of the Louvre. She looked like a child, Rockhurst thought. He smiled at her, suddenly, kindly; sat down on the window-seat beside her and took her little amber-tinted hand in his.
“This is a rude place for such a one as you,” he said; “and you look about you like some creature caught against its will. Nay, you shall but sing me a song, and take your flight again forthwith, if you so wish it.”
All the woman in her awoke, petulant, displeased. Chivalry in love, a man who could desire and yet spare—that was not at all to her French taste. She drew her hands quickly from his and tossed her head.