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.