And as if overcome by painful emotion, Lady Jane sank down at Catharine’s feet, and hid her head in the folds of the queen’s robe.
Catharine bent down to raise her and take her to her heart. Suddenly she started, and a deathly paleness overspread her face. “The king,” whispered she, “the king is coming!”
CHAPTER III. KING HENRY THE EIGHTH.
Catharine was not deceived. The doors were opened, and on the threshold appeared the lord marshal, with his golden mace.
“His majesty the king!” whispered he, in his grave, solemn manner, which filled Catharine with secret dread, as though he were pronouncing the sentence of death over her.
But she forced a smile and advanced to the door to receive the king. Now was heard a thunder-like rumble, and over the smoothly carpeted floor of the anteroom came rolling on the king’s house equipage. This house equipage consisted of a large chair, resting on castors, which was moved by men in the place of horses, and to which they had, with artful flattery, given the form of a triumphal car of the old victorious Roman Caesars, in order to afford the king, as he rolled through the halls, the pleasant illusion that he was holding a triumphal procession, and that it was not the burden of his heavy limbs which fastened him to his imperial car. King Henry gave ready credence to the flattery of his truckle-chair and his courtiers, and as he rolled along in it through the saloons glittering with gold, and through halls adorned with Venetian mirrors, which reflected his form a thousandfold, he liked to lull himself into the dream of being a triumphing hero, and wholly forgot that it was not his deeds, but his fat, that had helped him to his triumphal car.
For that monstrous mass which filled up the colossal chair, that mountain of purple-clad flesh, that clumsy, almost shapeless mass, that was Henry the Eighth, king of merry England. But thae mass had a head—a head full of dark and wrathful thoughts, a heart full of bloodthirsty and cruel lusts. The colossal body was indeed, by its physical weight, fastened to the chair. Yet his mind never rested, but he hovered, with the talons and flashing eye of the bird of prey, over his people, ever ready to pounce upon some innocent dove, to drink her blood, and tear out her heart, that he might lay it, all palpitating, as an offering on the altar of his sanguinary god.
The king’s sedan now stopped, and Catharine hastened forward with smiling face, to assist her royal husband in alighting.
Henry greeted her with a gracious nod, and rejected the proffered aid of the attendant pages.