HISTORICAL
VIGNETTES,
1st Series

“Halt!” The voice of an officer rang out in the heavy twilight, and with a sudden scream of brakes and jangle of harness the cavalcade came to a stand.

“Tell the Herr von Gastein his Majesty desires to speak with him.” The name ran up the long line, quick and sharp, like a rattle of musketry, and passed out of hearing of him who had uttered it. “Tell the Herr Captain to come at once.”

The Herr Captain was already, on the word, spurring back from the head of the cortège, which was of royal extent. It stood upon a flat road in a flat country, covering more ground than and including almost as many human souls as a modern mail-train. There was the King’s coach for principal item—a veritable little room slung on straps and drawn by eight horses; and there were carriages—seven or eight, and each holding as many people—for his retinue, and baggage-wagons, and a troop of fifty sabres to escort the whole. It took so much, or more, to carry this little corpulent apoplectic on his annual visit to Herrenhausen, whither he had already travelled to within a league or so of Osnabrück and a much-needed night’s rest.

The Captain von Gastein, having dismounted and thrown his reins to a groom, stood at stiff attention by the coach door. He was a patient, somewhat exhausted-looking man of fifty, spare-bodied, and with stone-blue eyes which rather matched the dusty Hanoverian blue of his uniform. His expression at the moment was one of a quiet fatality, as if the summons had not been altogether unforeseen by him.

A preternatural silence seemed to have succeeded the tumult of hoofs and wheels. There was a soundless blink of lightning in the sky, and a windmill on the flat roadside blackened and paled alternately in its flicker, as if it palpitated. It was late June, and the air seemed to have come out of a limekiln. The dust rolled up into it began to settle down sluggishly.

The door of the great travelling-coach opened, and a little bewigged gentleman, who had been peering from behind the glass, descended. His manner was dry, self-important, professional; he was the King’s English physician.

“His Majesty, my dear Captain,” he whispered, “is in a strange mood. You are commanded to ascend and converse with him—you may guess why. The affair of last year—you understand? Old associations are re-awakened, old injuries re-exposed—you were intimately acquainted with their subject. Bear in mind that this sad event has interposed itself between his last departure from and his present revisit to his paternal dominions, and venture upon nothing in the nature of a reminder. If you find him fanciful, excited——”

A querulous voice, breaking from the interior of the carriage, interrupted him:

“Der Herr Jesus! What is all this chatter? Tell the man to enter.”

The physician, placing a warning finger on his lips, skipped to one of the supplementary coaches; the Captain von Gastein climbed into the royal vehicle. A postillion put up the steps; the door was closed, the word given, and the cavalcade lurched on. “Sit,” motioned the King; and the Herr Captain, with what steadiness he could command, settled himself on the edge of the broad seat backing upon the horses, and awaited, rigid and upright.

He was quite alone with his Majesty, and there was plenty of room for them both. The interior of the coach was like a cabinet, and luxuriously upholstered. There were accommodations for writing, card-playing, shaving, coffee-making, and other conveniences. The pace was leisurely, the motion restful; the great wheels turned outside the windows with little apparent sound. The King of England lay in his padded corner opposite, a very weary, moodish little old man. His cheeks bagged, his eyes goggled, strained, and anxious; the silk travelling-cloak in which he was wrapped only partly concealed his immense corpulence, and his thick legs and stumpy feet dangled short of the floor. His head was unwigged, and enveloped in a close cap with a fur border which came down over his eyes.

The officer, observant of everything, for all the respectful rigidity of his vision, could not but be conscious of a certain feeling of repulsion in this his first close contact with the prince to whose unwelcome service, in one most tragic direction, he had devoted the best twenty-five years of his life. Twenty-five years it was since he had been ordered, a young impecunious captain, to the lonely castle of Ahlden on the Aller, where lived, already seven years incarcerated, the beautiful young wife of the then electoral Prince George—Sophia Dorothea, accused, rightly or wrongly, of misconduct with a Swedish adventurer. She was fair; unhappy; her husband had not loved her; the cold cruelty of his temperament had been confessed in this his consignment of her to a living grave. Had she not lain in his arms, borne him children? Gastein had needed no more to inflame his chivalry. Thenceforth he had given himself to the service of this lady, to ameliorate, to the best of his power, her bitter fate. His partiality, his sympathy, being, no doubt, reported, had kept him poor and unpromoted. For a quarter of a century he had shared his princess’s exile, and had only returned to the world when death had ended that, less than a twelvemonth ago. After thirty-two years! And this was the unlovely Rhadamanthus who had condemned her, this little wheezy, potbellied old frog of a man, who had become Elector of Hanover and King of England in the interval! The Captain had been educated to the right divine succession; but something monstrous in the picture struck him. His convictions and his emotions hurt one another in their efforts at a reconciliation. It was somehow not right that tragic beauty should lie at the mercy of this commonplace. He sat as stiff as a ramrod.

It is one of the most grotesque privileges of royalty to command silence. No one must address it unless addressed. Then, at its word, its gesture, the empty brass pot ceases to tinkle or the golden vessel overflows. This seems an unnatural impost, like taxing a man’s daylight or his drinking-water. It gives an uncanny self-possession to the mortal who levies it. The little swollen tub of a creature, glowering in his corner, mutely discussed the figure opposite for as long as it pleased him, with no more concern, probably less, than he would have shown in regarding a black-beetle; and when he spoke at last it was even with some grudging in his cold, guttural voice.

“You are of the escort, then, mein Herr?”

The Captain, stiffening yet a trifle, saluted. “As your Majesty commanded,” he said.

The other shrugged fretfully.

“I am glad,” he said, “to find something surviving to your sense of duty.”

Von Gastein made no answer. He ought not; he could not, indeed. That sense of warring emotions hurt him like a violent indigestion.

The King, for some minutes, condescended to speak no more, but sat looking out of the window upon the darkening flats and the white ribbon of the road reeling under him. What was in his mind? He had always declared, for some reason, that he would not long survive his wife; and she had died six months ago. Had he somehow cheated Fate—or might he have cheated it had he remained in England? This was his first visit to his patrimony since her death. Her death, her released spirit—turn the coach!

No, his beloved Herrenhausen! The stout little Guelph was no coward for all his love of life and good-living. A murrain on this old wives’ trash of spectres and premonitions! He glanced at the figure opposite—it sat up rigid and grey like a signpost—and, with a scowl, looked out of the window again.

Thirty-two years—a woman of sixty, and she had been a fresh, blooming young wife of twenty-eight when he had consigned her to her living death! Much water, as they said in England, had flowed under London Bridge during that interval—the highways of life had been paved and repaved. Thirty-two years! The Schloss was a dead, dreary place, situated in a dead, dreary country—a mere lonely manor-house in the wilds, good enough for a month’s stay; but—thirty-two years! Gott in Himmel! And she had been vivacious, worldly, sparkling with the glory of being and doing when he had last seen her!

A vision of the castle, as he had known it once or twice in the old, far-off days, rose before him. He saw again the leagues of flat marshland which surrounded it, the reedy river crawling by its walls, the grey alders shivering in the wind, and the wheeling of lonely plovers. He saw the sad towers, the cold, undecorated rooms, the windows looking out upon the lifeless waste of road. The road! the livid unfruitful highway, upon which, for hours at a time, it had been said, dry burning eyes had been set, despairing for the mercy, the deliverance, which never came! For thirty-two years! God in heaven! while the frost of age slowly settled on the beautiful eyes, the deep black hair, the breaking heart! With a writhe, as of physical suffering, the old man turned from his window.

“The life was dull at Schloss Ahlden?” he said.

“Dull, sire.”

The correct, impassive attitude of the Captain maddened while it half cowed him. For a minute he held his breath—only to release it in a sudden question, unexpected, astounding:

“In your eyes, soldier, she was innocent?”

Von Gastein started under the shock—and recovered himself.

“During the twenty-five years, sire, I had the privilege of attending on her the Princess of Ahlden did not fail weekly to take the Sacrament, and on each occasion to avow her innocence before the altar.”

The King stared, then mumbled from loud to low.

“They will avow it,” he began, and broke off quickly. Some words reported to him, as having been uttered by her to one seeking to bring about a reconciliation before his enthronement, recurred to his mind: “If I am guilty, I am not worthy to be your Queen; if I am innocent, your King is not worthy to be my husband.”

A casuistry, feminine, non-committing—hedging, in the true sporting sense. He hardened. This fate had not after all seemed so merciless to one so guilty.

“She had liberty,” he said, as if appealing to his own conscience.

The Captain made a frigid reverence, acquiescing in the enormous lie.

“I say, she had liberty,” repeated the King—“permission to drive abroad.”

“For six miles, sire, back and forth,” answered the soldier, as if he accounted himself addressed: “for six miles west, to the old stone bridge on the Hayden road. So much and no more. At the bridge the escort turned her. On fine days she would drive herself—fast and faster, till the stones spun from the wheels. She would seem to madden for freedom, to outstrip her misery. Many times she would traverse the distance, the lady-in-waiting sitting, the troop spurring at her side; and at the stone bridge it would be always the same. ‘No further?’ ‘No further, madam.’ ‘Ah! but death will release me!’”

He stopped, conscious of his own emotion. He had served the lovely sorrow so long, that its tragedy had become part of himself.

“I crave your Majesty’s forgiveness,” he muttered in a broken voice.

The King spoke up harshly:

“She was limited to that road by necessity.”

“During life, sire.”

The response came swift and involuntary. The soldier gasped, having made it.

“You will stop the coach, and return to your duty,” said the King, blue in the face.

The former commotion was repeated; the physician returned to his patient; the cavalcade rolled on. His Majesty spoke not a single word further, but sat staring from the window. It was deep dusk now without, and the lightning flickered with a ghastlier brilliancy. But still the King would give no order to have the lamps lighted. Instead, he lay with his livid face and protruding eyes addressed to the heavens, and the horror of a thought incessant in his mind. The road was open to her at last, and she was driving to cut him off from Osnabrück, the city in which he had been born. She knew that a man could not die in the room where he was born; and she was coming to forestall him with the dread summons to appear before his Maker, and answer for the thing he had done.

* * * * *

Much agitated, von Gastein remounted his horse, and spurred on to his place in the front. He did more; he drove ahead of all, and took the lead on the solitary road making for Osnabrück. The lights of the city were already faintly starring the distance, when a sound coming from in front startled and then thrilled him. Swift wheels, and the hoofs of a tearing horse! There was nothing uncommon in that; and yet his heart went cold to hear it. “God have mercy on me!” he muttered: “I am a fool!”

Nearer and nearer came the sound—it was close—it was upon him—and there rushed past the shadow of a cabriolet, with a wild woman on the seat flogging a wild black horse. The night of her hair streamed behind like a thin cloud dusted with diamonds, and there was a frenzy of triumph in her eyes, and on her lips a smile. And so she passed and was gone.

The Captain turned his horse’s head, and drove back upon the van.

“Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too late!”

They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented.

“What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this way.”

And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind, and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step by the open door.

“His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a stroke, and is dead!”

FOUQUIER-TINVILLE

“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice, bear, for your consolation, its memory to the scaffold.”

With a stiff smile on his lips, and those words of the President of the reconstituted Court in his ears, Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, late Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turned to follow his guard.

This was at seven o’clock of a May evening, and twelve or fourteen hours remained to him in which to collect his thoughts and settle his affairs. At ten on the following morning the tumbrils would arrive at the archway to the Cour du Mai, and he and his fifteen condemned jurymen would start on their long road of agony to the Place de la Révolution, whither, or elsewhere, on a like errand, he himself had already despatched so many thousands.

Those words of the President somehow haunted him.

So many thousands—dismissed to their deaths, without remorse or pity, from that same salle de la liberté in which he had just stood his own trial! How familiar it had all seemed, how matter-of-course, how inevitable!—the relentless hands of the clock, creeping on to the premeditated doom-stroke; the hungry, bestial faces lolling at the barriers; the voices of the street entering by the open windows, and seeming to comment derisively on the drawling evidence, selected to convict. He had known the procedure so well, had been so instrumental in creating it, that any defence had well seemed a mockery of the methods of the Palais de Justice.

“I have been a busy man,” he had said. “I forget things. Are we to be held accountable for every parasite we destroy in crushing out the life of a monster?”

That had appeared a reasonable plea. What did not seem reasonable was the base sums he had personally amassed out of the destruction of the parasites, the bribes he had accepted, his subornation of witnesses, his deafness to the just pleas of unprofitable virtue, his neglect of the principles of brotherhood. He had held one of the first offices of the fraternal State, and had made of it a wholly self-seeking vehicle. He had seen his chance in the mad battle of a people for liberty, and had used it to rob the dead. There was, in truth, no more despicable joint in that “tail of Robespierre” which Sanson was busily engaged just now in docking than this same Antoine Quentin. And yet he believed himself aggrieved.

That night he wrote to his second wife, from his cell in the Conciergerie, to which he had been returned, the following words:

“I shall die, heart and hands pure, for having served my country with too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed to the wishes of the Government.”

It bettered Wolsey’s cry in the singleness of its reproach.

The problem of all villainy is that it regards itself with an obliquity of vision for which it seems hard to hold it accountable. Given a lack of the moral sense, and how is a man to make an honest living? Tinville—or de Tinville, mark you—became an attorney because he was poor, and then a rascal because he was an attorney. There are always many thousands living in an odour of respectability whom fortune alone saves from a like revelation of themselves. But that is not to say that, in the general purification of society, the lethal chamber is not the best answer to the problem.

This man was by nature a callous, coarse-grained ruffian, constitutionally insensible to the pleas of humanity, and with the self-protective instinct prominently developed in him as in brutes. You could not regard his sallow, grim-jawed face-structure, his staring, over-bushed black eyes, his thin-lipped mouth, perpetually mobile in sneers and spitting scorns and cynicisms, and affect to read in them any under-suggestion of charity or benevolence. Numbers, poor obsequious wretches, had essayed the monstrous pretence, and had pitiably retracted their heresy under the axe. He was forty-seven years of age; he had lived every day of his later manhood in secret scorn and abuse of the principles he had hired himself to advocate; and only where his personal interests were not affected had it ever been possible to credit him with a deed of grace, or, at the best, of passive indifference.

“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice!”

He had done kind things in his time, two or three; but had they ever included “one act of self-sacrifice”? Had he not conceded them, rather, for the very contrary reason? He tried to think it out. The question worried him oddly and persistently; it seemed to have absorbed every other; he groped perpetually for an answer to it through the whirling chaos of his mind. There had been the wife and daughters of the Marquis de Miranion, whom he had shielded in their peril because once, when he had been a young man contemplating Orders, they had shown him kindness. He suddenly remembered the case, and remembered too that his condescension had occurred at a time when the despotic nature of his office had held him virtually immune from criticism or misrepresentation. Again, there had been the young virgins of Verdun, condemned and executed for offering sweetmeats to the King of Prussia. He had pitied them; but pity was inexpensive, and, at the moment, not unpopular. There had been—what else had there been? He flogged his brains for a third instance, and, not being successful, had to fall back upon the minor amenities. Little convivial generosities (for he had been a camarade, a joyeux-vivant, in his rough way), little family indulgences, and sensual concessions—he had these to set against the habitual inhuman greed which had made him the most squalid, soulless Harpagon of his tribe. Insolent to weakness, truckling to power, his interest in the awful part he had played had never risen above self-interest. The very list of the great names he had extinguished represented nothing to his ignoble mind but so many opportunities seized by him to acquire personal gain or personal safety. Vergniaud the ineffable, Corday the magnificent, Lavoisier the gentle, Hébert the dastard, Danton the tremendous—these, to take but a handful, he had despatched to their graves with a like indifference to the principles which had brought them subject to his chastisement. There were no principles in his creed but self-gain and self-preservation. From the poor Austrian “plucked hen” at one limit of the tale to Robespierre at the other, he had been always as ready to cut short a saint as a rogue in the vindication of that creed. He simply could not understand any other; and yet the words of the President were worrying him horribly.

He had answered them, at the time, after his nature—that is to say, with servility while a thread of hope remained, and afterwards with loud scorn and venomous defiance. Brazen by constitution, he was not to reveal himself soft metal at the last. Trapped and at bay, he snarled like a tiger, confessing his yellow fangs at their longest. Hope might exist for other men; but he knew too well it was ended. He himself had stabbed it to death with a thousand wounds.

And yet he was racked with a sense of grievance.

And yet those words of the President tormented him.

He spoke, and wrote, and raged—throughout the brief interval of life which remained to him he was seldom still. But always the one sentence floated in letters of dim fire in the background of his mind. He had a mad feeling that if only once he could recall the necessary instance, he would be equipped with the means to defy his enemies—to defy heaven and hell and earth. That was a strange obsession for a sceptic and atheist, but it clung to him. The words, and the rebuke that they implied, were for ever in his brain, crossing its dark wastes like a shaft of light peopled with tiny travelling motes, which bore some relation, only in an insignificant form, to the tremendous business of the day, and yet seemed to have survived that business as its only realities. Thus through the texture of the ray came and went little absurd memories of a cut that juryman Vilate, a fellow-prisoner, had made upon his chin in shaving, of an early queen-wasp that had come and droned about the presidential desk during the droning indictment, of the face of an old shrewd, wintry hag which had peered out, white and momentary, from among the crowd of spectators, and had been as swiftly absorbed back into it.

The face! His wandering mind brought up on the recollection of it with an instant shock. The hate, the tumult, all other foam-white faces of the court, seemed in one moment to drop and seethe away from it like a spent wave, and to leave it flung up alone, stark, motionless, astounding.

* * * * *

At ten came the tumbrils, together with the prescriptive guard of sixty gendarmes to escort them to the scaffold. The ex-Public Prosecutor mounted to his place, dogged, baleful, heroic, according to his lights. He could not help bullying even his fellow-sufferers; but from the outset there was a strange, searching gleam in his eyes, which never left them until they were closed for ever.

From the Quai de l’Horloge came the first roar of the mob, as rabid to flesh its teeth in the accuser as it had ever been in the accused. Already, as the Pont Neuf was reached, a running, howling valetaille of blackguards and prostitutes was travelling with the procession. Lumbering onwards, between ranks of many-windowed houses alive with screaming faces and waving hands, the carts traversed the rues la Monoie and du Roule, and turned into the long stretch of the rue St. Honoré, which ended only at the bend into the great square of the guillotine.

They cursed him all the way; he cursed them back. The habit of his lips spat venom, while his brain ignored and his vision overlooked them.

“Where are thy batches now, Antoine?” they screamed.

“Ravening curs!” he thundered; “is thy bread cheaper lacking them?”

All the time his eyes were going with the running crowd, searching it, beating it like covert, hunting for something on which they hungered to fasten. And suddenly they found it—the figure of a little withered old woman, bearing a gross green umbrella in her hand.

She was there in a moment, moving in pace with the carts, a dead twig borne on the living stream, now afloat, now under, but always reappearing—bobbing out grotesque and vital, and dancing on her way. She was of the poorest class, bent, lean, tattered, and her face was quite hidden behind the wings of a frowsy cap. No one seemed to observe her; only the eyes of the condemned gloated on her movements, followed them, watched her every step with an intense greed that never wavered. For she it was who stood to him, at last, for that single act of self-sacrifice with the instance of which he was to refute his slanderers and defy the grave.

It had come upon him, all at once, with the memory of that face, projected, livid and instant, from the mist of faces that had walled him in. He had recalled how, on a certain wet and dismal evening months ago, he had been crossing the Pont St. Michel on his way home after an exhausting day, when the gleam of a gold coin lying in the kennel had arrested his attention. Avaricious in the most peddling sense, he had been stooping eagerly to grasp his find, when the interposition of a second body had halted him unexpectedly on his way.

“Bon Dieu, little citizen, let the old rag-sorter be happy for once!”

He had heard the febrile plea; had checked himself and had looked. It was an old, old woman, grotesque, battered, drenched with rain. In her trembling claw, nevertheless, she had borne a shapeless green umbrella, an article sufficiently preposterous in that context of poverty and sans-culottism. No doubt the dislocation of the times accounted for her possession of it. It had burst open as she grabbed at the coin, and out had rolled a sodden red cabbage, fished from some mixen. It had borne an uncanny resemblance to a severed head, and had made him start for the moment.

“Let the old rag-sorter be happy for once.”

And, with a laugh, he had let her clutch the gold, restore the cabbage to its receptacle, and hobble off breathing benedictions on his head. God knew why he had let her—God would know. And yet God was a cipher in the scheme of things. Only, from the moment when the President had uttered those words, he had been looking—he knew it now—for the old rag-sorter to refute them. She could testify, if she would, that his life had not been entirely devoid of disinterested self-sacrifice. He had once, for another’s sake, refused a ten-franc piece.

How had she risen, and whence followed? There had been something unearthly in the apparition; there was something unearthly in his present possession by it. Yet, from the moment of his mental identification of the face, he had expected to renew the vision of it, to take it up somewhere between the prison and the scaffold, and he would have been perplexed only to find his expectation at fault. His witnesses were not wont to fail him, and this, the most personal of any, he could not afford to spare. He dwelt upon the flitting figure with a passion of interest which blinded him to the crowd, deafened him to its maledictions. Automatically he roared back blasphemy for hate; subliminally he was alone in Paris with his old rag-sorter.

He could never see her face; yet he knew it was she as surely as he knew himself. She went on and on, keeping pace with the cart, threading the throng, and always, it seemed, unobserved by it.

And then, all in a moment, the guillotine—and he was going up the steps to it!

He turned as he reached the platform. For an instant, tumult and a sense of mad disaster hemmed him in. There was a foam of upturned faces, vaster than anything he had yet realised; there was the tall, lean yoke, with its wedge of dripping steel swung up between; there was the lunette, the little window, and the corners, just visible, of the deep basket beyond into which he was to vomit his life. They were hauling away the trunk of the last victim, a ludicrous, flabby welter, into the red cart adjacent. What a way to treat a man—soulless, obscene! For one instant a deadly sickness overpowered him; he turned his head away—and saw her panting up the steps, confessed, but yet unnoticed, a jocund leer on her withered old face.

Then suddenly something happened. The thundering voice of the crowd rose to an exultant pitch; there was a crash, a numbing jerk—and he was erect again, amazed and flung at liberty.

But even in that supreme moment his vision sought out his old rag-sorter, and was for her alone. She was down on her knees, eager and mumbling, stuffing something into her green umbrella. What was it—a red cabbage—a head? He caught a glimpse of it as it went in—and it was his own head—the head of Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, ex-Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal.

THE QUEEN’S NURSE

Frivolous she may have been, shallow and light-hearted as a brook, but not heartless. Her nurse—she who, in modern parlance, had “taken her from the month” and had fed and bred her in the house of her father, Sir John Seymour, of Wiltshire, knight—would always defend her tooth and nail from that charge. And when at last, having followed her nursling’s dancing career through the Courts of the old gloomy Louvre and the more splendid Whitehall, she came to see her supplant in the royal caprice the unhappy Queen whose maid-of-honour she had been, she would allow in her presence no breath of detraction to slur the good fame of her darling, but would constantly aver that she had fought against the inevitable with all the desperation of which her buoyant nature was capable. Jane could never say nay to the least plausible beggar in the world, she would declare; and what was her chance when that suppliant was King Harry himself? She loved life, to be sure, the sweet butterfly—who would not with such a disposition? And when the alternative was to be broken on a wheel! How many, though deeper ones, would have chosen that in her place, she would like to know? And here was she about to justify her monarch’s choice by presenting him with a male heir—the heir for whom he had been growling and raging these twenty years past. She had no doubt it would be a male, since her bird always gave every one what he asked. And she had come to nurse her nursling through her first troublous days in this the new great palace of Hampton that the red Cardinal had built.

So she believed up to the last, and at that last the King, the least plausible beggar, sat all alone one wild October evening in the great oriel window of the great hall at the Court. It blew and rained boisterously without, and the wet, red leaves were dashed against the glass, where they ran down like gouts of blood. Their hue was reflected in the royal eyes, which stared out upon the desolate prospect between wrath and anxiety. Henry’s conscience was gnawing at his heart, in truth, and despot-like he resented the pain.

The tapers burned under that vaulted gloom like glow-worms in a dark avenue; the residue of a discarded feast lay tumbled about the tables. Apart from the golden dishes, the piles of fruit, the crusted goblets and great flagons of wine, he sat in his tremendous isolation, and fought the fight between desire and humanity. It was never, alas! but a brief struggle with him. He rose in a moment, a heavy, butcher-like figure of a man, a huge common hulk made formidable by padded doublet and “blistered” sleeves all roped and starred with gems, and, his lips puffing, the scant ginger hair bristling on his swollen neck and jowls, thundered an order into space. Instant to it an obsequious page leaped into the Presence.

“Sir Anthony Denny—summon him.”

The page vanished; the King strode up and down. At the fourth turn he paused to see a figure bow before him. This figure, for contrast, was robed all in black, with a tight coif on its head, and, hanging from its shoulders, a long, sleeveless gown edged with brown fur. It was the figure, livid and drawn-faced, of the chief barber-surgeon attending on her Majesty the Queen’s confinement.

“Sir Anthony,” said the King, “make note of our decision. Meseemeth in this realm of ours that wives be plenty, but heirs most sorely lack. Poor Jane must suffer for the succession. If one must perish——” He paused.

“It is even so, your Majesty,” murmured the physician.

The King stamped his foot, and turned away.

“I must have my heir,” he said. “God’s blood, I must and will!”

But that night, as he was crossing a corridor to his cabinet, an old woman broke upon him with tears and lamentations.

“They are killing my bird!”

“Peace, fool!” said the King, harsh and lowering. “I must have mine heir, though all birds fell dumb from this moment.”

She clung to him, but he shook her off roughly, and went on his way. She followed, importunate and beyond fear.

“Spare my nursling! She is one and only; thou canst not renew her; but many shall be her gifts of love to thee.”

He turned like a goaded bull, and the woman was dragged away.

That night the little Prince was born; and thereafter the wreck from which he had been delivered settled down, and on the twelfth day it sank into the fathomless deeps.

The King was sorry for a while; but he had his heir to reward him for the sacrifice he had made. Mary Tudor, a girl of twenty, and already as sour as crabs, was the little dead queen’s chief mourner. The trumpets brayed her obsequies, the laureate sang them in execrable verse, the baby—a pinched atom—screamed them. Only the old nurse sat dumb and dry-eyed, taking no notice of anything.

She would have nothing to do with the Prince, craved or claimed no part in his rearing. But presently she took her spinning-wheel to the little dark room by the chapel which had been allotted her; and there she would sit all day drawing flax from the distaff.

One noon, the door being open, the King in passing saw her thus occupied, and went in. She neither moved nor acknowledged his presence, but went on with her spinning. His eyes began to redden in the way all knew.

“What spinnest thou?” he demanded.

“Flax,” she answered, grim and quiet, without stopping in her work.

“For what?” he roared.

“Thy shroud,” she said, “and that of all thy house.”

Those with him thought the roof would have fallen. He raised his own blazing eyes to it, as if in momentary doubt of his omnipotence. But when he spoke at last it was noted with amazement that his words were temperate.

“That shall we see, old dotard,” he said. “Dispart her wheel and her.”

She stood up, with a smile on her thin lips, as they snatched her wheel away.

“Dispose them,” said the King, “where neither may avail the other. And, for her, take her incontinent in her sorcery, and put her where she may weave a shroud of darkness for evermore.”

He spoke, and passed out; and, as he had ordered, so was it done. The spinning-wheel was cast into a cupboard under the great staircase, and the nurse disappeared from human ken. Nothing more was heard of her for ten long years.

At the end of that time the King’s majesty lay ill. His huge bombard of a body was swollen with gout and dropsy; a mere rust of hair remained to his gross head; his hearing was capricious, and his eyes rheumy with half-blindness. He had grown slovenly in his dress; his every breath bullied the sweet air for ease and comfort; and, to cap all, his temper had grown with his deformities till hardly a man durst meet his eye.

Lying at Whitehall, he had a dream one night which troubled him. He sent for Sir Anthony Denny, always now in close attendance, and, heaving himself on his elbow, glared at the physician through a mist of anguish.

“Give me,” he said, “to mend this whirring in my brain.”

Sir Anthony, quaking in his list slippers, prescribed and administered a febrifuge. It availed little. Day and night the buzzing noise went on until it grew to madness. One morning the King groaned in torture: “It droneth, droneth for ever like a wheel!” and of a sudden sat up as if stricken.

“The old beldame’s!” he whispered. “What of it?”

It was some time before the alarmed leech could gather the import of his question, and then he hurried to have inquiries made. A special courier was despatched boot and spur to Hampton Court. But in these full years the very memory of the incident had vanished, and none knew where the wheel had been deposited. Only it seemed that others there had been haunted of late by a mysterious sound, so that none dared venture by the great staircase whence it appeared to proceed. And that was the message returned, in fear and trembling, to the tyrant.

He raged: “I will have no mysteries in my house. Pluck the stairway down.”

A despot’s will is law. In preparing to obey it the masons came upon the wheel. The King, being informed of the discovery, roared like a wounded tiger.

“Burn the thing to ashes!” he thundered, and, on the very word, turned white and mumbled. “Nay,” he said, in a fallen voice, “put it where the arts of Satan may not prevail with it; hide it away in my royal chapel, and the fiend shall be baffled. And look you that none comes near me in the night again to choke me in my shroud.”

His mind was impaired; it was evident that he was approaching his end; yet through all his desperation and mental anguish the inflexible will, which had surmounted all other wills of half the world, remained true, as history knows, to its dogged traditions. Almost his last breath was given to confirm the death sentence passed on a great subject. If one bitterer pang than another rent his released spirit, it must have been that which showed him his final vengeance unaccomplished.

And, in the meanwhile, none dared approach him with the truth of his nearing dissolution. He had killed men in the past for prophesying his mortality. He had held death so cheaply, had carried it so lightly in the hollow of his hand, that he could not believe it capable of striking at his omnipotence.

But there came a time when the truth could be no longer withheld from him, and Sir Anthony Denny was the one deputed to break it. He approached his task with a very natural apprehension, the more so as his Majesty had that morning shown some increased signs of confidence in his own recovery. He greeted the physician’s return with a distorted smile.

“I shall live to plague mine enemies yet,” he said, “so I can pluck this cursed hornet from my brain. Look you, man, I see a cause. It is my mind accusing me of an over-harshness in the past. Poor Jane her nurse, that old demented fool! Well, she loved her; the debt is paid; let her go free, I say.”

The physician stood aghast. He had been half expecting this thunderbolt ever since the King’s sick fancy had raised the dust of a long-forgotten sentence.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered, “your Majesty! The beldame died in prison this very day se’nnight.”

“This day!” The King struggled into a sitting posture. His face was like nothing human. “This day se’nnight!” He battled for breath. “It was when the sound began. God’s mercy! the wheel!”

“Alas, your Majesty!” half whimpered the leech; “there be those who say they cannot hear themselves pray for its whirring. The chapel is deserted.”

The King fell back, and raised his hands feebly, as if drawing something over his face. For an instant it appeared to the agitated physician as if a shroud of white had actually hidden it; but, on nearer approach, he saw that it was the frost of death that had fallen.

Long years after, a tradition which had for ages associated a muffled, incomprehensible droning with the occurrence of any death in the palace received, “in the white winter of its age,” a curious justification. Some workmen, in breaking through a wall of the old chapel, came upon an ancient spinning-wheel hidden away behind the panelling.

LOUIS XIV

Looking over the inner Cour de Marbre at Versailles Palace were two little rooms, in the main pile of the building, which constituted the very core of privacy in the Petits Appartements du Roi. One was his Majesty’s “den,” the other his wig-room, and both were elegantly simple, almost severe, in their appointments. In the Galerie des Glaces adjoining, marble, paint, crystal, and silver, in lavish profusion, represented to the public eye the habitual equipage of a Grand Monarch; these more restful surroundings represented to the monarch himself his secret possession of some emotions felt in common with the vulgar herd, to wit, the joys of a retreat where he could do just as he liked, without the necessity of posing to himself or others. A few chairs, a table, a secrétaire—all profusely painted and be-ormolued, it was true, but for the simple reason that beauty unadorned was unprocurable in the Paris of the period—sober hangings, a quiet picture or so—such was the furniture of the little apartment appropriated by Louis XIV. to his inmost meditations.

We find him in this distinguished snuggery on a certain afternoon of the year 1704—the twenty-first of August, to be exact. It is within three days of St. Bartholomew, a feast which his Most Catholic Majesty makes a particular point of solemnising. He is, in fact, pondering a minor detail of its observances at this very moment.

As he sits, his eyes fixed on nothingness in crinkled abstraction, we will seize the fearful opportunity to scrutinise him. He is sixty-six years of age, and in suggestion, we think, more like a queen-dowager than a monarch. His minute stature, his old-matronly face, worldly, shrewd, not unkindly; his immense falling wig, resembling a cap with hanging wattles; his feminine particularities and prejudices, all combine to convey that false impression of his sex. He has a woman’s tastes for dainty clothes and china and gossip; I am convinced that, were it possible to conceive him stooping to the condescension, he would play the part of Madame more realistically than the Chevalier d’Eon himself came to play it.

He is attired (for monarchs do not dress) in a full-skirted coat of apricot velvet, with silver frogs. The coat is left unbuttoned from neck to waist, revealing an ample breast of cambric and a rich lace cravat. His white silk stockings are rolled back over their garters, which are fastened above the knee, and embrace breeches of the same velvet material; and stiff diamond-buckled shoes, with square toes, long tongues, and very high silver heels, complete the exquisite picture.

So he poses, and posed, as punctilious in his homage to himself as any courtier. If he did not appear, in bulk, a star of the first magnitude, he was as brilliant a centre as his own dazzled system need desire.

An odd train of thought was in Louis’s mind as he sat thus gazing into vacancy. The nearness of the Feast of St. Bartholomew was its central subject, since it entailed the repetition of a custom long practised by him to significant effect. Or had there been any connection between the custom and the effect? That was just the question in his mind. He was inclining, for some extraordinary reason, to doubt for the first time their relationship. It had come upon him all in an instant at what, adopting the fashion, we must call a psychologic moment in his career.

He was not, according to some people, a really wise man; but there was no denying that he was a supremely self-sufficient. It had never occurred to him, in all his life, that his judgment could possibly be surpassed by another. That was the queer thing. He had tacitly, almost unconsciously, it seemed, permitted, in one curious instance, his mental supremacy to subordinate itself to a superstition. He appeared to recognise the fact all at once, and with an amazement that was like one of those sudden developments of reason which a child will exhibit between a single night’s sleeping and waking. Something had happened to him, and he saw himself in a moment—not a fool; that were impossible—but, in a certain solitary direction, a dupe to his own modesty. Quality, kingship, all his greatness as it stood, he had let be accounted, by default, less to the essence of divinity in himself than to a paltry charm, in the accidental possession of which any quacksalver might boast himself omniscient. He felt strangely small all of a sudden.

Presently he stirred, and threw out his chest. Small! He, Louis? Had he not made France what she was? Had he not in the blood of two great wars, prolonged, triumphant, deadly, cemented the fabric of state of which he stood, golden, sacrosanct, the supreme expression? Was he not at this date the most powerful monarch, the most glorious, the most dreaded that a dazzled world had ever worshipped? And since some there remained who questioned his preeminence, were not his armies at this moment opening a third victorious campaign in order to re-convince the recalcitrants? And to what was all this success to be attributed—to his own mastering genius, inspired, stupendous, or to his possession of a trumpery talisman, whose favour, even, was conditional?

He drew in his breath, with a slight hissing sound, as if he had been stung. Superstition? an aberration, to which the mightiest were subject. He thanked his majestic stars only that the knowledge of it was private to himself.

He half rose, and sank into his chair again, with a frown. It was his custom, he told himself haughtily, to command Destiny, not truckle to it. How had he come to concede even this single exception to his custom? There was a blind spot, it was said, in every eye; perhaps there was some like defect in every kingly constitution. The heel of Achilles! Or, maybe—what else?

Age!

The word seemed to smite him out of the depths. He almost jumped where he sat. This business, so childish in its credulity! Merciful Heaven! was it possible he could be verging on his second childhood—he, Louis, who had almost come to convince himself that he was destined to the fiery chariot? Of late the sun discs, the emblems of the Roi soleil, had increased in number on his walls and ceilings. Perhaps they, too, were a sign of his dotage.

He hesitated no longer, but, rising hastily, sought the secrétaire against the wall, and, feeling in a very remote and secret little recess of it, brought out a tiny packet, somewhat like a Hebrew phylactery in suggestion. It was no more than a couple of inches or so square, of vellum, flattish in form, and closely sealed with an odd, incomprehensible device. A number of pin-pricks perforated it.

As he stood, holding the thing in his hand, the time and occasion on which he had consented to its acceptance rose vividly before him. It had been a black night in a certain October long past, when a dark Italian monk, a famed astrologer, had waited on him by appointment in his Sêvres villa. He recalled how, consequent on his casting of the royal horoscope, this sardonic Genethliac had offered him (for a weighty consideration), as a defence against certain threatened complications in his royal ecliptic, the very talisman he now regarded, and which, saddled with a condition, was to procure him consistent happiness and prosperity throughout his reign. And he recalled how he had accepted the terms, covenanting, on pain of disaster, to preserve the charm intact, and, moreover, to plunge, on the occasion of every notable Church festival, a pin through its sides.

A naïve undertaking, perhaps, yet seeming justified in its results. Half credulous, half contemptuous, and entirely good-humoured, he had been faithful to the conditions, and had certainly prospered. The thing had become a habit with him, and his conscience had never felt a scruple in its performance. Why should it? Was not the bestower of the gift a consecrated priest? He could find a hundred reasons for tolerating his superstition, and not one for condemning it. Probably, if the truth were known, the packet contained what might be called a black, or contrary relic—a lock of Judas’s hair, a shaving of Ananias’s toe-nail, a scale of Saladin’s liver, or one shed by the devil himself when he struggled in St. Dunstan’s tongs. Or more likely it contained nothing at all, and had served for a mere trick to extort money.

He held it out at arm’s length, with a smile on his face. The absurdity of his compliance had struck him all at once acutely. That his destiny, through all these long years, could have hung at the mercy of so ridiculous a trifle! He was great because he was great, a conqueror by force of inherent genius. Away for once and for ever with the imposture!

One moment he held the packet up to the light, and saw a hundred tiny stars shine through the punctures he had made in it on successive feasts; the next he broke the seals, unfolded the vellum, stared, dropped the whole on the floor, and staggered back as if stricken to the heart.

There, at his feet, it lay revealed before him—the thing that he had done; and he knew that he, the most Christian King, he who had revoked the Edict of Nantes, he who had rooted up the tares and made all France one crop of catholicity, he who stood for Heaven’s vicegerent, its high priest, its super-pope, had been for years stabbing the Blessed Host, the consecrated wafer!

As he thus dwelt, motionless, aghast, a knock came at his door. He collected himself by a wrenching effort, and bade the intruder into his presence.

It was a courier from the Maréchal de Villeroy, introduced by a favoured courtier. Both men were agitated and death-pale. They came to inform his Majesty that his entire army, under Marshal Tallard, had been destroyed, or had capitulated to the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim, in Bavaria.

The King at first answered nothing; but his eyes were observed to wander towards a scrap of vellum, apparently insignificant, which lay upon the floor. And then he recovered himself, with a courageous smile.

“But that is very bad news, my friend,” he said.

NAPOLEON

It was the fourth of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor, himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its amour-propre and its hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to Strasburg.

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.

HISTORICALVIGNETTES,1st Series

CONTENTS