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Title: Historical vignettes, 2nd series

Author: Bernard Capes

Release date: May 1, 2023 [eBook #70685]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL VIGNETTES, 2ND SERIES ***





 Historical Vignettes,
 _2nd Series_

 BY
 Bernard Capes




 LONDON
 Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd.
 (_First issued in_ 1912)




 CONTENTS

 “Dead Man’s Plack”
 Fair Rosamond
 Maid Marian
 Raleigh
 Marlowe
 Queen Elizabeth
 Drake’s Chaplain
 George Buchanan
 The Lord Treasurer
 The Princess Elizabeth
 James II
 The King’s Champion
 George I
 George III
 The Hero of Waterloo
 Beau Brummell
 Paganini
 Napoleon
 Leonardo da Vinci
 Wu Taotsz, the Celestial Painter
 Cleopatra and the Decurion
 The Galilean




 NOTE

Ten of the following sketches are reprints from a volume,
_Historical Vignettes_, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin in 1910. The
remaining twelve here appear in book-form for the first time. The
author’s renewed thanks, for permission to reprint this fresh matter,
are due to the Editor of _Truth_.




 “Dead Man’s Plack”

Elfrida, wife of Athelwold, the King’s favourite, and daughter and
heiress to Olgar Earl of Devonshire, was a beauty of the true Helena
complexion. To see her, for most men, was to covet; to possess her,
for the one, was to wear a crown of exquisite thorns. The orchard
needs most watching when the fruit is ripe, and Elfrida hung at
perpetual ripeness, maddening to parched lips without. The keeper of
this garden of sweet things might hardly enjoy it for his fear of
robbers. And the worst of it was that, to maintain so ravishing a
possession in its perfection, no warning as to its own irresistible
witchery must be so much as hinted to it, lest the blue innocence of
two of the most lovely wondering eyes in the world should be impaired
thereby, and self-consciousness usurp in them the place of
_naïveté_. Gazing into those artless depths, if one had the
privilege, one presently recognised in their little floating motes and
shadows the souls of the many who had drowned themselves therein. Was
Elfrida conscious of the tragic secrets hidden away under those azure
waters? Her husband at least thought her the most loving, the most
unsophisticated, the most trustworthy of wives; and if the wish was
very particularly the father to the thought, the thought was none the
less for that sincere.

One noon the young wife sat, yawning and a little _ennuyée_, in her
bower of the Thanage house by Harewood Forest in Hampshire. Athelwold
was with the Court at Winchester, and time hung heavy on her hands.
She leaned back in her seat, listlessly conning the crumpled figure of
Daukin, the Earl’s clerk or bookesman, as he squatted on his stool
monotonously mouthing the Canons of Eusebius from an illuminated
manuscript--the light literature of England when Dunstan was Primate.
Like many ethereal women, Elfrida found a fascination in the deformed
and grotesque. She petted little harsh Daukin; and he, while he took
his full sardonic change of the licence allowed him, for ever in
spirit kissed the beautiful feet that trampled on his soul. So, he
thought, must feel the writhing, adoring, hopeless serpent under
Mary’s feet in the chapel.

She broke in upon his reading, suddenly and irrelevantly.

“Will our lord return this night, think you, Master Bookesman?”

The dwarf, closing the manuscript, accepted grimly the moral of his
own eloquence.

“Will a star shoot out of the east?” he said. “I’ll tell thee when the
night hath come and gone.”

“Nay, say that you think he will--say it, say it!”

“The King loves the Earl, lady, and thou desirest him. Which passion
shall pull the stronger?”

“Do not _I_ love him, thou toad?”

“Well, then, pull, and in double harness; so, belike, the King, that
holds to him, shall be drawn too.”

“I do not desire the King.”

“God give him strength to bear it!”

She laughed musically: “Insolent!” and so fell into thought.

“Thou knowest, Daukin,” she said presently, “I have never been to
Court--nor desired it indeed. Of what complexion is the King?”

“Hot.”

“Is he not very young?”

“He hath learned to lisp and help himself to what he wants. The young
husbands in his suite observe discretion.”

“Poor husbands! O, Daukin, O waly me, how the day loiters! If my love
could draw so strong, I’d e’en take the worser for the better’s sake.”

“Which first?”

“Peace, fool!”

“Well, the comfort is the King’s heard of thee, and heard enough to
satisfy him, it seems. He’ll not trouble thee with a visit.”

“He has not heard.”

“What! Did he not use his influence with the Earl thy father to
promote this match?”

“Aye, on grounds of policy and fortune. Thank Heaven I am not
beautiful!”

“It listens and will record.”

She sighed: “Alack a doleful day! O, I wish my lord would come!”

A bugle sounding without answered on her word. There was a thud of
racing hoofs, a sudden turmoil in the court, a mingling of many
voices, servile or peremptory. Elfrida rose ecstatic, clasping her
hands.

“’Tis he himself!” she cried, and advancing, as the curtain parted,
almost ran into the arms of her husband, Athelwold.

He was tall, sinewy, pale-haired and lashed. His tunic of fine
cramoisy was torn, his gold garters trailed; he looked like a man in
the last extreme of haste and agitation. He took the wondering beauty
in his arms, and gazed into her face, searchingly, passionately.

“Wife,” he said, “I have something of wild urgency for thy ear. I must
speak it ere my blood cools. Tell me that thy heart is mine?”

“Athelwold! What questions!”

“Tell it, tell it!”

“Am I not thy wife?”

“Priests’ business. I speak of love.”

“Why, did I not swear to love thee?”

“Elfrida, thy love’s my heaven; without it--hell. Hear my confession.
There’s no moment to lose.”

“Thou strange husband!”

“When I first saw thee in thy father’s house I saw my destiny. Such
immortal beauty, child--God, I was just man! Forgive the mad cunning
jealousy that would deceive thee even in thyself. ‘I must possess,’ I
thought, ‘this immortal thing or die.’ I bid for thy rank, thy
fortune, in pretence, the King upholding my suit. His interest turned
the scale, and we were wed. Elfrida, wife, dear love--I wronged the
King in all; I was no more at first than his deputy for thy hand.”

A little spot of white had come to her cheek; but she smiled on him,
not stirring.

“How, Athelwold?”

“I must confess it,” he said. “Edgar had heard speak of this lovely
Devon rose; and, toying, only half inclined, with a thought of
matrimony, sent me, on some feigned mission, to discover if the lady’s
beauty really matched her nobility--in which case----”

“Yes, Athelwold?”

He held her convulsively. “O, forgive me, Elfrida, that I made thee
Queen of love, not England! Thy wealth, thy name, I told him, were the
charms that gilded servile eyes--enough, perhaps, for such as I, but
for him, lacking the first and best of recommendations. And he
believed me, and yielded thee to me. And now, and now”--he held her
from him, his chest heaving, his voice breaking--“my sin hath found me
out--some one hath betrayed me--and he is coming in person to put my
report to the proof. Feigning to prepare for his visit, I fled but in
time to forestall him by a few hours. Ah, love! all is lost unless
thou lovest me.”

She answered quite softly: “What am I to do, Athelwold?”

“Do, be anything but Elfrida. Dress slovenly, speak rudely, soil and
discredit thine own perfection.”

“Substitute another for thy lady.”

They both started, and fell apart. The dwarf, forgotten by the one,
unnoticed by the other, had risen from his stool. The Thane’s hand
whipped furiously to his sword-hilt.

“Nay,” said the girl, interposing--“Daukin is my dog; Daukin loves me;
Daukin shall speak.”

“Let the Thane,” said the dwarf, cool and caustic, “seek his couch on
pretence of fever, and let Alse, the cookmaid, receive the King. We be
all devoted servants of our house. A little persuasion, a little
guile, and the thing is carried.”

“I will go instruct the wench,” said Elfrida hurriedly.

She seemed charmed with the idea. She drove her lord to his hiding,
with a peremptory laughing injunction that he was not to issue
therefrom until summoned by herself; she refused to linger a moment by
his side in her excitement. Her eyes had never looked so
heavenly-bright and blue.

At eve came the King, with a little brilliant retinue.

But Alse did not receive him. Instead there advanced and knelt at his
feet one of the most radiant young beauties his eyes had ever
encountered. The violet Saxon hood fell back from her face as she
raised it, revealing a sun of little curls bound by a golden fillet.
The slender lifted hands, the bright parted lips, most of all the
eyes, blue as lazulite and wide with innocence, seemed all as if posed
for a picture of Love’s ecstasy. The King, young, and lustful, and
handsome, with his strong, clean-cut face, stood the speechless one.

“Welcome, lord King,” she said in a half-articulate voice, like a
child murmuring a lesson.

He raised and kissed her. “Welcome, wife of Athelwold!” he said, and
let out a sigh like a man restored from drowning.

But apart stood the dwarf, amazed and sorrowful.

“She hath deceived us,” he thought. “What is to be the end?”

That night was spent in feasting; and in the morning came Elfrida to
her husband’s couch. Worn with fatigue and anxiety--since she had
given orders that none was to approach him--he had fallen asleep at
last.

“Up, up, my Thane!” she cried. “The King is bent on hunting, and
awaits thee in the court. Say nothing. All goes well.”

She would not linger, lest, as she whispered, she should risk
discovery; but, running from him, sought her bower. There listening,
a hand upon her bosom, she heard the chase ride forth; and presently
the dwarf stole in to her.

“Thou hast done it,” he said. “The King will kill him.”

She began, “Dog! Thou darest----” but, checking herself, put her hands
a moment to her face, then went up and down, up and down, like one
distracted.

“Well, he wronged the King,” said Daukin.

She stopped before him, and his soul struggled against the fascination
of the blue waters.

“What was that to his wrong of me?” she said passionately; and, as he
gazed, he saw the waters brim. “O, Daukin!” she wept; “cannot _you_
understand me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And love me still?”

“I can love the truth,” he said, with a heartbroken sigh. “I have
found it at last in the depths I have studied so long.”

When the King returned, the sternness of his white face belied his
uttered commiseration. The Thane, he told his lady, had stumbled on
his own boar-spear, and met with a mortal hurt.

“Long live the Queen!” said Daukin.

Edgar started, and his hand went to his dagger. Elfrida stumbled
forward.

“No,” she said in a weak voice, “it is my dog, lord King. I will not
have him killed because he barks.”




 Fair Rosamond

A lady, accompanied by a small armed retinue, rode out of a forest
glade near Woodstock, and, pausing beside the waters of the Glyme,
which here came sliding in a little weir, smooth as a barrel of glass,
over an artificial dam, reined in her steed, and sat gazing, in the
full glow of noon, upon the scene before her.

It was a scene of perfect pastoral quiet--woodland and meadow as far
as the eye could reach, broken by green hillocks and dominated by a
solitary keep of stone set on a leafy height in the foreground. To the
right a film of floating vapour showed where a hidden hamlet smoked.
There was no other token of human life or habitation anywhere.

The lady, halting a little in advance of her party, made a preoccupied
motion with her hand, whereupon there pushed forward to her a certain
horseman, who dragged with him a churl roped to his saddle-bow. The
knight was in bascinet and chainmail like the others, but his shield
and _pavon_ were emblazoned with arms betokening his higher rank.

“Messer de Polwarth,” said the lady, “is not this in sooth Love’s
paradise?”

“Certes, madam,” he answered grimly; “it is the King’s Manor of
Woodstock.”

She laughed; then, stiffening suddenly in her saddle, pointed upwards.

“Look!” she said.

A poising kite, as she spoke, had dropped to the wood-edge, and thence
rose swiftly with a dove beating in its talons.

“Behold a fruitful omen,” she cried, and turned on the hind: “Dog!
where lies the garden?”

De Polwarth struck the fellow a steely blow across the scruff.

“Answer, beast!”

The man, a sullen, unkempt savage, pointed with an arm like a snag.

“Down yon, a bowshot from the lodge. Boun by the waterside.”

The lady nodded, her eyes fixed in a sort of smiling trance. She was
Eleanor of Aquitaine, no less, the divorced wife of France, the
neglected and embittered Queen of England, and she was at this moment
on the verge of flight to those rebellious sons of hers who conspired
in Guienne against their father.

But, before she fled, she had just one deed of savage vengeance to
perpetrate, and of that she would not be baulked, though to accomplish
it she must ride across half England. Somewhere, she knew, in this
place was situated that “house of wonderful working--wrought like unto
a knot in a garden,” where lived her hated child-rival, that beautiful
frail rose of the Cliffords who had borne the King a son. So much the
worse for her--so much the worse.

The Queen descended to earth, spiritually and literally. She was
dressed like a queen in a belted blue robe latticed with gold, and a
long purple cloak over. A jewelled coronet embraced her headcloth and
the headcloth her face. The rim of hair that showed under was still,
for all her fifty odd years, crow black. Her colour was high, her
frame masculine; the prominence of her lower lip gave her a cruel
expression, and without belying her.

“Nay, de Polwarth,” she said, as the knight made a movement to
dismount. “No hand in this but mine.”

He retorted gruffly: “The place is reputed impenetrable.”

She smiled. “Hate will find out a way. Rest you here till I return.”

Never to be gainsaid, she went off alone by the streamside, and soon
disappeared among the trees beyond.

Her way took her under the slope of the hill which ran up to the
King’s Manor. At first, looking through the branches, she could catch
glimpses of the strong, irregular pile, butting like a mountain crag
from the forehead of the green height; but, in a little, the density
of the trees increasing, the house was hidden from her view, and she
had only the thick, towering woods and the little stream for company.

On and on she went, resolute to her purpose, thrilled with some
presentiment of its near accomplishment--and suddenly a white rabbit
ran out from the green almost under her feet.

She stopped dead on the instant, and, as she stood motionless, the
thicket parted near the bole of a great beech-tree hard by, and a
little boy slipped out into the open. He was pink-cheeked,
Saxon-haired and eyed--a shapely manikin of five or so. Intent on
recapturing his pet, he did not at first notice the stranger; but when
he turned, with the bunny hugged in his arms, he stood rosily
transfixed. In a swift stride or two the Queen was upon him, cutting
off his retreat.

She stooped, with a little exultant laugh.

“What is thy name, sweet imp?” she said.

He pouted, half frightened, but still essaying the man, rubbing one
foot against the opposite calf.

“Willie Clifford, madam,” he said, wondering for a moment at her
crown; but then panic overtook him.

“Nay, Willie,” said the Queen, holding him with a hand that belied its
own softness; “I like thy tunic of white lawn and thy pretty shoon so
latched with gold. Hast a fond mother, Willie--whose name I will guess
of thee for Rosamond? And for thy father, Willie--do you see him
often?”

“He hath a crown like thine, but finer,” said the child; “and when he
comes he puts it on my head.” Something in the staring face above him
awoke his sudden fear. He began to struggle.

“Let me go!” he cried--“I want to go back to my minny.”

“Thy minny?” said the Queen. “One moment, child. Is that thy secret
way behind the tree there?”

“I will not tell thee,” cried the boy. “I want my minny! Let me go!”

With one swift movement she tore the rabbit from his arms, and,
holding it aloft with her left hand, with her right whipped a jewelled
bodkin from its sheath at her waist, and stabbed the little white
body, stabbed it, stabbed it. Then she flung the convulsed encrimsoned
thing to the ground, and, resheathing the weapon, held the child with
a stare of fury.

The swiftness, the savagery, the dreadful novelty of the act had had
their purposed effect on him. His eyes widened, his throat swelled;
but the scream to which he was on the instant impelled never came. His
little soul was paralysed; he was utter slave to horror. If she had
told him at that moment to lie down and go to sleep, he would have
tried to obey her will, though the unuttered sobs were half bursting
his bosom.

“Now,” she said, “now!” panting a little. “Seest, thou harlot’s whelp?
Cross me again, and so shalt thou be served. Wait here--move one step
hence an thou darest--until I come again.”

She cast one final look of menace at him, then, stepping to the
beech-tree, parted the green and disappeared.

It was a cunning blind, as she had expected. The great trunk was so
packed amongst the thickets of the hillside that none would have
guessed its concealment of a scarce-discernible track which threaded
the matted growths above and behind it. Mounting by this, the malign
creature came suddenly upon a broken opening in the rock, so mossy and
so choked with foliage that its presence would have been quite
unsuspected from the glade below. She stopped; she uttered a little
gloating exclamation; for there, looped over a projection of the
stone, was the end of a strong green thread hanging out of the
darkness. The clue, of which she had heard whisper with but small
faith, was actually in her hand. Providence had doomed the foolish
mother to permit her child to sport with the very means designed
against her own destruction.

The cavity led into a ramification of passages, roughly trenched and
hewn out of the calcareous slate of the hill. Occasionally roofed,
mostly open, always tangled in foliage, and so cunningly devised to
mislead that it had been near humanly impossible to resolve its
intricacies without such guide to follow, the labyrinth led the Queen
by a complicated course to a sense of approaching light and release.
And then all in a moment the thread had come to an end against a stake
to which it was fastened; and there was a pleasant garden sunk in a
hollow of the hill, and a fair young woman, with an awaiting, somewhat
troubled expression on her face, standing hard by. She had evidently
spun the clue, and returned the first by it from the glade, to make
sport for her little man.

The intruder took all in at a glance--the expectant figure, the quiet,
inaccessible pleasaunce, the roof of a gilt pavilion rising, a long
stone’s-throw away, above the branches of a flowering orchard;
dominating all, and hiding this lovely secret in its lap, the wooded
hill crowned by its protecting keep.

The young woman, with one startled glance, turned to fly; but in the
very act, staggered by a recollection, turned, and came towards the
Queen, a hand pressed to her bosom. She was a frail thing, in the
ethereal as well as the worldly sense--fragile, it seemed, as china,
and as delicately tinted. All pink and cream, with pale golden hair,
her darker eyebrows were the only definite note of colour in a thin
face. Even her long robe of pale green suggested the anæmia of tulip
leaves forced into premature growth.

“A weak craft to have borne so huge a sin,” said Eleanor, as the girl
approached. She eyed her with malignant scorn, her under lip
projecting. “So, wanton,” she said, “dost know the wife thou hast
wronged?”

The other gave a little mortal start and cry “The Queen!” and could
utter no more.

A small, hateful laugh answered her.

“The wife, fool! the she-wolf against whom you thought to guard your
fold with straws. Why, look at you--I could peel you in my hands--a
bloodless stalk, without heat or beauty!”

“Spare me!”

“Aye, as the wolf spares the lamb, the hawk the wren. Let me look on
you. So this is a King’s fancy. I could have wrought him better from a
kitchen-scrub. Quick! I am in; I have no time to lose, and thine has
come. Poison or steel--make thy choice.”

“O, madam, in pity! My heart--I have been weak and ill--I shall not
vex thee long!”

“God’s blood! And baulk my vengeance? Come--poison----”

“O! What poison?”

“Why, that thou art betrayed--supplanted. Another leman lies in thy
bed--wife to one Blewit, a willing cuckold. Drink it, thy desertion,
to the dregs.”

“Sin must not beshrew sin. It is bitter to the death; but I drink it.”

“O, thou toad! Thou wilt not die, for all thy stricken heart? Will
this kill thee then?”

She whipped out the red stiletto. Rosamond uttered a faint shriek.

“Blood!”

The Queen brandished it before her eyes.

“I met thy whelp in the glade. It was he who betrayed the way to me.”

The girl gasped and tottered forward.

“I let him to his death. Monster, thou hast killed my Willie--my boy,
my one darling!”

She made an effort to leap forward--swayed--and fell her full length
upon the grass.

The Queen, softly replacing her blade, stood staring down. No sound or
movement followed on the fall. Stooping, she gazed long and silently
into the thin face, then, without a word, turned and retreated as she
had come.

The boy was standing, white and tearless, by his dead rabbit as she
parted the leaves and slunk forth.

“Go to thy mother, child,” she whispered, hoarse and small. “She is
ill.”




 Maid Marian

“Master Kay, are you my friend?”

“Hear me vow it, madam.”

“Alas! what vow?”

“That I am your friend.”

“Can you so perjure yourself? Are you not the King’s friend?”

“O yes, indeed!”

“How can you be his friend and mine?”

“Why, as the bee’s the flower’s friend. I carry messages of love.”

“Does he ask mine of me?”

“Just that, madam--only your love, no more.”

“No more? You say well. Why, truly my love were a little thing to be
valued at no more than a man’s base desire.”

“The man is the King, madam. His desire is great like himself.”

“The King is the man, sir, and the man is hateful to me. Will you tell
him so, and be indeed my friend?”

“It would serve you ill, madam.”

“Will he force me? Alack! I will kill myself.”

“Nay, that you shall not, save you hold your breath and die of your
own sweetness like a rose. No other way, be assured. He will wear you
in his bosom first.”

“God! Dear Master Kay, good Master Kay, sweet, gentle friend, let me
kill myself!”

“I must not.”

“But to leap from the wall! It is a little way--but a step, and to
save me hell! You would not have me burn for ever?”

“I would have you reasonable, madam.”

She had fallen on her knees to him, this Maud Fitzwalter, fair
daughter of Robert the Baron, who was to come to head the revolt
against the infamous King. Her long white fingers plucked at his
sleeves; her eyes sought his eyes imploringly. He drank of them,
lusting in their passionate appeal. She was called Madelon la Belle,
and to see her was to think of spring, with its crab-blossoms against
a blue sky, its glow and youth and waywardness. There is a lack of the
sense of symmetry in Love that makes his sweetest faces out of
drawing; and yet one never doubts but that they are Love’s faces, as
endearing as they are faulty and for their very faultiness most
lovable. His drawing, I say, may be defective, but he knows the trick
of lip and eyelash to a curve and how to snare men’s hearts thereby.
And so, while we criticise his work, saying that this or that line
goes astray, we would not have it turned by a hair’s breadth nearer
the truth, lest we should miss love in aiming at perfection.

Such a face was Maud’s, framed in its yellow braids so long that,
parted from her forehead and plaited in with a cord of gold, they
almost touched the ground when she stood up. For the rest her simple
tunic was green, and clasped loosely at the hips by a belt of jewelled
gold, the slack of which hung low. Madelon la Belle she was called, or
Passerose, for the sweetness of her Saxon face and the Saxon blue of
her eyes. But most of all she herself loved her name of Maid Marian,
given her in those green holts and brakes of Sherwood whither she had
followed her own true love, the outlawed Earl, and whence, in a dire
moment, she had been ravished by the cursed King. He had seen her
loveliness and coveted it, and where John coveted was no safety for
wife or virgin. And so it had befallen that once, when abiding in her
father’s castle of Dunmow, the Baron being absent, he had come,
shedding in his hot haste his smooth phrases and courtly wiles, and
had torn her from her shelter and carried her to London to his Tower
on the Thames. And there he kept her fast, not doubting but that she
would yield to him in time, and glooming ever a little and a little
more as her obduracy held him aloof.

This Kay was one of the King’s minions, whom he would send to bribe or
threaten the lovely captive into surrender. The fellow was no better
than a maquereau, who tasted passion by deputy. He was confident, in
the soft persuasiveness of his voice, in the irresistibility of his
figure and finery, of the ultimate success of his mediation. His hair,
rolled about his ears, was scented; his tunic, short beyond custom,
was of gold-embroidered crimson, and his hose were like-hued. A
curt-manteau, of cloth of gold lined with green, hung about his
shoulders, and on his feet were boots of green cloth, the upper part
of lattice-work, embossed at each crossing with a little leopard’s
head in gold. He had no real heart of tenderness or mercy. He was a
mere painted mask, as bowelless as the Elf-maiden herself.

“I would have you reasonable, madam,” he said.

She rose and stood away from him.

“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.

“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the
thief come in well armed and strong of body? It were reason better to
yield it with a good grace.”

She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O hence, thou beast!” And so
she lay writhing--“Only to die--and they will not let me die!”

She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost,
lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so
favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her
hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers
to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a
weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself
down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was
excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover
himself.

On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable.
There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And
it was late spring without--she could see it through her window across
the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its
sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart
came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad
song that she and her Robin had often sung together:

 “_Summer is a comin’ in,_
  _Loud sing cuckoo._
 _Groweth seed and bloweth mead,_
 _And springeth the wood now._
  _Sing cuckoo, cuckoo._”

“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O Robin, my Robin!” She
would never see him again--could never wish to. In a few hours,
perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death,
found too late, could cleanse.

In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim
jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a
bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and
flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen
torches he brought.

“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”

Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.

“Plunge thy knife into my breast, Sir King,” she said, “and with my
last sigh I will praise thee.”

“What!” he snarled--“so much in love with Death? We’ll see to it thy
desire’s whetted in his fondling. He shall prick thee here and there
before ye close. Away with her to the Watch Tower!”

It was at least a respite, and she had dreaded the instant worst. This
Watch, or Round Turret, rose from the north-east angle of the great
Keep. He had her there at his mercy. Her cries might rise to heaven,
but could not penetrate the dense fabric below. In this chill, high
dungeon they imprisoned the girl. Its cold, its dreadful loneliness,
scant food, and the silent guard should break her spirit, the wretch
thought. He would taste her submission to the dregs, then fling her to
his lackeys to teach her what it meant to flout her King. She answered
by starving herself; on which came Kay, the silky-tongued, and warned
her smoothly that such contumacy could only invite its swift reprisal.
She would not be permitted so to slip through her royal lover’s hands.
Whereat she ate all that they would give her, and despaired the more.

There was no escape, none. Locked in as she was, she knew that her
every movement was canvassed by hidden eyes, her every sigh recorded.
And Robin made no sign.

One day it moved her to hear unwonted sounds rising from the outer
ward below, into which the public were admitted on occasion of State
festivities, executions, and so forth. The multitudinous jollity of
voices, soaring above the whine of bugle and tap of drum, proclaimed
it a May-day revel, when the whole place was delivered over to sport
and merriment.

She could not see from her high, narrow window, sunk deep in the wall;
but the babble flowing in on a shaft of sunlight made her heart warm
as it had never felt for days. Some spirit of release seemed to ride
in on the happy music, some emotion that made her bosom heave and her
eyes fill thick with tears.

She was standing, drinking in the merry noise, when her lids blinked
involuntarily, and, with a swish and smack on the ceiling of her cell,
something alighted at her feet. She fancied on the instant that a bird
had flown in and struck against the stone; but, looking down quickly,
she saw that it was a broken arrow--one of a dear, familiar pattern.
With a gasp she stooped, snatched at it, and stood listening. There
was no sign of anyone having observed. With swift trembling fingers
she detached a strand of green worsted which was knotted about the
shaft under the quill, and found beneath a folded scrap of parchment,
which, on being opened, revealed a glutinous smear of brown substance,
and just these four woeful words written above:

“_Poor Robin’s Pledge. Farewell._”

It was her death-warrant.

So sweet and tragic, her heart near stopped from its sorrow as she
read it. She knew at once what it was--a mortal Arab poison, given
long years ago to her woodland lover by a follower of the Lion King.
It might serve him in a sore need, had been the words accompanying the
gift--to taste it was death. And once Robin had shown it to her,
proposing, half playfully, that they should pledge one another in its
Lethe were Fate ever to dispart them.

And so she knew that her last hope was dead before her. Robin could
not come. He was hurt; he was ill; the guards were too many for them,
the Fates too strong, and their only refuge at last was in death. He
had sent some one of his cunning archers, Will Scarlet belike, to take
advantage of this merrymaking to speed the message, and, when she had
realised all that it meant to her, she fell on her knees with a
bursting prayer of gratitude to the Providence, to the dear lover,
between whom her honour was held safe from the despoiler.

She never doubted that her Robin meant to share the pledge. Likely his
dear spirit was waiting for her now, eager to link with hers in the
green woods where first their loves were spoken. Fearful of
interruption, she put her lips to the poison, and died with his name
on them.

That evening came Master Kay to the cell, with a sick smile on his
mouth, and in his hands a tray of comfortable things, including a
flask of drugged wine. The King’s patience was exhausted.

But when he saw what had happened he stole out, and fled to join the
refractory Barons, of whom was Fitzwalter, father of Madelon la Belle.

And in the meantime Robin did not die. The poison that was to kill him
came years later from the hand of his kinswoman, the Prioress of
Kirklees. Women will take things so literally.




 Raleigh

“Admit, Captain,” said the scholar, “that Opportunity signifieth by
the lexicon a meet or convenient time; and what is time but an
abstraction? Wherefore whoso seizeth opportunity seizeth an
abstraction, the which has never been held, nor ever will or can be
held, to constitute a violation of that social contract which is
called the law.”

Two men were seated in a bower of the “Ship Aground” at Greenwich. The
bright little garden at their feet ran down to a low parapet
overlooking the river, whose waters, gay with shipping, sparkled
merrily in the June sunshine. Behind them the tinkle and gossip of the
inn sounded pleasantly; to their left a small plantation of trees led
direct to the boundaries of the royal palace--“Placentia,” or the
“Manor of Pleazaunce,” it was called--whose red roofs and bowed
Italian windows were plainly visible through the green. A flight of
wooden steps in the embankment to their right constituted the public
landing-place; and for the rest and everywhere were climbing wood and
lawn, tumbled with houses like warm red boulders, and gathered at
their summit into that Lancastrian tower which was destined in future
ages to blossom into the universal meridian.

The men sat on either side a rustic table, a stoup of warm ale with a
toast in it between them. The soldier, strong and thickset, was
Captain Nicholas Blount, of the Earl of Sussex’s guard. The other, a
dissipated, whimsical-looking young man, dressed in black, with a
plain falling band, and on his head the scholar’s biretta with
embracing flaps, was Master John Sparrow, ex-graduate of Trinity and
clerk to the same nobleman. The former sprawled with his doublet
unbuttoned, and his rapier and bonnet laid aside. He was an honest,
downright soul, more of a Davus than an Œdipus, and yet with a naïve
humorous side to him that ingratiated. In common with some soldiers of
his rare time he had a tremendous respect for learning.

“Jack Sparrow,” quoth he, “thou hast a damnable overplus of
sophistication to answer a plain man withal. But I’ll have thee there.
Is not theft an abstraction, and yet punishable by the law?”

“Well countered, Captain,” said the clerk; “but I will prove it
otherwise.”

“How, sharp wit?”

“Why, look you; by the token that a theft is an abstraction, an
abstraction is a theft. But I say an abstraction is no theft, sith it
steals nothing but time, which is itself an abstraction. Is a thief a
thief, therefore, who steals from himself?”

“Thou playest on the word, that hath another meaning.”

“God save your neck if you’ll insist on ’t. One day you’ll be caught
in a reverie and hanged for an abstraction. For me, one word one
meaning is enough.”

“What hanged--Nick hanged!” cried a voice, that of one of two
gentlemen who at the moment came round the leafy angle of the bower.
“What is his offence?”

Blount and the young man rose to their feet, the one with a jocund,
the second with a respectful manner of salutation.

“Fair welcome, masters,” said the soldier. “Your wit shall save me a
halter, or I’ll be hanged for it.”

The two new-comers were Mr. Greville and his _alter ego_ Mr. Philip
Sidney, the latter already the _preux chevalier_ of his age. Though
now in no more than his twenty-seventh year, his world-knowledge and
accomplishments exceeded those of most contemporary gallants. Tall,
spare, with a rather long melancholy face full of sweetness and
intelligence, his whole aspect conveyed an assurance of reasonableness
and liberality. His hair, warm yellow and somewhat sleek, was parted
at one side into the long love-lock in vogue; his doublet and
trunk-hose were of a sober grey but laced with a rich frilling of
gold. So was his own quiet nature veined with light. A poet and
scholar, a traveller and man of action, a courtier in the worthiest
sense, some paltry squabble thrust upon him had banished him latterly
from the side of the sovereign to whom his qualities were most
endeared, and he was only present in Greenwich on a private affair
during the absence of the Court. His friend and coetanian, the Lord
Brooke to be--he who came to desire of posterity no greater
recognition than that he had been Shakespeare’s friend--was a young
man of like learning, sincerity, and skill in arms.

“Why, Nick,” quoth Sidney, “the alternative is certain. But whereby
hangs the halter?”

“Round my neck,” answered Blount. “He seeks to throttle me, this
learned clerk here, with his sophistications.”

The three gentlemen sat down, the student remaining standing.

“How throttle?” said Sidney.

Jack Sparrow took the answer out of the soldier’s mouth:

“We were discussing your friend, Master Raleigh, sirs, whom the
Captain here will dub the very thief of opportunity.”

“And hold to it,” said Blount.

“Nay,” said the ex-graduate, “when, as I maintain and repeat,
Opportunity is the common property, whereby to take it is no more
offence in a man than the picking of blackberries on the highway.”

“Or the picking of pockets,” said Mr. Greville.

“Hold, Fulke,” said Sidney: “I do perceive a flaw there, in that the
seizure or prehension is by its very terms held personal to the
appropriator. Thus I may take _my_ opportunity, but not another
man’s.”

“Well decreed, Phil,” cried the soldier, with a shout of triumph, and
smacked a hand to his knee. “How now, Master Quiddity? Wilt answer to
that?”

“With submission, Mr. Sidney,” replied the student, “is not all
opportunity yours when you see it? _Oblatam occasionem tene_: the
warrant of Cicero is in the phrase.”

“The very offering, my friend, implies a priority of ownership by
another; wherefore, if I seize another man’s opportunity uninvited, I
am guilty of a moral felony.”

“But supposing he, that other, omits or refuses to make use of his
own?” persisted the student, with his tongue in his cheek.

Nicholas Blount roared: “Omits, quotha! But what is mine is mine,
rogue, though there be a thousand popinjays could convert the thing to
their own more profitable usage. Wherefore I say, who takes my
opportunity steals; wherefore I say, this Raleigh is a thief of
opportunity.”

“Instance, instance!” cried the two young gentlemen, crowing; and
Greville bawled for the drawer to bring wine.

The soldier grunted: “I’m no man for equivoque; I hold by what I say.
You shall hear and judge between us. This Walter, sirs----”

“A very proper courtier of his inches,” said Greville.

“Your friend, sir,” answered Blount sarcastically; “and mine--God quit
us of all such allies. He was my friend once, and took the privileges.
There was little he would not take, including the wall, of any man. To
do him justice, a sweet fighting Hector, full of courage as of grace.
He was just home from Ireland when we met last year--fresh from
carving of the Kerns. Yet a hand like milk. Nothing would ever stick
to it but gold. I cry you mercy, gentles. He was my friend, I say.”

Greville broke into laughter, and Sidney smiled, his lips twitching.

“_Castigo te non quod_--eh, master clerk?” said the latter. “Perchance
he chastised the Captain for very love.”

“You shall hear,” said Blount grimly. “A proper courtier, quoth Master
Greville--a very proper courtier. I doubt it not. How looked he when
you saw him last?”

“It was at Whitehall,” said Greville. “You know the man--the mirror of
fashion, the prince of wit, the pink of assurance. One noon he met the
Queen just stepping from her closet. ‘What time is it, good sir?’
quoth she. ‘What time your Highness pleases,’ he answered. ‘Then,’
says her Majesty, ‘I will have it the hour when men speak truth.’
‘Alas, madam!’ says Raleigh, ‘do you seek a pretext for destroying
me?’ ‘What pretext, sir?’ she asks. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘the enforced
confession of my hopeless passion for a Queen.’”

The soldier snorted alarmingly. “I warrant he’d rehearsed it, preening
and curling before his glass,” he said.

“Alack!” said Sidney; “his hair curls naturally--the worse for sleeker
heads.”

“How went he?” said Blount--“a painted popinjay?”

“Always in silk and velvet,” answered Greville demurely--“white for
choice, and his doublet jewelled in the seams. He becomes his dress,
in sooth; knows how to shadow with ambrosial fleece the high pale
culture of his forehead; wears his sword as if he used it; hangs his
cloak----”

The soldier roared out:

“Hold! His cloak? God’s grace! It hangs--hang him, I say! So I picture
him--all but the cloak. It was here we sat together, in this green
arbour, but a year ago. Just home from bloody Ireland was he, yet as
white and cool as swan’s-down. We were here, I say, we two, in this
very spot, and the Court at Pleazaunce. The Queen was in her barge on
the river. We saw her pass, and the rogue’s eyes dreamed. Some
caprice--some premonition belike--engaged her Majesty to land at the
common steps yonder. They were wet and foul, the morning having
rained, and, perceiving his chance, my comrade snatched up cloak, and
leaped and joined the throng that hovered on the royal advent. I came
more leisurely behind, and saw the pretty Queen mount up and hesitate,
pursing her lips in comical dismay before a pool of mud. And then, all
in a moment--but you’ve heard the story?”

“He spread his cloak for her to step on?”

“Damn him!”

“Why so?”

“It was _my_ cloak, that was all--new green velvet, and home that
morning from the cutter’s. Own him now a thief of opportunity.”

Mr. Sidney and Mr. Greville looked at one another gravely a moment,
then burst into a shout of laughter.




 Marlowe

“Prithee, Kit, pay me the pound you owe me.”

Mr. Christopher Marlowe, Master of Arts, playwright and rakehell,
sprawled his arms upon the tavern table, and leered inebriously across
it at the speaker. Behind him an open red lattice gave upon a sunny
street alive with swarthy gold-ear-ringed mariners; before his sleepy
eyes glowed, framed in the end of a black passage, like a picture in a
diorama, a square of green banks and flashing waters webbed with
rigging. The waters were the waters of Deptford Creek, and the tackle,
or at least part of it, belonged to Drake’s ship, the _Golden Hind_,
already, in this June of the year 1593, laid by for perpetuity at her
Majesty’s command, as a memorial of her nation’s characteristic
prowess.

Marlowe tinkled with his fingers an empty flagon on the table.

“A pound, Frank Archer?” quoth he in a slurred derisive voice. “Listen
here--as empty as my pocket or your head. An I had a pound, I should
know better what to do with it.”

The man he addressed, a fellow-actor in Lord Strange’s company, stood
up sulkily before him. He was a neurotic player of women’s parts, and
somehow uncleanly attractive to the sex he paraphrased. Perhaps he
understood it enough to be feared by it--a lithe vicious creature, as
white-faced as a girl, and subject to feminine spites and hysterics.
He hated the playwright just now, not only because the latter owed him
money, but because the two were rival suitors for the favour of some
riverside Thaïs. It was a pitiful association, as who, regarding that
other figure of bright genius, could not but feel. Not yet thirty,
with blue eyes and honey hair, the face of an angel, the forehead of a
sage, the indulgence of insatiable appetites had already marked down
this Christopher Marlowe for death or insanity. He seemed to find no
adequate satisfaction for his passions’ hunger short of feeding their
ravenous fires, as Cellini fed the molten arteries of his Perseus,
with dishes and quart measures.

“An you had one?” protested the player. “What! with your _Edward_
still mouthing it at the ‘Rose’?--a damned play.”

“A damned play lines no purses,” said Marlowe.

“Pay me my pound, I say.”

“For what? To frank you to the stews? A man were a fool so to
accommodate his rival.”

“Ah! You fear my rivalry.”

“I fear the woman’s cupidity, sir. If Kit with gold, the better; but
gold at any price, says she. So they compound. Will you take a
post-obit?”

“I want my money, Kit Marlowe.”

“How the parrot repeats! No, on my honour, Frank, on my honour. I am
drunk out. Should I not otherwise have been before you with the girl?
I cannot pay.”

A shadow darkened the lattice, and Archer, on the point of retorting,
paused with his mouth open. Some stranger, attracted by the colloquy,
had stopped to listen. He came round now by the open porch and entered
the room.

“By your favour, sirs,” he said, “I overheard a name to whose
possessor methought I owed a duty. Was not it Master Marlowe’s, the
playwright’s.”

Christopher nodded, without rising.

“Duty’s a dry debt,” said he. “I would you had ought the name that cup
of burnt sack which my present poverty denies me.”

The new-comer was a young man--little more than his own age--of a very
fine and distinguished appearance. His face was delicate and handsome,
but a little irregular in its contour, as if its commanding
intelligence were easily at the mercy of its humour. A chestnut
moustache and beard, small but already strong, clothed a jaw a thought
underhung. The eyes above were wonderful--brown vivacious lights of
sagacity that seemed to take all observation for their province. A
comely compact figure, of the average height, clothed sombrely but
richly in purple velvet, a snowy ruff, a flexible black hat with a
rolled band of silk above its brim--such completed a personality which
was as attractive as it was compelling.

“Is that so?” said the stranger. “Genius insolvent? ‘_Ingenium res
adversæ nudare solent, celare secundæ._’ Your poverty should be your
gain, sir.”

“As with the Horace you quote?” answered the playwright. “I ask for
nothing better, sir, nor for a more enlightened Mæcenas than her
Majesty’s Counsel-Extraordinary.”

Mr. Francis Bacon--for it was he, indeed--laughed, knowing himself
detected, as if pleased.

“I am well answered,” he said. He was already, young as he was, in
advance of his amazing promise--a Bencher and Reader of his Inn, a
Member of Parliament, my Lord of Essex’s loved client. And his vast
imagination had been the first to grasp the full significance of the
dramatic revolution inaugurated by this scapegrace genius who sat
revealed before him. “And by a scholar,” he added.

“An exhibitioner, an it please your worship,” cried the other.
“Bachelor and Master of Arts of Benet’s College of your own
University; translator of Helen’s Rape from Coluthus, and, since, a
humble reformer of the Miracles, and, as some aver, even a worker of
new ones.”

“I have been eye and ear-witness of your _Tambourlaine_,” said the
stranger; “of your _Faustus_, of your _Jew_; lastly of your _Edward
the King_; and I have no desire to traverse the statement. You have
done things; you have revealed; you have opened out worlds which
others, perchance, shall colonise. I doff my hat to that fine madness
of your Muse--the hot passion that tears the ‘unities’ to rags and
leaves her clothed in Nature. Withal, Master Marlowe, I have a bone or
two to pick with you.”

“Alack!” cried the playwright: “this arid mirthless feast!”

“Anon, anon, my gentleman! Grace before meat.”

“But sack before all. Have you never mastered, learned sir, the five
most excellent reasons for drinking?”

“I know them not.”

“Why, a friend’s visit, the thirst that is, the thirst that will be,
the flavour of the wine, and any other reason.”

“They are reasons for. There is one more potent against.”

“What’s that?”

“Why reason itself, which, being robbed by wine, hath no reason to
applaud it.”

He saw, indeed, that the man was irretrievably drunk, and that he was
wasting time on him. He prepared to go on his way--which was to
Greenwich, where the Court was being held.

“Not robbed, but transmuted,” cried Marlowe. “O liquid alchemy! So to
be traduced! Have I not ought to thee all the golden treasures of my
brain? And he prefers a bone! Well, sir, pick it, pick it.”

“It is german to the matter, I think. Thy golden treasures sink thee
even like the shipwrecked miser’s laden belt. Not reason exalted is
wine’s, but reason debased--so lowered in the mind’s balance that it
sees all the world lopsided, deformed. Such is my quarrel, sir, with
the author of the _Jew of Malta_. A man cannot lust with him but he
can do naught else; a Jew cannot be a Jew but he is an unredeemed
monster. It is not so in fact; we derive from the multitudinous
past--are compact of a thousand inconsistencies. There is more good
than ill in all men. The purpose of the drama should be to hold a
mirror up to Nature--to give us truth, not anamorphosis. There is no
truth in wine, despite the proverb.”

He moved to go, and the playwright sprang to his feet.

“No truth?” he cried. “Then let me swallow lies faster than Churchmen
can promulgate them. The world’s redeemed, they say--I see it not; we
are the children of a beneficent Providence, they say--It will not
even feed us, but sends the worm and storm to kill the grain It’s
given. My figments are the types of what I see--passion, black malice,
usury--selfishness unredeemed by God’s love, but tempered, brute-like,
by His terror. An arrant orb of reptiles, worshipping through fear.
And so I paint it--sober. Then--drink! Ah, it is my good angel, my
better half, my sweet gentle mate that woos me to the larger
temperance. I could show you things--but there! Not truth?--not sordid
truth? Give me the noble lie, then, that transports me to Elysium,
that lends me the wider vision, and I will rain benevolence on this
crawling sphere. I am no pessimist in wine.”

His eyes were flaming, his breast heaved, some real emotion strung
him.

The great lawyer smiled. “God forbid I should debar you Elysium,” he
said, and throwing a gold angel on the table, he left the room.

For some moments after he was gone Marlowe, his passion slowly
subsiding, stood eyeing the bright coin.

“A lackey’s vail,” he said at length, “yet the obolus to pay my
passage to Elysium. And did I not earn it? Answer, old sack; answer,
my rosy Thaïs of the leaping-house. Elysium, Elysium! O, it opens to
me!”

A hand came past him like a snake and nipped the coin.

“The debt you ought me,” gulped Archer, with a pallid snigger. “We are
quits at last, Christopher.”

With a snarl the playwright turned on the thief.

“Give me back mine own.”

“It is mine.” He hugged and cherished the piece convulsively. “You
ought it me. I have the first claim--to Doll and your Elysium.”

“To hell rather--I’ll send you there--be warned.”

“I’ll not yield it.”

He slithered aside, preparing to bolt. With a scream of rage Marlowe
drew a knife from his belt and sprang upon him. The actor, warding off
the assault, struck out blindly. His arm caught the vicious wrist with
a force that made it twist and recoil, driving back the blade full
into the eye of the assailant. There followed a gasp, a stagger, a
tearing fall--and then silence.

It was the prelude to that immortal music whose symphony had already
closed in Elysium.

And the lawyer, profoundly thoughtful, went unconscious on his way.




 Queen Elizabeth

“What was that?”

“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”

“Methought it was a footstep.”

“No, madam.”

“There, heard you it not--the sound of someone running?”

“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”

“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”

“Your Highness is overwrought.”

“Will someone speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones
ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”

The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped
lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her
young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.

“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”

The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring
from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet
of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end
like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees
and over the Palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed
no sign of life anywhere.

Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed
the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the
figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of
the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood.
The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with
the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As
to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this
gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.

Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by
the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the
child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the
moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her
own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an
officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human
neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn
soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her.
She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if
they were no more than inarticulate animals--wistful dumb affections
on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their
unconscious understanding.

Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awestruck a
moment, then bent and whispered to her mother, “O, madam, the Tower
gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”

The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with
a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her
mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions,
self-communings.

“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their
relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the
mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh--he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind
blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no
courtier--the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”

The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging
to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed
her.

“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.

“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too
honest--the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”

“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day
of February.”

She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the
horror of this coming day had brooded--this ghastly morning when on
Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex--he was but thirty-four--was to pay
the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one
tranced.

“Never flattered,” she repeated--“a bad policy where a woman reigns.
The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or
writes.”

“Yes, madam--O yes, indeed!”

The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.

“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”

“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”

“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the
axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead--no longer dub my
mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with
the years, striving to slough its vesture like a snake. A fool, that
cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how
Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper.
Shall I not be Dian still to him?”

She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge--an
old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white
face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and
pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened
teeth--little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories.
Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her
poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven
dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.

“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His
eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown.
When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless
woman--barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It
turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly
alone--no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois
wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince
and curst to flattery?”

She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.

“Truth!” she cried--“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned
and struck it down.”

“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.

“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the
speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think
you?”

“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare,
that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds
the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn
the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy
with him because he saw your Highness so distorted--not to extenuate
the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon
me, madam!”

The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was
evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears
regarded the import of her speech.

“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean
I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the
well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who
could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on
his forehead, child?”

“O, madam! Your Grace!”

“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash
and head-strong fool! To think to overbear us!--teach our displeasure
a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain
of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp,
and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or
thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord--his
lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy--a man of men, brave, honest,
generous, and a fool.”

“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”

“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love
that made him but to ruin?”

“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”

“What for?”

“The ruin followed on the treachery.”

“Was he a traitor?”

“O, madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot
and league to win him the succession?”

“Yes, he’s a traitor.”

“Your Grace forgive me.”

“And I’m a woman.”

“Madam!”

“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much
of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”

“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, madam.”

“I swear I heard him.”

“No, madam.”

“Pride! Will he not meet us so far--but to crave our clemency? He
knows the way, and, not taking it, must die! What o’clock is it? O
God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready.
Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”

She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek;
she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two
terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw
her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition
beyond their ken:

“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to
come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to
us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you
not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long?
A viper in our bosom--O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can
we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So
pale?--the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I
would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you
not send it--prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O,
I have waited, dear my love--have waited dying for this token.
Speak--utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel
so and bow thy comely head----”

A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a
shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her
hands before her eyes:

“O God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”

Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that
instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of
the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.

“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.

“Your Majesty!”

“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is
he?”

“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”

The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.




 Drake’s Chaplain

Looking like a man who had fallen from a roof, a pulp of red and
grey, with joints heaved out of all relation to anatomy, the prisoner
of the Inquisition was haled before his most Catholic Majesty, who sat
in a closet of the Escurial eating rich pastry from a salver, and
licking his fingers between. A swarthy guard on either side held up
the poor wretch, else he would have weltered to the stones, for he had
no limbs capable of supporting him. Yet he swaggered in grotesque
suggestion, and gave a twisted parody of a laugh. The pitiful, it
seemed, where such existed, could endure the sight of his mutilation
less than he himself the fact. He was one of those endowed with a
constitutional insensibility to pain. That such human anomalies occur,
witness the contemporary examples of Gérard, who murdered William the
Silent, and Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry of Navarre. Each endured,
jesting and unflinching, the most exquisite tortures, the least of
which, one cannot but think, would have killed any man of normal
nerves.

Like Gérard, like Ravaillac, was William Donne--Drake’s Chaplain, as
he was called, being trebly damned in the title. He had been captured
in that final descent of his master on Cadiz, and had thereafter, of
course, nothing but the worst to expect. Not short shrift, but
particular torments was the ruling for the “sea-dogs,” whom Philip had
especial cause to hate. The appeal of their odd buccaneering divinity
was largely to humour, of which he was utterly devoid. He had been
offended by nothing so much as Drake’s boast of singeing his Spanish
Majesty’s beard, and he retorted, wherever he got the chance, with
flame and molten lead.

But now he was, for him, in a rare good temper--which might continue
until the pastry, to which he was gluttonously addicted, began to
assert its effects on an enfeebled digestion. Gleeful in the
triumphant maturation of his long-elaborated schemes, he played in
fancy at baiting and pricking the English bull, to which he was about
to deliver the Spanish quietus, and William Donne offered himself as
well as any to symbolise the fated victim.

It was the 1st of August, 1588; the invincible Armada, after a mishap
or two, had sailed for Flanders, where the Prince of Parma awaited it
with a force of seventeen thousand veterans and a fleet of
flat-bottomed transports; Portugal was annexed, William of Orange
dead, and, to crown all, the Leaguers, under Henry of Guise, held
France and Paris. The Catholic nobility in England only awaited,
according to the King’s Jesuit advisers, the landing of the Spanish
troops to join forces with the invaders; there was nothing to fear at
last and everything to gain. No wonder his Majesty, for ever cold,
calculating, patient, had relaxed a little in the near prospect of
this unprecedented harvest of his sowing.

He swallowed a last scrap of pastry, and dusted his fingers
delicately. An emaciated little man of sixty, with over-blown
forehead, small-pupilled ice-blue eyes, and pinched aquiline nose, not
all his power nor all his dominions could redeem him from the charge
of personal insignificance. His mouth was repulsively wide; his lower
jaw, from which bristled a point of grizzled beard, once dusty yellow,
was so protruded as to thrust into prominence a disorder of broken
teeth like an old bulldog’s. He was dressed unostentatiously in velvet
doublet, trunk-hose and curt-manteau, all black, and the collar of the
Golden Fleece hung round his neck under a small ruff. Such was Philip,
as he sat regarding, without one spasm of emotion, the human wreck
before him. Illiterate, infinitesimal-minded, pusillanimous, a
disgusting debauchee, he had no one virtue in all the world but
sincerity, and with that he endowed a thousand crimes. The monstrous
idolatry, through him, of the hereditary principle he embodied, had
long supplied its own moral in the torture and immolation of countless
hosts of guiltless, happy human beings, in scores of midnight
assassinations, in the poisoning of the very springs of nature. Let it
be said of him that the murder of his own son was his greatest act of
grace, and there is the man summarised.

An English Jesuit, Father Allen, the King’s principal authority for
the statement about the Catholic nobility, hung confidentially over
his Majesty’s chair, his chill grey eyes scanning the figure of that
mutilated fellow-countryman. A second, a Spaniard, but of the like
black cloth and inhuman aspect, stood motionless near the prisoner.
The King, having cleansed his fingers, glanced up covertly (to the day
of his own agonised death he could never look any man, not even the
meanest, in the face) and spoke suddenly, in the rapid voice that
always seemed to grudge its own utterance:

“The gnat will kill the King! Were those the man’s words?”

Allen looked towards his colleague, who answered in a passionless
voice:

“Those and little else--the constant burden of his blasphemy. On the
pulley, on the rack, wrenched in the ‘Escalero,’ or with the greased
soles of his feet frying at the brazier, always that cry or song. He
utters it as it were a charm against pain, jubilant, triumphant.”

His Majesty’s eyes frowned.

“Methinks the Holy Office lacks a counter-charm. Has it no hooks to
root up speech, no blistering gags to choke it? Bid him construe his
words, or suffer worse.”

“It seems that feeling is dead in him,” said the Father adviser,
“killed like a bird in the hand. He is own brother to Balthazar
Gérard, who, after all, was a martyr. But it is just a trick of the
spirit, detaching itself from the matter it makes sensitive. Shall I
question the man?”

Philip waved his hand, and Allen crossed the closet and stood before
William Donne, an ingratiatory smile on his lips.

“Good seaman,” he said, “what is this same regicidal gnat you chaunt
of?”

The prisoner jerked up his battered face, hearing a question in his
own tongue.

“The gnat,” he said in a thick voice, faintly rollicking, “that killed
the King.”

“Why and how did he kill him?”

An expression of slyness evolved itself from the wrecked features. A
parable was quite in keeping with the regenerate privateering of the
time.

“The King,” said William Donne, “had conquered all the blessed world,
from the Orcades to Cape Horn, and then, being puffed-up like, he
thought he’d sail for the land of God and conquer that. So he fitted
up a fleet of winged carracks and steered for heaven. But was the
Almighty disturbed to see the countless host approaching? Not He. He
just sent out a single gnat, that flew and crept into the King’s ear
and stung his brain, burning it to madness, so that there was an end
of the expedition; and the fleet went about, crashing together in its
confusion, and returned, what was left of it, to the Spanish Main.”

A short pause succeeded, and then Allen smiled and nodded.

“To the Spanish Main,” he said, “exactly. And the land of God, my
friend?”

“What but little England,” cried William Donne, “and Drake the jolly
gnat?”

The Jesuit turned and interpreted to the King, who, for all his
world-dominion, spoke no tongue but his own. His Majesty, caressing
his thin beard, answered without emotion: “Well, he hath betrayed his
charm. Let the Holy Office get at him at last.”

He dismissed the man and the subject with a gesture, and, rising, put
a hand upon the priest’s shoulder. His eyes glistened with a cold,
remote look, as if their pupils contracted to a distant vision.

“It comes, Allen,” he said, “it comes--the fruition of our long
desire. These news--how spiteful Fate delays them; and yet it can be
but a day or so. To grasp that little stronghold of heresy in our hand
at last, and dust the tares into the fire. Woe on them that have
baulked us in the hour of their triumph! They shall burn, Allen, they
shall burn. We will sweep the land with flame, that the after-crop may
be rich and virgin. The world surrenders piecemeal to our Christ, the
Prince of love and justice. A land of God we’ll make it----”

He paused abruptly on the word, and stood staring, his jaw loose. Then
rallied, and, breathing out a deep sigh, whispered: “That dog! A
blasphemous appropriation! We’ll show his God of gnats the warrant of
the Cross; we’ll dispute his claim, I think. His God!--a Jezebel, a
false idol, who sends her ships to poison my new world--mine, decreed
of Rome! A curse upon the gnat!”

He appeared of a sudden strangely moved. The gnat’s particular humour,
indeed, was the sting he most abhorred; the virus of its memory for
ever rankled in his veins. Not eight years was it since this gnat,
this Drake, this bold heretic fanatic, had, daring his edict, swept
the Spanish Indies and plundered a Spanish galleon of their treasures,
loaded with which he had returned to England, to be applauded and
knighted by its Queen. Not one year was it since, descending upon
Cadiz and the ports of the Faro, this same freebooter had inflicted an
almost irreparable blow upon the preparations ripening for the great
attack.

The land of God! The land of the foul fiend rather. But it was all
decided at last; the hour of reckoning was come, and he, Philip, only
awaited the news confirmatory to exact his bitter toll for every
abuse, for every humiliation, for every insult so long heaped upon
him.

Standing there, he recalled a certain letter, in which this Jezebel,
this Queen of heretics, had finally, soon after her accession,
rejected the offer of his hand. That had been thirty years ago, but
the memory remained, an open wound. She was to answer for it in her
“land of God.” And Drake! With the venom of a mean nature he lusted to
wreak the first of his triumphant hate on the body of the “sea-dog’s”
chaplain. The wretch’s nerves of feeling must be got at somehow; he,
Philip, must think of some harrowing method; and in the meantime it
would be richly gratifying to disinter that old letter of rejection,
and gloat over the reprisals to be exacted for it.

His face transfigured, he released his hold of the priest, and was on
the point of moving from the room, when a sudden soft hubbub arising
outside arrested him. Always fearful of violence, he hesitated an
instant, then, in a spasm of panic, tore aside the hangings. A throng
of ashy faces greeted him. Instinctively he read the truth.

“My fleet!” he gasped.

A cowering courtier fell upon his knees before him.

“Destroyed, dispersed, great lord.”

“By what--by whom?”

“By shot, by fire, by tempest. The English captains in their
privateers swarmed like gnats about the rolling hulks.”

“Like gnats? Was Drake among them?”

“The first and worst.”

The King staggered, recovered himself, stiffened, and turned towards
his oratory.

“No more,” he said. “I take it kneeling.”

He moved away stupidly, stopped, turned again, and addressed himself,
as if groping, towards the Jesuit:

“I take it kneeling, I say. The land of God--England--can it be--and
I----?”

Some insect droned in the dead silence; the King was seen to start, to
stoop, to block his ears with his hands.

“Tell them,” he said thickly, “to let the seaman go, in God’s name and
the King’s. It is our will.”




 George Buchanan

Two boys were quarrelling in the privy garden of Stirling Castle on
the Forth. Their shrill little passions rose ludicrously inconsonant
with the majestic gravity of the old historic pile. That had its roots
deep-striking into the mighty rock from which it had sprung; and,
above, every lusty tower, every folded roof, every soaring pinnacle of
the massed congeries of hall and chapel and battlement which comprised
the royal rookery was a living testimony to the fecundity of the
source from which those roots had drunk. Stirling Castle, in common
with other impregnable fortresses of its kind, had grown fat and
strong, like a strapping vine, on the blood which soaked its bases--so
strong that, in this year of stormy grace 1576, it was still the
residence confidently appropriated to a regal minor.

The Castle, massive and somnolent, commanded imperturbably from its
height the beautiful open champaign--with its meandering river like a
silver uncoiled spring--in the midst of which it was set; the angry
small voices vexed its serenity about as much as a buzzing fly might
vex a mammoth. Yet they had this right in common with the great voices
of the past; one of them came from the lungs of a nestling of the
right eagle breed.

He, this nestling--the one destined to be our first Stuart
monarch--was a stubby, commonplace boy of ten. His face was pale and
somewhat meaty, his features were undistinguished in a pawky
good-humoured way, his hair was longish and of a bright auburn, which
was to deepen later on. Now, under the influence of anger, its roots
were flushed red, which gave it an inflamed look, and the young
gentleman’s close-buttoned doublet was sadly disordered, and its lace
torn at the wrists.

And what _was_ the subject of dispute, meet to environments so stern
and so imposing? Why just a tame sparrow, which King Jamie was bent on
appropriating from his young playmate, the Master of Mar, to whom it
had been presented by a diplomatic gardener.

“Gie it me, Geordie,” cried his Majesty, snatching and struggling. “I
wull hae it. Saul of my body, man, dinna ye ken the voice of royalty?”

The other, a ferrety, pink-lidded and ginger-headed boy, lithe but no
match in avoirdupois for his thicker-set antagonist, answered only by
cries and contortions. In the result, the sparrow changed hands, a
crushed and lifeless little body. Geordie broke away, and made,
howling, for a certain room in the Castle.

It was a room well known to him, sombre, rude in its scholastic
appointments, but with the stony acerbities of its walls somewhat
softened by a good lining of books. An old man of seventy, sitting
reading by the bare strong table, raised his head as the intruder
entered.

“Ye’ll be comin’ to tell me of some new act of tyranny, Geordie man?”
he said.

He looked a very shrewd, observant old fellow, in the falling collar
and long black tunic and gown of a grammarian. He had a high, bald
forehead backing into a sparse crop of hair, like a track losing
itself on a hill; a rough, bulbous nose, and rugged cheeks shaven down
to where a thick moustache lost itself in a thicker chin-beard. There
were plentiful bags and crow’s-feet about his eyes, which were like
bright buttons in soft wrinkled leather.

The boy, thus encouraged, made the utmost of his wrong. In the midst
his Majesty entered, a little shamefaced, but defiant. He condescended
to avow his act and to justify it, and he exclaimed on his playfellow
for a “snoovin’ taed,” which was the Scots for sneaking toad.

Papa Buchanan--Majesty’s preceptor--listened very serenely, slipping
in a word here and there where the angry brabble permitted it.
Probably in the end he would have summed up and dismissed the squabble
with a warning, had not Master Jamie, incensed by some hint of
correction, muttered just audibly an invitation to anyone to whom the
peril of the essay might appeal “to come and bell the cat”--a
challenge to which authority, in its own interests, was bound to
respond. It did, in fact, respond promptly, with an amazing vigour for
its years, and with the pliant persuasion of a leathern “tawse” kept
for the purpose; and, when it had done with Majesty, it administered a
similar dose to the other disputant, as the shortest way to restoring
amity through fellow-suffering.

“Haud your rowt, Geordie, like a gude mannie, and rin awa,” said the
breathed pedagogue, as he prepared to sit down and resume his reading.
But it was not to be. Attracted by the uproar, the Countess of
Mar--widowed sister-in-law to Mr. Alexander Erskine, the King’s
present guardian--came hurrying into the room, and gathering, from the
position of the royal hand, the true state of the case, caught the
vociferous victim into her arms, and, rounding on the grammarian,
demanded passionately of him how he dared lay his hands on the Lord’s
anointed.

“The end justifies the means,” responded the pedagogue coolly. “I
marle your ladyship’s confusion of pairts. The Lord shall keep to his
ain and I to mine.”

“Yours, ye presumptuous fool!” cried the angry woman. “But ’tis time
this arrogance ended.”

Master Buchanan, a practised psychologist, decided, in the words of
the proverb, to “jouk and let the jaw gae by.” He withdrew.

The King forgot all about his chastisement, and its indignity, in a
day or two. But not so the Countess. The act had brought to a head in
her a long-swelling process of exasperation. That this audacious
pedagogue should dare to claim a privilege denied to his colleagues,
when a whipping-boy, common to all of them, was provided in the person
of the young Sir Mungo Malagrowther, was simply intolerable. Her
smouldering resentment took fire in a determination to bring this
domineering will to its knees. And, as luck would have it, an
opportunity seemed quickly given her.

One day her son, the young Master of Mar (who had by no means
forgotten, or forgotten to resent, _his_ clouting), came to her,
triumphant, with some notes which he had picked up while spying about
in his absent preceptor’s room. These notes were incriminating, they
positively smelt of treason, and the Countess was fiercely jubilant.
She abode her time.

But Buchanan had in the meanwhile discovered his loss for himself,
and, putting this and that together--Geordie’s new air of defiance,
and his lady mother’s conscious looks--had formed a shrewd guess as to
the state of affairs.

That day he appeared before the King with a sifflication, or petition,
which he desired his young pupil to sign, convinced that the
thoughtless, good-natured boy would never trouble to examine into more
than its purport. And his surmise was justified.

“What is it a’ aboot?” was the indifferent demand.

“Just a bit place at Court, Jamie, my man,” answered the pedagogue,
“for a worthy chield, more fitted than mony to adorn his office.”

The King signed, and the strategist retired with his spoil.

That night the storm burst. A message reached Buchanan, desiring his
immediate attendance in the royal cabinet. He obeyed the summons
without hurry, an odd smile on his dry old lips. He found Erskine, the
Countess, and the young Master of Mar gathered about the King’s chair.
Her ladyship lost no time in opening the proceedings.

“D’ye ken those papers, Maister Buchanan?” she cried, flinging the
notes down on the table under the pedagogue’s nose.

“Vera weel,” he answered--“and who stole them from my room?”

“The Lord shall justify the theft,” she cried, “since it hath revealed
a treason to His anointed.”

Erskine, half bored, half amused, bade the pedagogue take up the notes
and explain them as he could.

“They are for a work I am projecting,” said Buchanan--“_De Jure Regni
apud Scotos_--which is just a compendium of poleetical philosophy.”

“Read,” cried the Countess; and, without hesitation, Buchanan obeyed,
giving the whole of what is here only the gist:

“If a King should do things tending to the dissolution of human
society, for the preservation of which he has been made, he is a
tyrant, ergo an enemy of all mankind. Is there not a just cause of war
against such an enemy, and is it not lawful in such war for the whole
people, or one, or any, to kill that enemy? May not any out of all
mankind lawfully kill a tyrant, as one who has broken the bond made
between himself and mankind?”

“Haud!” cried her ladyship, rabid to seize her point. “What ca’ ye
that, brother, but a direct incitement to treason? Heard ye aye such
sedeetious blether! A bond, the deil hae’t! I tell ye, ye misleared
pedant, there’s na bond save between the Lord and His anointed, and
whosoever thinks otherwise, or designs in ony way to injure the King,
is guilty of treason to the Lord.”

“I submit,” said Buchanan. “It is treason to design in ony way to
injure the King. Oot of your ain mouth, woman, do you stand convict.”

He took a paper from his pocket and threw it on the table.

“Read!” he commanded, in his turn.

Dumbfounded, but somehow impelled, the Countess lifted the paper,
glanced at it, and, uttering a shriek, threw it down before Erskine,
who, also perusing it, gave a sudden snort, and handed it, with an
amused ironic bow, to the King.

It was a document, signed by his own Majesty, vesting his title and
authority for the space of fifteen days in the person of his faithful
servant George Buchanan.

The pedagogue, with a stern aspect, advanced, and, motioning the King
out of his chair--a dictate which the pupil instinctively
obeyed--assumed the vacant place.

“D’ye deny your ain sign-manual, James Stuart?” he asked.

The boy, looking very sheepish, shook his head.

“It shall be a lesson and a warning to ye, Jamie,” said Buchanan. “How
aften have I rebuked, and vainly, your complying good-nature! And now
that easy concession has dethroned ye for the nonce, as ane day it may
for gude and a’. For the future, read your sifflications before
signing them.” He whipped round suddenly on the small Master of Mar.
“As for this young traitor and his mither,” he bawled, “that have
conspired to injure their King----”

The Countess cried out, as Geordie ran screaming into her arms, “No
treason, gudeman, no treason! I allow the truth of your contention. It
is maist lawful, under just provocation, to dethrone and kill a
tyrant.”

“Humph!” said Buchanan, twisting into place again. “I am nane, maybe,
so convinced of that as I was, and we will e’en leave the point for
future discussion. In the meanwhile, as King I decree that the person
of ane George Buchanan, _homo multarum literarum_, is sacred from this
hour and for ever, and that onyone at ony time conspiring to injure
it, shall be adjudged guilty of treason against the King’s Majesty.”

Alexander Erskine lay back in his chair and went into a roar of
laughter.




 The Lord Treasurer

“Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer--“my breeches!”

The attendant, stooping to the august legs, reverentially relieved
them of their small-clothes, and his lordship stood up in his shirt
with his back to the fire. Even so denuded, he could never have
conceived himself as anything less than a hero to his valet--no, not
when, with a comfortable rearward shrug of his shoulders, he lifted
the veil of his unspeakableness to the gratifying warmth.

“Let me see, Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer. “To-morrow is
Wednesday--the black velvet with the plain falling band, is it not?
Very well. Empty that pocket of its papers, Phineas.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Sir Richard Weston, Baron of Exchequer and Lord High Treasurer to his
Majesty King Charles I, was disrobing for the night in his official
residence off Chancellor’s or Chancery Lane. He was a man of
inflexible routine, who changed his raiment, parcelled out his duties,
and pigeon-holed his correspondence with an unswerving regularity from
which nothing could ever make him deviate but a bribe. He had a suit
of clothes for Monday, a suit for Wednesday, another for Friday, and
so on--a change on every third day; and in the doublet of each suit
was a little pocket below the waist, into which it was his custom to
slip all memoranda of affairs requiring his early attention. This
pocket it was the valet’s duty to explore upon every occasion of
exchange into fresh habiliments.

Now, _system_ has this drawback, that it entices those who practise it
into a confidence in their inability to err, which is in itself an
error. Pigeon-holes are useful things, if one is convinced that every
article in them is docketed under its obvious letter. But, alas! in
actual fact the short cut too often proves itself the longest way
round, and the pigeon has an amazing way of hiding in the unexpected
compartment. He may fail to answer to his own name or his firm’s, and
leave one in the last resort only his subject or his business by which
to trace him--if, indeed, one can identify either under a capital
letter. We have known an orderly man to tear the heart out of a nest
of pigeon-holes from “B” to “Z,” only at length to find what he sought
under “Anonymous.” Yet he remained no less convinced than the
Treasurer that he had eliminated confusion from his category of
affairs. System, in short, may provide against everything but the bad
memory which most trusts to it.

Sir Richard, pleasantly conscious of his calves and upwards, reared
himself on his toes and yawned and sank down again.

“Is aught there, varlet?” he demanded. “Bring me whatsoever it
containeth.”

The man laid down the discarded doublet.

“Naught, my lord,” he said, “but a single scrap of paper.”

“Give it me.”

The servant crossed the room, and presented the memorandum with an
obeisance. The master accepted it, glanced down, and stood suddenly
rigid.

“_Remember Cæsar!_”

That was all--just those two words, written bold in ink in an unknown
hand. “Remember Cæsar!”

Sir Richard was holding the paper in his right hand; dropping the
veil, he brought his left to the front and stood staring in a sort of
stupor. A consciousness as of chill, as of a sense of warmth and
security suddenly and shockingly withdrawn, tingled through his veins.
It was succeeded by a faint thrill of grievance or self-pity. He had
been so exceedingly comfortable and happy a moment ago.

“Remember Cæsar!”--just those two words, no more, but how voluminous
in terrific import! “Remember Cæsar!” Remember the retribution that
always waited on “vaulting ambition.” A vision of a vast Senate Hall,
of a throng of passionate figures holding aloft blood-stained daggers,
of a silent, prostrate form in their midst, rose before him. “Remember
Cæsar!” Remember Cæsar’s fate: remember what came to befall the
greatest soldier, statesman, jurist of his time--possibly of all time.

A certain flattery in the analogy for an instant restored the colour
to Sir Richard’s cheek. Perhaps the comparison was not so extravagant
a one after all. The position of Lord Treasurer was so exalted, that,
looking down from it, all lesser offices and all lesser men appeared
dwarfed. It needed surely a stupendous intellect to preserve its
equilibrium at that altitude. And yet, such the height, such the fall.
The Treasurer’s momentary heroics came down with an anticipatory
thwack which left him gasping.

If he could only avoid Cæsar’s fate while admitting the soft analogy!
The illustrious Imperator had also, if he remembered rightly, received
_his_ warning, and had ignored it. To ape the foolhardinesses of the
great was surely not to justify one’s relation to them in the best
sense.

A shrill wind blew upon the casement. Its voice had but now awakened a
snug response in the Treasurer’s breast. All in a moment it spoke to
him of the near approach of the Ides of March, and he shivered and
dropped the paper to the floor.

“Phineas,” he said in an agitated voice, “Phineas! How came that into
my pocket?”

The valet, busy about his affairs, approached deferentially but
curiously, and, at a sign from his master, lifted and examined the
billet, and shook his head.

“You don’t know?”

“No, indeed, my lord.”

“How do you read it, man? How do you read it?”

Phineas scratched his poll and grinned and was silent.

“You are just an intolerable ass,” cried his master. He danced in his
excitement. His dignity was all gone; he was simply a man in a shirt.
“Fetch master secretary!” he cried. “Fetch master comptroller! Rouse
the household, and warn the porter at the gate! Send everyone in to
me, here and at once.”

The valet hesitated.

“Do you hear?” shouted Sir Richard. “Why do you wait?”

“It doesn’t come down to your knees, my lord,” said Phineas.

The Treasurer leaped to a press and tore out a robe. “Go!” he screamed
over his shoulder.

In a minute they all came hurrying in--comptroller, secretary, clerks,
grooms, and underlings--in dress or in undress, a motley crew, as the
occasion had found them.

“What is it, my lord?” asked the first in an astonished voice. He was
a tall, pallid man, so inured to method and routine that a rat behind
the wainscot was enough to throw him into a flutter.

“Master Hugh,” cried the Treasurer--“Master Hugh! I found that in my
pocket when I came to strip--a thing that I had never put there, or
put unconsciously. What do you make of it, my friend? What does it
import?”

They all gathered round the comptroller to read the billet, and,
having examined it, fell apart with grave, inquiring faces.

The comptroller looked up, his lips trembling.

“My lord,” he said, “it can signify but one thing.”

“My assassination?”

“Without doubt, my lord.”

The Treasurer turned pale to the bare dome of his head. He had to the
last hoped to have his worst apprehensions refuted; but it was plain
that only one construction could be put upon the missive.

“How did it reach me?” he said dismally. “How did it get there?”

“Probably, my lord,” ventured the secretary, a sleek, apologetic man,
“it was slipped into your lordship’s hand by one whom your lordship
mistook for a chance importunate suitor, and your lordship accepted
and pouched and forgot it.”

“It may have represented a threat or a friendly warning,” said the
comptroller.

“Your lordship hath many and mighty enemies,” said the secretary, “as
who hath not among the great and influential?”

“Your power, your imperious will, your favour in high places, my
lord,” said the comptroller--“these be all incitements to the envious
and unscrupulous. Without question there is some conspiracy formed
against your life.”

“I could almost suspect you all of collusion in it,” cried the
Treasurer bitterly, “for the relish with which you dispose of me.”

The comptroller murmured distressfully, “O, my lord, my lord!”

Sir Richard broke out, moved beyond endurance:

“What the devil do you all, moaning and croaking? I am not food yet
for your commiseration. The plot may be already forward while you
babble. Look under the bed, Phineas.”

The valet dived, rose, scoured the room, examined into every possible
lurking-place.

“Shall I set a guard, my lord?” inquired the comptroller.

The Treasurer exploded:

“Set a guard when the thief is in! A household of braying jackasses!
Go, dolt, and remedy your oversight. Shut the gates and warn the
porter; beat up every hole and corner first. See that not a soul is
allowed entrance on any pretext whatever. And, hark ye, Master Hugh,
no eye to-night shall be shut on penalty of my high displeasure. An
unwinking vigil, an unwinking vigil, Master Hugh, on the part of all.
See to it. And if anyone asks an audience, save of the first
consequence and character, I am indisposed, Master Hugh--I am
indisposed, do you hear?”

He was so, in very truth, as he drove them all out, and locked the
door upon himself, and sank into a seat before the fire. A sickness of
apprehension stirred in his bile and made his face like yellow wax.
This business had given him such a shock as he had never before
experienced. What did it mean?--what could it mean? No doubt the
secretary’s theory was the right one: he was incessantly being
importuned by petitioners, and often, to get rid of them, he would
accept their memorials, and pocket and forget all about them. So must
it have been with this paper, thrust into his hand amidst a crowd. It
was merciful chance alone that had restored it to his notice before
too late. But, accepting all that, _why_ was his life threatened? His
heart was full of an emotional complaint and protest against destiny.
He was not an unjust man as things went--certainly not so signally as
to merit this fatal distinction.

He passed a terrible night, shrinking from every shadow, starting at
every sound. Morning when it came only added to his sick perplexity.
What course was he to pursue, fearful of the lurking terror, to
preserve his dignity and his life at once? He dressed in a sort of
mental palsy, crept breakfastless to his library, and sent for the
comptroller’s report. So far, it appeared, the night had passed
without event. No doubt the deed was destined for the open air.

As he stood, trying to deliberate his policy, a visitor, the Earl of
Tullibardine, was announced as craving an audience. His lordship was a
personal friend of his, and beyond suspicion. Reluctantly Sir Richard
gave the order for his admittance.

The nobleman came in breezily, and with much concern expressed over
the report of the Treasurer’s indisposition. “Which,” said he, “maketh
me loth to trouble your lordship on a personal matter, which, saving
the pressure of the occasion, I would forbear. But the business calls
for dispatch, and your lordship had promised me an answer.”

Sir Richard put a hand to his forehead.

“Not well,” he murmured, “and overtaxed. You must pardon me, my lord.
What business?”

“Why,” cried the Earl, “have you forgot how you promised me three days
ago to speak to the King about appointing my kinsman, Robert Cæsar,
to a vacant clerkship of the Rolls, and how, asking me for a
memorandum of the matter, I writ ‘_Remember Cæsar_’ on a slip of
paper and gave it you?”

Sir Richard stood staring a moment, then burst into an uproarious
laugh.




 The Princess Elizabeth

She was really the most affectionate and harmless of little
princesses, though, in the cruelty of her fate, one of the most tragic
figures of her sad time. Destiny, the great bully, in the absence of
any celestial S.P.C.C., often delights in torturing good children, and
surely he had never vented his spite on a prettier innocence than
this. She was born on the Holy Innocents’ day, actually; and that may
have prejudiced the odious tyrant. A counterpane of snow covered the
earth at the time, and when the sun of the New Year withdrew it, there
was this smiling snowdrop underneath.

We pass over the little Princess’s first reception, the splendour and
hyperbole of it all. To insist on such in such connection is like
breaking a butterfly on a wheel. She was for all human purposes just a
desirable baby, most precious in her lovable disposition; and if the
States of Holland thought fit, for political purposes, to signalise
her minute advent by a congratulatory present to King Charles I, her
father, of ambergris, incomparable china, a cunning clock, and several
Titians and Tintorettos, those gifts were not to be considered
representative of anything but her material values. Her real dearness
was moral and inestimable. Only the ambergris, perhaps, symbolised the
sweetness of her nature.

We dwell on her sweetness, the kind little soul, more fondly than on
her reputed learning and her piety. At eight years old she was said,
on the authority of Mrs. Makin, her parliamentary governess, to be
suitably proficient, Angelica-like, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French,
Italian, and Spanish, all of which languages she could read and write.
Well, we don’t believe a word of it, any more than we believe in the
precocious pietism allowed her by godly Mr. Stephen Marshall and other
long-winded Fifth-Monarchists appointed by the Parliament to preach
her and her brothers into a state of dead-with-sleepiness grace. Like
a sweet-natured child she struggled dutifully to please her tutors,
and the very love in her disarmed and moved them to the utterance of
those fond fictions. No doubt she could stammer without a solecism of
Balbus and his wall-building, or, in childish cacography, indite her
_Déme un beso_ with little rosy fist cramped tight and her lips
pursed to the message. But that any tongue but her own spoke naturally
in or to her we will not believe.

The most prettily pathetic letter ever written by a child she
addressed to the Lords of the Parliament, and that was in 1642, when
she was really eight years old. It was at the time when King father
and Queen mother were gone, launched on the flood of that long
disaster, and Elizabeth and her baby brother, the little Duke of
Gloucester, had been left together in the great empty Palace of St.
James’s under the guardianship of the Houses. It was a period of tense
national emotion--the opening of the great Civil War. The two
children, who figured more or less as hostages, were a source of
perpetual anxiety and embarrassment to the revolted Commons, who could
not forbear, nevertheless, imposing upon the twain their own loveless
ruling. The infants were stripped of all privileges of State, were
maintained meagrely, and were delivered to the dronings of orthodox
divines for their spiritual sustenance. It being decreed that none,
unless he were a subscriber to the Solemn League and Covenant, should
be permitted to hold any office about them, the cashiering of most of
the household followed of necessity. And it was this, the dismissal of
her few loved familiars, which produced the letter. The child, in a
burst of passionate grief, appealed from the Lower to the Upper House:

 “My Lords,

 “I account myself very miserable that I must have my servants taken
 from me, and strangers put to me. You promised me that you would have
 a care of me, and I hope you will show it, in preventing so great a
 grief as this would be to me. I pray, my Lords, consider of it, and
 give me cause to thank you, and to rest,

                                            “Your loving friend,
                                            “Elizabeth.”

Your loving friend! No polyglot precocity there, but just the
stumbling iterative language of a child’s swelling heart. Cannot you
picture her, in her plain black frock and falling collar, her slim
arms bare from the elbow, the shining golden curls dropping over her
cheeks and the shining tears dropping from her eyes, as she sits at
the long table in the bare panelled room carefully shaping the
characters of her desperate little plea. Her throat has a lump in it;
her breath catches from time to time; so almost does ours, when we
think of her, as of any other imprisoned child, so lonely, so
non-understanding, deprived in one amazed moment of all love and
luxury, conscious of vague frightening things around, awake, as if in
the night, from a terror of dreams, and no one, no least footstep in
the dark house, hurrying to her with reassurance of comfort and
soothing words.

But we would not overpaint the picture; and indeed this little girl
had the compensations of her nature. Few could be harsh with her or
help loving her--not Mrs. Makin, nor Mr. Obadiah Sedgewick, who knew
so much about the Bible that he might have written it, especially its
wrathful passages, nor certainly the Earl of Northumberland, who was
the guardian appointed by the Houses. Moreover, being of the stuff
maternal, she had natural duties to occupy her. She had mothered her
dolls, very lovingly and intimately, in the times of absorbing
unreality; now, awakened to the tremendous responsibilities of fact,
her solicitude was transferred to their living substitute, the little
baby Duke Henry of Gloucester. In her pretty, faithful stewardship of
this small charge she forgot the worst of her own grief and
loneliness.

We would dilate upon her maternal resourcefulness, for in that was her
natural development. It came to embrace in time the fortunes of her
elder brother, the Duke of York, who, when he was thirteen and she
eleven, was added to the party at St. James’s. In the interval
Elizabeth had had a fall and broken one of her legs, an accident
which, though surmounted, had further weakened an already delicate
constitution. And then events came fast, culminating, after many
disastrous defeats, in the virtual imprisonment of the King father at
Hampton Court. There was a day which the little Princess never forgot,
when all three were taken to visit the captive in his prison-palace.
They slept the night there, and the tramp of the sentries in the long
corridor got upon her nerves and haunted them for weeks afterwards. It
seemed so dreadful that a king should have a gaoler.

But now affairs were rushing to a crisis, and the alarmed heart of the
child-mother inspired her to action. In this threatening of a dynasty
it was imperative to secure the escape of her elder boy brother, and
she set herself, the little courageous thing, to devise the means.
Love made of her a very Machiavellian plotter, made of her small wits
a counter-force against all the watchfulness and caution of great
Ministers and their servants. Very innocently--in seeming--she
prepared her ground: the three children, to beguile the tedium of
their long confinement, took to playing hide-and-seek in the great
empty Palace every evening after dark. And on the 21st of April, in
the year 1648, the plot was ripe.

“I will not hide to-night, Harry.”

“Yes, Jamie, do, do.”

“Will you not, Jamie dear, to please him?”

“Why not you, sister? With your sad raiment, toning into the hangings
and the shadows, you have always the advantage over us.”

“But you have the better ideas. You shall wear one of my gowns if you
like.”

“Shall I? Then I shall be doubly equipped. Very well, send for a
gown.”

Amid the laughter of all, governess and attendants, assembled in the
room, the young Prince became a girl. Little Harry was delighted, and
clapped his hands.

“Find me to-night, Harry, if you can,” cried the Duke of York as,
holding up his skirts, he danced out of the room. “I will take ten
minutes’ law, and then give you two hours for the task.”

He disappeared; Elizabeth had hard ado to hold in the child the
stipulated time; but punctually on the tick of the eleventh minute she
rose, and took his hand, and the hunt began.

There was always a fearful joy in this sport for the little boy. The
vast glooms; the imagined crouching shapes; the starts and shrieks of
discovery over some object which would reveal itself when
approached--no dim, half-shrouded face, but just a ghostly bowl or
ornament; the crawling silences and puckered shadows--the appalling
venture of it all was just endurable if one kept the prize in view.
And then this elder brother did such things. Once, actually, standing
on a mantelpiece, he had become the figure of a pale-faced Moroni
Cavalier, whose picture hung convenient; and Elizabeth and little Hal
had passed and repassed hand in hand without ever discovering the
imposition. And to-night again, it seemed, was to record one of his
inspirations.

Long before the two hours were passed in fruitless search Harry was so
tired that he could scarce drag one foot after the other. But he was
still trailing his weary toes undaunted when the Earl came home.
Prepared to attend the Princes to bed, Elizabeth, by then worn out,
had transferred her place in the hunt to a couple of menservants, who,
amused and unsuspecting, accompanied the little boy.

Northumberland, being informed that the Duke was hiding, tarried
impatiently awhile, until, seeing his growing irritation, one of the
servants whispered to his charge. The child, brightening and clapping
his hands, shrieked out, “O, Jamie! In the gardener’s house!” The Earl
turned on the speaker.

“What is that?”

“His Highness,” answered the man, “ran into the servants’ hall,
demanding of Job his key to hide withal. He’s been there, my lord,
these two hours.”

“There? Where?”

“In Job’s lodge in the garden, my lord.”

The Earl, hastily calling his attendants, hurried, the little boy
trotting beside him, to the house--only to find it empty and the bird
flown. Undetected in his disguise, the young Duke, after slipping from
the window of the lodge into the darkness without, had made his way
down to the river, where, at a certain spot, by preconcerted
arrangement, a boat awaited to convey him to a Dutch vessel. And the
demure deviser of all this pretty scheme had been from first to last
the little good Princess.

She looked up when the Earl came to acquaint her of the result of
their evening’s play. Her eyes filled; her lips quivered; but she was
too long inured to shocks to express surprise.

“He hath fled, then,” she said. “I can only pray, sir, for his
preservation. Yet be sure you have left no corner unexplored.”

Northumberland convinced her, even as he turned away. There was a
puzzled frown in his eyes.

“No, it is impossible,” he whispered to himself. “Was she not born on
the feast of the Holy Innocents?”

A big heart in a frail body. She came to die, this tired little lamb,
really of neglect and loneliness, when she was no more than fifteen.
Emotional pietists have declared that she was found dead with her head
resting on the Bible. So short-sighted people can mistake for a book
the Good Shepherd’s knee.




 James II

The City clocks were chiming four in the starry chill of a December
morning as the King and his two attendants hurried down Whitehall
stairs to the river. A boat, bespoken hours earlier by his valet
Abbadie, who was in waiting for the party, lay ready off the public
steps. These, for an obvious reason, had been chosen in preference to
the privy stairs, and the result seemed to justify the precaution. The
fugitives were not observed or followed, it appeared--unless any
significance attached to the form of a sleeping loafer, sprawled
heavily over a baulk of timber hard by--and in any case they were all
prepared, if challenged, to assume the rôle of belated citizens
taking boat after a frolic.

The two oars, proved men, were, if not in the actual secret of the
escape, sufficiently near it to act in all things with quiet and
dispatch. The embarkation proceeded noiselessly, and Sir Edward Hales,
the last of the party, was about to step on board, when a remark,
_sotto voce_, from one fellow to the other arrested his attention. He
paused, his foot on the gunnel, and quickly demanded an explanation.

“Why, see, your honour,” said the man in a low voice, “you’re
over-late, and the tide’s at the slack. With a pull of thirty miles
before us and a heavy boat, it’s odds but we meet the flow this side
Greenwich.”

“What, then, waterman?”

“We shan’t fetch Gravesend before daylight, that’s all.”

Sir Edward, being a faithful Papist and Jacobite, cursed ecumenically.
Ex-Lieutenant of the Tower, he had only just been dispossessed of his
post, a significant one, by dictate of the usurper, and Fate, he felt,
might have spared him these lesser vexations. It was important above
all things at this pass to get the King bestowed under cover of
darkness in the vessel that awaited him at the river-mouth.

“Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply.

The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said--“two
oars and the sculls.”

Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr.
Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be
left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set
his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound
the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice
sounded behind him:

“Here’s at your service, master.”

Sir Edward started and turned round. It was the sleeper, it seemed,
who had risen and come behind him unobserved--an immense shambling
figure of a man, ragged and hoary. Power no less than age spoke in his
massive frame, in his hands like roots, in his sinewy neck. Even the
few teeth that remained to him were like bones of contention in a
resolute jaw. Shadowy, a dim giant, he stood up in his mouldy duds in
the starlight.

An opportune phantom, too foul and solitary for a spy. Sir Edward,
under stress of urgency, took what the Fates had sent him.

“Can you pull?” he asked only.

The great creature jeered hoarsely.

“Aye,” he said, “though it were the house of Dagon about the ears of
the Philistines.”

Sir Edward made a wry mouth; there was a tang in this of the pietistic
cant he was old enough to remember. But the occasion was urgent.

“We desire to light at Gravesend before dawn,” he said. “You shall be
well paid if you enable us.”

He entered the boat, and the man followed, the latter signifying in a
determined manner that he would pull stroke. The concession being made
to a certain arrogance of will in the fellow as much as to his
physical strength, they took their seats and the craft put off.

The four passengers were all in cloaks and unfeathered hats. The King,
unconscious, it seemed, of the addition to their number, or of the
brief parley which had led to it, sat next the water, dark, silent,
preoccupied. They had hardly reached midstream when he put his hand
over the side, and something slid from it into the flood without
splash or sound. As he recovered his position with a sigh, his eyes
encountered those of the new-comer, and he started slightly and spoke
under his breath:

“Who is this?”

“A figure of exigency, sir,” whispered Sheldon, “hired to speed us the
quicker to an end. A supplementary hand and a strong one was needed,
it seems, to bring us under night to our goal.”

His Majesty said no more, but his eyes, hollow and tragic, continued
to con the stranger. He seemed to him to have arisen, like a sudden
cloud, huge and menacing, against the dim horizon of his hopes. That
had not ceased to glimmer faintly, to his mind’s strained vision,
through all the gloom of this long bitter night. A haunting sense of
unreality pursued and half stupefied him. He felt like one in an
enchanted wood, always sighting deliverance and always mistaken, yet
drawn on by perpetual expectation. There had been something fantastic
and illusory in this rapid vanishing of a kingdom; it seemed even now
a myth, a jest. He would wake presently and laugh over the strangeness
of that very vivid dream. It had been the oddest experience to feel
State, authority, service, friendship, a throne, a people, all
suddenly slipping from him, as if the bottom, in one unexpected
moment, had come out of his universe; to feel himself, when in a
condition of normal security, all at once, as in a nightmare, standing
exposed and reviled, an alien not only in his own Court, but in his
own country. The thing seemed too preposterous for belief, like the
fantasy of a dead man witnessing in substance his own funeral, and he
existed and moved in the constant expectation of the strange cloud’s
dispelling. These shadows of the few faithful who remained to him
would explain themselves and their insignificance; the flight by icy
starlight would merge itself into the confused flow of a dream; the
very curdling of the water would become the ropy web of moisture over
sleeping eyeballs. Steadily he had kept his vision concentrated on
that line of dawn which was to end the long delusion, and when the new
shape rose to block it he felt suddenly as if his hope were overcast,
and he awake at length to full consciousness of the truth. From that
moment, for some unknown reason, he despaired.

The boat was sped on its course by muscular arms. The regular pump of
the oars, churning up liquid gold, the flight of house and palace,
vast hilly hulks of shadow that fled behind them into vaster glooms,
the silence and the stress seemed to hypnotise the party, so that none
spoke or moved. But the eyes of the King, fixed and haggard, never
left the face of the nearest oarsman. Even when, with a dive and rush,
they shot into the stream that thundered under London Bridge, his gaze
did not falter or withdraw itself for a moment. But presently, when
they hove into the weltering shadow of the Tower, as if in an
uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward, and, touching the stranger
on the knee, spoke: “You guess what destinies you carry, my friend?”

Sir Edward Hales started and put out an expostulatory hand; but the
great thing, never ceasing in his labours, only mowed and nodded.

“Aye,” he said, “I knew you from the first, James Stuart.”

The King sat back, stiff and motionless.

“No traitor?” he demanded rigidly.

The man gave a short laugh.

“No traitor to my own principles,” he said, “which are to free Judea
of the last of thy house and dynasty.”

Sir Edward ground out a killing oath; but the King silenced him. Here
was evidently a survival of the fierce fanaticism of the ’forties, and
still unappeased by the blood of an ancient holocaust. It seemed a
significant, an ominous chance to have encountered him at this pass. A
profounder dejection settled upon James’s heart. He spoke as if
appealing:

“You wish us gone, my friend?”

“Aye,” said the creature, “I wish you gone.”

“For what reason?”

“So that I may live again.”

“Live?”

“Other than as the scapegoat that bore upon his head the iniquities of
the unclean. For twenty-eight years have I sojourned in the desert,
nameless, hungry, and abhorred--I, that delivered Judah of her sins.
Yet the hour is mine at last. The elect shall receive and justify me.
Thy deposition is my restoration, James Stuart. Judge if I rejoice to
speed thee on thy way.”

“Mad,” snapped Sir Edward shortly.

The midmost sculler, without stopping pulling, put in his oar, so to
speak:

“Let the ranter mouth, master, so he keeps his fists shut on his task
and swings to ’t.”

“Not so mad, either,” retorted the giant. Continuing to pull with his
left hand, he flung out his right towards the dark blot of the Tower
shrinking behind them. “It fades, King,” he cried--“the symbol of thy
sovereignty, the shambles sanctified by the blood of Freedom’s
martyrs. Harrison, Coke, Peters, and the rest--remember them in the
day of thy tribulation, since the Lord hath made of their servant and
right hand the instrument of His retribution. They died to testify;
but the instrument remains to extirpate. It shall be acclaimed and
honoured henceforth in the temples of the Lord.”

The prospect seemed somehow to goad him to more furious exertions; the
boat groaned under his strokes. A madman, no doubt, and best humoured
and disregarded. He did not speak again, and in silence the journey
was continued. Only an oppression as of death sat upon the heart of
the King, and his eyes for ever sought behind the great rocking figure
some sign of the dawn that his soul so desired and his interests so
feared.

But they drove, unpursued and unmolested, down the starry flood; and
presently the waters broadened and there blew a little sea-breeze
among the scattered shipping. And suddenly Sir Edward Hales, intently
alert, gave a sharp low order, and they ran under the counter of a
small unobtrusive vessel lying at anchor in the midstream. There were
white faces here looking over the bulwarks, and, down in the chains,
hands ready to support the fugitives aboard. Then his Majesty, having
mounted, and before he turned to withdraw, bade Sir Edward reward his
boatmen with a liberal vail, which duty the knight performed. But,
even as he received his tribute, and the boat drifted away, the hoary
giant rose in his place and cast the money into the water.

“I am paid a thousandfold,” he roared, “in the extirpation of thy
race.”

The King, with a ghastly face, leaned forward.

“In God’s name, who are you?” he cried.

The answer came back, mad and jubilant, across the widening interval:

“Ask me who I was, and I reply, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, who cut off
the King your father’s head upon the scaffold.”




 The King’s Champion

“And now, schentelmen, about that little inzident at the
goronation?” It was his Majesty King William III who spoke, crumpled
back into his big chair. His eyes, bright as a sparrow’s, peered from
the nest of an enormous wig. His small, shrewd features, diminutive
frame, and legs like cribbage-pegs, were the least adapted, one might
have thought, to carry the extravagant vesture of his day. He
appeared, indeed, to be always lost in it, and as if just on the point
of finding his way out. Yet the clothes of a Daniel Lambert would
hardly have sufficed for his spirit.

The Marquis of Halifax, his Lord Privy Seal, smiled, and shrugged his
stout shoulders deprecatingly. There were four others present in this
his Majesty’s somewhat melancholy little Cabinet at Whitehall: Lord
Denby, his President of the Council, and three solemn Dutch
mynheers--D’Auverquerque, Schomberg, and Zuylestein, who had been
appointed respectively the King’s Masters of Horse, Ordnance, and the
Robes. These last were all as grave as mustard-pots, and the subject,
long-expected and broached at last, made them graver.

It turned upon an incident, slight in itself, significant only in its
context, which had struck a discordant note in the tremendous
ceremonial of the day before. When the King’s Champion, riding in by
the great door of Westminster, had cast his gage upon the floor,
offering to prove in person upon the body of whomsoever should
challenge the right of King William and Mary his Queen to reign as
sovereign inheritors of the realm that that same dissentient lied in
his throat and was a false traitor, a most unexpected response had
followed. A little old lady, dressed in a watered tabby and mittens,
and having large spectacles on her nose and a stiff three-storied
_commode_ of lace perched on her white hair, had darted from among the
spectators, and, whipping up the steel glove, had returned it to the
Champion with a whispered word or two, and then fairly run away,
melting into the crowd which thronged about the entrance before anyone
could think of interposing.

The affair had caused a momentary stir, and even a titter, instantly
subdued to the august occasion, as Sir Charles Dymoke, the Champion,
had ridden up the Hall, his face as red as fire, to deliver and
re-deliver his cartel.

But it had not passed unobserved by the King himself or by those
around him. Extinguished as he had appeared to be in his panoply of
purple and ermine and embroidered scarlet, looking, as he had risen at
the great table to drink his Champion’s health, for all the world like
a little over-swaddled Greek icon elevated against a background of
glittering stained glass, his diminutive Majesty had had an ear and an
eye for everything within the longest range of either. His birdlike
optics, bright as twin buttons sunk amid that pomp of raiment, had
been fully cognisant of the little episode, and had watched the
after-approach of his Champion with an unwinking interest, which had
seemed to concentrate itself to such a challenging focus on the
flushed face of the knight as he came near, that that doughty Paladin
had fallen into confusion and had something botched the business of
the toast that followed. However, he had managed, though crestfallen,
to retire presently with sufficient aplomb and his perquisite of a
golden beaker; and there for the moment the matter had ended.

“Sir Charles Dymoke----” began Lord Halifax.

“Who is dat man?” interrupted the King. “Vat is his title to the
bost?”

“It is claimed by him, sire,” answered the peer, “in his right of the
Manor of Scrivelsby. The office was originally deputed, I understand,
to Sir Richard de Marmyon by the Conqueror, and hath descended by
virtue of that tenure to this day. Sir Charles is its legitimate
representative.”

“Well,” said the King, “broduce him before us.”

“Why,” said the Marquis feebly, “that is the odd thing. Sir Charles is
nowhere to be found.”

The three Dutch mynheers uttered guttural sounds in their throats, and
looked at one another and at the King significantly.

His Majesty’s brows knotted.

“Dat is very vonny,” he said. “Not to be vound, mein vrent?”

“It has been ascertained, your Majesty,” said Lord Denby wearily--he
was a picked white bone of a man, with no stomach and yet a perpetual
stomach-ache, which naturally aggrieved him--“that Sir Charles rode,
immediately after the ceremony, to the ‘Cock’ hostelry in Tothill
Street, whence, having disencumbered himself of his panoply, he
continued his way to the riding-school of one Dobney, near Islington,
where he delivered up his horse and disappeared. Since when he has
neither returned to his inn nor vouchsafed the least token of his
existence.”

The King considered the matter very glumpily within himself. It
appeared a trifle; yet trifles might easily be underestimated in the
existing state of things. The incident was something or nothing--a
mere meaningless frolic, or a challenge to his title bearing a certain
significance. The land swarmed with Jacobites of more or less power
and prominence. What if one of them were to meet and defeat his
Champion? How, in that event, would his claim stand? What was the
procedure? It was an odd contingency, and he put it rather acridly to
my Lord Privy Seal.

“He drow de gage; anodder agcept it; dey vight; my man vall. Vat is to
vollow?” he demanded.

“Ja! Dat is vat strike idself into me bom-bom,” said Schomberg the
warrior.

Lord Halifax smiled rather sheepishly. He was a large, tolerant soul
of sixty, repudiating all sentiment and subject to much. He had been
called the “Trimmer”; but, then, no man of humour can ever be a man of
convictions. Kind, witty, and cynical, he was yet so fond of Reason
that he could make a fool of himself with her. He was even worked upon
to do so in the present case.

“There is positively no precedent, sire,” he said. “To my certain
knowledge the thing has never happened before.”

“Bot zhould it jost zo happen?” insisted his master.

“Ach!” said D’Auverquerque penetratingly.

“With deference, sire,” said his lordship, “is it not something
premature to assume any hostile intent in the matter? The good
lady----”

“Posh!” put in the King irritably. “Neither goot nor lady.”

“Zo it strike itself into mein head bom-bom,” said Schomberg.

“Dat dress vas a masguerade,” said William--“a vact we zhould haf
gonsidered, blain to the stupidest indelligence.”

“Certainly, certainly,” agreed Lord Halifax nervously.

“Vell, sir--vat den?”

“Ach! vat den?” demanded D’Auverquerque cunningly.

“I vill dell your lordship,” said Schomberg. “Dere was a vine
swordsman gonzealed under dose bettigoats.”

The Lord Privy Seal, considering the subject, woke to a certain
trepidation.

“It is impossible,” he admitted, “to avoid attaching a measure of
importance to the affair, or to gauge its consequences should it be
carried through. Surely Sir Charles could not be so foolish as to risk
a serious encounter? But he must be found and warned at all costs.”

His mood communicated itself to the others. The matter began to assume
with them all an increasingly sinister aspect. Majesty was not yet so
safe on its throne that omens could be disregarded. The King, prompt
and tireless, for all his sickly constitution, in business--the little
man who was to regain for England her reputation for workaday
sanity--had yet, at this beginning, a vast estate to recover from
chaos, and his path was beset with perils. The country was still in
two minds, and each distracted; a trifle might upset the balance.
Deliberating in this sort, a species of hysteria communicated itself
after a time from one to another of the little Council, until it
definitely came to perceive in the episode a daring ruse for bringing
about a reaction in popular sentiment. What if the meeting were
actually to occur, and the Champion to be overthrown? It was not to be
doubted that the event would have been provided for, and those engaged
in bringing it about forearmed. Defeat might result in riot, and riot
in revolution. Arrived at that pitch of the debate, the six gentlemen,
including his Majesty, were all speaking together in considerable
agitation.

It was the personality of the mysterious Mohock, once convicted of
masculinity, which most exercised their minds. He was certainly an
individual of importance, as so momentous a mission would hardly have
been entrusted to a nonentity. But who? A dozen names suggested
themselves, Berwick, Tyrconnel, Lord Henry Fitzjames, the ex-monarch’s
natural son, Marlborough himself, and others. It was Zuylestein,
speaking for the first and last time, who finally put the spark to all
this accumulating tow. “Vat,” he said, “if it is James himselv,
zegretly gom over from St. Germains and resolved upon venturing dis
bigduresque abbeal to de poblic?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg.

He rose, Halifax rose, they all rose, and faced the King.

“Ik dank U, mijnheer,” said his Majesty; “it is a very blausible
suggestion.”

The words were equivalent to a bid to action. The Council broke up
hurriedly, and within an hour the Dutch troops had been beaten to
arms, the militia called out, the magistrates warned, and the whole
city placed under a surveillance of the most searching description. It
was at this momentous pass, when panic was in the air, that Sir
Charles Dymoke walked unconcerned into the “Cock” tavern, in Tothill
Street, and was immediately arrested by the guard set to watch that
hostelry, and conveyed in a state of complete stupefaction to
Whitehall. He was taken at once before the King sitting in Council.

“Vere haf you been?” demanded William sternly.

“Your Majesty!” gasped the Champion, a sturdy gallant of middle age.

“Answer, sir,” said the monarch--“and vidout eguivocation.”

“I have been with a friend,” stammered Sir Charles, all amazement.

“Ach!” exclaimed his Majesty sarcastically. “The vrow, vas it, vat
returnt you your gage in the Hall yesterday?”

“Certainly not, sire,” said the Champion, the flush of outrage on his
cheek.

“Not?” said the King. “Who vas she, den, dat voman?”

“The wife of Dobney, the horse-tamer, sire.”

“The vife--vat! Vat had she said to you?”

“She said, your Majesty, ‘Didn’t I warn you not to throw it down in
front of her nose, unless you want her to kneel and pick it up?’”

“She? Who?”

“The mare, sire. She performs at Islington.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Lord Privy Seal very softly, “shall we thank
Sir Charles and proceed to the order of the day?”

“Bom-bom!” said Schomberg under his breath.




 George I

“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
reawakened, 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 twelve-month ago. After thirty-two years! And
this was the unlovely Rhadamanthus who had condemned her, this little,
wheezy, pot-bellied 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!”




 George III

His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of
the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the
equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted
almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision.
They were shadows, no more--little blots of bile, too minute to
intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a
bodily condition, a source of irritation.

The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and
the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of
cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to
earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King’s
heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and
bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements
about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He
talked incessantly to himself--prayers, expostulations, even
blasphemies--though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting
him persistently--the thought that his reason was once more succumbing
to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year
of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that
apprehension. Providence had then thought fit to restore him, after a
few terrible weeks of possession; would not a renewed attack signify
his proved unworthiness of Its favours, and his abandonment by It to
the powers of darkness, this time for all eternity?

He uttered a sudden cry, and, sinking into a chair, covered his face
with his hands. The storm screamed above him, dashing its torrents on
the glass. Only that fragile glaze stood between him and the besieging
horrors. In a minute, in a moment, they must be through, and he would
be claimed by them and damned for evermore.

He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny!
Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet
and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to
honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will
was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He
should never call him a coward.

He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The
sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There
was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he
could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and
kin--torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of
spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing
visages.

To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness
of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so
to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no
hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so
isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it
not appalling to be a king!

Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled.
He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he
heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage
from his head and stood erect.


The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a
hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky.
And in their blossoming the faces were gone.

And then in a moment he saw and understood. The wind had fallen, the
sky was full of stars: they laughed and twinkled above the twinkling
city. He was looking from a window of St. James’s Palace across the
Mall----

What had happened? What had been affecting him a moment ago? He
breathed a prayer of fervid thanksgiving to Heaven for his quick
emergence from that terrific shadow--called down by what? He believed
he penetrated the cause. It was only yesterday that the _pourparlers_
for his marriage had been begun; and was he so inhuman, or so
superhuman, that, unlike all other men, he might experience no shock,
no temporary unbalance of reason, in the immediate prospect of that
tremendous change? Nay, was not the prospect more distracting for him
than for most? seeing that no sentiment warmer than duty--duty to his
people, duty to his succession--coloured its cold inevitability. He
had heard of men, though bond-slaves to love, killing themselves in
their inability to face that more lifelong bondage. What wonder that,
in his case, a contract so based on policy should have terrified his
reason in the thought?

Well--he was well now, he was well. The loveless lot of kings? That
had been the chimera of a fancy momentarily diseased. No love for
kings? He laughed softly to himself, and, crossing his arms on the
sill, leaned down his face into them.

And then instantly a dream came to him. The stars of the sky--first
one, then another, then dripping streams of them--descended from their
high places and, enshrining themselves in crystal, became the lamps of
the city. Faster and faster they poured, until he was treading a very
milky-way of radiance. He could hardly see his path for the brightness
as he walked--for, yes, he was walking! Half dazzled, with the glowing
smile of all things reflected on his face, he pushed his way through
the golden mist. It was jewelled and spangled everywhere with
glittering thoughts; one might hardly know it for the London of one’s
daily experience. He remembered when he had first encountered this
transformation--he, a serious, well-intentioned young prince,
resolute, in his sober, unimaginative way, to justify his election
before the face of Heaven--and how of a sudden some spirit exquisite
beyond conception had usurped in him the place of duty.

No, not usurped, but sanctified. Self-fulfilled through love, his debt
to Heaven and his country would find him tenfold strengthened in its
discharge.

Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent
glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the
thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He
had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a
single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal
discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits
of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love
creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his
meanest subject?

His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were
incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he
seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify
one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s
Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle
of the Market--throughout the whole short route it was always the
same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until
at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their
insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet,
possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the
goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain
it.

And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that
it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the
window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty
place.

With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he
all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of
a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a
passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a
large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks
and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For
whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the
very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and
choked over the whispered daring. And what then--what thereafter?
Surely no dream?

Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him
again--faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the
clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and
all congregated without relation to the sequence of time.
_Time?_--Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a
moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the
eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married,
he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long
been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months
ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the
terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and
crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst
them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to
intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken
this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they
were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and
beat with frantic hands upon the closed door----

A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped
gentleman paused beside the King.

“What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control
yourself.”

His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not
standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house
in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s
Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle,
beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement--an old,
old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the
world.

“You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the
cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is
it you need?”

The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head,
muttering and mumbling.

“I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little--only a
new suit of clothes. But they must be black--black, in memory of
George the Third.”




The Hero of Waterloo

Colonel Manton put up his rod and demanded to be set ashore. It had
been his first experience of coarse fishing on the river, and it had
not proved to his taste. It was not that the perch had been distant
or the chub unapproachable. On the contrary, the place having been
ground-baited overnight, the sport had been excellent. It was the
worms and one other thing which decided him. He had been present at
Talavera, at Ciudad Rodrigo, at Badajos, at Vittoria, at Quatre Bras,
at Waterloo; he had seen as much carnage as most men, but this
bloodless impaling of lob-worms on hooks, and then casting them, so
transfixed, to lie writhing on the river bottom for an indefinite
period at the end of a ledger-line, offended his sense of fitness. It
was not, it seemed to him, playing the game. The worms had no chance,
and they could not bite back. He hated to sit there and think of what
was going on under the quiet water, and the reflection gained nothing
in relish from the fact that, by refusing to soil his own hands with
the viscous contortions of the creatures, he must appear, in
delegating that operation to the boatman, to torture by deputy, like
the most cowardly of Eastern despots. And so when, as presently
happened, this same stolid deputy, in “disgorging” an obstinate hook
from a barbel’s throat, tore away---- But it is enough to say that the
Colonel put down his rod and demanded there and then to be set ashore.

There was no gainsaying him, of course. It was sufficient that he was
the guest of a distinguished General living at Datchet; but in
addition to this the Colonel’s personal actions invited no criticism.
He fished--as he walked, as he rode, as he appeared on all secular
occasions--in a dark blue wasp-waisted frock-coat with frogs, in tight
nankeen trousers strapped under neat insteps, in a stiff collar and
full black stock, in a tall hat with a brim so crescented that its
front peak looked like the “nasal” of a Norman helmet. And for the
rest he carried himself and his white moustache with the conscious
authority of a cock of a hundred fights.

The boatman put him ashore on the riverbank some half-mile below
Datchet, towards which village he immediately addressed his steps. The
path was lonely and unfrequented, and it gave the Colonel some
surprise to observe, as he turned a clump of bushes, a fashionable old
beau toddling along it in front of him. In a few moments the latter
paused, nonplussed, at a stile, and the Colonel came up with him.

The pedestrian was a man of uncouth bulk but distinguished mien. He
wore a black frock-coat of a somewhat military cut, with a rich fur
collar. Curly auburn locks, obviously artificial, showed beneath the
brim of his glossy hat, and accented somewhat ghastfully the puffy
pallor of a face whose texture betrayed its age. His eyes had a
glutinous, half-blind appearance; his loose lower lip perpetually
trembled. He peered at the new-comer, panting a good deal, as if the
sudden apparition had shaken his nerves.

“If I may venture, sir,” said Colonel Manton, and proffered his arm.
The other accepted it to mount the stile. It was an ungraceful
business, and, once over, he stood, with his hands to his sides,
vibrating heavily, like a worn-out engine, to his own respirations.
Presently he was sufficiently recovered to speak.

“A damned obstruction--a damned obstruction! Cannot I leave my
carriage a moment to walk round by the water but this annoyance must
appear in my path?”

“A villainous stile,” said the Colonel. “We will indict it for a
trespass.”

He was a reasonable man, and he felt the absurdity of the complaint.
But, to his surprise, his sarcasm missed fire.

“Do so, do so,” said the old gentleman, and took his arm again, as it
might have been his own walking-stick. They went on together, and in a
little the stranger had opened a conversation with all the effrontery
in the world.

“My boy, what’s your rank?” said he. “I perceive you are a soldier.”

The officer stared, and drew himself up.

“Colonel Manton, sir, at your service,” he answered distantly.

He was surprised; but the man was old, near seventy by his appearance,
and very possibly from his cut a retired veteran like himself.
Familiarity from a general, say, would be pardonable, and even kindly.
Besides, he did not dislike the implied suggestion of juniority.

“Hey!” said the stranger--“retired?”

“Yes, sir, retired.”

“Brevet rank?”

“Brevet be damned!” said Colonel Manton hotly. “I owe my promotion,
sir, if you wish to know, to Waterloo.”

The stranger glanced at him with a curiously sly look, and pinched the
arm on which his own fingers rested.

“What!” he said, “were you there?”

“I had the honour, sir,” said the Colonel grandiloquently, “of playing
my little part in that Homeric contest.”

“Whose division, hey?”

“Picton’s--Pack’s brigade. You are a little--you will excuse my saying
it--particular.”

“Certainly I will, my boy. Wounded--hey?”

A distinct flush suffused the Colonel’s cheek.

“Wounded--yes,” he replied shortly.

The old fellow nudged him confidentially.

“Tell me,” he said--“how?”

“Look here--you must forgive me, you know,” exploded the Colonel; “but
I must point out that we are strangers. Still--as a
fellow-campaigner--if that is the case--may I ask, sir, if _you_ were
at Waterloo?”

The other laughed enjoyingly.

“_Was_ I?” he said. “To be sure I was. You had all good reason for
knowing it.”

Colonel Manton’s eyes opened. Here was a momentous implication.
Evidently he had to do with some great general of division, though the
boast sounded a little extravagant and unmilitary. He ran over in his
mind a dozen possible names, but without success. And then the thought
occurred to him: “Good reason for knowing it? What the devil! Is it
possible he was on the other side?”

The idea seemed too preposterous for belief; the stranger was so
obviously British. Who, in wonder’s name, could he be, then? Hill,
Macdonnell, Saltoun, Uxbridge, Vandeleur, Somersett, Hackett--all
divisional or brigadier-generals? He could not identify him, of his
knowledge, with any one of these. The Iron Duke himself? He had never
been brought into very close personal contact with the great man, but
naturally he was familiar with his features. Could it be possible that
time had so fused and blunted those that their characteristic contour
had degenerated into this scarce distinguishable pulp? Prosperity, he
knew, could play strange tricks with countenances, yet a _volte-face_
so revolutionary seemed incredible. And yet who else but the Duke had
been on that day as indispensable as implied? But it was conceivable
that some might have so regarded themselves--that certain heads might
have been turned by their share in the success of so stupendous a
victory.

Colonel Manton had been living abroad on his half-pay for some years,
and, until the occasion of this visit during the summer of 1830, had
dwelt for long a stranger to his native land. He could but suppose
that he had in a measure lost the clue, through subsequent
developments, to old events. It remained clear only that he was in the
presence of one who had, or believed himself to have, contributed
signally to the success of the epoch-making battle. And that must be
enough for him. He spoke thenceforth as a subordinate to his
commanding officer.

“I beg your indulgence, sir,” he said. “I have been absent from my
country for a considerable time, and features once familiar elude me.
You asked about my wound. It is a ridiculous matter, and I recall it
without enthusiasm. The fact is that, when d’Erlon’s guns were
pounding us before the advance, a ball smashed the head of a sergeant
standing near me, and one of the fellow’s cursed double-teeth was
driven into my neck. It was not enough to cripple my fighting power,
but I would have given a dozen of my own to boast a more honourable
scar.”

The stranger chuckled.

“Scars are not the only guarantee of valour,” he said.

The Colonel ventured: “You brought away some of your own, sir?”

“No,” said the old fellow. “No; Wellington and I got off scot-free.”

The Colonel dared again: “Were you, may I ask, on his personal staff?”

“Well, yes,” said the stranger, chuckling still more, “I suppose you
might call it that.”

Suppose? Colonel Manton gaped. It was positively a matter of history
that not one of that staff had escaped death or mutilation. The other
may have noticed his perplexity, for he turned on him with an air of
sudden annoyance.

“You haven’t the assurance to question my word, I hope, sir?” he
demanded.

“Certainly not,” answered the Colonel.

“I could give you convincing proof,” said the stranger. “Did the
Commander-in-Chief--now did he or did he not--visit General Blücher
at Wavre the night before the battle to make sure of his
co-operation?”

“It is a disputed point, sir,” said the Colonel. “I believe that even
his Grace has been known to contradict himself in the matter, saying
at one time that he would never have fought without Blücher’s
explicit promise to back him up, at another flatly contradicting the
report that he saw the Prussian general on the night before the
battle.”

“And he did not, my boy,” sniggered the old fellow triumphantly, “for
his interview with him was after midnight, and therefore on the day
_of_ the battle. I ought to know, _for I sent him off there myself_.”

He cackled into such a spasm of laughter that the convulsion caught
his wind.

“O, my chest!” he wheezed and gasped, “my miserable chest! I’m the
most wretched creature on earth. But it’s nothing, nothing--the
youngest fellows are subject to it.” He coughed and wiped his eyes
with a heavily scented handkerchief. “Yes,” he said presently, “yes,
Wellington was a sound workaday general, a fine soldier, an inspired
commissary, but, of genius--h’m! We need only suggest, Manty my boy,
that he was well advised. The man at his elbow, hey? You need not
mention it, you know, but the real hero of Waterloo--hey, d’ye see?
Keep it to yourself; there were reasons against its being
divulged--you understand? What, my boy!”

The Colonel stared before him as if hypnotised; he stumbled in his
walk. Was it possible to mistake the implication--that the laurels
ought by rights to have adorned the brow of this stranger beside him?
He felt like one whose faith had suddenly exploded of its own
intensity, leaving his breast a blackened shell. Could there actually
have been another, of whom he had never heard, at the Duke’s right
hand on that tremendous day, the presiding but unconfessed genius of
it? He had heard speak of the Corsican’s little red familiar. Was his
great rival, were possibly all commanding intellects, so
supernaturally provided?

He was really a simple man, with a mind ruled to certain prescriptive
lines of conduct. He glanced askance at his companion, who was smiling
and murmuring to himself. Who in Heaven’s name could he be? and why
had he selected _him_ for his astounding confidences? For all his own
fearless rectitude, an uncanny feeling began to possess him. He was
glad, in turning a corner, to see the end of the path, and the head of
a waiting coachman showing above the hedge. And the next moment they
had emerged on to the village green.

A barouche stood there, with a bare-headed gentleman standing at its
door. The liveries of the servants were scarlet, and a mounted man in
a scarlet embroidered coat waited a little apart. The gentleman came
forward.

“Will your Majesty be pleased to ascend?” he asked.

The King dropped the Colonel’s arm, and appeared on the instant to
forget all about him.

“Yes, Watty; yes, certainly, my boy,” he said. “Is that the fiery
chariot?”




 Beau Brummell

George Bryan Brummell, Esq., his Britannic Majesty’s Consul in the
Norman city of Caen, was about to entertain. He had given instructions
to his attendant that great company was expected, together with a list
of the distinguished names to be announced; and by eight o’clock his
room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre was prepared, the tables for whist
were set out and the _bougies_ lighted. Staring, half hypnotised, into
the radiance of one of these placed on the mantelpiece, the Beau’s
eyes blinked, and the Beau himself faced about with a puzzled look and
a suspicious sniff.

“What is that smell, Loustalot?”

He spoke to the attendant, who in his little black _jaquette_ and blue
apron looked very much like what, in fact, he was--a waiter at the
hotel. The expression on this man’s face scintillated between gravity
and mockery; the tone of his voice hovered between audacity and
deference.

“It will doubtless be the soot in the chimney, Monsieur,” he said
coolly.

“H’m! You are sure it is not a candle in need of snuffing?”

“The best wax, Monsieur? Monsieur speaks as if he burnt filthy tallow.
Monsieur’s nostrils are more sensitive than discriminating. _A, là!_
What it is to be bred to this imperishable refinement!”

He was busy while he spoke in snuffing the wick, and in privately
depositing the reeking instrument on the hob.

“I go to announce the company, Monsieur,” he said. “In the meantime,
if I were Monsieur, I would not spit too much on the carpet.”

“An insolent rascal!” muttered the Beau to himself as the man
disappeared. “I shall have to discharge him.”

He had, however, so completely forgotten his resolve the next minute,
that when Loustalot, returning, thrust his head round the door, he
could not for the moment recall who he was.

“O! by the by, Monsieur,” said the man, “Monsieur Magdelaine, the
confectioner, desires to know if you will settle with him your little
account for Maraschino and Biscuits de Rheims.”

The Beau smiled, waving his hand.

“To be sure--when it is full moon. Tell him so, my friend.”

“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I
cannot reproduce it.”

Brummell burst into a scream of rage.

“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”

The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant
waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls,
the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes--all with an expression of the
most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked
a positive sigh of transport.

“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish!
But it’s devilish expensive--devilish.”

He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little
stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:

 “_Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,_
 _At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;_
 _Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,_
 _For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!_”

He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.

“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye--the poor butterfly,
and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best--to fold one’s
plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die
and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time
yet--poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”

But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his
face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far
too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light
returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification
beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he
reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like
an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false
friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He
had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to
hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original
ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly
might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite
perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate!
What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s
debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness,
perhaps?--O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the
immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with
a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate
himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an
intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance
of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would
never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had
always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to
forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such
possible demoralisation.

Loustalot threw open the door wide, and announced in a loud voice,
“Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire!”

With a bright smile and extended hands the Consul tripped forward.

“Ah! my dear Duchess,” he said, “you are welcome a thousand times. A
chair, Loustalot.” (He seated himself close beside the lovely
visitor.) “I was dreaming of old age,” he said, “and imperishable
youth comes to rebuke me. Your Grace, more loving-kind than Aurora,
once bestowed immortality on me, but with a better percipience than
the goddess when she doomed her poor Tithonus to perpetual dotage.
This is no dry grasshopper’s note, but the same liquid cackle that
greeted our sallies at Chatsworth. Do you remember the French Marquis,
whose hair-powder we dusted with sugar, and how at the
breakfast-table, the heat and _sueur_ having melted it, the flies
settled until the poor man’s head was like a plum pudding? _Hélas!_
the jocund spirit survives; only the environment dejects. But now that
your Grace----”

“Milord Byron!” announced Loustalot at the door. The Beau rose, and
advanced with infinite courtesy. Always the pink of breeding, he had
yet an especial part to play before this pale, distinguished guest,
whose compliment on the “exquisite propriety” of his dress and conduct
had once reached his ears, never to be forgotten.

“I greet your lordship,” he said, “with a particular confidence, since
for the nonce a goddess does the honours of my poor abode. Ah! that
Sèvres biscuit figure--a girl bathing, after Falconet. It will appeal
to you--a new acquisition. You know my fancy for canes and snuff-boxes
and china--trivial pursuits, but more profitable than fox-hunting.”

“His Grace the Duke of Bedford!” bellowed Loustalot.

Brummell, having deposited the poet in a third seat, hurried to the
door.

“Bedford, my dear fellow,” he whispered, horrified, “do you realise
that the collar of your coat is turned up at the back? It recalls to
me the most supreme moment in my life. I was due at Lady Dungannon’s
reception, and circumstances had forced me--hush! the admission is
inexpressibly painful--to, to take a hackney coach. However, I
believed that I had successfully evaded detection, and had mounted the
stairs into full view of the drawing-room, when a servant whispered in
my ear, ‘Sir--do you know that you have got a straw in your shoe?’
Conceive, if you can, my horror. I shall never forget that moment.”

The memory, indeed, appeared so to weigh upon him, that for a little
he forgot his company, and sat apart from it in dreary abstraction.
The name of Mr. Chig Chester being called withdrew him from it, and he
rose gaily.

“Our redoubtable gamester and sportsman,” he said, returning with the
visitor. “We have material here for a table, Duchess. But remember, in
Caen we play only for love and crackers.”

He dissolved into a fit of chuckling laughter, until the Lady Jersey
was announced. And then came others--my Lord Petersham, the Duke of
Rutland, Scrope Davies, Mrs. O’Neill, the Duchess of Gordon, and half
a dozen more. The little room was soon too full for its capacity; but
the spirits of the courtly host surmounted all difficulties and made a
positive grace of inconvenience. He tripped, he chatted, he was
perpetually talking and on the move, exchanging badinage with one,
recalling incidents of past happy days with another, pointing out the
treasures of his modest sanctum to a third--a picture by Morland, a
clock by Verdier, a Louis XV _bonheur du jour_. Exile, he wished to
show, had not dulled his appreciation of the beautiful, or shaken his
position as a wit and supreme arbiter of the elegancies. Now as always
it was a privilege to claim his acquaintanceship, to be seen on his
arm; now as always his smile or his frown could make or break.

In the midst, a candle guttered heavily on the mantelpiece, and a
little girl, the landlord’s petted one, ran into the room.

“Monsieur Brummell,” she cried, “Monsieur Brummell, you have not yet
given me the sou you promised for _nanan_.”

He caught her by the arm.

“Hush!” he said. “Do you not see the company?”

She stared round with wide, wondering eyes.

“What company, Monsieur? I see only a row of chairs!”

“Look again, Babette.”

“I am looking hard, Monsieur.”

The Beau, releasing his grip, sank into a seat. Before him on the wall
loomed a cheap mirror. He saw the reflection in it of a broken,
toothless old man, semi-palsied, dirty, degraded. His scratch-wig,
poked awry, was foul with rancid grease; his shoes were lustreless and
in holes. He raised dim, wandering eyes, and marked the squalid,
unfurnished walls, the one whist-table with a broken leg, the three
common shells on the mantelpiece flanked by a couple of reechy tallow
candles in brass sconces. And--yes, the row of empty chairs. Staring
like one awakened, he uttered a dreary little laugh, and beckoned to
the child.

“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope
it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing,
child--playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead
everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one
lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers,
which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”




 Paganini

It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific
secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in
the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of
melody, that monster Paganini--and more astounding, more inexplicable
than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo;
he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of
his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was
here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates
of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s
overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate
solution of the mystery.

What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the
source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers--nothing more nor less. But,
for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul
for full ten months--ever since that night, in fact, when he had first
heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night
onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from
town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing
and lusting at once.

Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as
well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the
sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and
the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as
much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it
surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman
passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one
listened, but temptation--melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things
forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master,
it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind
through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could
the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his
responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his
suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with
haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious
fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the
Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.

And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great
discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced
himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which
the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.

It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel,
like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of
all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s
custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions
abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of
darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser
young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the
Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able
to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the
party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who
had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his
hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long
prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by
fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild
apostrophisings of the _thing_, held up in worshipping hands before
two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the
mystery--only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as
yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the
Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.

One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed
from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always,
among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend.
It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man,
her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to
exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable
disappearance of the two. He believed the story--and he did not
believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the
shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its
bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which
pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either
way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil,
to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying
himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of _being_ the
instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.

And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before
the expectant house.

Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion
associated with its production--an impossible grotesque, like a clown
got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood
in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind
could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular;
his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with
two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled
upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black
swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly
short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the
orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right
hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle,
dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon
his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.

Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his
eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And
then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious
sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.

Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It
was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to
bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch,
alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of
utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought
his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself--somehow this thing
must end, and to-morrow.

In the late morning he rose--to ominous skies and a sensation of
stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s
hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs--to fast at times, to
gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated
priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of
energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether
for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with
the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac
figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage
northwards. He hesitated a moment--then started in pursuit.

Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men--an itinerant butcher, a
bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and
the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm
against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap,
carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the
other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the
bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his
ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his
shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve
alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but
himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like
a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the
butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered
prayer, sprang back into the roadway--and collided with Baronte, who
pushed him aside and sped on.

“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed
deridingly.

“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said
he. “The second was the true devil.”

He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he
hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the
south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through
which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning
northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with
what purpose he himself did not know.

It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And
all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of
rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung
water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him,
gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering
peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the
storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.

A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte,
panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a
brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it
laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies;
it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an
answering cry the young man ran round--and staggered to a stop before
the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the
tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the
black Master himself.

It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it
hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed
grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.

“_Ah, póvero me!_” screamed Paganini. “Why did I forget the bag!
_Eccomi perdûto!_ I am lost--I am lost!”

With a gasp Baronte stepped back, undiscovered of the other. The next
moment he was racing down the hill towards Florence.

At the door of the hotel, wild and drenched, he ran upon young Varano,
and, clutching him by the shoulders, glared into his eyes.

“Quick!” he panted. “He is up there on the hill--I have seen him--and
without his fetish. Quick! Our opportunity has arrived.”

Varano nodded pallidly.

“I know,” he whispered. “I was coming to look for you.”

Together they stole up to the Maestro’s chamber; opened the unlatched
door like thieves; entered, and discovered the forgotten bag lying
upon a chair. Dreading he knew not what terrific revelation, Baronte
pressed the snap and disclosed----

Down in the vestibule a moment later they ran upon the landlord.

“_Benedetto, mi’ amico_,” said Varano smoothly, “can you tell us what
is ‘Leroy’?”

“Of a verity, Signore,” answered the man. “‘Leroy’ is a quack remedy,
a sedative, and very good for relieving pain. You should ask the great
Maestro Paganini, whom it is my distinction to lodge, and who applies
it to a bowel complaint from which he has long suffered terribly. He
is never without a bottle or two of it in his little black bag.”




 Napoleon

It was the 4th 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 mastermind,
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.




 Leonardo da Vinci

“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes
me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the
resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine
sense--divine creation by deputy, that is to say--whereby the love
that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the
flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the
earnest of such a meeting--a moment rarely possible, but still
possible to any union--and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his
hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even
as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was
withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.

The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to
look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just
perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.

“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the
mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this
earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near
fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but
one in all the world.”

He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those
same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.

Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for
the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a
quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel,
tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and
drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ--among the
people, as was meet--Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an
angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother
was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride
in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths
for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never
let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different
thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé,
had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last
Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle
Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously
sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing
beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great
Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of
innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.

The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery
refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room,
and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly
outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ
Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a
figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream
materialising.

Before this figure da Vinci, tall, comely, a rapt look on his
beardless, keen-cut features, the solemnity of the riddle in his eyes,
stood one morning, his forefinger to his lip, and pondered--pondered.
His model for the Christ stood at his shoulder.

“Ho, Lucio!” he said suddenly, like a man awakening; “you suggest it
is thus; and perhaps it is thus. How, then, to elude the riddle which
eludes me?”

“Why not paint me so, Master, with my lids down?”

Leonardo glanced quickly at the speaker; then, raising his left hand
with the brushes and the pallet in it, selected here and there and
began to work. Presently, as he modelled with deft fingers,
half-murmured fragments of speech came from him.

“What is thine age, Lucio? I forget.”

“Yet under twenty-five, Master.”

“Why, a miracle, Lucio! The bloom of thee; the round chin of thee; the
golden dusky wings of thy hair! What ensures such youth in manhood?
Innocence? A mother’s love? Art thou very innocent, Lucio?”

“Who can be wholly innocent, Master, with the stain of that original
sin in him?”

“True. Yet, for all that, a good son, a pious son. Show me thine eyes
again. Ah, the shy revealing! Art afraid it will out--the answer to
the riddle?”

“No, Master.”

“Once more, then. There! Now keep them so.”

Presently he spoke again:

“Your poor mother, Lucio--she mends?”

“She mends a little, Messer.”

“All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.”

“The story, Messer!”

“Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of
it--how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate,
promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the
Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next
to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing
that was--a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her
child’s and her husband’s hair; you know--or doth the story lie? It
relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded
to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love
of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who
owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage,
fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much
hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon.
Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There
ends the story--and she mends, you say?”

“Faith is the great physician, Messer.”

“Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.”

He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence
ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes.

“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not
find my Christ!”

He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way
he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a
yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for
all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed
child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering
escape heavenwards.

“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his
small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the
Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”

From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his
labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his
former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into
the mist of half-remembered things.

Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious
as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One
vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for
ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall
thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way
pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme
creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished--the varnishing
and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.

Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged
Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the
artist; years rolled by--five years, ten years, and more--and still
the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two
heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of
darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the
composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last
to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models--the
one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other--Judas. Of the latter
he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the
former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if
he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke
laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited.
More years went by.

At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke
Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo
looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted
for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a
tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without
merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling
mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the
executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged
_contadino_ with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and
threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo
exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!”
halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed
to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of
death.”

It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence,
bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and
thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his
heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied
him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and
rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to
reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and
wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of
ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled,
and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And
thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this
monstrous life.

He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to
assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a
vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A
Judas--with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and
indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do--or
would it--perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement.
The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy
with the debased thing--reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.

And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the
refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might
consider him in his actual relation to the composition--whence, still
flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ--and his
voice came in a moment like a breaking water:

“He lied to Heaven and his mother, Messer; he had never hung the
little gold and crystal reliquary at the shrine of the Beata Virgine
in Saronno!”

Leonardo started violently and faced round. He stood gazing rigid at
the speaker, like one stricken by some mortal memory.

“He was a hypocrite and a libertine,” cried the apparition, wildly
striking its breast. “He had never left Milan. He had hung the
reliquary about the neck of a little evil courtesan of the Ghetto, and
with it had bought of her the hour’s bliss he had long and greedily
coveted. But his mother, believing him, was cured through her faith;
and, when she was restored, she herself made a pilgrimage of gratitude
to the shrine, and she discovered what alone was to be found
there--the killing truth. And thence she returned, the false life
ebbing from her drop by drop, and, coming home, she read the
confirmation in his eyes and she died of it. And you could not read
it, Messer, as a mother came to; but the riddle spoiled your
Christ--as it need not spoil your Judas. I am well portrayed at
last--I am well.”

He ceased, dropping his head; and Leonardo found his voice in a cry:

“Thou art Lucio!”

And the other muttered:

“Yes, I am Lucio, who came to thee for Christ and remain’st as Judas.”

Then Leonardo said:

“He forgave them on the cross. As thou look’st towards Him whom in
thine own image thou hast betrayed, so shalt thou find mercy, even
thou. In Judas’ eyes I find my Christ at last.”




 Wu Taotsz, the Celestial
 Painter

In his fortress-palace at Nankin sat the Emperor Shun-yuen. It was a
torrid day of the year 750, and the Emperor was fretful. Surfeit of
power, he was reflecting, did not spell content. On the contrary, like
lesser surfeits, it discomposed. It was a natural paradox, perhaps,
that his seeming so full should make life appear so empty. He could
not, for all his omnipotence, both eat his cake and have it.

The Emperor drew his imperial yellow silk surtout querulously about
him, and “wah’d” snappishly. What was wrong with everything? As the
third or fourth of his dynasty--the Tang, now long matured in a
peaceful despotism--he possessed the lordship of all the good that
existed. And yet the good was not good enough--it was failing somehow
to satisfy. And why? He wished, by the celestial dragon, that he could
tell!

Shun-yuen, as the product and successor of warriors, of their kin but
not of their kind, was really, had he known it, in the throes of a new
birth. There was represented in him at the moment the line of
demarcation between the forces of the blood and of the intellect. He
stood far enough away from the spirit which had enthroned his dynasty
to have developed wholly in the ameliorating atmosphere of the peace
which that spirit had won for itself; and yet there survived in him a
virility which vaguely aspired to new fields of conquest. Surely there
was something yet to be gained from the world beside territory and
power; surely to be constituted Emperor of the Sun was not to be
condemned to eternal stagnation in its glare? The germ of unrecognised
thoughts and aspirations moved in him like a wriggling indigestion.

Suddenly in some near corridor of the Palace there rose a sound of
repressed but excited voices, awaking a sympathetic response in his
own restlessness. He attributed the disturbance to the general
agitation evoked by his condition, since any imperial distress was
automatically reflected in the imperial household, which was
constituted very much on the lines of a hive; and it was with a thrill
of interest, therefore, that he observed the entrance and reverential
approach of his Chamberlain Chung-chi, an official of the second rank
of the opaque red button and the three peacock feathers in an agate
tube.

“Speak,” said the Emperor, ready to chastise for a disappointment, but
longing for something novel.

Chung-chi, prostrating himself at the imperial feet, and bowing his
forehead nine times to the floor, raised his fat face and obeyed:

“Light of the day, and supreme effulgence, under One, of the entire
universe, on whom once to gaze in thy quintessential splendour is to
be condemned to perpetual blindness, know that there has been seized
in the town a stranger capable of the impossible heresy of asserting
that there is on the earth a power greater than the Emperor himself.”

Shun-yuen sat erect, a sudden excitement tingling in his veins.

“Bring this slave before us,” he said, “that we may face and wither
him in his blasphemy.”

Chung-chi rose, backed from the presence, disappeared, and returned in
a moment, ushering in a man under guard. The stranger, offering no
obeisance, stood up calm and fearless before the Emperor.

He was a small man, and old; yet the age in him, certified by a
thousand minute wrinkles, seemed somehow discounted by the glow of a
couple of brown eyes, as glossy and visionary as a child’s. His feet
and ankles were bare; his short trousers and waistless blouse were of
the ignoble butchers’ blue; his hair was clipped close to his
scalp--for in those days the Tartar imposition of the pigtail was not,
nor had women yet adopted the decadent fashion of hoofs. Over the
stranger’s shoulder hung an open wallet, stuffed with brushes and
pigments.

“Thy name?” demanded the Emperor.

“I am called Wu Taotsz, the celestial painter,” answered the stranger
in a voice like a clear echo.

The Emperor’s lip curled slightly. This was one of the despised
crafts, as yet held in contempt. Even at that date, to shine in
letters or learning was the surest road to distinction, which is worth
recording of a people warlike enough in the eighth century, however
their reputation for arms may have suffered since. A uniform did not
with them excuse and glorify a multitude of inanities; the fighting
man got his due and no more. But still, however the intellectual arts
were respected, the art of painting had not come into its own.

“Thou bearest thy head high,” said the Emperor. “Wilt thou remain
celestial if we dock thee of it?”

He alluded to the common belief that to be deprived of one’s head, the
seat of understanding, was to be disgraced beyond acceptance in
paradise.

“Aye, even then,” answered the stranger.

The Emperor stared.

“By what authority?” he cried.

“By the power of Imagination,” said Wu Taotsz, “which is greater under
God than all.”

“Greater than I am?”

“Greater than thou, O Emperor!”

Shun-yuen gave a little gasp.

“Thou hast said it,” he spake. “Who or what, then, is this
Imagination?”

“It is that which penetrates and possesses even me, Wu Taotsz.”

“Thee? Then it is thou who art greater than I?”

“It is I, by virtue of that power.”

“What, then, can this Imagination do that I cannot do?”

“There is nothing which it cannot do, Shun-yuen. At its summons the
world crawls prostrate at its feet; the Emperors bow their necks;
wealth, beauty, power throng to worship it; nay, it can reach down the
starry bodies from the skies and weld them into a single sphere, as
potters knead clay, incomparably stupendous. Ask me what it can do!”

The Emperor glanced about him. His eyes had suddenly assumed a
perplexed and troubled look; he shook his head slightly. The vague
emotions and aspirations which had lately dejected him returned with
redoubled force, and he thought, What is to seek here that this
Imagination could perchance supply?

Suddenly his face brightened, and when all thought he was about to
condemn the presumptuous madman to most exquisite tortures, he smiled
upon Wu Taotsz, and spoke:

“Is it conceivable that in all these years we have not learned to
honour lovely Peace with other than a fortress for her habitation?
Mine eyes are dim with dreams of things I cannot shape--gold walls,
and tumbling waters, and shining birds, and the misty loom of turrets
clouding a vast space. Can Imagination build me such a shrine for
Peace?”

“Aye, and more than thou dreamest,” answered the painter.

Shun-yuen rose. He bade the attendants honour Wu Taotsz, and minister
to him, and give him all that he needed.

“Only the bare wall of a quiet room, and much rice-water, and my
paints and brushes,” said the stranger, his eyes gleaming.

And he was allotted such a room as he desired; and, by his wish, none,
not even the Emperor, came near him while he wrought. But every day
Shun-yuen looked from his Palace windows upon the surrounding
emptiness, and wondered when he was to see arise there the first
evidences of the glorious fabric which Wu Taotsz was to build for him
of his Imagination. And still every morning his soul was unsatisfied
and the waste glared desolate.

Now in the meantime speculation was rife as to the stranger and his
genesis. Some believed him to be a wizard embryo hatched from the
sands of the great river; others that he was the spirit of the kilns
where they baked the earth Kaolin into the porcelain which, in its
hues and forms of increasing beauty, was coming to express more and
more day by day the creative genius of the age. But of all these
surmises Wu Taotsz was unconscious, as he worked on alone in his empty
room.

And at last one morning he sent for the Emperor.

Eagerly Shun-yuen, dispensing, for the first time in his life, with
forms and punctilio, hurried to obey the summons, and entered the room
alone. And instantly he uttered a cry of rapture, and stood like one
half stupefied. For there before him stood realised the pleasance of
his dreams, only a thousand times transfigured.

He was gazing upon the clustered minarets of a palace such as his soul
had never conceived, a fabric all builded of cloud and amber and foam,
and yet as solid as the sward from which it sprang. There, in the
midst of heavenly gardens which receded down terrace on terrace of
loveliness to low hills and a blue horizon, the pearly structure
sprang into a sky of lazulite; and to the golden gates of the main
pavilion a flight of marble steps ascended.

Rousing himself as if from a trance of ecstasy, the Emperor spake:

“Who builded this, Wu Taotsz?”

“Imagination,” was the answer.

“Bid, then, Imagination to make the winds blow, the river sing, the
birds warble.”

“They are vocal to my ears, Shun-yuen, and beautiful are the forms
within the house.”

At that moment a droning fly settled with a flop upon the golden gate.
The emperor started violently, and cried out, “A fly, and so far yet
so plain!”

He hurried forward, peered closely, put out his hand and turned, with
a scream of fury.

“Wretch! This is no more than a painted picture.”

“To Imagination it is real,” said Wu Taotsz.

The Emperor, his face orange with rage, leapt and drew his sword.

“Impostor,” he shrieked, “let Imagination, so it can, preserve thee
from my wrath.”

He flew at the artist, who sped before him, across and round the room,
until, reaching the foot of the painted steps, up the flight sprang Wu
Taotsz, and, with a laugh, disappeared within the golden gates.

Following blindly in his anger, the Emperor rushed at the steps,
staggered, recovered himself, gave a mortal gasp, and fell back.
Before his eyes was just the blank wall of the room. The Palace and Wu
Taotsz had vanished together.




 Cleopatra and the Decurion

On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping
promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies.
The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait,
and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like
gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and
chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of
Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like
a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before
the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for
all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed,
and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.

Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his
retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his
leman’s treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought
perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment.
The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir
and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that
crushed her--to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final
days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in
his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.

One night they sat at supper in the Palace, a fierce nucleus, where
enthroned, to all the blazing splendour of the hall. It was so alight
with torches that the marble columns on which those hung aloft looked,
in their deep reflections in the pavement, as if they were rooted in
hell fire. Not a sleek Nubian crossing the floor with a golden dish in
his hands but had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping step with him,
like a devil reversed and busy in that under inferno. There were far
faint cries in the air--of a doomed city, of some nearer
anguish--punctuating the throb and swoon of harps. The swaying of
peacock fans in soft undulating arms stirred the floating incense,
lest the rank breath of torture should enter and overpower it. There
was not a man or woman there whose heart, for all the sensuous
glamour, was void of fear--unless it were, perhaps, the Decurion
Dentatus. He was young, cold, beautiful as Antinous--a Græco-Roman of
the heroic type--and he loved his master Antony.

A Hebe, sweet in years and looks, filled the wine cups of the King and
Queen. Antony, lifting his, hesitated on the draught. His eyes,
already inflamed, sought his partner’s, half covertly, half
challengingly. Cleopatra laughed, and putting her glass to her full
lips, drank. She followed a formula in doing so, conceding it
agreeably to the very madness of his passion. He was haunted, since
his defeat, with the thought that she would poison him to save
herself. And yet he loved her. It was not the first or the last time
in the history of worship that the supreme egotism had evoked the
supreme adoration.

Presently, amidst some amorous fondlings, the Queen took the lily
chaplet from her hair and shredded a petal or two from it into her
lord’s wine.

“Do you the same by mine, my soul,” she whispered, “and let us drink
the very perfume of each other’s wit.”

His eyes burning, he lifted the wreath from his brow and obeyed,
dropping a flower into her cup. As he raised his own to drink, she
stopped him, coaxed the vessel from his hand, and calling the little
Hebe to her, bade her take it.

“Thou art fair,” she said. “My lord pledges thee. Drink to his passing
fancy.”

Like one of those woodland growths which, being torn, flush a faint,
slow sapphire through all their tender flesh, the child’s face, as she
stood, seemed to sicken to the hue of death. She shuddered; her limbs
began to fail her.

“Drink!” said Cleopatra, rising in her place with a smile. “Drink,
child--for thine own sake.”

Better swift death than nameless torture. The poor slave drained the
cup, and, casting it, with a scream, from her, dropped upon the
pavement, a glittering, voluble shadow, writhing to its own
reflection.

Antony had risen, the company with him--speechless all, breathing out
the long minutes of the tragedy. It amounted to no more than this,
that the child had been so young and lovely--and that now she was
spoiled.

At the end, the Queen, scornful, magnificent, turned her burning eyes
on her lover’s face. There was a look in its ruined strength which
made her pause a moment.

“Read there, sweet lord,” she said, “the groundlessness, the
unworthiness of thy suspicions. Were my love false, what precautions
of thine could avail against my wit and will to end thee?”

He turned, still without a word, and, the light glinting a moment on
his grizzling hair and fuddled, frowning eyes, passed from the
banquet.

Then, coming down into the hall, Cleopatra, with a wave of her hand,
dismissed the company, the slaves, the musicians--all without
exception, save the Decurion Dentatus, whom she called to her.

Under the blazing lights the two stood together, and the body of the
dead girl lay at their feet. The Queen pointed to it. Her arm and hand
were of faultless beauty. She was thirty-eight, but with all the bloom
and fullness of just-ripened womanhood. Years had not set one streak
of alloy in the treasure of her golden hair, or clouded the azure of
her eyes, or done more than perfect in her the natural weapons of the
sorceress. She might have been the Decurion’s sister, so like he was
to her in grace and Grecian fairness.

She fixed him with her eyes.

“I marked thee, Decurion,” she said--“and not for the first time. Thy
looks defied me, thine eyes condemned. What--did you dare! And thy lip
curled when Antony yielded me the cup. Answer why, so thou wouldst
not----”

He stayed her fearlessly:

“Because I love him.”

“What, then?” she said, wondering.

“Could he not see, as we all saw,” he answered, “that thou hadst
poisoned it? For his wit’s sake I would have had him comprehend; for
his nobility’s sake I would have had him refuse thee the cup; for his
soul’s sake I would have had him drink from it himself, and die, and
be free.”

“Free? From what?”

“From his thrall.”

“What callest thou that?”

“The Curse of Antony.”

“Meaning Cleopatra?”

“Meaning thee, O Queen!”

She laughed. She did not strike his mouth, as was her first mad
impulse.

“Darest thou?” she breathed again; then stared into his eyes in pure
amazement. Was he not the first man who had ever spoken to her thus?

“Well, thou lovest him,” she said presently, with a deep sigh--“and I,
too, in my poor way. It shall be a contest of loves between us.”

She gazed a moment unmoved on the little distorted body at her feet,
glanced mockingly at the Decurion, and, turning, left him lost in
wonderment.

He never saw her again until near the end. She was occupied in the
meanwhile in building herself an unsurpassable mausoleum, and in
testing on the bodies of slaves the effects of various poisons.
Foreseeing the worst, and prepared for it, she would yet woo Death
like a voluptuary, and borrow rapture of his embrace. Yet so far the
test had failed her; and not from any inhumanity; for indeed she would
have kissed in ecstasy that slave who suffered nothing in obliging
her. But one and all they would persist most perversely in dying in
extreme agony.

And then one day she sent for the Decurion Dentatus, who, in the thick
of the general treachery, was among the few noble who stood by their
leader. It was when Octavius was at Pelusium, and the fate of
Alexandria appeared sealed.

The soldier was brought in to the Queen where she lay in a private
chamber of her Palace. Two faithful women attended upon their
mistress; an enamelled casket lying on a table near by was half buried
under scented blossoms. Cleopatra fanned herself languidly; a luminous
green scarab burned on her forehead between the wings of golden hair;
the gauzy film which enwrapped her deepened to a tender flush over
hips and bosom. Yet in her eyes some shadow of a mortal fear belied
the sensuous abandonment of her attitude.

“The contest of our loves, Decurion,” she said. “Art thou prepared to
wage it?”

He looked at her steadfastly, and answered, “Yes, Queen.”

“To free thy master,” she said, “from this curse? Wilt thou teach me
how to die?”

“Aye, gladly,” he said.

She pointed to the casket. “It lies therein--the means. Open and
handle it. It is said its sting benumbs--puts Death asleep. So thou
diest sweetly, I am thy slave and grave-fellow.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he strode to the casket, and unfastened
and raised the lid. Within, upon a mat of green leaves, lay coiled a
thick emblazoned worm, all bronzed and gold--a poisonous horned viper.
He grasped and held it aloft; received the stabbing tooth, once,
twice, in his arm; flung the reptile back into its box and closed the
lid.

After long waiting, he was down upon his knees, pallid but triumphant.

“Sufferest thou?” she demanded.

“But too much bliss,” he answered faintly. “I swoon from it.”

He crawled towards her, but sank on the way and died, forcing a smile
to his agonised lips.

Then, when it was over, she rose in great emotion, and looked down
upon the body.

“I have conquered all others,” she said. “Thou conquerest me. Greater
than mine is thy love.” She turned to her trembling women. “Keep the
worm safe.” And then she kneeled and, bending, kissed the dead man’s
lips. “Take me for thy slave, Dentatus,” she whispered, “in the
shadows to come. Not Antony, not another, but thou alone.”




 The Galilean

A solitary goatherd sat crouched on a slope above the Sea of
Galilee. It was approaching morning, and he had lit a little fire on
the rocks in order to roast his breakfast of fish. It was still dark,
though the embroidered velvet canopy overhead was beginning to reveal
a grape-like bloom along its eastern verge. Seven miles across, on the
opposite shore, the lamps of Tiberias, minute and liquid, dripped
threads of gold into the motionless lake; to the north the snows of
Mount Hermon lay like a pillow to the quiet hills; everywhere was the
swoon and stillness which characterise that last deep hour of slumber
when sleep itself sleeps.

The smoke of the goatherd’s fire rose in a thin, unbroken shaft; the
hiss and explosion of its thorns were uttered in a subdued voice; he
himself sat like a figure carved in old ivory. His arms and legs were
bare; his only garment was a tunic of brown sackcloth; he was the
gauntest man of his race in all Galilee. He suggested some grotesque
vulturine fledgling rather than a human being, in his leathery skin,
denuded scalp, prominent eyes, and great horny beak of a nose.
Whatever juice there was in him must have been as brown and acrid as a
walnut’s.

He had laid his sticks upon a little ledge or plateau where the green
of the banks, rising some fifty feet or so from the margin of the
lake, first strayed to lose itself among the waste and tumble of the
sandstone heights above. Scattered among the bents and yellow boulders
from which he had descended lay his silent flock. He was the only soul
awake, it seemed, in all that heaped-up solitude.

Suddenly he raised his head. The sound of a footstep, distant at
first, but regularly approaching, penetrated to his ears. It fell low
and loud, unmistakably human, until it resolved itself into the tramp
of a worried man coming over the hills from the south. The goatherd
was not interested or concerned. He sat apathetic, even when the
traveller, appearing round a bend of the rocks, walked grunting into
the firelight and revealed himself a Roman soldier.

The new-comer had a heavy, colourless face with thick black eyebrows.
The close chin-piece of his small cap-like helmet gave his lower jaw a
bulldog look. His body to the hips was cased in a laminated cuirass of
brass, epaulets of which covered his shoulders, and his short tunic
was garnished with hanging straps of leather plated with strips of the
same metal. Skin-tight drawers descended to the middle of his calves,
and were succeeded by puttees of pliant felt, which ended in military
caligæ with spiked soles. A short, double-edged sword hung in a
sheath at his right side, and in his hand he carried a javelin of
about his own height, the shaft of which had served him for a staff.
Weary and benighted as he appeared to be, his speech and bearing
expressed the arrogance of the dominant race.

“Ho!” he said, “ho!” and stretched himself relieved. “Food and fire,
and a respite at least from this cursed chase. What lights are yon
across the lake, goatherd?”

“Tiberias.”

It might have been an automaton speaking. The soldier swore by all his
gods.

“Eighty miles from Jerusalem--a land of rogues and fools! Now directed
this way, now that, mountains where I was told valleys, and torrents
for fords, and to find at last that I have taken the wrong bank!
Harkee, thou wooden Satyrus: my horse fell foundered among the hills,
and I saw thy fire and made for it on foot. Well, I carry dispatches
for thy Tetrarch, and thou tellest me that is Tiberias yonder. Should
I not do well to beat thee for it?”

The large eyes of the goatherd conned the speaker immovably.

“Tiberias,” he repeated. And then he added, “With dawn will come the
fishermen.”

The soldier cursed: “What, calf!” and checked himself. “Thou meanest,”
he said, “a boat to carry me across?” He heaved out a sigh. “Well,
goatherd, so be it; and while I wait I starve. Dost thou not hunger
too?”

“Aye,” said the goatherd, “always and for ever.”

The fish were spluttering on the embers. The soldier speared one with
his javelin, and, blowing on it, began to eat unceremoniously.

“I would not concede so much to _my_ Fates,” he said. “I would rob
sooner. Besides, here is proof plenty that you lie, old goatherd.”

The goatherd bent forward, and prodded the speaker once with a finger
like a crooked stick.

“How old wouldst call me?” he said.

“A hundred.”

“I am seven-and-twenty, Roman.”

The soldier laughed and stared.

“Bearest thy years ill. Since when beganst to age?”

“Since I began to starve.”

“And when was that?”

“When one said to me, ‘Feed on the illusions of the flesh until I come
again.’”

“One--one? What one?”

“A strange white man. They called him Jesus of Nazareth about here.”

The soldier, his cheek bulged with fish, stopped masticating a moment
to stare, then burst into a hoarse laugh.

“Ho, ho! my friend! Art in a sorry case indeed! Thou shalt starve and
starve, by Cæsar. Tell me the story, goatherd.”

The gaunt creature mused a little.

“Why, there is none, Roman, but just this. I had heard of him and
scoffed--I, a practical man--and one day (it was many seasons back) he
came across the water to these hills, and a great multitude followed
and gathered to him from all sides. And they brought with them a
number that were maimed and sick, and the man touched them and they
appeared healed, rising and blessing his name, so that I, though
counting it an illusion of the spirit, could not but marvel in his
magic and the people’s blindness. Now the crowd abode here into the
third day, and they felt neither thirst nor hunger; but I, that durst
not leave my flock, waiting for them to go, was like a ravenous wolf.
And on the third day this Jesus called for food to give to his
followers, and some that were his went down to the boat, and I with
them. And, lo! there were but a few loaves and fishes--nothing at all
for such a multitude. But I helped to carry these up, and on the way
the largest fish of all I hid beneath my tunic, for I thought, ‘Great
he may be, but nothing is lost that I take precautions against his
failure to assuage my hunger.’ Then did he bid us all to sit upon the
ground, and he blessed and brake the fish and bread; and so it
happened--account it to what you will--for every soul there was a meal
and to spare. But when it came to my turn he would give me none; only,
gazing on me, he bade me, since faith I had not, to feed on the
illusions of the flesh until he came again. And I laughed to myself,
thinking of the fish; but, Roman, that fish when I came to devour it
was like a shadow in the water, having form but no substance, and so
it is with all food to me since. Though I behold it, handle it, I put
a shadow to my lips. Yet every day do I prepare my meal, hoping the
curse removed, and knowing always it shall not be until he come
again.”

The soldier broke into a roar of laughter.

“Until he come again!” he cried, “until he come again! O, a jockeyed
Jew, a poor deluded Jew!”

He was so gloriously tickled that he had to gasp and choke himself
into sobriety.

“Harkee, goatherd,” he said presently; “there was a day, not long
past, in Jerusalem--a lamentable day for thee. It thundered--gods, how
it thundered, rattling the Place of Skulls! I ought to remember,
seeing I was on duty there. Nazareth was it, now? Why, to be sure--I
know my letters, and it was writ plain enough and high enough. Jesus
of Nazareth, who saved others, but could not save himself--that was
it--one of three rogues condemned. Well, he laid an embargo on thee,
did he? You see this spear----”

He paused, in the very act of lifting his javelin, and sat staring
stupidly at it. Its point was tipped with crimson.

“The rising sun!” muttered the goatherd, and, getting suddenly to his
feet, stood gazing seawards. The soldier came and stood beside him.

The whole wide valley, while they spoke, had opened to the morning
like a rose, the clustered hills its petals, its calyx the deep lake,
the lights upon it dewdrops shining at its heart. And there upon the
dim waters, swinging close inshore, was a fisherman’s boat, its crew
gathering in an empty net.

Now the two on the hill stood too remote to distinguish sounds or
faces, while the conformation of the rocks hid the shore from their
view. But of a sudden, as they looked, the forms in the boat started
erect, and, all standing in a huddled group, appeared to gaze
landwards. And instantly, as if they had received therefrom some
direction, they seized and cast their net the other side of the boat
and drew on it, and the watchers saw by their straining muscles that
the net was full. Perceiving which, one of the fishermen, a burly
fellow, quitted his hold of the cords, and, leaping into the water,
floundered for the shore and disappeared.

“What now?” said the soldier. “Do they spy and seek us?” He muttered
vacantly, and glanced again at his spearhead, and shook the haft
impatiently. But the sunrise would not be detached from it.

Now the goatherd ran to a cleft which commanded the shore below, and,
glaring a moment, returned swiftly, his face alight.

“Rabboni,” he said excitedly, “it is the man of Nazareth himself come
back, and he ascendeth the hill towards us, and the spell will be
removed from me so that I shall taste fish once more.”

But the words were hardly out of his mouth when the soldier seized his
arm, and, dragging him to the shelter of a great boulder at a
distance, forced him to crouch with him behind it, so that they might
see without being seen. And so hidden, they were aware of a shape that
came into the firelight, and it was white like a spirit of the hills
and waters, and it stretched its hands above the embers, so that they
leaped again.

And the goatherd heard the soldier mutter in his ear:

“A practical man--you say you are a practical man! Now, who is it?”

“Jesus of Nazareth,” he answered.

But the soldier looked at his javelin and it ran with sunrise.

“That cannot be,” he said, “for seven days ago I opened his side with
this spear as he hung upon the cross, and there is the blood to
testify to it.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the goatherd; “my palate is
sufficient evidence for me. Look where they come and lay their fish
upon my embers. The very savour of their cooking tells me I can taste
again. It is Jesus, sure enough!”

 [The End]




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The author produced two books titled _Historical Vignettes_: one in
1910 (T. Fisher Unwin, London), and the other in 1912 (Sidgwick &
Jackson, London). Being the later, “2nd Series” has been appended to
the title to distinguish it from the former (_i.e._ “1st Series”).

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ birdseller/bird-seller, etc.)
have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Abandon the usage of drop-caps.

[Title page]

Add “2nd Series” to the book title. (See above).

[The Princess Elizabeth]

Change “... when the Earl came home. _prepared_ to attend...” to
_Prepared_.

[James II]

“_Abaddie_, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless” to _Abbadie_.

[George III]

“Of a sudden _be_ became aware... was all about him again” to _he_.

 [End of text]






*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL VIGNETTES, 2ND SERIES ***


    

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